But Colorado’s death house stories became lost in the blur as more states joined in the movement to adopt lethal gas. At the start of 1935 Wyoming adopted legislation prescribing lethal gas as its official execution method. The editor of the Rawlins Republican, W.L. Alcorn, commended his local state representative, Senator I.W. Dinsmore, for introducing the bill following the newspaper’s revulsion over a hanging that had nearly decapitated George Brownfield in 1930.86 Their opponents put up a stiff fight, but the pro-gassing forces ultimately won.87 Wyoming officials sought guidance from Nevada and Colorado and from Eaton Metal Products in establishing their new system. A Cheyenne architect, William Dubois, oversaw the design and construction in collaboration with Eaton.
In mid-November 1936, the Associated Press reported that Eaton had completed a “glistening, all-steel lethal gas chamber, guaranteed by the makers to ‘bring almost instant death.’” Earl Liston said his “tank” was completely airtight and should be “just as efficient” as the larger one in use in Colorado. “The gas swirls upward like smoke from a cigarette,” he said, “and the prisoner is unconscious at almost the first whiff.”88
In August 1937 Wyoming inaugurated its new Eaton-built gas chamber by executing Paul H. (“Perry”) Carroll, a thirty-six-year-old white man who allegedly had murdered his boss, the superintendent of the Wyoming division of the Union Pacific Railroad, at Rawlins (seventy miles from the Colorado border), on October 27, 1935. A small black blindfold was placed over Carroll’s eyes and the guards shook hands with him before exiting the chamber. Warden Alex McPherson pulled a control lever dropping a cheesecloth sack containing thirty-two cyanide eggs weighing half an ounce each into a bucket containing a mixture of three quarts of water and three pints of sulfuric acid beneath the chair, sending deadly fumes swirling through the cell. After a few deep breaths, his head pulled back and he gasped, then his head fell to his chest; his body made further reflex spasms for about six minutes. As soon as death was pronounced, another switch was thrown to open a vent at the top of the chamber, and an electric fan helped evacuate gas from the room. Valves on four ammonia tanks were then opened to neutralize the lethal fumes. Finally, after fourteen minutes of the ammonia treatment, guards wearing gas masks unbolted the door and removed Carroll’s body.89
In 1940 a thirty-eight-year-old Jewish rail worker, Stanley Lantzer, met the same end for allegedly murdering his wife. Lantzer’s executioner later said he preferred hanging to the gas chamber because the victim lost consciousness as soon as the trap fell, whereas lethal gas took several minutes to kill its victim. But Dinsmore, the author of the 1935 legislation that replaced hanging, was quoted as saying, “Lethal gas execution probably can be improved upon… but I’m sure now that it’s the most humane way of taking a life currently known to man.”90
In April 1937, Missouri also voted in lethal gas. Missouri was a state rooted in both the Midwest and the South, reflecting yet another expansion of lethal-gas executions—several legislators expressed concern that local capital cases were “too dangerous” because they often resulted in “Roman holiday” lynchings. Like three of its predecessors who had moved to gas (Colorado, Oregon, and Arizona), it, too, had previously abolished capital punishment for a time, but then reinstated it.91 Defense attorneys complained the new method would make juries more likely to hand out death sentences in the belief that death was “painless” and “humane.”92 But their arguments fell flat, and lethal gas became the official method of execution. Missouri’s Eaton model, almost an exact duplicate of Wyoming’s, claimed its first victim, William Wright, a thirty-three-year-old black man, in September 1937.93 By the end of 1941, of the first thirteen persons executed, at least eight were black.
Discussions about lethal gas went on in California for more than a decade. In 1930 Governor James Rolph vetoed a bill to substitute gas for hanging. But after members of the legislature continued to agitate for the new method, in 1932 the Republican Rolph ordered the wardens of the state’s two largest prisons to witness a gas chamber execution in Nevada and report back their impressions. James B. (“Big Jim”) Holohan of San Quentin and Court Smith of Folsom visited Carson City for the gassing of Everett T. Mull, and they brought back two sharply contrasting views.
Warden Holohan, a former sheriff who had witnessed several botched hangings, said he preferred the Nevada system for being painless and less prone to mistakes. “Nevada authorities inform me that never in a lethal gas execution has there been the slightest slip up, the least error,” he claimed. “Every execution has gone off smoothly.” Smith, on the other hand, concluded the noose was more merciful than complicated and drawn-out gassing procedures.94
The chemical companies dreamed up all sorts of publicity gimmicks to sell the image of the gas chamber in California. At the beginning of 1933 Wide World Photos distributed a photograph of a librarian at Pasadena’s famed Huntington Library poring over $50 million worth of rare books and manuscripts that were being processed through a specially built gas chamber designed to rid the paper treasures of the Sitodrepa panicea menace. The headline in the New York Times read “Lethal Gas Chamber for Book Worms.”95
While Rolph was mulling over his wardens’ reports, he found himself the object of disdain as a result of his response to a November 1933 lynching of two alleged kidnappers in San Jose. The day after a mob broke into the jail and hanged the two suspects, Rolph responded, “If anyone is arrested for this good job, I’ll pardon them all. The aroused people of that fine city of San Jose were so enraged… it was only natural that peaceful and law abiding as they are, they should rise and mete out swift justice to these two murderers and kidnappers.” Governor Rolph added that he would like to release all the kidnappers and murderers in San Quentin and Folsom prisons and deliver them to the “patriotic San Jose citizens who know how to handle such a situation.”
His comments created a firestorm of criticism. Editorial writers had a field day. In New York City, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders, including the president of the American Jewish Congress, launched an antilynching campaign. Some Jewish leaders complained that their efforts to protest Nazi persecutions in Germany had been weakened by the ability of Europeans to point to lynchings of African-Americans in America, and Reverend Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem warned, “If lynching is not stopped the mobs will lynch not only Negroes, but white men, and not only white men, but Governors and newspaper reporters and photographers. If we don’t put a stop to the situation we will have mob rule right here in our city.”96 Such warnings struck a chord, as newspapers had recently pointed out that more than one thousand members of Hitler’s Swastika organization had recently immigrated to the United States and organized themselves into an American division of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party), based in New York.97