The Last Gasp
Page 8
Fries especially touted the use of war gases for “insect and animal extermination.” “We have given a good deal of attention to [the elimination of insects and other pests],” he noted in 1922, “and expect to give a great deal more to it in the future.” Then he added, with obvious scorn, “The nearly four years that have elapsed since the close of the war have shown us that the human pest is the worst of all pests to handle.”14 During the war, the military had regarded the enemy as insects; now, during peacetime, it aimed to “wage warfare against insect life.”15 L. O. Howard, chief of the Bureau of Entomology, said the insect horde seemed from “another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insensate, more atrocious, more infernal than ours.”16
Fries tried his best to build national support for his policies. He told reporters the military had used some of its leftover poison gas to kill rats in seaport cities and wipe out locusts in the Philippines; next it would wage war against the pesky boll weevil, which ravaged cotton in the South.17 When Southern senators heard this, they rushed to insert funds for that purpose into the War Department’s budget. (In fact, the boll weevil proved more resistant to the poisons than expected, due to what some researchers later ascribed to the insects’ “apparent ability to suspend breathing more or less at will.”)18 Turning west, Fries also bolstered political support in California by pointing out that citrus growers were using liquid cyanide gas against scale and other bugs that had endangered their fruit crops.19
The science of pest control and the science of chemical warfare shared much in common. “Chemists, entomologists, and military researchers knew that chemicals toxic to one species often killed others,” one historian has observed, “so they developed similar chemicals to fight human and insect enemies. They also developed similar methods of dispensing chemicals to poison both.”20 Fries also understood how to win funding from Congress by appealing to various vested interests.
By December 1923 the United States Department of Agriculture had become so concerned about the possible health effects of using hydrocyanic acid gas as a fumigant on fruits and other foods that it released a study reporting the quantity of the fumigant that was absorbed by various foodstuffs. Aware of the power of the chemical lobby, however, the agency didn’t dare offer any conclusions about whether fumigated foods were safe for human consumption, saying only that such conclusions “lie in the domain of the pharmacologist.”21 Indeed, no government agency ever challenged the pervasive use of poisons in the nation’s food and water supply and air.
In this void, the CWS propaganda campaign cited studies concluding that there were no harmful health effects from war gas—no tuberculosis or other respiratory problems related to exposure to war gases, even though thousands of war veterans were still suffering from just such maladies.22 Notwithstanding the veterans’ complaints, Fries kept insisting that “the after effects of warfare gases are practically nothing,” and he adamantly denied there was any link between poison gases and respiratory disease or other ailments.23 Alleged environmental damage from poison gas was also denied. (Years later, a scientist revealed that the results of the government’s gas experiments were kept secret, “on account of the resultant damage to vegetation” and other effects.)24
Instead, industry spokesmen insisted how benign or even beneficial various poison gases could be, claiming that they would rid the world of dreaded diseases. Chlorine gas, they said, would eliminate the common cold and pneumonia; mustard gas would cure tuberculosis; and lewisite might be the remedy for paresis (the final stage of syphilis) and locomotor ataxia (an inability to control one’s bodily movements).25
Some claimed that their research findings were backed by human experimentation. For example, Dr. Arthur S. Lovenhart, a well-known pharmacologist at the University of Wisconsin, injected sodium cyanide into a severely disabled mental patient and was surprised that the previously catatonic subject suddenly relaxed, opened his eyes, and even answered a few questions.26 Lovenhart also conducted experiments using arsenic-based water-soluble compounds (such as lewisite) to treat patients with syphilis.27
In 1923 a prominent article planted in the press proclaimed that “poison gases invented to slay are just completing their first year’s apprenticeship to the arts of peace.” Unnamed sources reported that men who had worked in the poison gas factories during the war had become immune to influenza or other germs due to their exposure to hydrogen sulfide, chloropicrin, and chlorine. The War Department offered statistics apparently showing that soldiers who had been gassed were less susceptible to tuberculosis.28 “Inhalariums,” or gassing chambers where sick patients could breathe chlorinated air, became a new craze. Fries was photographed in one of these chambers, and even President Calvin Coolidge was convinced enough to receive chlorine treatments for a cold (he later said it had “cured” him).29 Although New York health officials later minimized chlorine’s ability to fight the common cold, Fries vociferously defended it, insisting it was a miracle cure.30
Many historians trace the beginning of cancer chemotherapy to the aftermath of World War II, crediting two pharmacologists in particular, Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman, for using mustard gas to treat lymphoma. (Goodman and Gilman had been recruited by the Department of Defense to investigate possible therapeutic applications of chemical warfare agents.) But in fact, some important preliminary work leading to such chemotherapy had occurred earlier, during and shortly after World War I. By the early 1920s, Fries was already saying that medical discoveries from chemical warfare had proved a boon to the human race, and in some respects he may have been right.31
Gas’s appeal seemed boundless, particularly in fighting crime. Fries got himself deputized to supervise a “gas battalion” for the Philadelphia police to handle disorderly crowds using tear gas.32 Tear-gas devices, which some security operatives mischievously referred to as “lewisite,” were rigged to bank vaults to deter robberies.33 Later, as the crime problem of the Roaring Twenties appeared more threatening to the social order, gas advocates such as Fries gave more thought to dramatizing other ways it might serve as a deterrent.
