The Culture of the Condemned: Pastoral Execution and Life on Death Row in the 1930s

Scholars working in liberal, Marxian, and poststructualist frameworks have argued that the end of public execution and removal of the condemned behind prison walls was a key step in the transition toward modernizing democratic capitalist states. ¹ In the United States, the change took place between the 1830s and the 1930s. Focusing on the Northeast, where the shift first took place, most have concentrated on how the legally-sentenced were hidden from public view, as middle-class officials grew concerned that rowdy working-class audiences could not be trusted to interpret the solemn lessons in Christian morality or Republican self-control that governors intended. ² More recently, scholars examining the American South and West traced a similar dynamic that included not just formal executions, but also extralegal racial lynching and summary killings. ³ If conceptual explanations and historical effects differed, the transition they describe was consistent. Regardless of theoretical framework, the reformers who sought to hide executions, or the audiences from whom they were hidden, remained the subject of most analyses. But generally unexamined in this oft-told tale is how the condemned, hidden ever further from view, responded to the emergent killing regimes. Popular awareness may have shifted from the site of execution to newspaper reportage or the drama of the trial, but academic thought need not follow that misdirection. ⁴

In their 2005 article “Breaking Bodies into Pieces,” Cary Federman and Dave Holmes analyzed the experience of the condemned from a Foucauldian perspective. The sovereign of the ancien régime ruled through the ability to kill, but modern statecraft was made more palatable (and effective) through the application of correction, concern, and health, which Foucault theorized across his works as discipline, governmentality, and biopower. Each technique would ostensibly nurture life rather than crush it, and modern bureaucracies would benefit by encouraging the reproduction of healthy populations while minimizing the dangers that citizens might face. ⁵ States would also rely on what Foucault’s critics would identify as “necropolitics,” and the persistence of death in modern rule. ⁶ From this foundation, Federman and Holmes argued that contemporary execution in the United States exists in a biopolitical and pastoral mode, in which bureaucratization, ritual medical inspection, and general routinization radically reduced resistance to legal execution. “If power provokes resistance, then we would expect to see resistance on death row,” where state power is most extreme. “Instead,” they wrote, “we find the opposite.” ⁷ But what is the opposite of resistance? Does the seeming absence of rebellion signal easy willingness to die on the state’s terms? ⁸

Drawing on archival research, this article examines how capitally-condemned responded to the new forms of power hidden behind prison walls, in which lethal force and pastoral care interwove. It builds on Federman and Holmes’ work to analyze the radically asymmetrical struggles in the death house, in the years when lynch violence ebbed and state killing grew more expansive. These were also the first years of what social and political historians have called the New Deal Order, consolidating the modern state forms that would predominate for much of the 20th century. ⁹ The article is, moreover, a conceptual and methodological gesture toward the lives of the condemned. Doing so addresses E. P. Thompson’s still-relevant injunction to return hidden peoples from the condescension of posterity, and, though hardly the polemic of Thompson’s attack on Louis Althusser, it stresses the need for a dialectical relationship between archival research and critical legal and criminological theory. ¹⁰ Its thick description analyzes life in the death house, and the experience, to the extent that the experience of death is accessible, of execution: for the condemned and their families, for state executioners and their aids. Cued by inmates’ language for death and execution – “going out the back door,” “doing the air dance,” or “doing the big sleep” – it understands state killing in the 1930s as a process (going and doing) and a threshold space (the back door, suspended in the air, sleep) at the edge of life, law, and culture. While Federman and Holmes argued that resistance to execution has been all but eliminated in the modern regime, my close reading of archival evidence at the moment of its consolidation demonstrates that inmates did oppose the state’s terms of their deaths, or “go out their own way,” in means that were often subtle, certainly constrained, but there nonetheless. In this context, the very category of “resistance,” as something that is either present or absent, blunts understanding. The acts of the condemned were rarely of open rebellion, though at times that happened, nor did they consist solely of legal fights over individual innocence or sentencing. The forms of struggle in the death house were considerably more subtle and supple, and did not adhere to the ever more stridently managed bounds of penal space, time, or the individuated bodies and subjects that experienced them. Rather, the condemned tried to take control of their deaths and what remained of their lives. The condemned created a sort of community; their religions challenged or reoriented the meanings of death and the state; their violent or medical embodiment tried to regain corporal control; their music and their memories reclaimed the significances of their own deaths. The multifaceted struggles in the death house came over personal meaning and the minute spaces of autonomy, in biopolitical realms and in those that exceeded the biopolitical. And yet, as Judith Butler has argued,

