The Last Gasp

Scott Christianson’s The Last Gasp provides an in-depth and often-fascinating account of the origins and relatively short career of the gas chamber, both as a mode of execution in the United States and as a means of Nazi-run genocide in Europe during World War II. The story is told chronologically, beginning with the promotion by Progressive-Era eugenicists of the elimination of “degenerates” and the “unfit” for the greater good, preferably by means of “a gentle, painless death” (pp. 30, 31). The extensive use of gas warfare during World War I provided strong incentive for the industrial development of lethal poisons and increased the power of “big American chemical interests” (p. 52). It was not long before Nevada, the first state to adopt the lethal chamber, carried out its first execution by gas in 1924 (of the convicted Chinese gangster Gee Jon). Eleven other states eventually legislatively adopted the gas chamber, and ten of them carried out at least one execution by lethal gas for a total of 594 such executions by the time the last one took place in Arizona in 1999. Christianson interweaves the American execution chronology with Adolf Hitler’s deployment of Zyklon-B, a particularly efficient and lethal form of hydrogen cyanide, in the gas chambers during the Holocaust. Christianson argues that the American chemical industry and American policy makers sympathetic to its interests—especially John J. McCloy, who served as assistant secretary of war during World War II—deserve an as-yet unrecognized share of responsibility for the Nazi genocide for their promotion of the market for cyanide, their cozy relationship with Nazi leaders during the buildup to the war, and their insufficient support of European Jews during the war

Political science · Power (physics · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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