Boyle later said the bill’s supporters had claimed that the lethal gas method of inflicting the death penalty had been officially adopted in France already, and that they had cited Dr. Hamilton’s writings about it. (In fact, gas hadn’t been used in French executions.) Boyle also recalled that the matter had been taken up with the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, a group that said it was opposed to capital punishment, yet it had “passed on the lethal gas method as more humane than any other which had been brought to its attention.” Although the world had recently undergone the horrors of chemical warfare, advocates of gassing claimed that the poor soldiers on the battlefield had suffered more because of low concentrations and other conditions, whereas a lethal chamber would provide highly concentrated doses in an enclosed space, thereby ensuring a quick and painless death. Upon receiving such assurances and seeing no one presently awaiting execution in Nevada nor any death cell constructed, on March 28, 1921, Boyle signed the Humane Execution Bill, making Nevada the first state in the world to require the administration of lethal gas to legally end human life.58
The new law required that a suitable cell be constructed for inflicting the death penalty by gas, and it specified that the warden, a competent physician, and six other citizens must witness the execution. The news wire reported, “It is planned that when the condemned man is asleep the air valves shall be closed and others, admitting lethal gas, be opened, life being taken without the prisoner awakening.”59 Several suggestions were made for ways to carry out the gassing when the prisoner was asleep. “It is anticipated the gas will be administered much as gas is administered to a patient in a dental chair or to a person preparing for a surgical operation,” one local newspaper reported. “In other words, it will be a form of anesthesia, and the administrator will probably be an expert anesthetist chosen from among physicians or male nurses. Those who favor this method of dealing death declare it is absolutely painless.”60
Nevada’s innovation received worldwide publicity. An editorial in the New York Times commented, “The electric chair is not modern enough for the Nevadans, apparently, or else it displeases them in some way, and their law calls for the use of putting of condemned murderers to death in what is called in euphemistic terms a ‘lethal chamber’—a room that can be made airtight and into which at will can be introduced through hidden conduits a suffocating gas.”61 Nevada’s lethal gas approach provided further dramatic testimony in support of Amos Fries’s vision: gas would act as a powerful deterrent to America’s public enemies while serving as the “most humane” weapon of war yet devised.
Meanwhile, Nevada’s cyanide machinations continued to be bound up in economics and politics. In May 1922, the United States Senate was taking up the tariff issue. Senator Reed Smoot, a Republican from Utah and a Mormon apostle who was strongly protariff, attacked Roessler & Hasslacher as being the sole agent of the German cyanide cartel in the United States. Smoot said the firm had made “unconscionable” profits from its sale of cyanide; however, he still argued for the 10 percent duty proposed by the committee on the grounds that without it the cyanide industry in the United States would be destroyed, and as a result Germany and Canada would control the American market. Then, Smoot said, he had no doubt that the Germans would force the Canadian company (American Cyanamid) out of business and impose ruinous prices on American consumers as it had done in the past.
On the other hand, Senator Key Pittman (the Nevada Democrat who represented Tonopah mining interests) argued that the proposed duty was in the interest of only one company and its subsidiaries, Roessler & Hasslacher, adding that with it the firm would charge “what the citrus fruit growers and the miners of this country can afford to pay.” Pittman charged that two days before the United States entered the war against Germany, Roessler & Hasslacher’s owners had transferred stock to German-American citizens in order to conceal the company’s true German ownership.
But Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen, a Republican from New Jersey (site of Roessler & Hasslacher’s headquarters), declared that Roessler & Hasslacher was now American-owned and therefore subject to tariff protection.62 In the end, the tariff act of 1922 brought tariff barriers to new heights, guaranteeing U.S. manufacturers in several fields a monopoly of the domestic market. But the Senate, on the motion of Senator Tasker L. Oddle, Republican of Nevada, voted to make cyanide duty-free.63 The Fordney-McCumber Tariff signed by President Harding on September 21, 1922, created an average duty of 14 percent on all imports, and an average of 38.5 percent on dutiable imports, but cyanide was an exception, which resulted in a considerable increase in imports of that material.64 The tariff act created a chemical division of the United States Tariff Commission to investigate production costs and other factors in the competitive situation regarding various commodities, and some of the commission’s surveys contained information about trade secrets and cost data of individual manufacturers.65 The tariff exemption saved the mining industry a great deal of money and in the process benefited American Cyanamid as well as German interests. “The action on the part of the Senate is very gratifying to the mine operators of Nevada and the entire West,” said the secretary of the Nevada Mine Operators Association.66 In its aftermath, the purveyors of cyanide jockeyed to take advantage of the changes to come.
By the time the conservative Quaker lawyer and staunch Republican William Brown Bell became head of American Cyanamid in 1922, the company had already branched out to begin making cyanide from cyanamid, and it had also started to produce hydrocyanic acid, which would prove an especially important ingredient in the vulcanization of rubber. By the mid-1920s the cyanide end of its product line had helped to propel American Cyanamid into a period of substantial growth. One of the hallmarks of Bell’s administration was that he provided little information to his stockholders or anyone else about the company’s activities or revenue sources, while at the same time he studied his competitors’ elaborate reports as a means of sharpening his competitive edge.67
By 1923 the alien property custodian had been confiscating German patents and German-controlled businesses in the United States, and Roessler & Hasslacher was under intense scrutiny that prompted it to cloak its German ties. In one of its most important expanding markets, Southern California, new cyanide plants were going up. One of these plants was started near Cudahy City. Its manufacturer was the newly established California Cyanide Company, a corporation chartered in Delaware in April 1923. The company was a subsidiary of the Air Reduction Company, an enterprise that sold oxygen and other gases, and which had been started by Percy A. Rockefeller, a nephew of John D. Rockefeller. The directors of the California Cyanide Company included a collection of East Coast and West Coast industrialists and bankers: Charles Edward Adams, a banker (and later a member of the Federal Reserve) who headed the Air Reduction Company; Samuel F. Pryor, the president of Remington Arms and a director of the German Hamburg-Amerika Line, who would later be called before a congressional committee to testify about his involvement with the IG Farben cartel; Colonel Leonor Fresnel Loree, the railroad tycoon; and Frederick W. Braun of Los Angeles, a prominent California businessman and developer who had long served as the West Coast sales agent for Roessler & Hasslacher Chemical Company and the Pacific R & H Chemical Corporation in Los Angeles.68