While this was going on, a fierce industrial and political battle ensued over one of the world’s deadliest and more useful poisons: cyanide. Hydrogen cyanide—the gas Barcroft had encountered at Porton Down—is a chemical compound with the chemical formula HCN. Discovered in 1782, hydrogen cyanide is a colorless or pale blue liquid or gas that is highly volatile, with a bitter taste and an odor like bitter almonds, although a sizable segment of the human population is not able to detect the scent due to a genetic trait. It is also extremely poisonous. A solution of hydrogen cyanide in water is known as hydrocyanic acid, Prussic acid, or “Berlin blue acid,” due to its intensely blue coloration.
If taken by mouth in salt form, such as potassium cyanide, a person’s stomach acid converts the cyanide to volatile hydrogen cyanide, often making it fatal if taken in a sufficient dose. Both the liquid and vapor are acutely poisonous if absorbed through the lungs, skin, or eyes. Massive doses can cause a sudden loss of consciousness, asphyxiation, and death from respiratory arrest. Medical studies warn that cyanide can cause salivation, nausea, vomiting, hyperpnea (hyperventilation), dyspnea (labored breathing), an irregular or weak pulse, anxiety, confusion, tachypnea (rapid breathing), vertigo, giddiness, stiffness of the jaw, neurasthenia, breathlessness, bradycardia (slow heart rate), arterial hypnotonia, polycythemia, hepatic impairment, and thyroidal hypofunction. Unconsciousness is followed by violent convulsions, protruding eyeballs, dilating pupils, foaming at the mouth, paralysis, and death.34 Whether or not it also acts as a carcinogen has not been documented; hydrogen cyanide is generally considered not to have mutagenic properties and is not considered to cause cancer, simply because there have not been any studies to test its carcinogenicity.
Despite its dangerous properties, cyanide became highly prized by modern industrial society.35 It was widely used in photographic processing, steel hardening, electroplating, pharmaceutical production,
fumigation, the killing of birds and other wildlife deemed pests, and mining, in which it served to separate ores. Prior to the early twentieth century, the Germans had long controlled its production. By the eve of World War I, the world’s appetite for it had become voracious. Then the war made it even more valuable. Both of the warring sides developed and used cyanide-based chemical weapons, although not on as large a scale as they did some other poisons. Cyanides were classed as “blood agents” because they attacked the body through the blood and interfered with the metabolism of all living tissues. As weapons of war, hydrogen cyanide, cyanogen chloride, or chlorocyanogen had proved relatively ineffective on the battlefield because it was difficult to achieve a sufficient concentration of the gas in the open air to consistently kill the enemy.
