Auburn New York Prison Card for Leon Czolgosz. 1901. Source: L. Vernon Briggs. The Manner
of Man that Kills (1921). Da Capo
Press, 1983. Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Czol_execution_card.jpg.
T. Dart Walker
Wash drawing of assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz at Pan-American Exposition reception, ca. 1905
Source: Library of Congress Print and Photograph Division (cph.3a08686)
1 See Avery F. Gordon, “On
Education During Wartime,”
Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People
(Boulder CO: Paradigm Press, 2004), 18–26.
2 Emma Goldman,
“The Tragedy at Buffalo,” Free
Society: A Journal of Anarchist Communism, (October 1901).
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ The_Tragedy_at_Buffalo.
the most apparent characteristic of life. Movement equals life, it can only exist in time. Cinema reproduces movement, animation creates time. It is graphic cinema that invented the morph and the warp, the impossible transformation of form and the inversion of space.34 In a similar way to how Max Ernst perverted the rules of the optical toy of the zoetrope, animation perverts the scopic regime of the camera. But it’s the looks that count: we used quantified motions to trigger emo- tions. From determining the interval that deceives the brain, to meas- uring the heart’s pulse, to the biometric organization of bodies in front of the camera and in the movie theater or the theme park: orchestrated desire through regulated behavior is still, more than ever, present in our daily interactions with technology. Modernized by the industry, animation keeps on transforming modernity in newer, more attractive configurations.
34 On the cultural history of
morphing, see:Vivian Sobchack, ed., Meta-morphing: visual trans-
formation and the culture of the quick change (London: University
a doctor hired by Edison to build him an AC chair, appointed to the committee, which unsurprisingly selected the AC voltage electric chair. Despite the fact that for years people referred to the process of being electrocuted as being “Westinghoused,” Westinghouse did not support capital punishment, refused to sell his generators to prison authorities, and funded the legal appeals of the first prisoners sentenced to death by electricity. In the end, Thomas Edison lost the War of the Currents, but the battle confirmed his great talent for maximizing profits and monopolizing intellectual property. The sober representation of Czol- gosz’s execution—swift, seemingly without pain or bodily mutilation, a model of rational efficiency—was in sharp contrast to the reality of electrocution and to the far more graphic 1903 Edison depiction of its use to kill Topsy the elephant.7 But, then, Execution of Czolgosz, with its touted panorama of Auburn prison was less an argument for or against electrocution than it was an example of electricity in the service of the restoration of a social order momentarily disrupted by the death of the President of Progress, Industry and Empire by a self-proclaimed anarchist.8
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, grievously troubled over his usurpation of the di- vine powers of creation, has been replaced by Edison’s Tower of Light, blinding in its scientific harnessing of what Henry Adams called elec- tricity’s “occult mechanism” to capitalist expansion and social order. As one nineteenth-century observer remarked, “The old world of crea- tion is, that God breathed into the clay the breath of life. In the new world of invention mind has breathed into matter, and a new and ex- panding creation unfolds itself…. He [man] has touched it [matter] with the divine breath of thought and made a new world.”10 This new world was conspicuously displayed first in 1893 at the World’s Co- lumbian Exposition in Chicago and then at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo New York, both important industrial cities, each
H.R. Robinson. A Galvanized Corpse, 1836.9
Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-11916).
7 Electrocuting an Elephant (1903). http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/File:Topsy.ogg.
8 Both Gustave Baumont and
Alexis de Tocqueville (in On
the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Applica- tion in France, 1833) and Charles
Dickens (in American Notes, 1842) offered a very different im- pression of that panorama, find- ing the Auburn system of silence and hard labor inhumane.
9 “Jacksonian editor Fran-
cis Preston Blair rises from his coffin, revived by a primi- tive galvanic battery, as two demons look on. A man on the right throws up his hands as he is drawn toward Blair, saying: Had I not been born insensible to fear, now should I be most horribly afraid. Hence! horri- ble shadow! unreal mockery. Hence! And yet it stays: can it be real. How it grows! How ma- lignity and venom are ‘blend- ed in cadaverous union’ in its countenance! It must surely be a ‘galvanized corpse.’ But what do I feel? The thing begins to draw me… I can’t withstand it. I shall hug it!” Galvanism (from the exhibition Frankenstein: Pen-
etrating the Secrets of Nature).
United States National Library of Medicine. National Institutes of Health. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/ exhibition/frankenstein/galva- nism.html.
