Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, February 1924, 100 years ago, the Gas Chamber was first adopted in the US,

it was in Nevada, and it was adopted as a supposedly more humane way to execute people. On February 8th, G. John became the first person

to be executed by lethal gas. Capital punishment has existed for basically the entirety of this country's history as has

the push to find cutting-edge methods of executing people and we've talked

about that a lot on this show and touched on how you can see how the latest

method of execution does a lot to reflect

the political and social context of the time. So with that in mind let's talk about

what it means that in the progressive era the United States is adopting a new method of killing those sentenced to death

and moreover as I'm sure you know and have seen what does it mean that this year 100 years later

there was another high profile execution by gas we will get into that story just from this

last month but here as always Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of

Wellesley hello there

hello jody hey there let's start in that Wellesley, hello there. Hello, Jody.

Hey there.

Let's start in that bigger question of kind of how a new method of execution does

maybe reflect the era.

Why, what does it tell us about the progressive era that we're moving from hanging

people and firing squads to using poison gas? It's so in line with both of the

ethos of the era and the ethics of the era, which is this idea that you can apply science to make everything better.

You can make it more humane, you can make it cleaner, you can make it more efficient.

...