by Jill Jonnes
Warden Durston ushered Kemmler into a death chamber incongruously bright with morning sunlight. Cheerful shafts were streaming through two windows seven feet above the rough-planked wood floor. This small basement room had once been used to process new prisoners, who had washed at a sink and bathtub in the corner before donning their “stripes.” Several months earlier, the room had been painted a soothing pale gray. Two double-armed gaslight fixtures hung from the ceiling. The twenty-five official witnesses, eminent physicians and lawyers, as well as two select reporters, sat in uneasy silence.
“Gentlemen,” said Durston, his voice trembling, “this is William Kemmler. I have warned him that he has got to die and if he has anything to say he will say it.”
The condemned man bowed to the witnesses, all arrayed in a horseshoe of wooden chairs facing the malevolent-looking oversize electric chair. Then Kemmler said, “Gentlemen, I wish you all good luck. I believe I am going to a good place, and I am ready to go. I want only to say that a great deal has been said about me that is untrue. I am bad enough. It is cruel to make me out worse.”35 The bearded bantam, his eyes close set, bowed once again to the witnesses, turned, and removed his gray suit jacket. He began to sit in one of the regular chairs, then realized his mistake and sat instead in the electric chair. The sun illuminated his sallow bearded face. Warden Durston remembered he had to check that Kemmler’s clothes had holes clear through at the bottom of his back, again for proper attachment of electrodes. The shirttail did not. So Durston fished out a scissors and awkwardly cut through the tucked-in shirttail. “Are your suspenders all right?” asked the warden as he put down the scissors.
“Yes, all right,” said Kemmler.
“Well, then, Bill, you’d better sit down here.”
Kemmler matter-of-factly settled back into the electric chair, while the warden began to attach the rear electrode with its suction cup and wet sponges. “Now take your time and do it all right, Warden,” instructed Kemmler, cool as could be. The witnesses looked at one another in astonishment. “There is no rush,” he continued. “I don’t want to take any chances on this thing, you know.”
“All right, William,” Durston said grimly. Hands shaking, he was now attaching the leather masklike headpiece, also designed with a suction piece and wet sponge.
As Durston stepped back, Kemmler shook the mask and said in a muffled voice, “Warden, just make that a little tighter. We want everything all right, you know.”
Durston complied and then moved on to strapping in the arms and legs, his hands trembling as he buckled one after the other. “All right,” he said, and stepped back to the threshold of the death chamber. “Is it ready?” Reassured, he turned toward Kemmler, now just an ominous leather mask and maze of thick leather straps and wires warmed by the streaming sunshine. The freshening breeze outside rustled the thick ivy and the green grass. The sparrows twittered furiously.
Two physicians had come up to inspect the straps. One said, “God bless you, Kemmler, you have done well.” Many of the witnesses had tears in their eyes at this dreadful scene and now murmured, “You have, Kemmler.” At that moment the district attorney of Buffalo rose from his chair, looking quite green. Excusing himself, he walked unsteadily toward the closed door to the corridor, opened it, and went out. Later, the other men learned he had fainted in the hallway.
Back in the death chamber, the warden conferred briefly with the two physicians, who then sat back down. Durston surveyed his twenty-four tense witnesses and two reporters and said, “Very well, gentlemen,” then walked toward the room where he would signal the electricians at the dynamo. The electric lights in there were on, meaning the dynamo was running. Kemmler’s hands could be seen clutching the wide arms of the electric chair. The bright sunlight lit up the dust motes floating slowly about. A heavy shade at one window was lifted by the straying breezes and fell against the bars. The sparrows in the ivy sang noisily. In the room, all was tense silence.
