Deaths caused by the rampant introduction of poisons into so many sectors of American society were now and then reported, as when cyanide-laced mooring ropes cost seamen their lives, or when citizens inspired by what they read in the newspaper turned on the gas to commit suicide or laced their husband’s coffee with cyanide.69 But in an era before strict government regulation, incidents such as these were often overlooked, and they seldom resulted in any serious follow-up.
Fries and his supporters didn’t seem to be troubled by the dangers chemicals posed. Instead, they railed against the “menace” resulting from a “rising tide” of nonwhite immigration. One of his former captains in the Chemical Warfare Service, Representative Albert Johnson, chairman of the powerful Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, led the charge in Congress to restrict the immigration influx. Like Fries, Johnson was a transplanted Midwesterner who had ended up in Washington state, and his politics were extremely conservative, nativist, white supremacist, and antisocialist.70 Exclusionary immigration acts were enacted in 1921 and 1924. In 1921 China and Japan were portrayed as restless enemies of the United States, and fears of the “yellow peril” ran especially high in the Western states of California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada.71
After Germany’s defeat in the war, Fries focused his greatest scorn on those he considered America’s newest threat—the Reds. Like Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover, and other anti-Communist zealots, Fries did his part in the Red Scare. Although the United States had signed the treaty at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armament, Fries also warned that other governments were secretly preparing poisonous chemicals for war purposes.72
In July 1922, at the same time that congressional agreement was reached on exempting cyanide from the Tariff Act, the War Department announced that the manufacture of poison gas for the army was being discontinued. Under the pact, however, limited quantities for research and development of gas-defense appliances would still be produced. The secretary of war directed General Pershing to sign the order shutting down the production of poison gas.73 After the international treaty prohibiting the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases and all analogous liquids, materials, or devices, was signed, the U.S. Senate ratified it by a vote of seventy-two to zero.74
At the same time, General Pershing also issued an order granting officers the same right of self-expression as civilians and he encouraged them to exercise their civic duty. Fries used this newfound license to make speeches and write articles attacking pacifist organizations for being part of a worldwide Communist conspiracy. Even after later orders explicitly forbade such activities, Fries used his army resources to conduct a wide-ranging propaganda campaign against his political opponents.75 The American Defense Society, the Lions Club, and other right-wing patriotic groups backed Fries’s efforts, denouncing any critics as “disloyal” stooges of Moscow.76 The National Council for the Prevention of War and other pacifist groups protested these allegations and denied they promoted Communism, but this didn’t stop the printing presses and mailings.77 Fries directed his office librarian, Lucia R. Maxwell, to prepare a detailed graphic using U.S. Army files that purported to show the sinister links between many of the peace organizations that lobbied against chemical warfare and in favor of the League of Nations and the Geneva Convention. Maxwell’s widely circulated “spider-web chart” listed the League of Women Voters, the National Council for Prevention of War, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and several other moderate groups as “Reds” who were secretly committed to international socialism. At the bottom of her chart she also included a polemical poem deriding “Miss Bolsheviki.” The Red-baiting chart was printed in Henry Ford’s newspaper as proof of the worldwide Communist conspiracy.78
Both the Chemical Warfare Service and the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department were instrumental in fomenting the Red Scare throughout the early 1920s. Aiding them were the Department of Justice, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Chemical Society, and other groups.79 Fries and his allies also lobbied against America’s support for the Geneva Protocol, which sought to outlaw chemical warfare. He and the chemical industry adamantly opposed restrictions on America’s chemical gas production.80 Led by DuPont, Dow, and other large chemical concerns, the industry mounted a campaign aimed at defending gas warfare on practical and humanitarian grounds.81 They also enlisted civic groups such as chambers of commerce, Rotary Clubs, and the Kiwanis. Together the alliance demanded continued funding of the Chemical Warfare Service, renewed government contracts and subsidies for the chemical industry, and high tariffs to prevent German and other foreign competition from challenging America’s greatly enhanced chemical power. By and large, they got what they wanted.
The League of Nations at Geneva attempted to ban poison gas, and the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, was signed in 1925, but it did not go before the Senate for a vote until late 1926. In the end, thanks to lobbying by Fries and others, the United States did not sign the Geneva Protocol.
CHAPTER 4
STAGING THE WORLD’S FIRST GAS EXECUTION
In order to serve as a deterrent and to demonstrate its humane killing power, Nevada’s new weapon against crime would have to be proven effective, and that meant someone had to be executed. The opportunity arose five months after the enactment of the state’s Humane Execution Law, when prosecutors identified a crime with all the makings of a readymade test case.
It occurred in Mina, a tiny copper mining boomtown gone bust, located about 175 miles south of Reno in Mineral County, not far from Toponah Junction. There on the evening of August 21, 1921, Tom Quong Kee, a seventy-four-year-old laundryman and nominal member of the Bing Kung Tong, answered a knock at his cabin door and was shot twice in the heart with a .38-caliber revolver. Within hours of receiving the report, Deputy Sheriff W. J. (“Jack”) Hammill had sized up the crime scene, traced the footprints of two persons from the cabin entrance to a nearby spot yielding automobile tracks and empty beer bottles, and identified a Greek cab driver who had been spotted in the vicinity at that time buying beer for his passengers. Soon Hammill came to suspect two Chinese men who had been seen being driven toward Reno at about that time, and upon their arrival the pair were quickly apprehended.1
Law enforcement authorities said the killing was part of a wave of tong killings that was sweeping nearby Northern California. Most whites, particularly in the Nevada desert, knew very little about Chinese-on-Chinese gangster violence.2 At the time Chinese immigrants were experiencing intense discrimination, as the “yellow peril.” The crime, therefore, fit the bill as a potential landmark capital case.3