Given control over the Presidency and both houses of Congress by the 1888 elections, the Republican party quickly seized its chance to admit new states from the solidly Republican Western territories. North and South Dakota, Montana, and Washington had earned statehood in 1889; Idaho and Wyoming joined this list as the forty-third and forty-fourth states within a week of each other in July of 1890.
Both of the new states had a unique provision about voter eligibility. Idaho’s constitution contained a Test Oath Act that disenfranchised the state’s large Mormon population, once a dominant voting bloc in territorial elections, because its religion advocated polygamy. The church abandoned the practice only two months after Idaho’s admission on July 3, but the state legislature refused to restore the vote to Mormons until 1896.
Wyoming, admitted on July 10, became the first state to give women the vote. “This is the greatest event that has occurred in American history since the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Federal Constitution,” said the Woman’s Journal when the territory’s constitutional convention voted to retain the territory’s woman-suffrage statute. “It establishes for the first time in history a true Republic.” Wyoming’s example would inspire suffrage movements that within a decade would also give women the vote in Colorado, Utah, and Idaho.
“Science and civilization demand some more humane method than the rope,” complained Alfred Porter Southwick, a member of a New York State commission on capital punishment, to Thomas Edison. “The rope is a relic of barbarism.” Edison opposed capital punishment on principle, but he knew a business opportunity when he saw one. George Westinghouse’s system of high-voltage alternating current (AC) was replacing Edison’s less efficient direct current (DC) in the battle for electrification. Southwick’s suggestion of electrocution as an alternative to hanging struck Edison as the perfect way to gain back the customers he was losing to Westinghouse. Execution by alternating current would demonstrate that the Westinghouse approach was a danger in people’s home’s, Edison argued.
To prove the point, Edison hired a young engineer named Harold Brown to tour the country staging exhibitions at which he would kill stray dogs and cats with a jolt of alternating current. For the Albany commission on capital punishment, Brown electrocuted a calf, a horse, and an orangutan to prove the potency of AC on larger mammals. Impressed with his demonstration, the commission bought an “electrical cap and shoes” Brown designed to kill humans with Westinghouse AC dynamos. Among the names suggested at this time to describe death in the electric chair were ampermort, dynamort, and electricide; Edison insisted that a person executed in this fashion was “Westinghoused.”
The first man to die in the new electric chair was William Kemmler, a Buffalo fruit peddler convicted of murder. On August 6, 1890, Kemmler received a seventeen-second jolt of electricity that appeared to do the job. “There is the culmination of ten years’ work and study,” exclaimed Southwick. “We live in a higher civilization from this day.” One of the attending doctors, however, noticed that Kemmler’s fingernails had gouged his thumb when his hand contracted during the procedure. This wound, to the alarm of everyone present, was bleeding. The current was switched on again, this time for more than a minute, during which Kemmler’s groans and spasms caused observers to retch and faint; the district attorney who had prosecuted Kemmler fled the room in terror.
“It has been a brutal affair,” Westinghouse said later. “They could have done better with an axe.” The press foretold a quick extinction of the electric chair. “Kemmler is dead,” said the New York World. “Aye, and the fair, sweet mercy of electric death should die with him. Better, infinitely better, the one quick wrench of the neck-encircling hemp than this passage through the tortures of hell to the relief of death.” Like “the age of burning at the stake,” wrote another New York paper, “the age of burning at the wire will pass also.” This proved to be a false prophecy: more than one thousand people have died in American electric chairs since 1890.
1915 Seventy-five Years Ago
On July 3, the morning after a bomb had destroyed the U.S. Senate’s reception room, a German sympathizer named Erich Muenter shot J. P. Morgan, Jr., in his Long Island mansion for having represented the British government in the negotiation of war contracts in America. Muenter had taught German at Cornell and Harvard before disappearing after being indicted for poisoning his wife in 1906.
Muenter later claimed that he only wanted to scare Morgan into using “his influence to prevent the exportation of arms and ammunition” to Great Britain, but this defense had little credibility alongside Muenter’s boasts that he had also planted the Senate bomb. His escape from Washington proved to be much easier than one from a millionaire’s mansion. Wounded twice in the groin, Morgan still managed to wrestle Muenter to the floor, where a butler knocked the gunman senseless with a chunk of coal. “It was a most disagreeable experience,” said the burly banker afterward, “though it is not as painful as I imagined it would be to be shot. …” Muenter committed suicide in prison two weeks after the shooting; his activity increased fears that the United States was swarming with German agents.
