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But others, including Berkeley’s German-born police chief August Vollmer, an internationally known figure in law enforcement and a member of the advisory councils of both the American Euthanasia Society and the American Eugenics Society, firmly opposed capital punishment and disdained theories of racial superiority.110 Some of Hollywood’s movie moguls, who had grown concerned about anti-Semitism, also tried to tone down the public discourse. But most Californians weren’t ready to give up their death penalty—at least, not yet.

Meanwhile, Eaton’s workers were keeping busy. Immediately after Wyoming and California’s first gassings the company had also installed a chamber in Oregon’s state penitentiary at Salem.111 Like California and North Carolina, sparsely settled Oregon also conducted involuntary sterilizations. Signing the authorizing legislation was Governor Charles H. (“Iron Pants”) Martin, a West Point graduate and former army commander who had served with Pershing and Fries in the Philippine Insurrection and World War I and had formed a secret Red Squad in the Oregon State Police that had operated up and down the West Coast. The conservative Democrat staunchly opposed the New Deal and favored German rearmament for Hitler’s regime as a cudgel against Communism.112 But Martin didn’t get to carry out any gas chamber executions while he was in office. Oregon’s first gassing occurred on January 20, 1939, during the new administration of Governor Charles A. Sprague, a progressive Democrat, when LeRoy Hershel McCarthy, aged twenty-seven, was executed for a robbery and murder. By the end of 1941 Oregon’s lethal chamber had taken the lives of three convicts, all of them white.113

By November of 1939 Missouri’s gas chamber had claimed the lives of eight men, five of them African-American and five from Jackson County. The sixth victim, Adam Richetti, a criminal associate of “Pretty Boy” Floyd, had been convicted on highly circumstantial evidence of participating in the Kansas City Union Station Massacre of five policemen. During his four-year stay in jail before his execution some of his keepers had tortured him with lighted cigarettes, and his sanity had become an open question. To the end Richetti protested that this was one crime of which he was innocent. Even after the gangster was strapped into the chair, he kept asking, “What have I done to deserve this?” and he struggled and let out a piercing scream before he finally expired.

Dr. W. W. Rembo, the prison physician, recorded the following timetable on a scorecard:

Prisoner entered chamber: 12:06–30/60 AM

Doors locked: 12:10 AM

Eggs enter solution: 12:10–15/60 AM

Gas strikes prisoner’s face: 12:10–30/60 AM

Prisoner apparently unconscious: 12:11 AM

Certainly unconscious: 12:12 AM

Head falls forward: 12:11–30/60 AM

Head falls backward: —

Heart stopped: —

Respiration stopped: —

Blower started: 12:28 AM

Chamber doors opened: 12:46 AM

Prisoner removed from chamber: 12:50 AM

Pronounced dead: 12:14 AM

After the gas was removed a federal agent took a fingerprint from Richetti’s limp hand to verify the positive identification, and the FBI trumpeted the gangster’s demise. But one witness, the popular writer Courtney Riley Cooper, later went public to say he favored hanging or electrocution, because in those cases the “victims apparently don’t suffer so long.”114

CHAPTER 6

PILLAR OF RESPECTABILITY

An indication of how powerful and respectable the German-dominated cyanide cartel had become in the 1930s can be found by examining the career of John J. McCloy, a pillar of the East Coast establishment who is considered by many to be one of the most influential yet overlooked American figures of the twentieth century.

A top U.S. assistant secretary of war during World War II, McCloy was a key player behind the internment of the Japanese, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the strategic victories over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. He later served as the first high commissioner of Germany, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the World Bank, trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, member of the Warren Commission, and advisor to nine U.S. presidents, all of which gained him the appellation as the “most influential private citizen in America.” McCloy spent much of his career in service to some of America’s wealthiest families, especially the Rockefellers. Most of the criticism leveled against him has been as a result of his decision not to bomb rail lines leading to Auschwitz, his opposition to Jewish emigration from Europe, and his lenient postwar treatment of Nazi war criminals.1 Missing from the discussion, however, has been sufficient recognition of some of McCloy’s other lawyerly activities, particularly his connections to German interests in the periods before and after World War II.

McCloy was born in Philadelphia in 1895 to a family of humble means. His Irish-American father died when he was six, leaving him to be raised by his Pennsylvania-Dutch mother, who worked as a hairdresser. Excelling as a student, he graduated from Amherst College in 1916 and subsequently entered Harvard Law School, but he suspended his education in May 1917 to serve in the U.S. Army when America entered the war. He was a field artillery officer in France, where he saw limited combat and rose to the rank of captain, before he returned to Harvard, where he received his law degree in 1921. He then began a prosperous career in law and banking, starting at the prestigious New York firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft.

In December 1924 he joined the high-powered Wall Street firm of Cravath, Henderson & de Gersdorff (later Cravath, Swaine & Moore), where he quickly made a name for himself. Soon after he joined Cravath, the firm participated with J. P. Morgan in a huge $110 million loan to the German government. This work in investment banking often took him to France, Italy, and Germany, all of which had been ravaged by the war. “Practically every merchant bank and Wall Street firm, from J. P. Morgan and Brown Brothers on down, was over there picking up loans,” McCloy later said. “We were all very European in our outlook and our goal was to see it rebuilt.”2

In 1929, while traveling west on a train, McCloy ran into a friend from his days at Amherst and in the army, Representative Lewis Williams Douglas, scion of one of the most powerful families in Arizona and sole heir of the Phelps Dodge copper mining fortune. After a brief stint as a state representative in Arizona, Douglas had worked in his family’s mining operation and gotten himself elected to Congress in 1926. Douglas and McCloy had several friends in common, including Trubee Davison, whose father was a partner in the J. P. Morgan Company, and they moved in some of the same social circles. Douglas was married to Margaret “Peggy” Zinsser from back in New York, and the young congressman introduced McCloy to his wife’s elder sister, Ellen Zinsser, as a possible beau.