10 Edward W. Byrn quoted in
Jurgen Martschukat, “‘The Art of Killing by Electricity’: The Sub- lime and the Electric Chair”
The Journal of American History,
vol. 89, no. 3 (December 2002): 906, 908–9 (on Henry Adams).
6 See Byron R. Bryant, “When
Czolgosz Shot McKinley: a Study in anti-Anarchist Hysteria,” Resistance, vol. 8, no. 3 (December 1949): 5–7; Richard Porton, Film and the
Anarchist Imagination, (London
and New York: Verso, 1999), 16; and Chris Vials, “The Despot- ism of the Popular: Anarchy and Leon Czolgosz at the Turn of the Century,” Americana: The
Journal of American Popular Culture, vol. 3, no. 2 (Fall 2004).
nism of being a government provocateur, but Emma Goldman, who inspired him, and who Czolgosz met very briefly, dismissed the charge and wrote eloquently about the young man who killed the “president of the money kings and trust magnates.”3
Leon Czolgosz moved to Buffalo in August and on that September day waited in the receiving line to greet McKinley. Rather than shak- ing the President’s hand, he shot him twice at point blank range with a .32 caliber revolver. He was immediately captured by the secret serv- ice agents and military police present and beaten almost to death by them. Between the angry crowds, the police and the prison guards, by the time Czolgosz arrived at Auburn Prison (via the Erie County Wom- en’s Penitentiary) on September 27 to be executed by electric chair as punishment for his crime, he was barely alive himself, unable to stand, moaning in pain. Czolgosz said nothing at his trial and refused to co- operate with his assigned lawyers, but moments before his death on October 29, strapped into the large electric chair, he was reported to have shouted out: “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people! I did it for the help of the good people, the working men of all countries!”4
Czolgosz’s brother Waldek and brother-in-law Frank Bandowski were witnesses to the execution, but they were not permitted to take away Leon’s body. After his brain was autopsied (no doubt to confirm the noted criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s theory that “there were a greater number of ‘lunatics’ and ‘indirect suicides’… among anarchists than among ordinary criminals”), sulfuric acid was placed into his cof- fin to destroy the body, his letters and clothes were burned, and his remains were buried on the prison grounds.5 McKinley’s assassination ignited another violent wave of anti-anarchist and anti-radical hysteria against those heard or known to be critical of McKinley and especially of his war that included the arrest of Emma Goldman, the tarring and feathering of Reverend Joseph A. Wildman by his own congregation, several near-lynchings, and numerous mob attacks that forced individ- uals and families to flee their homes. With the desecration and burial of Czolgosz, the vigilantism momentarily quieted, but “America’s on- going anti-radical bloodlust” persisted in various forms, aided and ac- tivated by Edwin S. Porter’s widely viewed film of Czolgosz’s execution and others such as D. W. Griffith’s The Voice of the Violin (1909).6
Leon Czolgosz was the fiftieth person to die in the electric chair in the state of New York. Edwin S. Porter’s reenactment of his execution for Thomas A. Edison Inc. marked the culmination of Edison’s oppor- tunistic involvement in electrocution. The first electric chair was built by Harold Brown, then secretly employed by Thomas Edison, and in- troduced at Auburn prison in 1890, replacing hanging as the principal form of capital punishment. Although Edison claimed to oppose capi- tal punishment, his desire to crush his competitor George Westinghouse was stronger. The War of the Currents was aggressively prosecuted by Edison who ran a smear campaign against Westinghouse and his AC current, which included setting up a 1000 volt Westinghouse AC gen- erator in New Jersey and publicly executing a dozen animals, the better to discredit it, which garnered considerable press coverage and lead to the new term “electrocution” to describe death by electricity. A skilled political operator, Edison not only lobbied the New York legislature to select AC for use in electrocution but managed to get Fred Peterson,
Detail of Sing Sing Prison Principal Keeper James Con- naughton’s Execution Log Book. 1896-1897. Source: Sing Sing Prison Documents, 1893–1928. Westchester County, NY.
3 “Leon Czolgosz.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Leon_czolgosz; Emma Goldman, “The Tragedy at Buffalo.”
4 The Buffalo History Works,
“The Trial and Execution of Leon Czolgosz.” http://www.buffalo- historyworks.com/panamex/ assassination/executon.htm. “Buffalo Men at the Execution. Sheriff Caldwell and Charles R. Huntley Saw Czolgosz Die. Their Impressions,” Buffalo
Commercial, (October 29, 1901).
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Buffalo_Commercial/Buffalo_ Men_at_the_Execution.
