The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  Attention focused on Eaton Metal Products, which was now supplying its fifth gas chamber under contract. A reporter for the United Press began his account by pointing out that “Denver—nationally famous as a health center—ironically has become the nation’s leading producer of lethal gas chambers.” He described one of the company’s designers, Earl C. Liston, as a “quiet, self-styled steel architect,” and wrote that Liston and his fellow workers were putting the finishing touches on the new gas chamber that was bound for San Quentin in California. “We seem to have a monopoly on the gas chamber business,” the mild-mannered designer happily noted. “We’ve built five of them—and that’s exactly five more than any other company ever made.” He pointed out that California’s version incorporated the latest innovations in death cell manufacture.

  In the past, acid was placed in an ordinary crock under the death chair, and the cyanide eggs were dropped into the acid by pulling a lever. But under the new system, the acid, which generated deadly gas when it came into contact with the balls of cyanide, would be piped into the chamber through special tubes. “This new system will make it easier for the executioner,” Liston explained. “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers. But it gets results.”101

  Liston’s patent was filed with the U.S. Patent Office on October 16, 1937, and patent number 2,172,768 was issued on September 12, 1939. A copy is included in Appendix 1. (A few years after Liston’s design was completed, Nazi death camps would utilize a similar method, assigning a soldier to pour Zyklon-B pellets down a chute. The shafts at Auschwitz would become a focus of intense study for many years, mistakenly assumed by most scholars to have been invented completely from scratch by the Nazis.) As far as Eaton was concerned, a company spokesman later explained, the hardest design problems were fitting the chamber with enough windows to accommodate all the spectators and making it airtight so that the fumes would kill only the prisoner or prisoners being executed.102

  Shipped from Denver by rail and barge, the strange contraption finally arrived at San Quentin, where a team of workers was assembled to help Liston install it. One of them was a hunchbacked convict, Alfred Wells, who was serving time for burglary. Wells later explained its workings to some of his fellow inmates, saying, “That’s the closest I ever want to come to the gas chamber.” (Five years after he helped to put the gas chamber together, however, Wells was sentenced to death for a triple murder and he was executed in it, a victim of his own handiwork.)103 Once he had his unit properly put together and inspected, Liston prepared his chemicals and tried out his new death device on a small red pig that was cheerfully selected from the prison farm. “Our calculations show that this new chamber should snuff out life in about fifteen seconds, much faster than any of the others we have built,” he said. The Denver Post proudly proclaimed, “Denver has become the capital city of the country, possibly the world, in the manufacturing of lethal gas chambers.”104

  By December 1937 national discussion about the pros and cons of lethal gas had become so widespread that Reader’s Digest published a comparison of the arguments. “Gas is practically foolproof,” the spokesman for the pro–lethal gas side contended. “No black hood to hide a hanged man’s fantastic grimaces. No sickening among witnesses as an electrocuted man’s hair stands straight on end, burning smokily. No chance of some horrible miscue to make the headlines scream.” In rebuttal, the spokesman for the “anti-gas side” argued that the new method was neither painless nor easy to watch. Some victims, he said, could take up to thirty seconds of agonizing struggle to fall unconscious, and any witness could see that “his tortured body suddenly protests with clutching, writhing convulsions.”105

  The California gas chamber received its first victims on December 2, 1938, when two hardened convicts, Albert Kessell, twenty-nine, and Robert Lee Cannon, thirty, were put to death in succession for murdering the warden of Folsom. Thirty-nine spectators looked on as each convict acted rebelliously, shouted, and then suffered convulsions. Dr. L. L. Stanley, the prison physician who was one of four medical participants to listen to the men’s heartbeats during the executions, emerged shaken by his experience to tell the ravenous reporters, “Hanging is simpler, quicker, and far more humane.” Another attending physician, Dr. J. C. Geiger, agreed with Stanley, saying, “The idea that cyanide kills immediately is hooey. These men suffered as their lungs no longer absorbed oxygen and they struggled to breathe. They died of an internal suffocation against which they had to fight and from which they must have suffered.” Even Warden Smith went on record to complain, “Hanging is a damned sight quicker and better.” But others endorsed the new method. “These men went easy,” said Sheriff Dan Cox of Sacramento. “They didn’t appear to suffer at all.”

