As it would turn out, potassium cyanide eggs would prove to be the type of cyanide used exclusively in American executions from 1930 onward.
The late 1920s and early ’30s witnessed some intense jockeying among the major chemical firms for more control over the world cyanide market, sometimes pitting German interests against American and British ones. William Bell, whom Fortune magazine described as “the precise, unobtrusively autocratic gentleman” who had guided American Cyanamid through its most prosperous period of growth to become America’s fourth-largest chemical company, was one of industry’s leading opponents of the New Deal and a staunch supporter of the economic policies of Mussolini and Hitler. He further expanded the firm’s business into other cyanide-related products, including cyanogas calcium cyanide for use as a rodenticide and insecticide.14 Bell also entered into agreements with the international cartel, doing business with the German dye trust controlled by IG Farben. Indeed, during World War II American Cyanamid would face federal prosecution for allegedly conspiring with the Germans to suppress competition and monopolize the manufacture of dyestuffs, including cyanide.15
In 1930 DuPont, the immensely powerful American corporation, purchased Roessler & Hasslacher. DuPont had dominated U.S. gunpowder sales for more than a century, earning the moniker “merchant of death”; it was also America’s leading chemical company and a major producer of synthetic rubber and cars. Prior to 1926 DuPont was run by the U.S. industrialist Irénée du Pont, a strong supporter of eugenics, right-wing political groups, and IG Farben. In 1934 he would help lead an attempted coup d’etat against President Franklin Roosevelt—a plot that was exposed and short-circuited, but never prosecuted, even though it amounted to high treason and involved plans to kidnap and murder the president and subvert the Constitution. His equally conservative brother, Lammot du Pont Jr., succeeded him as president in 1926 and guided the company through the turbulent 1930s. The du Ponts were not the only leading capitalists involved in the coup conspiracy; they were joined by representatives from J.P. Morgan, General Motors (which they controlled), and other oil, chemical, and pharmaceutical interests, as well as such well-known politicians as National Democratic Party chairman John Raskob and former New York governor Al Smith.16 But as happened with so many other investigations into the company’s misdeeds, the du Ponts managed to evade criminal accountability.
DuPont said it had purchased Roessler & Hasslacher “primarily to ensure a steady supply of raw materials for the manufacture of dyes and tetraethyl lead.” The acquisition also provided the company with high-grade cyanide for insecticides and other uses.17 One of its products was “cyanegg,” briquettes or egg-shaped pellets of high-grade (96–98 percent) sodium cyanide the size of pigeon eggs that were used to generate hydrocyanic acid gas for the fumigation of flour mills.18
Roessler & Hasslacher had long produced cyanide eggs for DEGUSSA, using the Castner-Kellner process, during which hightest sodium cyanide was produced by reacting sodium, glowed charcoal, and dry ammonia gas to form sodamide, which was converted to cyanamide before then being converted to cyanide with charcoal. (Cyanamide or cyanamid is an amide of cyanogen, a white, caustic, acidic crystalline compound.) In 1926, however, the American chemist James Cloyd Downs invented for DuPont a new process for the commercial preparation of sodium directly from salt, which proved a less expensive way to manufacture cyanide. Shortly after DuPont became a major producer of high-grade cyanide, which held all kinds of industrial applications, it would bolster its position by coming out in 1932 with a new synthetic process for making hydrogen cyanide.
Starting in the early 1930s, the giant chemical firms—DuPont, American Cyanamid, IG Farben, DEGUSSA, and Britain’s Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and the German-controlled London Fumigation Company—would begin to play the cyanide cartel game for several years, enmeshed so tightly that it was difficult to tell them apart.19 In 1934 they reached a patent and processes accord (amended in March 1935) concerning research in cyanides, formaldehyde, and derivatives. The 1935 Farben project involved ICI, DEGUSSA, London Fumigation Company, and others for the “manufacture and sale of [the] fumigation product known as Zyklon.”20 After 1935 the DuPont Company increased its holdings in Nazi Germany, purchasing 3.5 percent of DEGUSSA, among other investments.21 American Cyanamid was also a big player. In 1936 Harry J. Langhorst of Larchmont, New York, assignor to American Cyanamid, applied for a U.S. patent for an improved fumigant carrier combination related to the Zyklon discoids product, reflecting some of the collaboration that was going on between American and German chemical interests at that time.22
American Cyanamid would continue to manufacture Zyklon-B discoids under license from DEGESCH through 1943, selling large quantities to the U.S. Army for fumigation.23 In short, the Germans, British, and Americans were in business together, at least as far as cyanide was concerned.
Nevada’s shiny new gas chamber was inaugurated on June 2, 1930, on Bob White, a sturdy two-hundred-pound man who had been condemned for killing a fellow gambler at Elko. Instead of the unwieldy liquid cyanide that had posed so many problems in Gee’s execution, the state had prepared ten one-ounce “eggs” of cyanide of potassium in a screen container, to be dropped into a jar of sulfuric acid and water to form lethal HCN. Government officials insisted that their new system was superior to the old one in many key respects, and now they were ready to try it out.
Fifty-three spectators crowded close to witness the execution. Two were women: Mae E. Kenney of Carson City and Margaret Skeeter of Reno, both of them trained nurses. Warden Matt Penrose escorted White into the chamber. The condemned man seemed composed, and he smiled at the faces gaping at him through the thick glass. After the guards had strapped him into the straight-backed chair, he gave each of them a firm handshake. Off to the other side and out of view of the spectators, Dr. Edward E. Hamer, the uniformed state health officer, stood at his station, monitoring the sounds of White’s beating heart from a specially built stethoscope that was connected to the condemned man’s chest—another innovation that was designed to avert some of the problems encountered in the first gas execution, when the prison officials were unable to pronounce death or remove the body from the chamber for hours.
This time the executioners expected to be able to proceed much more quickly. When all of the guards had left the cell, Warden Penrose glanced at the two-gallon jar of acid. Then he turned to the condemned man, grasped his hand, and said, “Good-bye, Bob.”
“Good-bye, Matt,” said White with a broad grin.
Penrose then stepped out of the cell and shut the heavily insulated door. His next nod signaled a hidden staff member to cut the string holding the cyanide container, and ten eggs plopped into the acid, giving off their warning like a cobra hissing before it delivers its deadly venom.
“As the first cloud of gas arose from the jar,” the correspondent for the Associated Press wrote, “White looked at the crowd. With his head held high he took a deep breath. Then his eyes closed, his head fell back, the muscles of his arms and legs moved and a convulsive movement shook his entire body. This movement ended after three more breaths and his head dropped forward.”
Everyone waited for White to die. At first it seemed that the end had come very quickly, but it was several more minutes before the doctor declared White dead and unfastened his stethoscope. Afterward, Warden Penrose told the assembled reporters that they had just witnessed “by far the simplest and most humane method yet devised…. The prisoner is subject to no torture or violation of any kind. The prisoner’s body is not disturbed or distorted in any way, and there is absolutely no chance for any slip up. Death by gas is quick, sure and painless.”24 His official report would later claim that the execution had gone off without a hitch and been a perfect success. Hamer later published a brief article about the execution that appeared in the widely circulated Journal of the American Medical Association.25