[e]xceeding is not escaping, and the subject exceeds precisely that to which it is bound. In this sense, the subject cannot quell the ambivalence by which it is constituted. Painful, dynamic, and promising, this vacillation between the already-there and the yet-to-come is a crossroads that rejoins every step by which it is traversed, a re-iterated ambivalence at the heart of agency. ¹¹

The condemned’s rearticulation of their experience could even draw in their executioners. District attorneys may have championed state killing in the act of sentencing, but the state was hardly a monolith, and actual prison workers who carried out sentences were more circumspect. As political theorist Wendy Brown has suggested, the state is a strange combination of “powers and techniques, … discourses, rules, and practices, cohabitating in limited, tension-ridden, often contradictory relation with one another,” and this was certainly true in the death house. ¹² Indeed, guards and officials expended considerable energy rationalizing their own actions carrying out the will of “the people”; convincing themselves that the roles they played were but drops in a sea of culpability. ¹³ Guards brought last meals and cinched leather straps over the soon-to-die, but the memories, traces, and even ghosts the condemned left could produce political meanings – for the families and friends of the dead, but also for state agents themselves, some of whom would later oppose capital punishment. Too little too late, perhaps. As one such official noted, “it was not for me to question its merits or drawbacks. I was part of a system.” ¹⁴ The modern state and its legal edifice consisted of countless participants: voters, police officers, prosecuting attorneys, clerks, jurors, judges, wardens, guards, doctors, and priests. All played a role but none claimed responsibility for the killings that ensued.

* * *

The Texas Death House was a small, red brick building inside the Huntsville Walls Unit. An enclosure within an enclosure, it was spatially and administratively distinct from the rest of the prison system. The Death House held nine cells, each facing the corridor known as the Long Last Mile, which ended at a gray, solid steel door. A guard was constantly on duty, keeping an eye on the men who walked into the building but would be carried out. Behind that steel door, set into the concrete of a low-ceilinged room sat “Old Sparky,” the electric chair. Like each man and every piece of furniture in the Texas Prison System, it was also known by a number. Built from sturdy oak by prisoners in the carpentry shop, Old Sparky was also No. 8,573. Between 1929 and 1942, a relatively short period in Texas’s lethal history, 158 people died in that chair. When the chair replaced the noose, some saw it as a sign of better things to come. The first warden to use the electric chair reflected on the difference from hanging: “it’s more humane – the chair.” Shortly after midnight on February 8, it took the lives of five black men. ¹⁵

Texas and California are often, and with some justification, understood as diametrically opposed to each other. Texas is read as a sign of backwardness, of slavery resurgent, of naked racial violence. California, in contrast, is typically read as a sign of the future, a place where American dreams come true. As far as prisons go, at least, California’s history hardly meets the image. For much of the twentieth century and especially since the Second World War, California was understood as an exemplar of penal reform. The two states signal different kinds of punishment, and different penal modernities. In the recent past, Texas has been renowned for its predilection for capital punishment, having executed 447 people since 1976, more than four times as many people as Virginia, the next most lethal state. Though California puts fewer people to death than its Southern neighbors, Californians, too, are eager to sentence offenders to death. With 697 awaiting execution (as of January 1, 2010), it has the largest death row in the nation. ¹⁶ Moreover, Texas and California today have two of America’s largest and costliest prison systems. ¹⁷ Punishment in the American Northeast has been well-represented in criminological and historical scholarship – and arguably over-represented, given the importance of Western and South/Southwestern states. ¹⁸ Their penal histories, and the experiences of those they sentenced to die, demand our understanding.

Geographies and histories mattered on death row. Failing sharecropping economies in Texas and the rising agribusiness of California; different patterns of colonial conquest, varying histories of racial formation, of migratory streams, of labor extraction, all had lasting impact on who was executed and who was not. But for the condemned, their forced removal from the “outside” by multiply layered concentric barriers, may have mattered more. This isn’t to suggest that there were no important differences among different state systems. But the spaces allocated to legal killing set their own common domain: special buildings within special prison facilities, walls set within walls, enclosures within enclosures became meaningful: these structural features distanced the living from the nearly-dead, and produced significant similarities in social experience. Prisoners named the spaces of death with terms appropriate to their finality: Texas’s Walls Unit had its Death House, and San Quentin its Condemned Row. The names were in common use among prisoners and staff, and were used with frequency in the Depression. More people were legally executed in Texas and California in the 1930s than ever before. In fact, capital sentencing rose nationwide in these lean years, peaking in 1935 when 199 people were put to death. Then as now, Texas was a national leader in lethal punishment. The 20 men who died in Huntsville’s electric chair in 1935 made up 10 percent of all U.S. executions for that year, and Texas accounted for seven percent of the nation’s total executions between 1930 and 1942 (148 of 2,065 total executions). Texas legally executed 158 people between 1929 and 1942, and California citizens sanctioned the killing of 144 people in the same period. ¹⁹ These numbers dramatically outpaced previous decades, and Progressive-era movements against capital punishment withered. While six California legislators supported an anti-death penalty bill in 1933, thirty-three voted against it. ²⁰ Though abolitionist pockets remained, a 1936 Gallup Poll found that 68 percent of Americans were in favor of execution. ²¹