  Completion of the double execution was delayed for more than two hours when the exhaust system failed, requiring staff to use a suction device to clear the chamber of deadly gas. A guard wearing a gas mask entered the gas chamber to make sure the two men were dead. Some spectators were sickened by their exposure to the gas. In the fiasco’s wake the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “Their execution… precipitated an immediate controversy over the relative merits of cyanide and the scaffold as humane agents of death and may be the signal for a new drive to abolish capital punishment.”106 The San Francisco Examiner referred to “California’s new robot executioner,” calling the gleaming new unit “a chamber of horrors.”107

  During the same period California was known for its cutting-edge eugenics program, for leading the nation in forced sterilizations, and for providing scientific and educational support for Hitler’s regime. In 1934 Sacramento’s rabidly racist real estate developer Charles M. Goethe, a founder of the Eugenics Society of Northern California and Pasadena’s influential Human Betterment Foundation, returned from a trip to Germany to report to a fellow eugenicist, “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought…. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”108 In 1935 Goethe hailed Germany and the United States for “two stupendous forward movements” but complained that “even California’s quarter century record [in eugenics] has, in two years, been outdistanced by Germany.” Some Californians endorsed the chilling words of Dr. John Randolph Haynes, the Los Angeles philanthropist who said, “How long will it be before society will see the criminality of using its efforts to keep alive these idiots, hopelessly insane and murderous degenerates…. They should go to sleep at night without any intimation of what is coming and never awake.”109

  But others, including Berkeley’s German-born police chief August Vollmer, an internationally known figure in law enforcement and a member of the advisory councils of both the American Euthanasia Society and the American Eugenics Society, firmly opposed capital punishment and disdained theories of racial superiority.110 Some of Hollywood’s movie moguls, who had grown concerned about anti-Semitism, also tried to tone down the public discourse. But most Californians weren’t ready to give up their death penalty—at least, not yet.

  Meanwhile, Eaton’s workers were keeping busy. Immediately after Wyoming and California’s first gassings the company had also installed a chamber in Oregon’s state penitentiary at Salem.111 Like California and North Carolina, sparsely settled Oregon also conducted involuntary sterilizations. Signing the authorizing legislation was Governor Charles H. (“Iron Pants”) Martin, a West Point graduate and former army commander who had served with Pershing and Fries in the Philippine Insurrection and World War I and had formed a secret Red Squad in the Oregon State Police that had operated up and down the West Coast. The conservative Democrat staunchly opposed the New Deal and favored German rearmament for Hit
ler’s regime as a cudgel against Communism.112 But Martin didn’t get to carry out any gas chamber executions while he was in office. Oregon’s first gassing occurred on January 20, 1939, during the new administration of Governor Charles A. Sprague, a progressive Democrat, when LeRoy Hershel McCarthy, aged twenty-seven, was executed for a robbery and murder. By the end of 1941 Oregon’s lethal chamber had taken the lives of three convicts, all of them white.113

  By November of 1939 Missouri’s gas chamber had claimed the lives of eight men, five of them African-American and five from Jackson County. The sixth victim, Adam Richetti, a criminal associate of “Pretty Boy” Floyd, had been convicted on highly circumstantial evidence of participating in the Kansas City Union Station Massacre of five policemen. During his four-year stay in jail before his execution some of his keepers had tortured him with lighted cigarettes, and his sanity had become an open question. To the end Richetti protested that this was one crime of which he was innocent. Even after the gangster was strapped into the chair, he kept asking, “What have I done to deserve this?” and he struggled and let out a piercing scream before he finally expired.