For many years there was only one cyanide manufacturer and supplier in the United States. Besides importing potassium cyanide from Germany, Roessler & Hasslacher had begun to manufacture cyanide from prussiate in New Jersey in 1894.36 Although Roessler & Hasslacher was legally based in the United States and headed by Franz Roessler, it was actually a long-established German-controlled firm that had been founded by his brother, Hector Roessler, and was part of the German chemical concern DEGUSSA (Deutsche Gold und Silber Scheideanstalt) of Frankfurt am Main, which served as the selling agent for the German cyanide producers. In fact, Roessler & Hasslacher was DEGUSSA’s American subsidiary.37
The sale of cyanide was largely controlled by an international cyanide cartel, which aimed to restrict the supply and thereby set a price high enough to ensure the desired profits for the established firms but low enough to keep smaller or new firms in check. Because of this system, the Germans largely dominated the U.S. market prior to the war, enjoying in particular a monopoly on the supply of potassium cyanide, which was imported from Germany. By 1921 Roessler & Hasslacher had discontinued its manufacture of potassium cyanide and taken up making large quantities of sodium cyanide. The raw materials used in its manufacture were caustic soda, anhydrous ammonia, and charcoal, all of which were produced in the United States.38 As a result of Germany’s defeat in World War I, however, DEGUSSA was supposedly stripped of its American subsidiary, Roessler & Hasslacher, along with its Hoboken plant and all other foreign shareholdings and patent rights.39 Approximately 47 percent of the shares in the company were sold at public auction under the Alien Enemy Act. But Germans somehow managed to retain control.40
In 1926, it was revealed that Isaac Meekins of North Carolina had received a salary as a voting trustee of Roessler & Hasslacher while he was employed as counsel to the U.S. alien property custodian, Colonel Thomas W. Miller, when the custodian was taking over the firm’s holdings. Meekins was said to have used his influence to get relief for the company and its affiliated holdings.41 It was also alleged that Miller had been appointed to his position through the influence of the DuPont Dye Trust, of which his father-in-law was an officer, and that his administration, like that of his predecessors, was dominated by the Chemical and Dye Trust, which was controlled by the du Ponts. The alien property custodian, one congressional watchdog group reported, “cooperated in an effort to have one of the DuPont Dye Trust chemists made a voting trustee of the Roessler-Hasslacher Chemical Co., an alleged enemy concern which in this particular case would have given the du Ponts not only an insight into the business of one of their competitors in the chemical industry, but control over it. Happily this plan failed because of violent opposition, but not for lack of support given by Custodian Miller to the DuPont aspirant who appears to have been represented in the negotiations by Francis P. Garvan, president of the so-called Chemical Foundation, incorporated by DuPont attorneys.”42
The mining industry relied on cyanide’s ability to separate silver, gold, copper, lead, and other ores. Some mining had been conducted in Nevada and other parts of the Southwest dating back to the Spanish period, and much of the area’s history centered on mineral discoveries and boom-or-bust mining camps. In the United States Roessler & Hasslacher’s potassium cyanide was known to be of high quality, and since 1916 the firm had offered various grades of cyanide based on the sodium cyanide content.43 Shortly after the war, in 1921, the Nevada Mine Operators Association was confronted with a high price from Roessler & Hasslacher, so it purchased the chemical from a different supplier at a lower cost, thereby saving the Tonopah companies 10 cents per ton of ore they treated, for a total savings of $100,000 in just a few months—a considerable sum in those days.44
Roessler & Hasslacher’s new competitor, American Cyanamid, had been founded in 1907 and specialized in manufacturing a compound of gray granules called cyanamid. Consisting of lime, carbide, and nitrogen, it was made by blowing nitrogen through white-hot calcium carbide. Crushed, it was suitable for use as fertilizer, which accounted for three-quarters of the firm’s business. American Cyanamid’s manufacture of calcium cyanamide—which used a technology different from Germany’s Haber-Bosch Process, required huge amounts of electricity, which was why the company located its plant at Niagara Falls.
Because cyanamid readily lends itself to conversion into ammonia that is used to manufacture explosives, Congress in 1916 appropriated $20 million for American Cyanamid to build a plant to make nitric acid, and America’s subsequent entry into the world war caused the company to focus all its capacity on government ordnance contracts, producing aqua ammonia used in the manufacture of ammonium nitrate and sulfuric acid. In 1917 the company began to manufacture a low-grade cyanide from cyanamid of lime, for the treatment of previous and base metal ores—a product that soon became competitive with Roessler & Hasslacher’s brand. Big mining companies began using it. The company also produced a liquid hydrocyanic acid used for the fumigation of citrus trees in California, and cyanogas, a fumigant, insecticide and rodenticide.45
There was a catch, however. Although Roessler & Hasslacher was controlled by the Germans, its product was manufactured in New Jersey. American Cyanamid’s form of lesser-grade cyanide, on the other hand, was actually manufactured abroad, at Niagara Falls, Canada.
