The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  “A startled expression appeared on his hitherto calm face,” one reporter observed, “and he threw his head back, [filling] his lungs with the first of the gas to reach him.” The faces at the window grew tense, as the witnesses could hear his labored breathing. Then his chin dropped to his chest. After a suspenseful moment passed he threw his head back and took another breath. Again, his chin dropped to his chest. The reporters were recording every movement they could detect.

  Some spectators thought they began to smell the deadly gas, with its fragrance like almond blossoms, and a few of them lurched back from the window in terror, but the warden and the newspapermen and most of the physicians steadfastly remained at their posts. This time, two long minutes passed. “He’s unconscious,” someone finally whispered. But Gee’s head pulled back and his mouth opened, showing his crooked teeth. His eyes rolled back until his pupils disappeared and his head jerked forward.

  “He’s dead now,” one physician said, leaving the spectators to scour Gee’s body for any movement, any sign of life. For an entire minute they saw none, but just when it appeared over, Gee suddenly raised his head again and extended it all the way back, causing many of the onlookers to gasp in horror. His chin dropped again and rested on his chest. The witnesses craned their necks to look, but nobody saw any stirring. The gas clouding the window made it difficult to see inside with perfect clarity, but it appeared that Gee had not ceased to move until 9:46 A.M. After that he remained motionless.

  Dickerson cleared his throat and abruptly said, “The execution was a success, but the method of application is dangerous…. You will leave the prison yard, gentlemen.”

  Once the spectators had been removed from the area, at 10 A.M., the warden ordered the ventilator gate opened and the suction fan was turned on, while inside the guardroom the men talked excitedly about what they had just witnessed.57 Under advice from his experts, however, Dickerson decided to wait until the liquid pool on the floor had evaporated before allowing anyone to enter. The chamber door was not opened until noon, more than two hours after the gassing had started, and the visitors were allowed back into the prison yard to witness the final act.

  At long last, at 12:20 P.M., Captain Muller, clutching a jar of ammonia salts to his nostrils but not wearing a mask or any other protective gear, stepped into the death cell. He and Dan Ranean, an inspector for the state police, gingerly unfastened the straps, removed Gee’s inert body from the chair, and lugged it to the prison hospital. At 12:30 P.M. they deposited the body faceup on a table, where it was perfunctorily examined by a ring of excited physicians including Dr. Huffaker, Dr. Hardy, Dr. Turner, and Dr. Edward E. Hamer of Ormsby County.58

  Nobody wanted to get too close. Huffaker held his stethoscope to Gee’s heart and listened as best he could. Although he and the others agreed that Gee was dead, Turner continued to insist he was still alive enough to be resuscitated and he wanted to inject the body with camphor to bring him back to life, “in the interests of science.” But Warden Dickerson refused to allow it.59

  Gee Jon was officially pronounced dead at 12:25 P.M. Seven doctors—M.H. Gray, Leo C. Owen, Harry C. Lang, Dr. Hamer, Dr. Hardy, Dr. Turner, and Dr. Huffaker—signed the death certificate.60 No autopsy was performed because cutting open the body was deemed too dangerous due to the poison gas that might have accumulated within. This would make gas chamber executions different from electrocutions, for which an autopsy was legally required. Nobody saved his brain as a souvenir. Instead, the intact body was simply slipped into a plain pine box, and after a quick Christian ceremony it was buried in the cemetery behind the prison.61

  Turner later startled some reporters by saying lethal gas represented “an extremely dangerous method” of execution because the victim might come to consciousness or be brought to consciousness, and also because a witness or observer could be accidentally killed (which he characterized as “an idiosyncrasy”). He also considered it “dangerous because the amount of HCN used would kill or suspend animation to the entire community, and as accidents will happen, any or all persons present are liable to an overdose.”