In each state’s past, egregious crimes such as rape or murder (or the accusation of such crimes) could be met with a public mob lynching. When black, Mexican, or Asian or Native American men in either state were accused of violence against whites, or especially white women, they could be tortured and killed in ritual displays designed to instill terror in nonwhites, future wrongdoers, and to protect the foundations of an elite, white patriarchy and social order. While much had changed in the shift from lynching, a generation of scholars have identified historical consistencies in the valuation of white life and the forced insignificance of black death, the persistence of racial and class biases, and the relationship between legal execution and lynching. Consistencies, too, remained in the geography of vigilantism, lynching and execution. ²² Though more work is necessary for California, evidence from Texas is clearer. Of the 191 men so sentenced in Texas between 1929 and 1942, one hundred and seven were black (56 percent), sixty-three were white (33 percent), twenty were Mexican (11 percent), and one was Native American. ²³ As with the history of lynching, accusations of rape, and particularly the rape of a white woman by a black man, consistently drew the harshest legal wrath. Between 1924 and 1972, some 75 percent of men executed for rape in Texas were African American. Ninety percent were unskilled laborers: yard workers, dishwashers, warehousemen, or service station attendants. Few had any education beyond the sixth grade, and many were illiterate, signing their execution papers with an “X.” ²⁴

California’s condemned were uneducated, too, and lived at the bottom of the political economic hierarchies. They tended to work – if they were employed – in low-wage positions, and few if any could afford expensive legal representation. Even Leo Stanley, the San Quentin physician who advocated forced sterilization of the feebleminded and euthanasia for those he deemed unfit, challenged the equity of California’s death penalty. “It is the friendless, forsaken, wretched poor who get the supreme punishment. Those who have finances and can employ legal pressure to the brake-pedal of the executing machine may win a commutation of sentence.” ²⁵ Regardless of procedural errors, class and racial biases, forced or voluntary confessions (archives reveal evidence of them all); regardless of the dubious discretion of judges and juries that called for blood or for a moderate sentence, those sentenced to die found themselves in the death house or condemned row, social and legal spaces reserved for the nearly-dead.

Extant records reveal angst and antipathy on the row, tears and silence and rage. Despite this, shared feelings emerged that could lead to something of a community, even across Jim Crow lines. While J. F. Hogan was on death row in Texas, he recalled “about four o’clock one evening when one of the Negroes was going down that night, we sort of held court on the Row, and the Negro willed all his personal belongings to the other boys he was to leave behind.” ²⁶ As the condemned ordered their last meals, they frequently requested five bowls of ice cream, six pieces of pie, and so on. This wasn’t simple gluttony or a final sensory inundation. While many ate last meals with gusto, others didn’t touch the food. Rather, these extra pieces of pie went to the other prisoners in the death house. It was part of the community made among the nearly-dead, among men who knew, almost to the minute, when they would die. ²⁷

Fear and apprehension and the memories of home and of crimes must have been thick in the death house. As elsewhere in the prison system, and especially in black prisoners’ worksongs, music enabled inmates to conjure other times and places beyond the walls that surrounded them. Biopolitics might have the ability to break bodies into pieces to better know them, and penal discipline and architecture the ability to produce regimented, and alienating, experiences of space and time. ²⁸ Yet music had the ability to reorient the space and the time of incarceration. Philosophers Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggested that music can be a powerful force of what they called “deterritorialization” – of challenging and reformulating space-time in conflicted environments – and reterritorializing new ones. Music, they argue, “always carries earth with it.” ²⁹ California prisoners had access to a record player on the night before their execution. “The last tunes they want to hear are jazz tunes,” Leo Stanley marveled, “played over and over on the prison phonograph. Music serves, momentarily, to distract their thoughts from what they are about to face.” ³⁰ In the death house, music bolstered the condemned’s self-control and tamed their fears; it protected the masculine dignity they would carry with them in their last conscious minutes on earth.