  Dr. W. W. Rembo, the prison physician, recorded the following timetable on a scorecard:

  Prisoner entered chamber: 12:06–30/60 AM

  Doors locked: 12:10 AM

  Eggs enter solution: 12:10–15/60 AM

  Gas strikes prisoner’s face: 12:10–30/60 AM

  Prisoner apparently unconscious: 12:11 AM

  Certainly unconscious: 12:12 AM

  Head falls forward: 12:11–30/60 AM

  Head falls backward: —

  Heart stopped: —

  Respiration stopped: —

  Blower started: 12:28 AM

  Chamber doors opened: 12:46 AM

  Prisoner removed from chamber: 12:50 AM

  Pronounced dead: 12:14 AM

  After the gas was removed a federal agent took a fingerprint from Richetti’s limp hand to verify the positive identification, and the FBI trumpeted the gangster’s demise. But one witness, the popular writer Courtney Riley Cooper, later went public to say he favored hanging or electrocution, because in those cases the “victims apparently don’t suffer so long.”114

  CHAPTER 6

  PILLAR OF RESPECTABILITY

  An indication of how powerful and respectable the German-dominated cyanide cartel had become in the 1930s can be found by examining the career of John J. McCloy, a pillar of the East Coast establishment who is considered by many to be one of the most influential yet overlooked American figures of the twentieth century.

  A top U.S. assistant secretary of war during World War II, McCloy was a key player behind the internment of the Japanese, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the strategic victories over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. He later served as the first high commissioner of Germany, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the World Bank, trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, member of the Warren Commission, and advisor to nine U.S. presidents, all of which gained him the appellation as the “most influential private citizen in America.” McCloy spent much of his career in service to some of America’s wealthiest families, especially the Rockefellers. Most of the criticism leveled against him has been as a result of his decision not to bomb rail lines leading to Auschwitz, his opposition to Jewish emigration from Europe, and his lenient postwar treatment of Nazi war criminals.1 Missing from the discussion, however, has been sufficient recognition of some of McCloy’s other lawyerly activities, particularly his connections to German interests in the periods before and after World War II.

  McCloy was born in Philadelphia in 1895 to a family of humble means. His Irish-American father died when he was six, leaving him to be raised by his Pennsylvania-Dutch mother, who worked as a hairdresser. Excelling as a student, he graduated from Amherst College in 1916 and subsequently entered Harvard Law School, but he suspended his education in May 1917 to serve in the U.S. Army when America entered the war. He was a field artillery officer in France, where he saw limited combat and rose to the rank of captain, before he returned to Harvard, where he received his law degree in 1921. He then began a prosperous career in law and banking, starting at the prestigious New York firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft.

  In December 1924 he joined the high-powered Wall Street firm of Cravath, Henderson & de Gersdorff (later Cravath, Swaine & Moore), where he quickly made a name for himself. Soon after he joined Cravath, the firm participated with J. P. Morgan in a huge $110 million loan to the German government. This work in investment banking often took him to France, Italy, and Germany, all of which had been ravaged by the war. “Practically every merchant bank and Wall Street firm, from J. P. Morgan and Brown Brothers on down, was over there picking up loans,” McCloy later said. “We were all very European in our outlook and our goal was to see it rebuilt.”2

  In 1929, while traveling west on a train, McCloy ran into a friend from his days at Amherst and in the army, Representative Lewis Williams Douglas, scion of one of the most powerful families in Arizona and sole heir of the Phelps Dodge copper mining fortune. After a brief stint as a state representative in Arizona, Douglas had worked in his family’s mining operation and gotten himself elected to Congress in 1926. Douglas and McCloy had several friends in common, including Trubee Davison, whose father was a partner in the J. P. Morgan Company, and they moved in some of the same social circles. Douglas was married to Margaret “Peggy” Zinsser from back in New York, and the young congressman introduced McCloy to his wife’s elder sister, Ellen Zinsser, as a possible beau.