In early 1921 Roessler & Hasslacher appeared before the Committee on Ways and Means in Washington, D.C., and asked for a 33-cent ad valorem duty on cyanide salts.46 The California Metal and Mineral Producers Association petitioned Congress against the proposed import duty.47 As a result, there was a terrific fight.48 Some industry observers believed that if the Congress put such a duty on cyanide, the business would become monopolized by the German-controlled firm and its largely American competitor would go out of business. This, in turn, would raise the cost of fumigation for the California citrus growers and Nevada silver mining interests.49 Supporters of the mining and citrus interests as well as American chemical interests waged a fierce publicity campaign against their German competitors, claiming that Roessler & Hasslacher was largely (48 percent) under German control. The advocates also complained that the firm’s “Prussian methods in its business” were “disadvantageous to the consumers.”50 Stories about the California citrus industry noted how orange growers had recently changed their cyanide fumigation method to fight scale pests, switching from the use of potassium cyanide to the cheaper sodium cyanide.51
While this trade battle was going on, in early 1921 another “constructive peacetime use” was suggested for poison gas. The proving ground was Nevada, the sparsely settled Western mining state with a population of only about seventy-seven thousand. During the postwar boom buyers from Los Angeles had begun to invade the state to buy up the land, only 3 percent of which was privately held.52 Mining interests controlled the state. Nevada had also established a reputation for progressive reform: it was the first state to adopt quick divorce, indeterminate prison sentencing, rigidly enforced prohibition, and was considered a relatively infrequent user of capital punishment. In 1903 the state legislature had required that all hangings be carried out in the state prison at Carson City. In deference to Mormon preferences, the lawmakers had granted condemned convicts the right to choose being hanged o
r shot, though only one man (a Montenegrin, Andriza Mircovich) had opted for the latter.53 In previous years, fifteen states had at some point abolished the death penalty for a time, though only seven were still without a capital punishment statute in 1921. Since 1911 Progressives in eight states had wiped it from the books, and Nevada might have become another, were it not for some “humane alternative.”54
In early 1921 Frank Curran, a former district attorney who was one of U.S. Senator Key Pittman’s aides, suggested that lethal gas should be substituted as the “most humane” way to end life, particularly if it were administered when the condemned was asleep or sedated with a soporific drug. Curran claimed to have been influenced by the ideas of the late Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, the famous alienist who had recommended such a method in his memoir published in 1916.55 Curran took the idea to two assemblymen, J. J. Hart of Lovelock (R-Pershing County) and Harry L. Bartlett (D-Elko), hoping they would introduce the appropriate legislation.56 Near the end of the legislative session, on March 8, 1921, Hart and Bartlett introduced Assembly Bill 230. It was favorably reported out of the committee and was approved by the lower house one week later. The next day the senate received the bill and quickly approved it on March 15, sending it to Governor Emmet D. Boyle, a Democrat who had been in office since 1915 and who was also a mining engineer from Virginia City.57
Boyle later said the bill’s supporters had claimed that the lethal gas method of inflicting the death penalty had been officially adopted in France already, and that they had cited Dr. Hamilton’s writings about it. (In fact, gas hadn’t been used in French executions.) Boyle also recalled that the matter had been taken up with the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, a group that said it was opposed to capital punishment, yet it had “passed on the lethal gas method as more humane than any other which had been brought to its attention.” Although the world had recently undergone the horrors of chemical warfare, advocates of gassing claimed that the poor soldiers on the battlefield had suffered more because of low concentrations and other conditions, whereas a lethal chamber would provide highly concentrated doses in an enclosed space, thereby ensuring a quick and painless death. Upon receiving such assurances and seeing no one presently awaiting execution in Nevada nor any death cell constructed, on March 28, 1921, Boyle signed the Humane Execution Bill, making Nevada the first state in the world to require the administration of lethal gas to legally end human life.58