“Good-bye, William,” said Durston, and there was heard a low click.36 The switch was thrown in the far-off dynamo room. Then, reported The New York Times, Kemmler’s body jolted upright and strained terrifyingly against the straps. He became “as rigid as though cast in bronze, save for the index finger of the right hand, which closed up so tightly that the nail penetrated the flesh on the first joint and the blood trickled out on the arm of the chair.” When Kemmler’s face turned ashen, the prison physician, who had crept forward from his chair to watch, said, “He is dead,” leading the warden to signal for the switch to be turned off. Seventeen seconds had passed, and it was now 6:43 A.M. The assembled witnesses collectively exhaled in relief that the awful deed was done and turned their heads away from Kemmler as Durston detached the electrode from his scalp. Two physicians leaned forward to examine Kemmler. The other doctors gathered around and dented Kemmler’s flesh to judge his state. Dr. Southwick smiled broadly as he came away from the fresh corpse. “There,” he exclaimed to a knot of witnesses who had quietly withdrawn to the far end of the chamber, “there is the culmination of ten years’ work and study. We live in a higher civilization from this day.”37
But the blood was continuing to ooze from Kemmler’s small finger wound. His heart still had to be beating. The physicians around the limp figure recoiled as one yelled in horror, “Great God! He is alive!” Another ordered, “Turn on the current.” “See, he breathes,” gasped a third. When Dr. Southwick and the others whirled around at these cries, they saw that Kemmler’s body was still limp, but his chest was heaving up and down. He seemed to be struggling for breath, and foam was seeping horribly from his masked mouth hole. “For God’s sake, kill him and have it over!” screamed one witness. The Associated Press reporter fainted on the wood floor, and several men carried him to a bench, where they fanned him. Durston had turned chalk white. He fumbled and reattached the scalp electrode. As the current flowed anew and Kemmler again went horribly rigid, “an awful odor began to permeate the death chamber.” Kemmler’s hair and skin were being visibly singed. A blue flame played briefly behind his neck. His clothes caught fire, but one of the doctors quickly extinguished them. “The stench,” reported the Times, “was unbearable.” After several minutes, the current was turned off, and as purple spots mottled Kemmler’s hands, arms, and neck, the doctors again declared him dead. The room reeked of burned meat and feces. The nauseated witnesses signed the death warrant for Warden Durston and then trailed out into the stone corridors, silent, shaken, several sick, the Erie County sheriff so distraught that tears trickled down his face.
Three hours later, when the doctors had sufficiently recovered to perform an autopsy, they found that rigor mortis had stiffened Kemmler into a permanent sitting position. Examination of the body showed scorch marks wherever the electrodes and buckles touched the body. Kemmler had been “roasted” as well as a piece of overdone meat. Once the autopsy was complete and numerous organs removed, Kemmler’s baked corpse was taken and buried at night in the prison courtyard with great quantities of quicklime to dissolve all ultimate traces. Southwick excused the bungled electrocution as inevitable on a first try. Otherwise, he was rhapsodic. “I tell you, this is a grand thing, and is destined to become the system of legal death throughout the world.”38 The next day, New York’s many newspapers devoted page after page to the world’s first official electrical execution, including every ghastly detail. The New York Times’s front-page headline charged, FAR WORSE THAN HANGING; KEMMLER’S DEATH PROVES AN AWFUL SPECTACLE. The New-York Daily Tribune subhead read, “Errors and Misunderstandings Made the Execution Painful to the Witnesses.” Thomas Edison was quoted as saying, “I have merely glanced over an account of Kemmler’s death and it was not pleasant reading.”39 He blamed the doctors present for misplacing electrodes—they should have been attached to the palms of Kemmler’s hands—and general “bungling.” Bourke Cockran said, “It is a sort of ghastly triumph for me. The experts against me on the trial figured it all out such that such a shocking thing was im
possible and yet it has just happened…. After Kemmler’s awful punishment no other state will adopt the electrical execution law.”40
As for George Westinghouse, he said, “I do not care to talk about it. It has been a brutal affair. They could have done it better with an axe. My predictions have been verified. The public will lay the blame where it belongs and it will not be on us. I regard the manner of the killing as a complete vindicator of all our claims.”41 Almost forty years later, Nikola Tesla still abhorred the electric chair, calling it “an apparatus monstrously unsuitable, for the poor wretches are not dispatched in a merciful manner but literally roasted alive…. An individual under such conditions, while wholly bereft of the consciousness of the lapse of time, retains a keen sense of pain, and a minute of agony is equivalent to that through all eternity.”42 Suspicion was rife that Westinghouse had somehow managed to mastermind this botched execution. As for Harold Brown, one of the most ardent and combative officers in the War of the Electric Currents, he was strangely absent from all the bitter aftermath and hullabaloo. He disappeared from public sight, never to be heard from again.