Texas prisoners did not have jazz records, but they had something better still – each other. Country singer Merle Haggard’s mournful “Sing Me Back Home” poignantly intermingles music, memory and penal space in the death house. In the song, the community of death row prisoners all stand to say goodbye to a prisoner being escorted to his death. In the midst of the formal farewell and its signs of manly respect, the prisoner about to be executed asked the song’s narrator to play a song for him, and, in the face of death, “Make my old memories come alive / Take me away / And turn back the years / Sing me back home / Before I die.” ³¹ This might be dismissed as pop culture sentimentalism, and though Haggard served time in prison, it is unlikely that he knew that the events his song described literally took place in the Texas death house decades before he wrote it.

Paul Mitchell spent time on the Texas Death Row prior to having his sentence commuted. In Mitchell’s words:

I played a mouth organ quite a bit then, and one of the men took a fancy to “Chicken Reel.” He asked me to play it for him when his time came – said he wanted to go down with that tune ringing in his ears. I thought it would be easy, but … well, at midnight he came by and shook hands with me. I had the harmonica in my hand. He tried to say goodbye – but he just kind of choked up. Then he pointed to the mouth organ, and I began playing … and he began walking toward that little gray door. Mister, that was the hardest piece I ever played in my life! And it kept getting harder! Then, when it was over, I threw my harmonica into the corner and both sides flew off of it. Now I never play “Chicken Reel” anymore. ³²

Music allowed for prisoners to create temporarily reterritorialized penal space and time, and create moments of self-control and community. David Lamson, sentenced to die but later exonerated, also noted human compassion rather than alienation on San Quentin’s Row. He recalled the kindness of J. B. McNamara, its cell tender. McNamara had been sentenced to life for bombing the Los Angeles Times building in 1910, and Lamson called him “gentle, courteous, affable, and utterly undefeated.” McNamara’s undaunted spirit led Lamson to believe “that even prison has no power to cast you down, if you will not be cast down.” It helped Lamson fight his conviction, and eventually write a book about his brush with state killing. ³³

Men on San Quentin’s row talked about anything and nothing – about fast cars they would never drive, about their favorite cigars. They bragged and insulted each other, too, in gallows humor. “Well, one fellow will holler at another in the next cell and say: ‘I bet they stretch your neck two feet long.’ And the other guy will come back: ‘If I had feet like yours, my button would come off.’” ³⁴ Yet the banter was desperate; it reoriented the truth of their situation, if only for a short time, against far stronger state force.

Above all the row was a place of despair. “Every day took something out of me,” reflected John Lee Howard. “I wanted to sleep all the time so I wouldn’t know what was happening. My lawyer kept telling me I had a chance, but I didn’t believe him. All I could think of was that awful thing upstairs. I saw it on my walls when I was awake and I dreamed about it when I was asleep.” ³⁵ Tom Mooney, the labor radical sentenced to die on flimsy evidence, was perhaps the most famous inmate on San Quentin’s death row, and a nearly constant stream of correspondence and visitors occupied him. Yet loneliness was a material force, even for Mooney: “I am so lonely – never was I so lonely,” he wrote. ³⁶ One can imagine what less-well known prisoners underwent.

It was hardly surprising that inmates felt such depths of sorrow, in the liminal zone that Federman and Holmes identify between sentencing and punishment. In such a state, many tried to seize some control over their bodies. ³⁷ Officers were constantly afraid that inmates would commit suicide and cheat the gallows, as the phrase went. Leo Stanley quoted a prisoner who said “Put the rope in my cell tonight and I will do the air dance tomorrow.” ³⁸ It did not happen with great frequency, but some death row prisoners did manage to kill themselves. William O’Brien went to San Quentin in 1916 for highway robbery, and after his transfer to Folsom, he escaped. He was brought back to San Quentin in September 1928 for killing a cashier during an Oakland bank hold-up. Both of his partners had already been executed. O’Brien was found dead on his cot, his body clenched, with a dried white, crystalline substance dripping from his mouth. The consensus was suicide by poison – a vexing issue on many levels: firstly, no officials knew how he managed to get the poison; secondly, because the state sought to master health and the lessons death would impart. O’Brien left a note to counter this very measure:

Dear Jean: I have changed my mind about going up there and leave them hang me. I intend to kill myself in a little while and save them the trouble of doing it. So I am writing you these few lines before I go. I was sincere the other day when I told you that I was going to leave them hang me, but I have been thinking it over tonight and I have come to the conclusion that I will go out my own way. Don’t feel bad, dear, on account of me not waiting to see you again, as it would only make it harder for both of us. I was so glad to see Rene and the baby today, but after seeing them I felt pretty blue. I sure hope a [sic] make a success of this so nobody will ever be able to tell her when she grows up that her father was hanged, or to tell you, either. Say goodby [sic] for me to all your people and to Rene herself and Sam and Skiez and the kids and to mine. It is just 12 o’clock, so I am going in few minutes. Goodby, my dear Jean and Pappy, and I wish you both all the luck and happiness in the world. Your loving husband, Will. ³⁹

He closed the letter with a number of crosses to Jean and the baby. Taking his own life, and going out his own way, was O’Brien’s proud, troubling legacy for his daughter. Control over his death became central to the memory he wanted to leave. With his last words and final act, he tried to place himself back into his wife and children’s family, and into the stories of him that would remain.

If suicide was one kind of escape, another, rarer kind beckoned. On July 22, 1934, six Texas prisoners attempted to escape from the Walls Unit. Three of them – Raymond Hamilton, Irving “Blackie” Thompson, and Joe Palmer – had been in the death house. Hamilton was a member of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow’s gang, and was to be executed for killing a guard in a January 1934 escape. Whitey Walker, who was doing a life sentence, organized the break to free himself and save Thompson, his partner, from execution. Walker died in the attempt. Thompson, Palmer and Hamilton made it over the walls, though the increasing sophistication of national policing made evading the law more difficult, and rendered direct confrontation less effective. ⁴⁰ Thompson was killed in a police ambush in Amarillo six months after the escape. Hamilton remained on the loose for another two months before he was recaptured. He and Palmer would be executed in April 1935. ⁴¹

Condemned prisoners might stave off despair through song and with each other, and they also found solace in religion. Most Texas prisoners who died were not religious men. In 1929, one of the rare years when Annual Reports recorded this statistic, 28 of the 52 who died listed no religion. ⁴² Philip Smith and others have noted how the performance of religious contrition might turn audiences’ sympathies against the state, and while surely true, it tells us little of the interior meanings of religion for the condemned. ⁴³ For myriad reasons, many turned to God in their final days, and religious officials saw the death house as fertile ground for their harvest of souls. Certainly questions of the afterlife pressed urgently for those on death row. Indeed, Catholic Reverend Hugh Finnegan felt his most important service was among the condemned, with whom his work’s benefits were “most evidently manifested.” ⁴⁴ While the Reverend took heart in another soul saved, California physician Leo Stanley believed religion to be a painkiller: “Nothing else can lull the terror,” he wrote. “It is a strange experience for a physician to be forced to admit that opium and alcohol are not so strong as prayer.” ⁴⁵ Though Stanley likened religion to a sedative and lauded its anesthetic effects – seemingly a validation of the effects of pastoral power – it did not always breed quiescence.

Religion’s many meanings and, especially, its call to a power higher than the state, led officials to try and harness spiritual discourse. Religion was a conflicted terrain between prisoners and keepers, and prisoners were hardly a passive flock before these pastoral shepherds. The content of death row ministrations are lost to the historical record, though we may speculate that they emphasized repentance for admitted sins, and the Pauline tradition of obedience in this world with a promise of salvation in the next. Yet, much as slaves had in antebellum America, prisoners could make use of religion for differing ends. When a San Quentin prisoner proclaimed that “Jesus Christ was an agitator and the master class had capital punishment executed against him,” he hardly rehashed that Pauline tradition. Warden James A. Johnston’s only response was that the prisoner was insane. ⁴⁶

Natividad Valenzuela was sentenced to die for killing his wife. His family wrote to San Quentin officials, asking that their family priest, F. C. Ramirez, be permitted to visit him. The request was denied. Officials commonly told the families of the condemned that prison chaplains would attend to their spiritual needs. Rather than their own priest, who officials did not know, the warden assured them that Father George O’Meara, San Quentin’s Catholic Chaplain, would offer “spiritual advice and counsel.” O’Meara also warned Valenzuela’s family against seeking any help or advice beyond himself. “[B]eware of any approaches made to you by religious workers,” O’Meara wrote. “Any religious workers asking you for funds to pay their way to San Quentin or to assist you in securing the release of your boy are imposters.” Instead, the families of the condemned should place their faith in the administration and the state’s religious agents. “I am sure that you will find that dealing direct with Warden Smith will be the most satisfactory method. Whatever he will do to assist you or your boy will be done in a kindly and gracious manner. You will find the authorities in the Administration Building at San Quentin always ready to help you and to help your boy. Please be guided by them in matters pertaining to visits, etc.” O’Meara’s advice may have had some merit, but it also signaled a desire (and thus a lack to be filled) for officials to maintain control over matters that reached even beyond life and death. ⁴⁷

