Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [38]
Humanitarians railed against a common game—known as "spinning the cockchafer"—in which children pinned a beetle to the end of a string and spun it in the air so they could enjoy the loud whirring noises it made. Reformers objected not out of sympathy with the animal's suffering but because they saw it as the first step down the slippery slope of cruelty. What started with beetles would then lead to dogs, and to people: "Cruelty to animals predisposes us to acts of cruelty towards our own species," ASPCA founder Henry Bergh explained. In 1870 the Pennsylvania SPCA noted two cases in which men arrested for cruelty to animals later committed murder. In an SPCA journal, an illustration titled "The Labor Problem" showed a factory in flames and the arsonist, a union man, shot dead by a militia. The caption read, "Shall it be this—or humane education of rich and poor?" The humane movement was as much about taming the lower orders as about protecting animals. In the peculiar vision of some anticruelty reformers, social problems sprang not from vicious exploitation of the poor but from torturing beetles or kicking dogs. SPCAs lobbied hardest against the cruelties that were most public—especially the beating of carriage horses—because such spectacles "tend to brutalise a thickly crowded population."7
This same fear—of the contagiousness of cruelty—motivated much of the opposition to hanging. Executions whipped spectators into such a frenzy that they committed violent crimes themselves. It was reported, for example, that a man who attended Jesse Strang's 1827 hanging in Albany committed murder eleven days later. Hanging produced a "demoralizing effect upon society," one writer said. "We would put an end to capital punishment, for the sake of the law-abiding classes; just as the abolition of Slavery was wisely urged for the benefit of the white man." The statement reveals the self-interest that often lay at the heart of humanitarian sentiment. Reformers were concerned less with the suffering of victims than with the social consequences of that suffering. Spectacles of cruelty—the whipped slave, the beaten horse, the man dangling at the end of a rope—were thought to produce yet more acts of cruelty.8
Although a few citizens cited the suffering of hanged men as an argument in favor of abolishing the death penalty, not many were willing to take this step. Supporters of capital punishment, however, were not untouched by the anticruelty movement; they wanted to achieve the goals of the death penalty without fraying the moral fabric of society. According to one capital punishment advocate, a painless execution method would "deprive those who have the bad manners to argue against the death penalty, of one suggestion by which they operate on the nerves of others."9
THE PIONEERS IN THE FIELD of scientific killing were individuals connected to anticruelty societies. In the 1850s Benjamin Ward Richardson, a distinguished British physician and expert in anesthesia, constructed a "lethal chamber" for killing unwanted animals with carbon monoxide, and for the next thirty years he advocated this method of "humane destruction." In 1874 n e Pennsylvania SPCA built a special brick room for killing dogs with carbon monoxide, becoming the first American organization to move beyond shooting and drowning as methods of killing unwanted animals. Instructions for building a lethal chamber were published in Popular Science Monthly.10
Soon after the Pennsylvania SPCA built its lethal chamber, a Philadelphia physician suggested that the same method be used for condemned criminals, because it produced "the easiest and quickest death known to science." This was one of many proposals for making