The Last Gasp Read online

  The Nazis also honored America’s leading euthanasia advocate, Foster Kennedy (a psychiatrist who was professor of neurology at Cornell Medical College and director of neurology at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital), as well as Henry Fairfield Osborn (the famed paleontologist and director of the American Museum of Natural History), among others. The famous Harvard legal scholar Roscoe Pound also received an honorary degree from the Nazis.

  In turn, some American government officials lauded radical eugenics. In 1934 William W. Peter of the U.S. Public Health Service praised the German sterilization program in the pages of the American Journal of Public Health.35 A bill to legalize voluntary euthanasia (referred to as “the granting of peaceful death to incurable sufferers”) in New York was proposed by the treasurer of the American Euthanasia Society, State Assemblyman Charles F. Nixdorff, on January 26, 1939, shortly before Hitler enacted his own euthanasia measure. But the New York bill fell short of being introduced. A few weeks later, Foster Kennedy urged that “mercy killing” be expanded to include infants who were born “defective” and were doomed to remain so.36 (In May 1941, Kennedy addressed the American Psychiatric Association, saying, “We have too many feebleminded people among us….” He advocated the formation of a competent medical board that was legally authorized to “relieve the defective… of the agony of living.” In 1942 he set off a bigger controversy when his arguments were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.)37

  A number of leading American bankers and industrialists continued to finance and applaud Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascist approaches. “As the Hitler régime took each step in its war against the Jews and all of Europe,” historian Edwin Black has written, “IBM custom-designed the punch cards and other data processing solutions to streamline those campaigns into what the company described as ‘blitzkrieg efficiency.’” At the company’s inauguration of its new Hollerith machine–manufacturing facility in Berlin, the manager of IBM’s German subsidiary proclaimed, amid swirling swastika flags and storm trooper guards, “Hail to our German people and der Führer!”38 Such backing and involvement by many American investors, corporations, and foundations continued even after Italy and Germany had begun to display their bellicose tendencies—and well after they had laid out their racial agendas.

  The willingness of the fascist powers to use poison gas against populations they considered racially inferior was demonstrated in 1936, when Italy’s air force (propelled by German know-how) dropped German mustard gas bombs on soldiers and civilians in Ethiopia—and international protests by Emperor Haile Selassie fell on deaf ears.39 Such actions didn’t faze Germany’s American business partners. A few months after the bombings, Nazi propagandists at the Olympic Games in Berlin informed McCloy and other guests that German race policy was based on “internationally accepted science,” which they said had been developed in the United States and elsewhere.40 And McCloy continued to hobnob with Göring, Hess, and other leading Nazis.

  Starting in 1937, however, as the Nazis began to put into effect their racial laws and as war with militaristic Germany loomed, American corporate support for the Third Reich began to become more problematic. One of the more intriguing developments involved the sudden apparent suicide of the world’s top organic chemist, Wallace Hume Carothers, the young genius who had briefly taught in Conant’s chemistry department at Harvard before going on to invent nylon and neoprene at DuPont. Shortly after returning from an extended trip to Germany, Carothers apparently committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill with lemon juice.41 Shortly after Carothers’s death amid a congressional investigation linking American Cyanamid to secret German interests, Lewis Douglas abruptly resigned from the firm and left the country to become president of McGill University in Canada.42 Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938 apparently convinced him that another global conflict was inevitable, and out of concern that Great Britain and the United States would ultimately become involved, he began to soften his stance on isolation and strongly supported U.S. military assistance for France and Britain. (Both Douglas and McCloy strongly supported the Lend-Lease bill.) Douglas would remain in Canada until late 1939, when he returned to New York as president of the Mutual of New York Life Insurance Company.

  On September 1, 1939, the day that Hitler launched the blitzkrieg attack against Poland that started World War II, eleven corporations (including DuPont and Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation and its subsidiaries) that sold a large percentage of the nitrate products used in commercial fertilizer and explosives in the United States were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, charged with conspiracy to control the supply and prices of those products in violation of antitrust laws. The indictments weren’t announced until more than a year later, leaving the firms to repair their standing with the government.43

  Starting in December 1940 German imports of potassium cyanide were no longer allowed in the United States. The Roessler & Hasslacher chemicals division of E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company subsequently announced that it would begin manufacturing the chemical, spurred by “current U.S. needs and the urgency of national self-sufficiency.”44

  In April 1941, one hundred corporations (including American Cyanamid, DuPont, and Dow Chemical Company) were subpoenaed to provide records regarding the extent to which Germany’s IG Farben had gained control over vital sections of America’s drug and chemical trade.45 In May 1942 it was revealed that executives of DuPont, American Cyanamid, Allied Chemical, and twenty of their officers and directors had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Trenton, accused of a worldwide conspiracy with IG Farben to monopolize the manufacture of dyestuffs.46 It came out that DuPont had first sought its alliance with Farben in 1919, and in 1926 the corporations had contracted to divide the world market for military powder and cross-licensed patents and exchanged technical information. DuPont had also agreed to serve as the sales agent for the German companies so they could overcome the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty.47 Even after such disclosures, Justice Department officials continued to report that “German firms masquerading in this country as American” were still continuing to operate without interference, just as they had begun to do at the end of World War I.48