More trying – for San Quentin administrators, at least – was the battle between themselves and Alfred Wells. Wells had served previous prison sentences, and in fact had helped construct the gas chamber at San Quentin: evidence that its deterrent effect may have been limited. Wells was later convicted and sentenced to die for kidnapping and killing his brother, his brother’s wife, and her friend. While on the Row, he was known as a troublemaker. ⁴⁸ Yet he, too, found religion, and engaged in heated theological struggle with San Quentin officials. Wells’ increasingly rapturous religious experience conflicted with the doctrine, such as we know of it, preached at San Quentin and Folsom. He shared the experience of his exuberant religion with a prison chaplain, who, in Wells’ words, replied that he didn’t believe in “getting all worked up.” Wells later told the warden that such ignorance in a prison pastor was not just tragic – it was sinful. “I know what the blessed word of God says, I know what I know, feel, have heard and seen, and what it has done for me; and no one can make me believe different … It hurts so Warden to listen to someone (a preacher) talk so, and to denie [sic] the blessed teachings of Christ.” Rather than spending his final hours with the state’s chaplain, Wells wanted to be with a “real Christian in prayer and studdy [sic].” “[I]f I can’t have it,” he continued, “I would be far better off by myself with Jesus then [sic] to have to listen to such wicked talk.” Wells harangued other prisoners, and he wrote and sent tracts to religious workers on the outside. He was glad to be in touch with such “real Christians,” though they were denied entry, and could not share their religion with him in Wells’ final days. He was executed in December 1942. ⁴⁹

While religion was controlled, the condemned could have access to their families for short visits in each state, in special visiting rooms or perhaps, in Texas, in their cells. The families of the condemned felt complex and contradictory emotions. Of betrayal by the offending family member, of anger at social injustice, of confusion and perhaps relief that the ordeal would be finally done. They held conflicted feelings for those responsible for state killing, too, for at times executioners and the men in charge of death row could be kind. Texas prisoners could talk with others in the death house in their final hours, but in California’s death cells, shut off from other men on the row, the condemned had only state agents and the phonograph as companions. Warden Clinton Duffy instructed death watch guards to “make things as comfortable as possible,” “fitting their moods to the prisoner’s.” Duffy continued, “If the man wanted to tell stories, they listened and, if expected to, they laughed. If he wanted to hear stories, they told them.” ⁵⁰ All of this was to soften the blow of death. The palliative was likely as much for themselves as for the condemned.

Everett Gilbert Parman’s mother expressed many of these emotions, and surely hid many more, in a letter after her son’s August 1940 execution. She first asked that the warden send her son’s books, “especially his Bible with his name in it.” The quote below does not correct language in the original letter.

I wish also to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the last visit with my son. Which was a pleasant one with his end only 3 days away. also Guard Harris for his many little courtsies shown me. I am happy my Son met his fate brave – as only the ones that knew him realy could under stand. how unjustly he died. Thank God his debt to society is paid to bad Some have to be used for examples. Justic is counted in $s. Wholesale murders always escape. it seems ⁵¹

While thanking Warden Duffy and Harris for their personal kindness, she seethed at the structural injustices she saw in her son’s death, while the wealthy or “wholesale” murderers escaped the same fate. We are forced to speculate as to whom she meant as wholesale murderers, but we know they were not poor.

* * *

At the outset of the Depression, California’s Condemned Row was situated in San Quentin’s Old Spanish Cell block. San Quentin was already an old prison, and this was one of its most decrepit buildings. The condemned were marched across 150 yards of open ground in the prison yard, where other California prisoners could see them. They walked through a debris-strewn alley beside the old industrial Sash and Blind building, up three rickety flights of stairs, and into the large room on its top floor. They spent two days in the death cells, chambers built inside the room where the blue-painted gallows, with its thirteen steps, stood. Ropes with weights stretched from the ceiling, tagged in preparation for future executions. The room could hold up to two hundred spectators. ⁵² Throngs of visitors streamed into San Quentin to see an execution, chatting and laughing. They disgusted the prisoners who watched them through barred windows. Officials, too, were troubled by many who came to see “the show.” ⁵³