The German conspiracy theory was reinforced later in the month when Dr. Heinrich F. Albert, the head of German propaganda in the United States, left his briefcase in a New York City elevated-train car on July 24. A U.S. Secret Service agent named Frank Burke, who had been tailing Albert, grabbed the case and, seeing Albert coming back for it, fled the station. Burke caught a streetcar and escaped from Albert’s frantic pursuit only by persuading the conductor to outrun the madman who was chasing him and cursing in breathless German. Documents in the briefcase, most written in German and marked Streng Vertraulich (“strictly private”), detailed an extensive network of espionage and subversion throughout the United States.
Because the United States was not at war with Germany, the Wilson administration had had no legal right to take the briefcase, but it decided to release the documents to the press anyway. “It may, in my opinion, even lead us into war,” wrote the presidential adviser Colonel House to Wilson, “but I think the publication should go ahead. … it will make it nearly impossible [for Germany] to continue the propaganda.”
Details from documents released to the New York World in August undermined an American neutrality that was already in doubt after Germany’s sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania in May. “Albert’s portfolio was a veritable box of Pandora,” wrote George Sylvester Viereck, the editor of the GermanAmerican newspaper The Fatherland. “It unloosed every half-hatched plan of the Germans; the inner workings of the propaganda machine were laid bare. … The loss of that portfolio was like the loss of the Marne.”
1940 Fifty Years Ago
The Red Army occupied the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, installing Communist governments in each country. “The people of the United States are opposed to predatory activities,” said Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. “They are likewise opposed to any form of intervention on the part of one state, however powerful, in the domestic concerns of another state, however weak.” But Welles could do little more than express his government’s disapproval. By the beginning of August the three Baltic republics had been formally incorporated into the Soviet Union.
The artist Paul Cadmus enjoyed representing the escapades of American sailors on leave in his paintings, even though one such work had been removed from a Public Works of Art Project exhibition in Washington’s Corcoran Gallery in 1934. Early in August, Cadmus’s painting Sailors and Floozies, which showed two sailors and a Marine cavorting drunkenly with three prostitutes, caused a similar controversy when the head of the art exhibition at San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition, Dr. Walter Heil, anticipated the Navy’s protests and ordered it removed. “There’s too much smell about it,” Heil said. “It’s not a masterpiece. It’s just unpleasant.”
Criticism from San Francisco’s press persuaded Heil’s superiors to restore the painting to the exhibit. One Navy spokesman agreed with the decision: “We’ve learned from earlier foolish Navy squawks against other Cadmus paintings. It does us no good and merely gives the artist publicity.” The artist expressed disbelief that his painting could be considered unpatriotic. “Nobody expects or wants the Navy to be made up of Lord Fauntleroys and Galahads,” Cadmus said. “The picture portrays an enjoyable side of Navy life. I think it would make a good recruiting poster. I will raise my prices.”
1965 Twenty-five Years Ago
Bob Dylan had done so much to inspire the revival of folk music in the early 1960s that some proclaimed him the heir to Woody Guthrie’s legacy. Some of his followers sensed a betrayal of that legacy when, on July 25, Dylan shocked the audience at the Newport Folk Festival by taking the stage in a leather jacket and leading an amplified band in an earsplitting set of rock-’n’-roll songs. Folk purists who had expected Dylan to perform alone with his familiar acoustic guitar and harmonica registered their disapproval by booing their idol. “You could hear it all over the place,” Dylan said later. “I don’t know who they were. … I mean, they must be pretty rich to go some place and boo.” By the end of the summer, Dylan’s electric music had won him new and larger audiences, and “Like a Rolling Stone” had become his first No. 1 song on the charts.
A minor traffic arrest in the Watts section of Los Angeles on August 11 sparked a six-day riot that engulfed 150 blocks and left thirty-four people dead. Watts was an almost entirely black area suffering from poverty, segregation, and 30 percent unemployment. “Negro leaders have been predicting a riot like this for three years,” said the writer Louis Lomax. “The whites think they can just bottle people up in an area like Watts and then forget all about them. It didn’t work.”
The city’s police chief dismissed the first night of violence as “nothing like what happened in New York City, where it went on for days and days.” The following evening seven thousand people launched a guerrilla war with police in the streets, looting stores and burning whole blocks before the National Guard finally appeared on August 13. Fifteen thousand guardsmen and police made four thousand arrests, and some nine hundred people ended up in the hospital. The clumsy reactions of Gov. Edmund G. Brown and Mayor Sam Yorty to the crisis made it a central issue in the 1966 race for governor, ultimately won by a conservative political newcomer, Ronald Reagan.