  The Zinsser girls had grown up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, in a well-to-do German-speaking household, and they were sent to Germany to complete their education. Their father, Frederick G. Zinsser, ran Zinsser & Company, a successful chemical manufacturing firm founded by his grandfather that was one of the establishments contracted to produce mustard gas for Uncle Sam in 1918. At the same time Zinsser had also served as assistant to the commander of Edgewood Arsenal, Colonel William Walker, during the Great War. Frederick Zinsser’s wife (and the girls’ mother), Emma Sharmann Zinsser, was also descended from German immigrants. Both Ellen and Peggy had attended elite preparatory schools and Smith College. McCloy married Ellen Zinsser in 1930, and from the time of their honeymoon they often traveled in Europe together as he pursued his career, operating from Cravath’s Paris office.

  One of McCloy’s most demanding legal projects in those days was pursuing a high-stakes lawsuit against Germany in which he sought major civil damages in the infamous “Black Tom” case, stemming from a deadly blast at a munitions depot in Jersey City that had shaken Ellis Island and lower Manhattan on July 30, 1916. McCloy’s client, Bethlehem Steel, had suffered the biggest damage, losing fifty-two railcars full of shells and fuses. Many investigators attributed the explosion to German sabotage intended to disrupt the flow of ammunition to the front for America’s embattled allies, but the Germans had always denied any involvement. After the war, Black Tom was brought before the Mixed Claims Commission to enforce German government liability for the alleged sabotage. After several years of relentless investigation, McCloy uncovered evidence about the involvement of two prominent Germans in the conspiracy: Franz von Papen, a German army captain who would later become vice-chancellor to Hitler, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, the former classmate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Harvard who had been a close friend of Hitler from his Mein Kampf days and would later rise to become his foreign-press chief. McCloy’s intrigue-filled work took him deep into German and American industrial and military espionage. In one bizarre episode, he was interviewing a czarist Russian adventurer, Count Alexander Nelidoff, who said he had proof linking the German government to the Black Tom explosion. McCloy lifted a pencil from Nelidoff’s vest to take some notes, leading the anxious Russian to warn that the pencil was actually a tiny pistol loaded with poison gas. McCloy’s investigation took him and the twenty lawyers under his supervision to many exotic locations, where he got to know many top
spies, including Franz von Rintelen, the former German espionage chief.3

  Throughout the 1930s, as a member of the well-connected Cravath law firm, McCloy represented the financier Paul Warburg and the Rockefellers, among other clients.4 He also continued his work for J.P. Morgan. (One of his brothers-in-law, John Zinsser, would become a director of Morgan.) McCloy lived in Italy for almost a year, where he helped to raise money for Mussolini’s regime.5 Much of this work entailed huge loans to the German and Italian governments, which brought him into close connection with many fascist leaders.6

  In addition to Morgan and Rockefeller, some other big American financial backers of the fascist regimes included DuPont, Ford, IBM, and General Motors. Many of these German investments involved financing for IG Farben, the all-powerful German oil, drug, and chemical concern. McCloy’s law firm represented the Farben affiliates in America, and McCloy was often their point man in Europe.7 Farben had spearheaded the development of insecticides and chemical weapons during World War I, and in the 1930s it was playing a central role in Germany’s quest for world domination. It was Hitler’s biggest source of political contributions and the biggest recipient of German defense spending, as well as the world’s most important developer and supplier of poison gases. Some of its customers included fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, both of which used chemical weapons in the 1930s. (Farben was also the principal sponsor of Japan’s chemical industry.) By 1934 Farben was closely associated with the Gestapo; many of its executives stationed abroad served as spies. Nevertheless, despite its shady background, Farben remained closely allied with several of America’s most powerful corporations and banks, at least well into the 1930s, and in some instances even during the war.8