Saddled with the new nickname “Governor Lynch,” Rolph died in office a few months later. But the California lynching situation continued to take on national and international implications. The San Jose lynching and its aftermath caused more embarrassment throughout the United States after a prominent Nazi magazine published photographs of the California necktie party to illustrate the decadence of American life, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer also released a feature movie, Fury (1936), which was based on the vigilante hanging.98
Rolph’s successor, Frank F. Merriam, assumed office at the height of the Depression, and he immediately faced intense labor unrest that saw the police use tear gas and army troops from the Presidio to regain control. Such actions involving chemical agents and civil unrest were duly noted by agents reporting to the Nazi regime. German lieutenant general Friedrich von Boetticher, for example, served as Hitler’s military attaché in Washington from 1933 to 1941, and he often traveled around the country performing inspections at the Presidio and other sites and sharing his anti-Semitic views with sympathetic members of the U.S. Army Corps, Charles Lindbergh, prominent authors, and other key players.99
During Governor Merriam’s third year in office, in May of 1937, he received a bill to switch the method of execution to lethal gas. The bill’s sponsor was Senator Holohan, the former San Quentin warden, who urged that California model its gas chamber on Wyoming’s and carry on the best in state-of-the-art technology. Merriam signed the bill into law, making California the eighth and the most populous state thus far to embrace lethal gas.100 The gas chamber had achieved a new level of acceptance. The latest developments were reported around the world.
Attention focused on Eaton Metal Products, which was now supplying its fifth gas chamber under contract. A reporter for the United Press began his account by pointing out that “Denver—nationally famous as a health center—ironically has become the nation’s leading producer of lethal gas chambers.” He described one of the company’s designers, Earl C. Liston, as a “quiet, self-styled steel architect,” and wrote that Liston and his fellow workers were putting the finishing touches on the new gas chamber that was bound for San Quentin in California. “We seem to have a monopoly on the gas chamber business,” the mild-mannered designer happily noted. “We’ve built five of them—and that’s exactly five more than any other company ever made.” He pointed out that California’s version incorporated the latest innovations in death cell manufacture.
In the past, acid was placed in an ordinary crock under the death chair, and the cyanide eggs were dropped into the acid by pulling a lever. But under the new system, the acid, which generated deadly gas when it came into contact with the balls of cyanide, would be piped into the chamber through special tubes. “This new system will make it easier for the executioner,” Liston explained. “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers. But it gets results.”101
Liston’s patent was filed with the U.S. Patent Office on October 16, 1937, and patent number 2,172,768 was issued on September 12, 1939. A copy is included in Appendix 1. (A few years after Liston’s design was completed, Nazi death camps would utilize a similar method, assigning a soldier to pour Zyklon-B pellets down a chute. The shafts at Auschwitz would become a focus of intense study for many years, mistakenly assumed by most scholars to have been invented completely from scratch by the Nazis.) As far as Eaton was concerned, a company spokesman later explained, the hardest design problems were fitting the chamber with enough windows to accommodate all the spectators and making it airtight so that the fumes would kill only the prisoner or prisoners being executed.102
Shipped from Denver by rail and barge, the strange contraption finally arrived at San Quentin, where a team of workers was assembled to help Liston install it. One of them was a hunchbacked convict, Alfred Wells, who was serving time for burglary. Wells later explained its workings to some of his fellow inmates, saying, “That’s the closest I ever want to come to the gas chamber.” (Five years after he helped to put the gas chamber together, however, Wells was sentenced to death for a triple murder and he was executed in it, a victim of his own handiwork.)103 Once he had his unit properly put together and inspected, Liston prepared his chemicals and tried out his new death device on a small red pig that was cheerfully selected from the prison farm. “Our calculations show that this new chamber should snuff out life in about fifteen seconds, much faster than any of the others we have built,” he said. The Denver Post proudly proclaimed, “Denver has become the capital city of the country, possibly the world, in the manufacturing of lethal gas chambers.”104
By December 1937 national discussion about the pros and cons of lethal gas had become so widespread that Reader’s Digest published a comparison of the arguments. “Gas is practically foolproof,” the spokesman for the pro–lethal gas side contended. “No black hood to hide a hanged man’s fantastic grimaces. No sickening among witnesses as an electrocuted man’s hair stands straight on end, burning smokily. No chance of some horrible miscue to make the headlines scream.” In rebuttal, the spokesman for the “anti-gas side” argued that the new method was neither painless nor easy to watch. Some victims, he said, could take up to thirty seconds of agonizing struggle to fall unconscious, and any witness could see that “his tortured body suddenly protests with clutching, writhing convulsions.”105
The California gas chamber received its first victims on December 2, 1938, when two hardened convicts, Albert Kessell, twenty-nine, and Robert Lee Cannon, thirty, were put to death in succession for murdering the warden of Folsom. Thirty-nine spectators looked on as each convict acted rebelliously, shouted, and then suffered convulsions. Dr. L. L. Stanley, the prison physician who was one of four medical participants to listen to the men’s heartbeats during the executions, emerged shaken by his experience to tell the ravenous reporters, “Hanging is simpler, quicker, and far more humane.” Another attending physician, Dr. J. C. Geiger, agreed with Stanley, saying, “The idea that cyanide kills immediately is hooey. These men suffered as their lungs no longer absorbed oxygen and they struggled to breathe. They died of an internal suffocation against which they had to fight and from which they must have suffered.” Even Warden Smith went on record to complain, “Hanging is a damned sight quicker and better.” But others endorsed the new method. “These men went easy,” said Sheriff Dan Cox of Sacramento. “They didn’t appear to suffer at all.”
Completion of the double execution was delayed for more than two hours when the exhaust system failed, requiring staff to use a suction device to clear the chamber of deadly gas. A guard wearing a gas mask entered the gas chamber to make sure the two men were dead. Some spectators were sickened by their exposure to the gas. In the fiasco’s wake the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “Their execution… precipitated an immediate controversy over the relative merits of cyanide and the scaffold as humane agents of death and may be the signal for a new drive to abolish capital punishment.”106 The San Francisco Examiner referred to “California’s new robot executioner,” calling the gleaming new unit “a chamber of horrors.”107
During the same period California was known for its cutting-edge eugenics program, for leading the nation in forced sterilizations, and for providing scientific and educational support for Hitler’s regime. In 1934 Sacramento’s rabidly racist real estate developer Charles M. Goethe, a founder of the Eugenics Society of Northern California and Pasadena’s influential Human Betterment Foundation, returned from a trip to Germany to report to a fellow eugenicist, “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought…. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”108 In 1935 Goethe hailed Germany and the United States for “two stupendous forward movements” but complained that “even California’s quarter century record [in eugenics] has, in two years, been outdistanced by Germany.” Some Californians endorsed the chilling words of Dr. John Randolph Haynes, the Los Angeles philanthropist who said, “How long will it be before society will see the criminality of using its efforts to keep alive these idiots, hopelessly insane and murderous degenerates…. They should go to sleep at night without any intimation of what is coming and never awake.”109