Forty-eight hours before their appointed time, San Quentin prisoners would be moved from the Row into the Death Chamber, one of two cells actually inside the gallows room. They were stripped and searched, and changed from the ordinary prison garb and into new clothes, a kind of ritual purification, though it was not framed as such. ⁵⁴ As they walked up the gallows’ thirteen steps, some men were obedient and “bowed politely” to the hangman; others fought, violently – kicking, screaming, and protesting their innocence – and had to be forced through the trap door, their hands and feet bound. A black cap covered their heads and spared the audience their contorted faces, but could not hide their writhing bodies. ⁵⁵

In 1936, San Quentin’s condemned row relocated to the Fifth floor of the North Cell block. A much newer building, its row was accessible only by private elevator. The barred doors on most cells allowed prisoners to see out and talk and for keepers to see in, but the last four doors on the row were solid steel, used for punishment or storage, as the need arose. ⁵⁶ The move had many advantages, according to prison officials, but high among them was that condemned prisoners would no longer need to do their final walk across the prison yard. Seeing them on their way to die provoked unrest among the rest of the prisoners. Even hidden behind prison walls, the signs of execution provoked instability. As the gas chamber was put into operation and the gallows phased out, the condemned would never be seen outside. ⁵⁷

Officials lauded the progress made, but some pointed out troubling features. Gas was supposed to lessen prisoners’ suffering, but much of the concern was for themselves. “The executioner liked [the gas chamber] better, too,” Warden Duffy surmised, “because he didn’t feel so directly responsible for the death of the condemned. Death by lethal gas was more mechanical, which made it less personal.” ⁵⁸ Duffy’s rhetorical distancing of himself from the executioner, despite being the institution’s warden, also diminished his own responsibility.

The audience at San Quentin’s first gas execution – an audience of thirty-nine, rather than the two hundred who might witness a hanging – packed into a small viewing chamber, where they, too, must be protected from the lethal fumes. Robert Cannon and Albert Kessel, along with three others, were the first to be killed in the gas chamber. Originally imprisoned for robbery, they were sentenced to die for killing Folsom warden Clarence Larkin in a September 1937 escape attempt. Looking out through the gas chamber window at the spectators looking in at them, Kessel remarked “Quite a congregation!” – flippant word choice perhaps, but at the very least an ironic comment on the sacralization of the event. Next, he said “So long, Robert,” to the man strapped into the chair beside him.

Instantly the deadly hydrocyanic gas began generating. It rose over the knees of Cannon and Kessel and fogged the interior of the steel cell. But we could still see. As it reached Cannon’s face his dark head jerked back. His lips mouthed the word “Bad!” The next instant he seemed to be dead. ⁵⁹

He was not. Enveloped by what one participant recorded as “a sweet and sickening odor as of almonds,” spectators witnessed the final gasps, yells, convulsions and sighs of the dying men for another fifteen minutes. The blowers were turned on and the fumes sent into the sky above. An hour or more later, the chamber doors were opened, the bodies sprayed with liquid ammonia to “neutralize any gas” caught in the dead men’s clothes or lungs. Convicts assigned to the scavenger crew removed the bodies for burial. The next Friday and the one after that, the doors opened again for Kessel and Cannon’s accomplices in murder and attempted escape. ⁶⁰ The experiment in chemical technologies was deemed a success, and execution moved a step further from the memory and symbolism of the public execution, the vigilance committee, or the lynch mob. ⁶¹

Despite the many who died in Texas’s death chamber, few descriptions of the ritual remain. Prisoners would be brought to the Death House, where they might meet with clergy or possibly their loved ones. Prisoners’ families would receive form letters from the prison warden, informing them that they needed to arrange for the removal of their family members’ body after execution. A 1941 letter explained, “If you intend to claim the body, please have the undertaker advise this office by letter immediately. If you do not wish to claim the body, burial will take place in the Prison Cemetery here in Huntsville with full Christian rites.” And to set the family at ease: “[P]lease rest assured that everything possible is being done to make your brother’s last hours as happy as is possible under such conditions, and the Prison Chaplain is in constant attendance.” Some families of the condemned were unwilling or unable to travel across the state to join them at their executions. In these cases, a letter and kind word from the warden would need to suffice. When Bennie Randall’s parents wrote to the warden, they thanked him for his kindness, and implored him to pass a message to their son, since they could not themselves: “tell him I hope he has made his peace with God.” ⁶²