  Nevertheless, he pronounced it “a wonderful and humane way of execution.”62 “Even under the handicaps of improper equipment,” he later said, the lethal gas method was the “quickest and most humane method of putting a human to death.” Compared to hanging, where the doomed victim might suffer for seven to fifteen minutes after the trap was sprung, or electrocution, which was so shocking to watch, particularly if it took three or four jolts to finish the job, and even shooting, which sometimes didn’t cause instantaneous death, lethal gas produced instantaneous unconsciousness and practically instantaneous death, so there was no chance of suffering.

  Still, he acknowledged, there had been some problems in carrying out the world’s first gas execution. First, the heater had failed to warm the stone execution chamber to the required 70 or 80 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, “the lethal gas was liquefied instead of vaporized into fine particles. It also took a full minute and a half to pump the death chamber full of gas. With proper equipment and a specially constructed glass-lined chamber, death could be made both instantaneous and painless.”63 Turner also claimed that when Gee’s body was removed from the death cell two and a half hours after his execution, it was still warm and lacking any signs of rigor mortis, which led him to believe it would have been possible to resuscitate Gee using a little electric shock, some warm blankets, and a pulmonator.64 Turner later startled an audience at the Reno Lions Club by suggesting that Gee probably “died of cold and exposure.”65 He also suggested in his report to General Fries that all bodies removed from gas chambers in the future should be shot or hanged to ensure they were dead.66 Many regarded his comments as bizarre.

  Warden Dickerson commented as little as possible in public. “I am in favor of the lethal gas execution if spectators are not subjected to the death dealing fumes,” he said.67 However, Dr. Huffaker, the prison physician, conceded that future gas executions at the prison probably would require the addition of a specially constructed glass canopy to prevent any gas from seeping out and endangering the witnesses—in other words, a lethal chamber to be encapsulated within the death house.68

  A correspondent for the Consolidated Press Association reported, “Those who witnessed the first lethal gas execution here Friday were unanimous in declaring that if they had to suffer capital punishment they would prefer to die that way.”69 The state’s biggest newspaper, the Nevada State Journal, began its extensive coverage by pronouncing, “Nevada’s novel death law is upheld by the highest court—humanity.”70

  But others took a dim view. Some critics complained that the new execution method “robs capital punishment of its horror.”71 The San Jose Mercury Herald warned, “One hundred years from now Nevada will be referred to as a heathen commonwealth controlled by savages with only the outward symbols of civilization.”72 An editorial in the New York Times noted that a white man had been spared at the last moment, “and the new method was tested on a Chinaman,” adding, “That will need a good deal of explaining.” The editorial concluded, “The details of the execution are not such as to prove the superiority of this innovation, and it obviously involves the possibility of some terrifying accidents.”73 The Philadelphia Record called it the worst piece of official barbarity since the dark ages, and the New Haven Journal-Courier observed, “Nevada is the first state to take human life by this means, and we hope it will be the last.” Said the Philadelphia Public Ledger, “Nevada sought a way to make executions more humane. In her seeking she stumbled into new refinements and depths of cruelty.”74 The Women’s Peace Union, a disarmament group based in New York, condemned Governor Scrugham for the execution, saying, “As opponents of all capital punishment, because we believe that violence and the destruction of human life are never justified, we strongly denounce the execution of Gee Jon by lethal gas. We expressly protest against this experiment having been tried against a defenseless Chinese.”75

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p; Nevertheless, the Los Angeles Times reported that Gee’s death might have proved an effective catalyst for convincing the tongs to end their violent infighting. Two hundred worried tong leaders from eighty-one cities throughout the United States and Canada were said to be hurriedly planning a “peace” conference to discuss the matter in the wake of the Nevada gassing.76

  Notwithstanding all of the hoopla, Dickerson later coolly reported his views to Governor Scrugham:

  This method of execution, while no doubt painless, is not, in my judgment, practicable. The presence of an expert in handling this gas is necessary. Prison officials should be capable, at all times, of conducting an execution without outside help, as that help might fail at the critical moment. The gas is highly explosive and must be kept at a low temperature to prevent explosion. It must be carried by private conveyance, as express companies refuse to handle it. Los Angeles is the nearest, if not the only, point on the Pacific Coast, where it is manufactured, and it would be a hazardous undertaking to transport this gas from Los Angeles to Carson City by automobile during the summer months, and its rapid deterioration makes it impracticable to keep a supply on hand….

