Resistance to the gas chamber ultimately unmasked hegemonic notions of state-sponsored killing as being naturally just and humane, and finally destroyed its legitimacy as a method of execution. But the fall of the gas chamber went beyond that. In the end the resistance not only destroyed the moral legitimacy of the gas chamber; it also challenged the fundamental legitimacy of capital punishment itself.
This rise and fall of the gas chamber is problematic and incomplete because the defenders of capital punishment substituted another “rational” technique—lethal injection—in place of the discredited methods, and this replacement method of the poison needle is similarly shrouded in the trappings of bureaucratic management and medical ceremonialization. Lethal injection is hideous in its own right, but it is not a practical tool for mass murder. Unlike gassing, it is too unwieldy and individualized for carrying out genocide.
Social theories have their strengths and weaknesses. One might say, for example, that Rusche and Kirchheimer’s orthodox Marxist approach overestimates the importance of economic forces in shaping penal practice and underestimates the influence of political and ideological factors, giving little attention to the symbols and social messages conveyed.20 Foucault’s work is less a history of the birth of the prison than it is a structural analysis of the state’s power to discipline and punish, and he devotes considerable attention to knowledge and the body while ignoring other angles of interpretation. Instead of underestimating the role of politics in punishment, Foucault goes so far as to define punishment as “a political technology” and “a political tactic.”21
Another social theorist whose work is especially pertinent here is the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, who in his youth actually lived in Nazi society. Habermas went on to write of “the cruel features of an age which ‘invented’ gas chambers and total war, state-conducted genocide and terrorism, death camps, brain-washing, and panoptical control of whole populations.” He also noted that the twentieth century “‘produced’ more victims, more dead soldiers, more murdered citizens, more killed civilians and displaced minorities, more dead by torture, maltreatment, hunger, and cold, more political prisoners and refugees than previously were even imaginable. Phenomena of violence and barbarism define the signature of the age.”22 Habermas’s main aim was to develop social theory that would advance the goals of human emancipation while maintaining an inclusive universalist moral framework. His work squarely recognized the horrors of the Holocaust, yet he also held out hope that Germans and others who lived through it may have learned something beneficial from the disasters of the first half of the century.
Historians criticize many of these aforementioned theories on the basis that their broad generalities are not historically grounded and supported by detailed historical research that is particular to time and place. My own study—although influenced by the general theoretical work of Rusche and Kirchheimer, the classical sociologists, Albert Schweitzer, Foucault, Habermas, and other social theorists and writers about punishment and the Holocaust—essentially takes this position. I have opted for a historical approach rather than offering what might have been primarily a social theory of punishment: the book presents the results of detailed historical research into the rise and fall of the American gas chamber in specific states during the later three-quarters of the twentieth century. I have tried to pay attention to historical antecedents, ideological and political underpinnings, and changing political status over time. I’ve also sought to place these developments in their economic and social context, showing how the technology of gas-chamber executions evolved in response to scientific and political concerns.
Until now there has not been a book or even a single major article exploring this dreadful history. This book tells the story of the American gas chamber from its early imaginings to its nightmarish last gasp, with an attempt to place the developments in a historical context. The investigation takes us into several different arenas of modern science, war, industry, medicine, law, politics, and human relations, marshaling evidence from many quarters.
There remains much to learn for those willing to probe for it. Studying this subject has been a painful and demanding experience, but criminal punishments and crimes against humanity, I have long believed, can reveal many things about a civilization, and the tragic saga of the rise and fall of the lethal chamber is full of the stuff philosophers and tragedians dwell upon—and fools ignore at their own peril.
PART ONE
THE RISE Of THE LETHAL CHAMBER
CHAPTER 1
ENVISIONING THE LETHAL CHAMBER
The history of the gas chamber is a story of the twentieth century.
But an earlier event that would subsequently figure into its evolution occurred one day in 1846, when a French physiologist, Claude Bernard, was in his laboratory studying the properties of carbon monoxide (CO), a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas that would eventually be recognized as the product of the incomplete combustion of carbon-containing compounds. By that time the substance was already suspected of somehow being responsible for many accidental deaths, but nothing was known about the mechanism of its poisoning. Bernard therefore set out to explore its mysterious lethality by means of scientific experiment.
Bernard forced a dog to breathe carbon monoxide until it was dead, and immediately afterward opened the creature’s body to examine the result. The Frenchman observed the blood of the lifeless canine spilling onto the table. As he examined the state of the organs and the fluids, what instantly attracted his attention was that all of the blood appeared crimson. Bernard later repeated this experiment on rabbits, birds, and frogs, always finding the same general crimson coloration of the blood.
A decade later Bernard conducted additional experiments with the gas in his laboratory–turned–killing chamber, carefully recording each of his actions as he proceeded. In one instance he passed a stream of hydrogen through the crimson venous blood taken from an animal poisoned by carbon monoxide, but he could not displace the oxygen in the dead creature’s venous blood. What could have happened to the oxygen in the blood, he wondered?
Bernard continued with other experiments designed to determine the manner in which the carbon monoxide could have made the oxygen disappear. Since gases displace one another, he naturally thought that the carbon monoxide could have displaced the oxygen and driven it from the blood. In order to confirm this, he tried to place the blood in controlled conditions, which would permit him to recover the displaced oxygen. He then studied the action of carbon monoxide on the blood by artificial poisoning. To do this he took a quantity of arterial blood from a healthy animal and placed it under mercury in a test tube containing carbon monoxide. He then agitated the entire setup in order to poison the blood while protecting it from contact with the outside air. After a period of time he looked to see if the air in the test tube that was in contact with the poisoned blood had been modified, and he determined that it was notably enriched with oxygen, at the same time that the proportion of carbon monoxide was diminished. It appeared to Bernard after repeating these experiments under the same conditions that there had been a simple exchange, volume for volume, between the carbon monoxide and the oxygen in the blood. But the carbon monoxide that had displaced the oxygen in the blood remained fixed in the blood corpuscles and could no longer be displaced by oxygen or any other gas, so that death occurred by the death of the blood corpuscles, or, to put it another way, by the cessation of the exercise of their physiological property that is essential to life.1 Not long after performing one of these experiments, Bernard’s health suddenly deteriorated, perhaps, in part, as a consequence of the poison carbon monoxide gas to which he was exposed during his morbid experiments.