The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber by Scott Christianson

Author:Scott Christianson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Capital punishment - United States - History - 20th century, Social Science, Penology, 20th Century, Gas chambers - United States - History, General, United States, Capital punishment, Gas chambers, History
ISBN: 9780520255623
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2010-07-01T07:07:46.820486+00:00

PART TWO

THE FALL OF THE GAS CHAMBER

CHAPTER 9

CLOUDS OF ABOLITION

In the wake of two world wars that had occurred in the span of less than thirty years and cost more than ninety million lives (more than a million of those by the gassing of innocent civilians in prison camps), and with growing fears of annihilation from nuclear bombs or other mass destruction, not to mention rising concerns about the “enemy within,” Americans had much to reflect upon. Among other things, the traumas of World War II had sensitized many nations to the need for international standards of human rights and treatment of prisoners. Millions of POWs and civilians had died or been murdered in captivity, both during the war and after.1

Britain’s Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, appointed in May of 1949, undertook what was to that point the most exhaustive study of capital punishment. Although its five-hundred-page public report, issued in 1953, did not directly argue for abolition of the death penalty, it did question its underlying rationales, including the principle of deterrence, which was becoming so crucial in the nuclear arms race. Based on scientific review, the panel further concluded that executions by lethal gas, electrocution, or lethal injection were no more “humane” than killing by hanging. The commission’s conclusions prompted intense debate in England, Canada, and elsewhere about the appropriateness of capital punishment by any method. By 1954 many nations, including Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, most countries in Latin America, and New Zealand, had already abandoned the death penalty.2

In the United States, however, serious consideration of abolition was slower in coming, for political reasons. On the one hand, capital punishment had been used since the earliest days of exploration and colonization; it was still legal in all but a few states. On the other hand, America was entering the early stages of the black civil rights movement, with its calls for desegregation, racial equality, and an end to lynching. Moreover, the period 1951–53 witnessed one of the greatest waves of prison revolts in American history, including disturbances in some of the gas-chamber states, such as Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Oregon. Prisoners’ rights and the abolition of the death penalty were suddenly on many reformers’ agenda, and capital punishment was emerging as a key civil rights issue.

The memory of World War II cast a painful shadow over American society, but like the aftermath of so many catastrophes, the postwar period often prompted deep-seated desires to suppress, forget and overcome the traumatic past. “By the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s,” one historian later wrote, “talk of the Holocaust was something of an embarrassment in American life.” Deeper recognition of Germany’s crimes against humanity, including its use of the gas chamber, was hampered in part by cold war considerations that suddenly had transformed America’s former ally, the Soviet Union, into a new apotheosis of evil, and its former archenemy, Germany, into a “gallant” outpost against Communist domination.3 As a result, some of the revulsion previously expressed

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