  McCloy had been among those who believed that Germany had been unfairly penalized by Versailles; he had worked on behalf of several major financial institutions, helping to rebuild the German state into a formidable industrial and military power. He had never condemned the fascists. But the world was changing. In the 1940 American presidential election, Douglas supported Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate, but McCloy, who was a Republican, said he didn’t support either Willkie or FDR, adding, “People take for granted that such things must be the democratic process. If they are, I say a plague on it—let’s invent something different.”49

  Roosevelt won the 1940 election, however, and with America’s entry into the conflict appearing much more imminent, McCloy left his Wall Street law firm in December 1940 to become special assistant to Secretary of War Harry L. Stimson in the Roosevelt administration. In September 1941 Douglas spoke up against Hitler, saying, “Anti-Semitism is one of the characteristics of Nazism wherever it has stuck up its ugly head.”50

  It turned out that McCloy was the ranking person on duty in the War Department on December 7, 1941, when word was received that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. One of his early actions working with Stimson was to push for the roundup and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans (but not German Americans) in concentration camps based on their ancestry—an action that one historian later called “the greatest deprivation of civil liberties by government in this country since slavery.”51 Overnight, McCloy became one of the lead officials charged with prosecuting the war against Germany, Italy, and Japan—a war against enemies he had helped to arm and equip.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE RISING STORM

  In 1940 and ’41 Americans remained mired in the Great Depression and deeply worried about their future.
The country was about to become entangled in another world war, this one waged on an even broader scale and under more desperate conditions than the last. Freedom, democracy, and prosperity were very much in peril. In addition to fearing they might become dominated by foreign powers, many Americans wondered if some sinister inner forces would engulf their society and change their way of life, as had happened abroad. The Lindberghs were not alone in regarding fascism as the wave of the future. It already had swept Italy, Germany, Spain and other parts of the globe, and many of the seeds required for fascism to flower in the United States, some warned, were already planted. From the other end of the political spectrum, capitalist defenders warned that Communism was threatening to impose another sort of dictatorship, against which only the harshest measures could prevail.

  European social scientists had followed the Nazis’ rise to power with awe. At least one close observer took from it fresh insights about the fascists’ focus on punishment. In his study Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology (1938), the distinguished Danish sociologist Svend Ranulf explored some of the dynamics that shape the attitudes of different social classes toward transgressors, offering a classic discussion of social structure in punitive moralizing—what Nietzsche called ressentiment. Ranulf pointed out that the urge to assist in the punishment of criminals, as awful and primal as it might be, was nevertheless a “disinterested disposition,” since “no direct personal advantage is achieved by the act of punishing another person who has injured a third party.” He noted that it was furthermore a disposition “not equally strong in all human societies and indeed seems to be entirely lacking in some.” He suggested, consistent with the writings of Max Weber, the American V. F. Calverton, and others, that “the disinterested tendency to inflict punishment is a distinctive characteristic of the lower middle class, that is, of the class living under conditions which force its members to an extraordinary degree of self-restraint, and subject them to much frustration of natural desires.” “Moral indignation (which is the emotion behind the disinterested tendency to inflict punishment),” Ranulf explained, was “a kind of disguised envy, if ‘envy’ is understood not in a pejorative but in an ethically neutral sense, such as it is used by Herodotus.”1

  According to Ranulf’s reasoning, Americans, with their Calvinist roots, were especially susceptible to showing their strong desire to see other people punished for their immorality. The colonial legacy of slavery, indentured servitude, and convict transportation, as well as the subjugation of the Native Americans, had established a strong foundation for penal severity. There was also a long tradition of lynching and vigilantism. More recently, the eugenics movement had enhanced some of this eliminationist tendency by injecting into American discourse a “scientifically based” desire to create a master race. This eugenic fervor was couched in seemingly noble but practical visions of weeding out the unfit to better the cause of humanity, reduce taxes, and improve the gene pool. It appealed to nativist and nationalistic sentiments that sought to curb immigration and advance white Anglo-Saxon supremacy, and it softened its surgical thrusts with plenty of anesthesia—sedative for body and conscience alike—to make killing as quick and painless as possible in order to minimize suffering for everyone concerned. The economic hardships caused by the Great Depression had further threatened the lower middle class, feeding their sense of persecution, their feelings of economic and social insecurity, their disillusionment with democratic institutions, and their need to find scapegoats. As events in Germany had demonstrated, this could make for a particularly dangerous situation, possibly making them susceptible to demagogic manipulation by a “strongman” leader who would use his position to target one minority or another for the most severe kind of punishment.

