Death Penalty and Electric Chair

When Moran writes that he aims "to demonstrate how our most cherished social values can be manipulated to serve pecuniary interests: the way in which public policy is affected by behind-the-scenes maneuvering of powerful and often ruthless business interests," I think he is talking solely about the death penalty (xviii). There are various aspects within the death penalty that make it a much more dynamic issue. Throughout his book, Moran writes about the inhumanity of the death penalty, including the barbaric methods and public spectacle of the act prior to William Kemmler, and most importantly, the safety and efficacy of direct current versus alternating current in the eventually preferred method of the electric chair. Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, along with a few others, were the players who manipulated how the public, and therefore the lawmakers, felt about this social policy.

As it is today, the death penalty was a big debate issue in the early part of the nineteenth century. I think it is interesting that, considering his major public role in this issue, Thomas Edison was initially against capital punishment. When Dr. Southwick solicited Mr. Edison's advice on the electric chair, Edison wrote "as a progressive and a free thinker, he was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty" (74). With further prodding, and deeper review, Edison realized how getting involved with this issue would help his personal business cause. Thomas Edison's light business was quickly losing ground to rival George Westinghouse. He knew he was widely respected as an electrical engineer and claimed not to change his stance on executions, but acknowledged the necessity and offered a humane alternative with electricity. More specifically and strategically, he offered up George Westinghouse's alternating current dynamos as a possibility because he claimed, "the passage of the current from these machinesÐ'...produces instantaneous death" (75). These statements made their way to the Elbridge Gerry, an Edison admirer and man appointed to head a review commission on the death penalty. Not surprisingly the focus of the policy soon changed to the barbarity and inhumanity of executions, especially hangings, and ways to make the process more civilized.

Elbridge Gerry's commission report, influenced by Thomas Edison, Elihu Thomson (a future Edison business partner), and electric chair innovator Dr. Alfred Southwick, changed the way that executions were viewed and eventually carried out in the United States. Moran writes that the report "is considered the founding document for modern execution practice and protocol" (84). The report eventually turned into a bill that changed the way executions were carried out. No longer were they to be a public spectacle. Executions would take place in a state prison, not in public, and media access and account of the act would be limited. Also importantly, although it did not initially make it into the law, electricity would replace hanging as the death penalty method.

With the current excitement surrounding electricity, Thomas Edison figured that he could focus the public's interest in the electric chair as the primary means of execution and at the same time boost his own direct current form of electricity. Furthermore he aimed to harm the reputation of rival George Westinghouse by asserting that Westinghouse's alternating current was extremely dangerous and therefore the best method to quickly and painlessly kill someone. Edison found a willing ally in Harold Brown. Brown, who had no formal electrical training, made a name for himself by performing very misleading studies on both types of current and scaring the public into believing there was extreme danger in alternating current. George Westinghouse saw the effect that Brown was having on people and finally took ads out in all the major papers discrediting Harold Brown's