3. “Executions at the Dog Pound,” NYT, June 26, 1874.
4. J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), p. 66.
5. Benjamin Ward Richardson, “On the Painless Extinction of Life in the Lower Animals,” Scientific American Supplement 476 (February 14, 1885). See also Edwin Black’s excellent history of the eugenics movement, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), chapter 13. Black is practically the only American historian to date who has written in any detail about the significance of the lethal chamber.
6. When present in the air, carbon dioxide usually has no noticeable effect on humans at only 1–2 percent, but at 3 percent it causes breathing to become slightly more difficult, and at 5–6 percent it causes marked panting and headache. At 10 percent there is extreme distress, and at 15 percent humans often slip into partial unconsciousness with narcotic poison effects. At 18 percent suffocation and death can occur, and at 25 percent or more rapid death.
7. H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905).
8. Robert Reid Rentoul, Race, Culture; or, Race Suicide? (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1906), pp. 178, 179. See also Rentoul, “Proposed Sterilization of Certain Mental Degenerates,” AJS 12(3) (November 1906): 319–27.
9. D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922), p. 144.
10. Black, War Against the Weak, p. 248.
11. These developments are outlined in ibid., pp. 247–50.
12. Scott Christianson, “Bad Seed or Bad Science? The Story of the Notorious Jukes Family,” NYT, February 8, 2003.
13. Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf” (Politics as a Vocation), a lecture he gave in 1919, in Max Weber, Political Writings, ed. and trans. P. Lassman and R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944).
14. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 (New York: NAACP, 1919; reprint, Negro Universities Press, 1969), pp. 7, 30–31, 45. See also Charles J. Ogletree and Austin D. Sarat, eds., From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
15. Margaret Werner Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850–1984 (Rockville, MD: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, December 1986), p. 217. From 1890 to 1984 a total of 8,516 persons were legally executed and 3,543 were illegally lynched. About three-quarters of those lynched in that period were black. Although about 90 percent of those executed under state authority were executed for homicide, only 41 percent of those lynched were for homicide (ibid., 9).
16. Governor David Hill’s inaugural address, January 6, 1885, David B. Hill Papers, New York State Library, Albany.
17. Richard Moran, The Executioner’s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. 248 n39.
18. R. Ogden Doremus, Clark Bell, J. Mount Bleyer, Charles F. Stillman, and Frank H. Ingram, “Report of the Committee on Best Method of Executing Criminals,” The Medico-Legal Journal 5(1) (1888): 427–41. Bleyer is described in Moran, Executioner’s Current, pp. 72–74.
19. Allan McLane Hamilton (1848–1919), Recollections of an Alienist: Personal and Professional (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1916).
20. Letter from Governor James G. Scrugham to Dr. J. W. Kime of Boulder Lodge Sanitarium, Fort Dodge, Iowa, April 9, 1924, in Governor Scrugham Papers, Nevada State Archives, Carson City, Nevada.
21. Moran, Executioner’s Current, p. 110.
22. Quoted in “A New Form of Death Penalty,” NYT, December 15, 1896.
23. Henry M. Boies, Prisoners and Paupers: A Study of the Abnormal Increase of Criminals, and the Public Burden of Pauperism in the United States; the Causes and Remedies (New York: Putnam’s, 1893), pp. 292–93.
24. W. Duncan McKim, Heredity and Human Progress (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900), pp. 120, 168.
25. “72,000 Cats Killed in Paralysis Fear,” NYT, July 26, 1916.
26. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916). Grant’s book later found an ardent fan in Adolf Hitler.
27. Carey McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1948), pp. 58–60.
28. Ian Dowbiggin, A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
29. William J. Robinson, Eugenics, Marriage, and Birth Control (New York: The Critic and Guide Company, 1917), pp. 74–76.
30. Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, Applied Eugenics (New York: Macmillan, 1918), p. 184.
31. Allan McLane Hamilton, Recollections of an Alienist, Personal and Professional (New York: George H. Doran, 1916), pp. 380–89.
2. FASHIONING A FRIGHTFUL WEAPON OF WAR
1. Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 3.
2. Anthony R. Hossack, first published in Everyman at War, edited by C. B. Purdom (New York: Dutton, 1930).
3. Rev. O. S. Watkins, quoted in Amos A. Fries and Clarence J. West, Chemical Warfare (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1921), p. 13.
4. Daniel Charles, Master Mind: the Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (New York: Ecco, 2005), pp. 162–63.
5. “Mars in White Smock,” Time, March 8, 1937.
6. Curt Wachtel, Chemical Warfare (Brooklyn, NY: Chemical Publishing, 1941), p. 21.
7. “Mars in White Smock.”
8. Fries and West, Chemical Warfare, p. 14.
9. Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, p. 10.
10. See Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler (New York: Harmony Books, 2008).
11. Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (New York: Knopf, 1987), quoted in James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 63.
12. Charles, Master Mind, p. 152. For more on Fritz Haber (1868–1934), see Morris Goran, The Story of Fritz Haber (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967).
13. Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 18.