One New Yorker who liked Hamilton’s idea of using lethal gas instead of electrocution was J. Sloat Fassett, a Republican state senator from Elmira who had studied at the University of Heidelberg in Germany (and who later would serve as a congressman and secretary of the Republican National Committee).20 Fassett was among those who favored gas execution. But Hamilton’s idea didn’t catch on initially, in part because not everyone was convinced that gas technology was up to the task yet. As a result, the commission rejected the proposal for the lethal chamber in favor of electrocution, although the place in the prison where the executions were carried out came to be called the “death chamber” rather than the gallows.21
New York wasn’t the only state to consider gas executions. In 1886 the Medical Society of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, completed its own study of death-penalty methods by concluding that the “most humane method is to extinguish the life of the criminal sentenced to death by the use of gas.” It contended that “the gas chamber will be at once more effective, cheaper, and less repugnant to the gentler sentiments than the electric chair.”22 Henry M. Boies, a penologist for the Pennsylvania Board of Public Charities, went further by saying that it was “established beyond controversy that criminals and paupers, both, are degenerate; the imperfect, knotty, knurly, worm-eaten, half-rotten fruit of the race.” Society, he said, needed to take a multifaceted approach that included preventive and reformative measures. In his view, “The ‘unfit,’ the abnormals, the sharks, the devil-fish, and other monsters, ought not to be liberated to destroy, and multiply, but must be confined and secluded until they are exterminated.”23
Such calls were taken seriously, and some sought to make them a reality. In 1899 W. Duncan McKim, a prominent New York physician and eugenics advocate, argued, “The surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane means for preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of this high privilege [of human reproduction], is a gentle, painless death.” McKim aimed his plan at “the very weak and the very vicious, who fall into the hands of the State, for maintenance, reformation, or punishment”—idiots, imbeciles, most epileptics, insane or incorrigible criminals, and a few other classes. To eliminate them, he recommended the use of carbonic acid gas (also known as carbon dioxide, the gas that had been widely used to euthanize animals).24 At the time, McKim’s view was widely shared in the United States; The Nation magazine of November 1, 1900, recommended his work to “all good citizens interested in human progress.” But still, gas executions remained just an idea whose time hadn’t come.
By 1916 the public discourse regarding the lethal chamber seemed to have entered a new phase. Much of the talk about it increasingly straddled the boundaries governing “putting stray animals to sleep,” sterilization, and other forms of birth control, and the moral imperative of devising “humane methods” to execute criminals and “euthanize” mental defectives and other members of the “unfit” classes. Americans seemed to have become more comfortable with lethal-chamber technology. In 1915 the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in New York City announced that it had eliminated 276,683 animals; during the first three weeks of that year alone, responding in part to reports that germs from infected animals might lead to infantile paralysis, it gassed an astonishing 72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs.25
But removing unwanted animals was one thing; addressing the human being was another matter. Popular anxiety about class, immigration, and race mixing came together in 1916 when the blue-blood American conservationist and eugenicist (and director of the Bronx Zoo) Madison Grant brought out his popular book The Passing of the Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History, a work that would exert considerable influence over the next twenty-five years, particularly in Germany. “Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws,” he wrote, “and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community.” Instead, Grant insisted, the “laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit”—the extermination of defectives—because “human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”26
In his popular book, the most explicit statement of racist ideology ever published in the United States, Grant’s hatred for democracy and the immigration of “inferior peoples” knew no bounds. He expressed special disdain for “the Polish Jew… with his dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest.” According to Grant, “a cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.” But Jews were not his only targets. His categories of inferiority extended to other races as well—indeed, to anyone who did not meet his definition of white Anglo-Saxon.27
Grant’s views were widely shared among a hard core of leading eugenicists such as the biologist and American eugenics organizer Charles Davenport and Lothrop Stoddard, the Boston Brahmin political scientist and leading anti-Bolshevik who labeled the Jew as “the cause of world unrest.” Many such ideas also enjoyed support among many liberals, such as the government chemist and Pure Food and Drug Act pioneer Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and civil rights lawyer Clarence Darrow, who said it was just to “chloroform unfit children… [and] show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.”28 William J. Robinson, a New York urologist and leading authority on birth control, eugenics, and marriage, wrote that the best solution would be for society to “gently chloroform” the children of the unfit or “give them a dose of potassium cyanide.” Robinson also insisted that splitting hairs about any of their “individual rights” should never be allowed to trump the preservation of the race. “It is the acme of stupidity,” he wrote, “to talk in such cases of individual liberty, of the rights of the individual. Such individuals have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.”29
Grant’s views helped provide more of a political foundation for the lethal chamber. Across the country his friend Paul Popenoe, the leader of California’s powerful eugenics movement, also endorsed the lethal chamber as a sensible response to society’s woes. “From an historical point of view,” he wrote in his popular text Applied Eugenics (1918), “the first method which presents itself is execution…. Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.”30
In 1916, the same year that Grant’s book appeared, Allan McLane Hamilton released a memoir in which he recounted having witnessed a grisly double execution in Sing Sing prison’s famous electric chair several years earlier. The first inmate, he wrote, had been “a degenerate Italian” who was quickly reduced to “a limp thing,” although a convulsion had caused the prisoner’s right hand to “coincidentally” raise the crucifix he had been clutching. The second condemned convict was a burly German who had strangled his wife in a fit of jealousy. The execution did not go as smoothly, for it required the warden to order a second jolt, thereby causing the “distressingly perceptible and horrid” smell of burning flesh to permeate the execution chamber. “It was not long,” wrote Hamilton, “before my nervous system and stomach rebelled and I hurried to the cool outer air and left Sing Sing as soon as I could.” The famous physician said that for years afterward, he remained haunted by the brutality of the electrical execution he had witnessed, adding that it made him wish that the more humane alternative of gas had been used instead.31