  The real suffering of the condemned, regardless of the manner of inflicting the death penalty, is endured before the actual infliction of the death penalty. I have been a reluctant witness to executions by hanging, shooting and asphyxiation; and in each instance the condemned was unconscious, to all appearances, immediately after the trap was sprung, the rifle fired, or the gas released. Execution by shooting is the most humane, because death by this method is instantaneous, while life remains for some little time when the other methods are employed.77

  Efforts to repeal Nevada’s lethal gas execution law proved unsuccessful over the following year or so.78 In 1926 a triple execution was scheduled, and the chamber’s two pine chairs were freshly painted and a new electrical steam-heating apparatus was installed for the occasion. But once again, the governor commuted two of the death sentences.

  Then, as Stanko Jukich, a strapping Croatian miner convicted of murdering his sixteen-year-old sweetheart, was set to become the second person sent to the gas chamber, officials from the War Department expressed particular interest. Gas experts from the army’s Presidio base in San Francisco took part in the testing, leaving no doubt about the deadliness of the hydrocyanic vapor, particularly since there was no longer any winter cold to impede the gas. Jukich was put to death in May 1926. Once again, details of the execution were reported worldwide.79 This time the condemned man was pronounced dead two and a half minutes after the gas was turned on.80

  Word that Americans had become the first to use the gas chamber to execute a human being flashed across the world. In Russia, the nation that had sustained the largest number of chemical weapon casualties during World War I, Leon Trotsky, the Soviet war minister, expressed concern about where the United States was headed. “Americans are trying these new gases upon their criminals, discarding the use of electricity as a means of killing wrongdoers,” he warned. “Picture yourself rich and satisfied America sending to famine-stricken, revolutionary Europe whole squadrons of airplanes which threaten to rain these noxious gases upon our heads! This is no fantastic romance.” Trotsky continued, “Soviet Russia, however, will not resort to such inhuman methods to gain its ends. War cannot be eradicated entirely; but it cannot be done by these extreme measures. It can only be done by the annihilation of capitalist society.”81

  News of the Nevada gassing reached Germany, where modern chemical warfare had originated. German politicians and law enforcement professionals followed developments in the United States with keen interest, taking special notice of American ideas about law, policing, and prisons. German criminologists, eugenics researchers, and other scholars often visited the United States and vice versa, and the Germans closely monitored American publications. International wire services and professional association newsletters passed the latest news back and forth across the Atlantic. German scholars such as Hamburg law professor Moritz Liepmann, Berthold Freudenthal of Frankfurt, and the renowned criminologist Franz Exner as well as journalists such as Paul Schlesinger, popularly known as “Sling” (from the Vossiche Zeitung), often offered incisive reports on American criminal justice developments and racial laws. German media in the 1920s often ran stories criticizing the harshness of American penal practices, such as the heavy use of imprisonment and capital punishment. As one leading historian of this phenomenon has pointed out, “Both the liberal Weimar Republic and the oppressive Nazi régime were keenly interested in the American criminal justice system, although for very different and not always consistent reasons.”82 The poison-gas execution would have attracted special interest because of its implication for chemical warfare.

