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By Root 996 0

Americans were in thrall to the fantasy of the push button: the belief that, in the future, machines would do all of their work for them. Many tried to let machines do their thinking for them as well, and no one exemplified this engineering mentality better than Thomas Edison, the opponent of capital punishment who helped invent a killing machine. Like many death penalty foes, Edison believed that making killing more humane was a sign of progress, a step down the road to complete abolition. The strategy backfired. By making executions appear painless, Edison helped the death penalty survive. The electric chair—and the later scientific methods it inspired—masked the barbarity of killing in the civilization of the machine.

Mark Twain explored the new technologies of death in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, first published in the midst of the electric wire panic of 1889. Twain tells the story of a nineteenth-century mechanic who is knocked cold in a fight and wakes up in England in the year 528. The Boss—as the Yankee is known—grows powerful by introducing to Camelot such nineteenth-century wonders as newspapers, telegraphs, electricity, and gunpowder, but he runs afoul of church and royalty by trying to improve the lot of the oppressed peasantry. A plainspoken mechanical genius who tirelessly promotes the wonders of industrial society, the Boss bears a striking resemblance to Thomas Edison.

Written in the spring of 1889—at the time when electrocution experiments were taking place at the Edison laboratory and wires were killing people on the streets of New York—the ending of Connecticut Yankee offers Twain's dark views on the battle of the electric currents. In the final chapters, the Boss and a few allies find themselves trapped in a cave, with all the knights of England massed for attack outside. The Boss has a dynamo with him, and he fortifies the cave entrance with a fence of live electric wires—"naked, not insulated." At dawn one morning, the Boss inspects the fence and discovers a dead knight, "a dim great figure in armor, standing erect, with both hands on the upper wire—and of course there was a smell of burning flesh." Others followed and died so quickly they had no chance to warn their fellows. The electric fence killed 11,000 knights, so that the cave "was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead—a bulwark, a breastwork, of corpses, you may say."

Although nineteenth-century technology destroyed the best the sixth century had to offer, the Boss and his men remained pinned in the cave, with thousands of rotting corpses just outside and, beyond them, a considerable number of surviving enemy forces. "We were in a trap, you see—a trap of our own making," the Boss's top lieutenant explained. "If we stayed where we were, our dead would kill us; if we moved out of our defences, we should no longer be invincible. We had conquered; in turn we were conquered."12

The novelist and critic William Dean Howells, a good friend of Twain's, also saw the trap of scientific killing. On Christmas Day 1887, just after news had leaked of the death penalty commission's report, Howells wrote a satiric letter to the editor of Harper's Weekly that perfectly captured the era's rhetoric of blithe technological optimism.

I understand that the death-spark can be applied with a minimum of official intervention, and without even arousing the victim, or say patient, from his sleep on the morning fixed for the execution of the sentence. . . . I have fancied the executions throughout the State taking place from the Governor's office, where his private secretary, or the Governor himself, might touch a little annunciation-button, and dismiss a murderer to the presence of his Maker with the lightest pressure of the finger. In cases of unusual interest, the Executive might invite a company of distinguished persons to be present, and might ask some lady of the party to touch the button. Or, as when torpedoes are exploded or mining blasts fired in the completion of a great public work, a little child might be allowed to discharge the exemplary