Nevertheless, the Los Angeles Times reported that Gee’s death might have proved an effective catalyst for convincing the tongs to end their violent infighting. Two hundred worried tong leaders from eighty-one cities throughout the United States and Canada were said to be hurriedly planning a “peace” conference to discuss the matter in the wake of the Nevada gassing.76
Notwithstanding all of the hoopla, Dickerson later coolly reported his views to Governor Scrugham:
This method of execution, while no doubt painless, is not, in my judgment, practicable. The presence of an expert in handling this gas is necessary. Prison officials should be capable, at all times, of conducting an execution without outside help, as that help might fail at the critical moment. The gas is highly explosive and must be kept at a low temperature to prevent explosion. It must be carried by private conveyance, as express companies refuse to handle it. Los Angeles is the nearest, if not the only, point on the Pacific Coast, where it is manufactured, and it would be a hazardous undertaking to transport this gas from Los Angeles to Carson City by automobile during the summer months, and its rapid deterioration makes it impracticable to keep a supply on hand….
The real suffering of the condemned, regardless of the manner of inflicting the death penalty, is endured before the actual infliction of the death penalty. I have been a reluctant witness to executions by hanging, shooting and asphyxiation; and in each instance the condemned was unconscious, to all appearances, immediately after the trap was sprung, the rifle fired, or the gas released. Execution by shooting is the most humane, because death by this method is instantaneous, while life remains for some little time when the other methods are employed.77
Efforts to repeal Nevada’s lethal gas execution law proved unsuccessful over the following year or so.78 In 1926 a triple execution was scheduled, and the chamber’s two pine chairs were freshly painted and a new electrical steam-heating apparatus was installed for the occasion. But once again, the governor commuted two of the death sentences.
Then, as Stanko Jukich, a strapping Croatian miner convicted of murdering his sixteen-year-old sweetheart, was set to become the second person sent to the gas chamber, officials from the War Department expressed particular interest. Gas experts from the army’s Presidio base in San Francisco took part in the testing, leaving no doubt about the deadliness of the hydrocyanic vapor, particularly since there was no longer any winter cold to impede the gas. Jukich was put to death in May 1926. Once again, details of the execution were reported worldwide.79 This time the condemned man was pronounced dead two and a half minutes after the gas was turned on.80
Word that Americans had become the first to use the gas chamber to execute a human being flashed across the world. In Russia, the nation that had sustained the largest number of chemical weapon casualties during World War I, Leon Trotsky, the Soviet war minister, expressed concern about where the United States was headed. “Americans are trying these new gases upon their criminals, discarding the use of electricity as a means of killing wrongdoers,” he warned. “Picture yourself rich and satisfied America sending to famine-stricken, revolutionary Europe whole squadrons of airplanes which threaten to rain these noxious gases upon our heads! This is no fantastic romance.” Trotsky continued, “Soviet Russia, however, will not resort to such inhuman methods to gain its ends. War cannot be eradicated entirely; but it cannot be done by these extreme measures. It can only be done by the annihilation of capitalist society.”81
News of the Nevada gassing reached Germany, where modern chemical warfare had originated. German politicians and law enforcement professionals followed developments in the United States with keen interest, taking special notice of American ideas about law, policing, and prisons. German criminologists, eugenics researchers, and other scholars often visited the United States and vice versa, and the Germans closely monitored American publications. International wire services and professional association newsletters passed the latest news back and forth across the Atlantic. German scholars such as Hamburg law professor Moritz Liepmann, Berthold Freudenthal of Frankfurt, and the renowned criminologist Franz Exner as well as journalists such as Paul Schlesinger, popularly known as “Sling” (from the Vossiche Zeitung), often offered incisive reports on American criminal justice developments and racial laws. German media in the 1920s often ran stories criticizing the harshness of American penal practices, such as the heavy use of imprisonment and capital punishment. As one leading historian of this phenomenon has pointed out, “Both the liberal Weimar Republic and the oppressive Nazi régime were keenly interested in the American criminal justice system, although for very different and not always consistent reasons.”82 The poison-gas execution would have attracted special interest because of its implication for chemical warfare.
In early 1924, the right-wing Bavarian radical Adolf Hitler was awaiting trial at the People’s Court in Munich for his role in the failed November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. For the last year or so, American newspapers had reported on his extraordinary ability to sway crowds to his will, his hatred for Jews, Communists, Bolsheviks, and liberals, and his penchant for many of the trappings of fascism that had been introduced by Italy’s Benito Mussolini starting in 1922.83
The new political ideology held widespread appeal. Historian Robert Paxton has defined fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”84 Another historian, Roger Eatwell, has suggested, “Fascist ideology used primarily rational arguments to hold that people were largely swayed by irrational motives…. People were to be made whole again by bridging the more individualistic and collective aspects of modernity.”85
The romance of fascism quickly enticed some elite Americans who were steeped in various ideologies of racial superiority, capitalist discipline, isolationism and protectionism, and ultranationalism. News reports came out of Germany that American money from German-American anti-Semites was helping to fund not only Mussolini, but also the Bavarian-based fascist movement. The automobile manufacturer Henry Ford was singled out as a major Hitler backer.86 The ferment in Germany attracted attention from foreign racists, including the American Ku Klux Klan, which founded a chapter in Germany in 1921.87