38. Alan Lougheed, “Anatomy of an International Cartel,” p. 3.
39. Hayes, From Cooperation to Complicity, p. 6. See also K. D. Friedberg and H. A. Schwarzkopf, “The Exhalation of Hydrocyanic Acid in Cyanide Poisoning” (in German), Archives of Toxicology 24 (1969): 235–42.
40. “Alien Enemies’ Property Sold,” LAT, July 19, 1919.
41. Ibid. “Wants Judge Impeached: Ex-Federal Tax Employee Accuses Meekins, Once Miller’s Counsel,” NYT, May 8, 1926.
42. Arthur Altridge, “Sidelights on Alien Property,” The Searchlight on Congress 71(1) (June 30, 1922): 19. Miller resigned as alien property custodian in 1925, and in 1927 he was convicted of defrauding the U.S. government.
43. Roessler & Hasslacher Chemical Company circular from 1916, reprinted in G. A. Roush, ed., The Mineral Industry: Its Statistics, Technology, and Trade during 1916 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1917), p. 24.
44. Roush, ed., The Mineral Industry: Its Statistics, Technology, and Trade during 1920, p. 314.
45. American Cyanamid, Annual Reports to the Board of Directors, 1916–21, Princeton University Library; Roush, ed., The Mineral Industry: Its Statistics, Technology, and Trade during 1920, p. 314.
46. Ibid., 313.
47. Ibid., p. 314.
48. “German Firm Seeking Duty,” LAT, February 14, 1921, p. 15.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. R. W. Hodgson, “How Fumigation Methods for Fighting Scale Have Changed,” LAT, April 3, 1921.
52. “Los Angeles Buyers Invading Nevada,” LAT, November 7, 1920.
53. Guy Louis Rocha, “An Outline of Capital Punishment in Nevada,” Nevada State Archives and Records, Nevada State Prison Inmate Case Files, updated on September 26, 1997.
54. The abolitionist states to that point had included Michigan (1846–), Rhode Island (1852–), Wisconsin (1853–), Iowa (1872–78), Maine (1876–83, 1887–), Colorado (1897–1901), Kansas (1907–35), Minnesota (1911–), Washington (1913–19), Oregon (1914–20), North Dakota (1915–), South Dakota (1915–39), Tennessee (1915–16), Arizona (1916–18), and Missouri (1917–19). Margaret Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850–1984 (Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 1986), p. 13.
55. Nevada State Journal, February 8, 1924. Curran was born in Woburn, Massachusetts, on June 26, 1886. His father was a prominent Boston attorney, and he was educated in Massachusetts, at the Ecole Alsacienne in France, and at Boston University School of Law, where he studied with Lothrop Stoddard (the white supremacist author and agitator against the “yellow peril”) and graduated in 1909. Curran was admitted to the bar in Arizona but suffered ill health and moved to Nevada and California before returning to Battle Mountain, Nevada, where he served as district attorney of Lander County. After practicing law in Reno and other locations in 1920, he served as secretary to Senator Key Pittman (D-Nevada) during the Cox-Harding campaign. In 1922 he moved to practice law in Fresno, California, and he later served as deputy district attorney of Los Angeles. See Lilbourne Alsip Winchell, History of Fresno County; the San Joaquin Valley (Fresno: A. H. Cawston, 1933), p. 246. During World War I he had joined the army but failed to qualify for the aviation branch. Governor Scrugham Papers, Nevada State Archives.
56. Las Vegas Age, March 19, 1921; PR, March 25, 1921; NSJ, March 29, 1921; CCDA, January 6, 1923; REG, January 18, 1924; Loren B. Chan, “Example for the Nation: Nevada’s Execution of Gee Jon,” NHSQ 18(2) (Summer 1975): pp. 95, 104.
57. Nevada Legislature, Assembly, Journal of the Assembly, 30th sess. (1921): 247, 301, 314, Nevada Legislature, Senate, Journal of the Senate, 30th sess. (1921): 255, 257, 262, 272; Nevada Statutes (1921): ch. 246; CCDA, March 29, 1921.
58. From a two-page, unpublished typescript in the Nevada State Prison Papers, File 2320, Nevada State Archives.
59. “Nevada to Use Gas to Execute Criminals,” NYT, March 18, 1921; “Signs Nevada Law for Lethal Execution,” NYT, March 29, 1921. Boyle corresponded with Adolph Lewisohn, the famous philanthropist and mining tycoon who was president of the NCPPL based at Columbia University, about capital punishment.
60. PR, August 19, 1921.
61. “Painless and Yet Horrible,” NYT, January 30, 1922.
62. “Huge Profits Charge Made,” LAT, May 4, 1922. Pittman’s background is described in Betty Glad, Key Pittman: The Tragedy of a Senate Insider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and Fred Israel, Nevada’s Key Pittman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963). Founded in 1882, Roessler & Hasslacher Chemical Company had its corporate headquarters in New York and plants in Perth Amboy and Niagara Falls. It merged with E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company in 1930.
63. “Farm Bloc Victor in Tariff Fights,” NYT, May 30, 1922.
64. C. R. DeLong, “The Import and Export Trade in Chemicals,” JIEC 16(1) (January 1924): 83.
65. C. R. DeLong, “The Chemical Division of the United States Tariff Commission,” JIEC 16(6) (June 1924): 610.
66. “Defeat of Cyanide Duty Saves Mines Big Sum,” REG, May 30, 1922.
67. “American Cyanamid: Fourth-Largest U.S. Chemical Company,” Fortune 22 (September 1940): 66–71.
68. Articles of Incorporation of the California Cyanide Company, Secretary of State records, book 450 at page IXX, California State Archives, Sacramento. F.W. Braun arrived in Los Angeles in the early part of the century to sell drugs and chemicals wholesale. “Men interested in developing fumigation brought their troubles to me,” he wrote. “I did not know much about cyanide, and at that time I knew nothing whatsoever of fumigation, but I believed that I knew how to push the buttons and pull the strings so as to get not only the information but the goods.” Braun Corporation, School of Fumigation… Held at Pomona, California, August 9–13, 1915 (Los Angeles: Braun Corporation, 1915), p. 43.
69. See, e.g., “2 Die in Vain Effort to Rescue Another in Gas-Filled Ship,” NYT, July 14, 1921.
70. See Alfred J. Hillier, “Albert Johnson, Congressman,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 36 (July 1945): 193–211.
71. “Problems to Be Attacked by the Conference,” LD 71 (November 12, 1921): 1. See also Will Irwin, The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense (New York: Dutton, 1921).
72. “Hears War Gas Is Made Abroad,” NYT, May 25, 1922. See also Kenneth D. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007); Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000).