As the clock passed midnight on an inmate’s final day, he would be led through the heavy steel doorway and into the death chamber. ⁶³ He would have heard the executioner testing the electric generator, revving it up and down. There, the prisoner would see the warden, some guards, and perhaps a reporter. The chaplain would almost certainly hold a Bible, and the physician, the stethoscope through which he would listen for the absence of a heartbeat. He would be offered the chance to say some last words, and tradition held that he could speak for as long as he wished. Regardless of whether they professed innocence and anger or pious contrition, their words bespoke an implicitly (and at times explicitly) political assertion of themselves. ⁶⁴ Don Reid, a journalist who sat in on 189 executions, described the following:

The man moves into the chair and sits down. The guards move quickly, efficiently, to strap him in, to position electrodes on his head and left leg, first dampening the shaved spots with saline solution to facilitate the smooth flow of the electric current …

A mask is placed across his face. The guard steps back quickly. The warden glances around once more; every man is in his place. He turns and nods in the direction of the one-way mirror behind which Joe Byrd is waiting.

The crunch. The mounting whine and snarl of the generator. The man’s lips peel back, the throat strains for a last desperate cry, the body arches against the restraining straps as the generator whines and snarls again, the features purple, steam and smoke rise from the bald spots on head and leg while the sick-sweet smell of burned flesh permeates the little room.

The generator purrs to a halt.

The warden does not move. Neither do the guards. But the physician steps forward. He places his stethoscope against the steaming chest, listens intently. ⁶⁵

As the physician pronounced the man dead, “a dreadful odor of burning flesh enveloped us all.” Ventilator fans drew the fouled air from the room, but the acrid smell haunted Reid, and cloyed to his clothes through the night. ⁶⁶ In 1920, Texas lynchers had boasted of “barbecued niggers,” but now, the smoke from charred flesh was a cause for revulsion. ⁶⁷ Some grew inured to it. Following the ordeal, the death watch guard “sips his coffee and reads the newspaper.” ⁶⁸

If Reid’s description conveys an uncanny sense of the terrible and the mundane, it is, perhaps, because for the guards and participants, state killing was both of these. They were frequent, and exhausting tasks for prison workers, to say nothing of the experience of the condemned, their families, or the inmates whose lights might flicker and grow bright again. Even prison chaplains were exhausted by the ordeals. Not just by their roles in facilitating state killing, and for whom Jesus’ crucifixion must have been at least a passing concern, but simply for the work it involved. A Texas chaplain wrote a letter to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, “wondering if there isn’t some way whereby you could arrange to have these executions on some other morning during the week. It makes it mighty hard for the Chaplain to have to be up all night Saturday night and then to have to preach all day Sunday.” He continued,

The man that is to be electrocuted next week and also the other man have both requested that I be present when they go down. My presence at these electrocutions make it necessary for me to drive from Huntsville here after midnight which is 100 miles and then start me preaching services at 6:45 AM here at the New Unit. Then I hold four other services during the day and drive something like 150 miles. You can readily see how hard it is on me and I am sure the other Chaplains feel the same way in regard to the matter. ⁶⁹

Trying ministrations, to be sure, and pressing because both men specifically requested that he be there. Chaplains also had to attend to the burials of indigent prisoners, and among the executed, there were a considerable number. In their letter to the warden, Bennie Randall’s parents lamented that “though it pains me to my heart to tell you, I cannot claim the body of my son, I am not able to bring the body here so you will be doing a great favor by giving him a Christian burial there.” ⁷⁰ C. E. Garret, who tended to the spiritual wellbeing of white Protestants in the “upper sector” of the Texas prison system, oversaw some 29 burials in 1940 alone. ⁷¹

* * *

The rituals of execution, if they can be called such, were far removed from the public spectacles of death at the hands of the lynch mob, the vigilance committee, or a legally-appointed sheriff. Those sentenced to die – still disproportionately non-white and poor – received fresh clothes, religious council, a choice of meals, and medical attention. In a perverse sense, the lack of frightful symbolism bespoke the complexity of the new system. ⁷² Pastoral powers expanded while violent forms of state control grew more muscular. The condemned waited, they hoped, they tried to live with dignity in a space of death, even if their primary audience was themselves or the guards nearby. Prisoners opposed the new terms of control as best they could, and moved the realm of contest to arenas that exceeded the state. Pastoral power was ascendant; medical care and religious guidance interwove; space and time were more stridently managed. Yet the condemned sought to reorient and exceed that control, with each other, with their bodies, their memories, and their very souls. Given the asymmetries of force and the convolutions of biopolitics, one struggles to imagine how they might have done more. What they did in the death house mattered – to themselves and to each other. It should matter to us, too, if we are to understand the states that we make, and which both make and unmake us.