  It was true that as the United States prepared to enter the war, Americans had good reason to be worried about their future. Yet there was also reason for encouragement. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs had saved the lower middle class and others from total economic destruction and staved off mob rule. American society was also surprisingly peaceful given all of the pressures it was under. Despite the FBI’s highly publicized gun battles with public enemies such as John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, the newspapers’ obsessions with crime waves, and politicians’ urgent calls about the “war on crime,” homicide in the United States actually had dropped by nearly 50 percent from 1933 to the early 1940s, and other reported serious crime (rape, robbery, assault, and burglary) had declined by one-third.2 As most Americans saw it, J. Edgar Hoover’s crackerjack G-men commanded respect throughout the world as a professional law enforcement agency that had virtually invented crime control, and the federal government had established one of the world’s toughest prisons, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, in San Francisco Bay, matching several states in “strict but fair” prison discipline.

  As well, lynching—which one black writer characterized as “much more of an expression of Southern fear of Negro progress than of Negro crime”—had finally gone into steep decline.3 In terms of the most severe punishment, the United States hadn’t joined the distinct international trend away from the death penalty that criminologists said had been increasing during the course of the last century—and the number of executions had increased during the Depression. But American executions hadn’t skyrocketed. (The national tally of persons put to death by the state had gone from 140 in 1932 to 194 in 1936.) Six states (all in the North) didn’t have capital punishment on their statute books at all, and other states had reduced the number of crimes considered capital crimes.

  Many Americans figured they had “modernized” the death penalty by having the state take over executions, moving them inside prisons instead of making them such a mob spectacle, and changing the method of execution from grisly hangings to mechanical, clinical, and scientific procedures. Citizens prided themselves on the fact that their government went to considerable lengths to reduce the pain and suffering of those it put to death. By 1940, twenty-one of the forty-two states that had the death penalty used electrocution and eight employed lethal gas; the rest still clung to the noose or the firing squad. “In any case,” America’s leading criminologist, Edwin H. Sutherland, commented, whatever the method, “the principal distress is due to the anticipation of death rather than to the actual execution of the penalty.”4

  Most penal experts contended that a gassing was not as bad as a lynching, a hanging, or even an electrocution, calling the gas chamber the “most humane” form of capital punishment. They also said it compared favorably to how the death penalty was meted out in other countries. After all, it could be argued, everyone asphyxiated by lethal gas had been tried in a court of law, convicted of a capital crime, legally sentenced to death, allowed to appeal, and put to death in front of witnesses that included members of the press. There were no secret executions, no mass executions. Nearly every one of those condemned to die had been sentenced for murder (except that North Carolina’s capital offenses included rape, or burglary with attempted rape). And although eugenicists in several states had tried to introduce euthanasia laws, as late as the early 1940s there still were no such statutes on the books in the United States, and hence there were no executions drawn from mental hospitals or institutions for the retarded. The only “unfit” persons gassed to death in the United States were dangerous criminals, went the argument.

  In 1940 twenty-two men in eight American states were gassed to death by hydrogen cyanide, and in 1941 six states registered twenty-four such capital punishments—not much of an upsurge. These were not huge numbers, and, at the time, so far as most Americans knew, they were the only lethal gas executions carried out in the world. But that was about to change.

  The American criminal justice system in 1940 remained riddled with defects and deficiencies. A decade earlier, the blue-ribbon Wickersham Commission had documented the scandalous way that justice was being administered throughout the United States. Its report had devoted an entire volume to “Lawlessness in Law Enforcement,”
detailing such abuses as police corruption and the “third degree” (torture), which it defined as “the inflicting of pain, physical or mental, to extract confessions or statements.” The panel characterized police brutality as “extensively practiced” throughout the United States and described suspects whom the police subjected to beatings or sexual indignities in order to get what they wanted. When Buffalo’s police chief was brought to testify, he openly expressed his contempt for the guarantees of individual rights in the U.S. Constitution.5 The commission’s voluminous findings shook up the legal system, but they did not bring an end to all of the abuses and shortcomings highlighted in its reports.

  By current standards, the courts of the period granted fewer rights to criminal defendants than they do today: police routinely used beatings and torture to extract their confessions; poor defendants weren’t constitutionally entitled to a lawyer; police could question a suspect without an attorney present; forensic techniques were shockingly primitive; illegally obtained evidence could later be used to send someone to the gas chamber; and so on. Mental patients, hospital patients, and other wards of the state also enjoyed fewer protections than they would later obtain.

  Blacks during the Depression suffered disproportionately from poverty, discrimination, and harsh criminal penalties. In one of the era’s most infamous cases, nine young black men in Scottsboro, Alabama, had been arrested for allegedly raping two white women on a freight train. The “Scottsboro Boys” were later convicted in a kangaroo court and sentenced to death, but the Communist Party seized on the case and fought their cause all the way to the Supreme Court, which sent the case back to state court in 1932. But the case dragged on for more than a decade, and by the time the defendants went free, they had served in the aggregate more than one hundred years for a crime they had not committed.6 Nevertheless, the conditions that produced the injustice still existed in 1940, just as they had in 1900.