A formal portrait of George Westinghouse, 1906
CHAPTER 9
1891: “Fear Everywhere of Worse to Come”
November 15, 1890, dawned crisp and azure in Manhattan, one of those delicious fall Saturdays where the very air shimmers sweetly, full of life’s promise and yet tempered by autumnal tristesse. The money men in their mansions on upper Fifth and Madison, settling into their breakfasts, knew better than anyone the nation’s greatness, its commercial promise, its phenomenal wealth. The steady waves of immigrants flowing in through Castle Garden and then washing out across the land had pushed America’s population up to a mighty sixty-three million, according to the recent census. Politicians had taken to boasting that the United States was now a “billion dollar” country. It was, in fact, far richer than that, thanks to its relentless can-do commercial spirit and the reckless ambition of men like Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. In the postbellum United States, the national wealth had soared to $65 billion, more than the accumulated holdings of all the aristocrats and commercial classes of Great Britain, Germany, and Russia combined. By 1890, in America, nearly $40 billion was invested in land and buildings, $9 billion in the sprawling network of railroads, and $4 billion in manufacturing and mining.
But as the New York money men unfolded their daily newspapers that glistening November morning, there was only visceral dread. For weeks the rumors of a big London investment firm on the brink of collapse had been creeping quietly about the chaotic floor of the New York Stock Exchange, multiplying, growing more sinister, more fantastic, infesting the always volatile atmosphere with sensations of doom. Now here, today, the worst of the whispered disasters was openly aired. On the World’s front page, for all its vast readership to see, was the story in public print: DEPRESSED BY RUMORS, WALL STREET AGITATED BY REPORTS FROM LONDON, THE BARING BROTHERS, IT IS SAID, INVOLVED IN THE RECENT TROUBLES. As the World so rightly observed, “When London trembles, the tremor is felt the world over. Therefore New York quaked.” English investors leery of American silver policy had been flocking to the bonds known as “Argentines,” eager to earn the easy riches of that far-off South American nation, but a revolution had now rendered worthless all those considerable investments.
When the financiers converged on their elegant Wall Street offices that fine fall morning, the lurking skeletal rumors solidified into monstrous and hideous facts. As The New York Times reported in the lead story of its fat Sunday edition, Saturday morning had brought the bleak and mind-boggling news that Baring Brothers & Company, “the greatest banking house of all the world, a firm whose business connections have extended for a century or more to the uttermost limits of the habitable globe [whose] … signature has stood always and everywhere for an absolute guarantee,” was indeed tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. “This confession was sensational beyond anything that Wall Street had even suspected or dreamed of.” One New York Times financial writer elaborated on the nightmarish news: “If the solvency of the Bank of England had been questioned, it could not carry a more severe shock.” The ensuing days featured placating stories about the brilliant rescue of Barings and its reorganization and soothing assertions about the general good health of American business.
But the stunning and ominous collapse of Barings was not so easily dismissed. The American banks of the Gilded Age were not unlike Potemkin villages: august and solid on the face of it, hushed and impressive marble-columned temples to mammon. But behind that stolid, expensive architecture flapped flimsy financial structures, liable to collapse under the slightest economic ill wind. And the cataclysm of Barings was a gale-force reminder of how dependent American finance was on foreign investors. Despite the good face the newspapers put on the matter, every businessman knew in his gut that the Barings debacle would take a toll. Several smaller banking houses failed, “spreading everywhere fear of worse to come.”1 In this laissez-faire era before meaningful bank legislation, many decades before stringent federal bank regulation and individual deposit insurance, no authority or institution backed the banks, and the merest whiff of financial bad weather understandably sent jittery depositors to besiege their own branch and retrieve whatever cash they could. These panicked runs set off a chain of inevitable destabilization. Even before depositors began jostling and lining up, some banks began calling in their loans, knowing that only large stacks of greenbacks would reassure their clientele. And so, the economic disasters rippled out from each affected bank, sending fear seeping inexorably deeper into the American financial psyche.