  In early 1924, the right-wing Bavarian radical Adolf Hitler was awaiting trial at the People’s Court in Munich for his role in the failed November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. For the last year or so, American newspapers had reported on his extraordinary ability to sway crowds to his will, his hatred for Jews, Communists, Bolsheviks, and liberals, and his penchant for many of the trappings of fascism that had been introduced by Italy’s Benito Mussolini starting in 1922.83

  The new political ideology held widespread appeal. Historian Robert Paxton has defined fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”84 Another historian, Roger Eatwell, has suggested, “Fascist ideology used primarily rational arguments to hold that people were largely swayed by irrational motives…. People were to be made whole again by bridging the more individualistic and collective aspects of modernity.”85

  The romance of fascism quickly enticed some elite Americans who were steeped in various ideologies of racial superiority, capitalist discipline, isolationism and protectionism, and ultranationalism. News reports came out of Germany that American money from German-American anti-Semites was helping to fund not only Mussolini, but also the Bavarian-based fascist movement. The automobile manufacturer Henry Ford was singled out as a major Hitler backer.86 The ferment in Germany attracted attention from foreign racists, including the American Ku Klux Klan, which founded a chapter in Germany in 1921.87

  One of Hitler’s friends who visited him in jail and kept him abreast of recent developments in the United States was Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a six-foot-seven-inch German-American patrician graduate of Harvard University who was descended from a Union army general who had helped to carry Abraham Lincoln’s coffin. Hanfstaengl’s family owned an art-publishing house in Munich and belonged to the German and American aristocracies.88 When Hanfstaengl wasn’t entertaining his friend with his piano playing, he stimulated Hitler’s imagination with stirring accounts about American skyscrapers, gangsters, and college football chants. Hitler had been gassed and temporarily blinded while serving as a dispatch runner at the front during the war, so he already knew that gas was an ugly, painful, and unpredictable weapon, and he disdained its use on the battlefield. He would have been keenly interested to hear about what the Americans had done in Nevada.

  Hitler’s trial began on February 26, 1924, only eighteen days after Gee Jon’s execution. Convicted and sentenced to five years in prison on April 1, 1924, he was taken to cell number seven at Landsberg Am Lech Fortress Prison, where he proceeded to read everything he could lay his hands on, including piles of publications that his friends supplied.89 “Landsberg was my college education at state expense,” he would later say. Hanfstaengl often came by to translate and read to him from British and American newspapers. During his confinement Hitler also read several books about eugenics and racial supremacy, including the two-volume Mensc
hliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene) by E. Baur, E. Fischer, and F. Lenz, which collected references to Dugdale’s The Jukes, Popenoe’s Applied Eugenics, and work by New York blueblood Madison Grant. A number of works he read had been written by Americans, including Henry Ford’s The International Jew, as well as Grant’s Der Untergang der grossen Rasse: Die Rassen als Grundlage der Geschichte Europas (The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History).90 Hitler called Grant’s book “my Bible.”91

  During his imprisonment Hitler commenced composing his own political creed, which he at first titled Eine Abrechnung (Settling Accounts) but later would call Mein Kampf (My Struggle). In it he calls upon Germans to restore their nation to greatness by overthrowing the Weimar Republic, removing the Jews from Germany, and defying the Versailles Treaty. From time to time Hitler would dictate some of these thoughts to one of his fellow prisoners; to Emil Maurice, his chauffeur and bodyguard; or to another close follower, Rudolf Hess.

  On December 20, 1924, Hitler was released from confinement after serving only nine months, and a New York Times correspondent described him as “a sadder and wiser man” due to his imprisonment.92 At first he stayed briefly with Hanfstaengl, who gave him a copy of Ford’s autobiography, Mein Leben und Werk (My Life and Work), and then he headed up to Berchtesgaden for an Alpine holiday.93 A friend made available a one-room cottage with a deck overlooking the Obersalzberg for Hitler to continue his dictation. A visitor approaching on the dirt path could hear a series of sharp verbal cracks like gunshots that sometimes continued in a long volley like bursts from a machine gun, coming from inside the cottage. On one of the walls inside Hitler had hung up a picture of his idol, Ford.94 He paced the floor in a white shirt and lederhosen, barking out orders and sometimes swinging a dog whip to punctuate his phrases.95 Hess hunched over a Remington typewriter, taking down Hitler’s words.