The sale of cyanide was largely controlled by an international cyanide cartel, which aimed to restrict the supply and thereby set a price high enough to ensure the desired profits for the established firms but low enough to keep smaller or new firms in check. Because of this system, the Germans largely dominated the U.S. market prior to the war, enjoying in particular a monopoly on the supply of potassium cyanide, which was imported from Germany. By 1921 Roessler & Hasslacher had discontinued its manufacture of potassium cyanide and taken up making large quantities of sodium cyanide. The raw materials used in its manufacture were caustic soda, anhydrous ammonia, and charcoal, all of which were produced in the United States.38 As a result of Germany’s defeat in World War I, however, DEGUSSA was supposedly stripped of its American subsidiary, Roessler & Hasslacher, along with its Hoboken plant and all other foreign shareholdings and patent rights.39 Approximately 47 percent of the shares in the company were sold at public auction under the Alien Enemy Act. But Germans somehow managed to retain control.40
In 1926, it was revealed that Isaac Meekins of North Carolina had received a salary as a voting trustee of Roessler & Hasslacher while he was employed as counsel to the U.S. alien property custodian, Colonel Thomas W. Miller, when the custodian was taking over the firm’s holdings. Meekins was said to have used his influence to get relief for the company and its affiliated holdings.41 It was also alleged that Miller had been appointed to his position through the influence of the DuPont Dye Trust, of which his father-in-law was an officer, and that his administration, like that of his predecessors, was dominated by the Chemical and Dye Trust, which was controlled by the du Ponts. The alien property custodian, one congressional watchdog group reported, “cooperated in an effort to have one of the DuPont Dye Trust chemists made a voting trustee of the Roessler-Hasslacher Chemical Co., an alleged enemy concern which in this particular case would have given the du Ponts not only an insight into the business of one of their competitors in the chemical industry, but control over it. Happily this plan failed because of violent opposition, but not for lack of support given by Custodian Miller to the DuPont aspirant who appears to have been represented in the negotiations by Francis P. Garvan, president of the so-called Chemical Foundation, incorporated by DuPont attorneys.”42
The mining industry relied on cyanide’s ability to separate silver, gold, copper, lead, and other ores. Some mining had been conducted in Nevada and other parts of the Southwest dating back to the Spanish period, and much of the area’s history centered on mineral discoveries and boom-or-bust mining camps. In the United States Roessler & Hasslacher’s potassium cyanide was known to be of high quality, and since 1916 the firm had offered various grades of cyanide based on the sodium cyanide content.43 Shortly after the war, in 1921, the Nevada Mine Operators Association was confronted with a high price from Roessler & Hasslacher, so it purchased the chemical from a different supplier at a lower cost, thereby saving the Tonopah companies 10 cents per ton of ore they treated, for a total savings of $100,000 in just a few months—a considerable sum in those days.44
Roessler & Hasslacher’s new competitor, American Cyanamid, had been founded in 1907 and specialized in manufacturing a compound of gray granules called cyanamid. Consisting of lime, carbide, and nitrogen, it was made by blowing nitrogen through white-hot calcium carbide. Crushed, it was suitable for use as fertilizer, which accounted for three-quarters of the firm’s business. American Cyanamid’s manufacture of calcium cyanamide—which used a technology different from Germany’s Haber-Bosch Process, required huge amounts of electricity, which was why the company located its plant at Niagara Falls.
Because cyanamid readily lends itself to conversion into ammonia that is used to manufacture explosives, Congress in 1916 appropriated $20 million for American Cyanamid to build a plant to make nitric acid, and America’s subsequent entry into the world war caused the company to focus all its capacity on government ordnance contracts, producing aqua ammonia used in the manufacture of ammonium nitrate and sulfuric acid. In 1917 the company began to manufacture a low-grade cyanide from cyanamid of lime, for the treatment of previous and base metal ores—a product that soon became competitive with Roessler & Hasslacher’s brand. Big mining companies began using it. The company also produced a liquid hydrocyanic acid used for the fumigation of citrus trees in California, and cyanogas, a fumigant, insecticide and rodenticide.45
There was a catch, however. Although Roessler & Hasslacher was controlled by the Germans, its product was manufactured in New Jersey. American Cyanamid’s form of lesser-grade cyanide, on the other hand, was actually manufactured abroad, at Niagara Falls, Canada.
In early 1921 Roessler & Hasslacher appeared before the Committee on Ways and Means in Washington, D.C., and asked for a 33
-cent ad valorem duty on cyanide salts.46 The California Metal and Mineral Producers Association petitioned Congress against the proposed import duty.47 As a result, there was a terrific fight.48 Some industry observers believed that if the Congress put such a duty on cyanide, the business would become monopolized by the German-controlled firm and its largely American competitor would go out of business. This, in turn, would raise the cost of fumigation for the California citrus growers and Nevada silver mining interests.49 Supporters of the mining and citrus interests as well as American chemical interests waged a fierce publicity campaign against their German competitors, claiming that Roessler & Hasslacher was largely (48 percent) under German control. The advocates also complained that the firm’s “Prussian methods in its business” were “disadvantageous to the consumers.”50 Stories about the California citrus industry noted how orange growers had recently changed their cyanide fumigation method to fight scale pests, switching from the use of potassium cyanide to the cheaper sodium cyanide.51
While this trade battle was going on, in early 1921 another “constructive peacetime use” was suggested for poison gas. The proving ground was Nevada, the sparsely settled Western mining state with a population of only about seventy-seven thousand. During the postwar boom buyers from Los Angeles had begun to invade the state to buy up the land, only 3 percent of which was privately held.52 Mining interests controlled the state. Nevada had also established a reputation for progressive reform: it was the first state to adopt quick divorce, indeterminate prison sentencing, rigidly enforced prohibition, and was considered a relatively infrequent user of capital punishment. In 1903 the state legislature had required that all hangings be carried out in the state prison at Carson City. In deference to Mormon preferences, the lawmakers had granted condemned convicts the right to choose being hanged or shot, though only one man (a Montenegrin, Andriza Mircovich) had opted for the latter.53 In previous years, fifteen states had at some point abolished the death penalty for a time, though only seven were still without a capital punishment statute in 1921. Since 1911 Progressives in eight states had wiped it from the books, and Nevada might have become another, were it not for some “humane alternative.”54
In early 1921 Frank Curran, a former district attorney who was one of U.S. Senator Key Pittman’s aides, suggested that lethal gas should be substituted as the “most humane” way to end life, particularly if it were administered when the condemned was asleep or sedated with a soporific drug. Curran claimed to have been influenced by the ideas of the late Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, the famous alienist who had recommended such a method in his memoir published in 1916.55 Curran took the idea to two assemblymen, J. J. Hart of Lovelock (R-Pershing County) and Harry L. Bartlett (D-Elko), hoping they would introduce the appropriate legislation.56 Near the end of the legislative session, on March 8, 1921, Hart and Bartlett introduced Assembly Bill 230. It was favorably reported out of the committee and was approved by the lower house one week later. The next day the senate received the bill and quickly approved it on March 15, sending it to Governor Emmet D. Boyle, a Democrat who had been in office since 1915 and who was also a mining engineer from Virginia City.57