George Westinghouse had just gone up to his new Lenox, Massachusetts, country retreat to settle a real estate matter when his Pittsburgh office flashed an urgent telegraphic alert of the Barings catastrophe. Just ten days earlier, Westinghouse and his wife, Marguerite, whose health depended on regular doses of the pine-scented Berkshires, had finally moved into their turreted and gabled Gilded Age “cottage,” Erskine Manor. Surrounded by acres of elegant greensward, old shade trees, and brooding evergreens, the Westinghouses, their young son, and many relatives and guests could sit on the wide covered porches of the rustic new mansion and pleasantly contemplate the ever changing moods of the rolling Berkshire Hills. Two years earlier, Walter Uptegraff had become part of the household, serving as a full-time secretary, family accountant, and general confidant. Old Mrs. Westinghouse, eighty-one, whose late-life passion was the card game whist, had also come to live with her son, while brothers and sisters, young nieces and nephews, often stayed for months. Formal dinner parties were the routine in the Berkshires, as they were in Pittsburgh.
“After the guests had gone and the family had retired,” recalled Uptegraff, George Westinghouse “would go to his study where he would work on his inventions until one or two o’clock in the morning. During these quiet hours he always liked to have someone with him (myself) to whom he could open his inmost self without restraint; to explain what he was trying to accomplish by showing the drawings he was working on; to compliment the listener by inviting suggestions. He required but four or five hours of sleep and would come down to an early breakfast bursting with energy, eager to get at the day’s work as quickly as possible.”2 That fall of 1890, George Westinghouse had all reason to be enjoying his sylvan new estate and reveling in the phenomenal success of his substantial industrial companies, especially his newest and most cherished: the fast-growing electric company, which was finally beginning to fulfill his Olympian dreams.
Just the previous month, the Electrical Engineer wrote, “Reports from all over the country show that this year is the greatest the electrical industry has ever known…. [The Westinghouse] works are now being operated at their utmost capacity day and night.”3 Despite Edison’s war against alternating current, the month of September 1890, soon after William Kemmler’s botched electrocution, had been a banner sales month for the Westinghouse Electric Company’s alternating
current central stations (operating incandescent lights). In October, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, had ordered a 6,000-light AC system; Elmira, New York, put in for 1,500 lights, as did Nebraska’s state capital, Lincoln. And these were just three of many orders. Westinghouse had also expanded into arc lights and electric streetcars, and those departments were equally booming. In four short years, since it was established in early 1886 as George Westinghouse’s fifth industrial enterprise, total annual sales at the Westinghouse Electric Company had soared from $150,000 to more than $4 million.
The telegraphed news of the Barings collapse ended any sense of well-earned satisfaction. Westinghouse quickly packed, and he and Uptegraff got in a buggy to the train station to board his private railcar back to Pittsburgh. All the big electric companies were financially shaky, for they were fast-expanding, capital-intensive businesses in an era when capital was hard to come by. Before 1890, the New York Stock Exchange, like other exchanges around the country, listed only railroad stocks. So raising adequate long-term capital was vexing. Many local electric firms and towns made initial payment partly in cash and also by giving the Edison or Westinghouse companies stock in their new local lighting companies. The previous March, Edison president Henry Villard complained bitterly to Drexel, Morgan that Edison Electric was growing so fast, its working capital was “entirely inadequate. Instead of one million, several millions are imperatively wanted to meet the demands of the several manufacturing departments.”4 Westinghouse faced exactly the same problem, and he knew better than anyone the parlous state of his indebtedness as his train steamed through Pennsylvania’s strike-and-violence-plagued coalfields and past the still recovering hamlets savaged more than a year earlier by the fearful Johnstown flood.