5 Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man: According to the Classifications of Cesare Lombroso (Montclair NJ:
Paterson Smith, 1972), 305. First photograph of Leon Czol- gosz in jail. 1901.
Source: Leslie’s Weekly. Sep- tember 9, 1901, Cover. Library of Congress Print and Photograph Division (cph.3b46778).
habituation, and political regulation.”13 The social and human terms of this advanced society were deadly: a finance-controlled monopoly capitalism rooted in patriarchal militarism and white supremacy. The US nation state will also, in time, be secured by regimes of punish- ment and imprisonment whose origins in the aftermath of the Civil War determined its trajectory and the particular fate of Black Ameri- cans who today remain the disproportionate object of state violence and its legal sovereignty in matters of life and death. Cinema played an important role justifying and normalizing this way of life. Thomas A. Edison Inc.’s propaganda films for the Spanish American War made by William Paley, for the Pan American Exposition, and for McKinley’s presidential authority (his inauguration, death, and funeral) are only the most literal examples of Edison’s particular contribution to this cin- ematic project.14 Certainly too, it’s arguably the case, that, in all these films, what’s notably absent and repressed is just as significant: Black soldier resistance and desertion and the ongoing guerilla insurgency in the Philippines; the courageous movement to stop the lynching epidem- ic that terrorized black men, women and children from 1892–1902; or the organizing by workers against the degradations of capitalism and the founding of the US Socialist Party (1901) and the IWW (1905).
ELECTROCUTION OF CZOLGOSZ. Unhonored. [code for tel egraphic orders]. A detailed reproduction of the execution of the assas sin of President McKinley faithfully carried out from the description of an eye witness. The picture is in three scenes. First: Panoramic view of Auburn Prison taken the morning of the electrocution. The picture then dissolves into the corridor of murderer’s row. The keepers are seen taking Czolgosz from his cell to the death chamber, and shows State Electrician, Wardens and Doctors making a final test of the chair. Czolgosz is then brought in by the guard and is quickly strapped into the chair. The current is turned on at a signal from the Warden, and the assassin heaves heavily as though the straps would break. He drops prone after the current is turned off. The doctors examine the body and report to the Warden that he is dead, and he in turn officially an nounces the death to the witness.15
13 Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Mean- ing: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 92.
14 See Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning and
Jonathan Auerbach, “McKinley at Home: How Early American Cinema Made News,” American
Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 4 (Decem-
ber 1999). The most comprehen- sive collection of Edison source materials is available from the Library of Congress: http://mem- ory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/ed- biohm.html.
15 Edison film company
catalog. http://memory.loc.gov/ cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/papr:@ filreq(@field(NUMBER+@ band(lcmp001+m1b38298))+@ field(COLLID+mckin)).
fair designed to celebrate a phase in the conquest of the Americas. Chicago, in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival, debuted the installation of the 82 foot tall Edison Tower of Light, its 10,000 light bulbs flashing in concert with the 90,000 bulbs and 5,000 arc lambs lighting the grounds, which was built to 391 feet in Buffalo. This dazzling display of invention illuminated its automa- chinic wonders—the first electric chair among them—and the appro- priate instruction to be made of them. Inspired by the living ethno- logical villages French anthropologists helped design to represent the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, Chicago hired Harvard’s Frederic Ward Putnam to design the Midway Plaisance. Set at an angle to the White City, the Midway’s liv- ing museum of “primitive” peoples was conceived to enable visitors to measure progress toward the electrified idea of civilization displayed in the White City.11 That electricity was a key technological and symbolic medium by which modernity’s presumptive progress was articulated was reiterated at the Pan American Exposition where it was explicitly tied to service in justifying the Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish American War, and US global expansion. As President McKinley said in the final speech he made before being shot by Czolgosz: “The Pan-American Exposition has done its work thoroughly… illustrating the progress of the human family in the Western Hemisphere…. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem.”12
By 1901, “American capital was no longer a middling mercantile player in a global economy commanded by imperial European pow- ers. Now it was a robust industrial society voraciously appropriating a vast but disparate labor force which required cultural discipline, social
An African-American prisoner is prepared for execution in “Old Sparky,” Sing-Sing Prison’s electric chair. c1900. William M. Van der Weyde. (Library of Congress). Retrieved from: http://civilliberty.about.com/od/capitalpunishment/ ig/Types-of-Executions/The-Electric-Chair.htm.
11 It’s worth noting that the
segregationist schooling faltered on at least two fronts. First, the Midway became the amusement center of the fair—George Ferris’s great wheel was there and be- cause the ethnological villages were also concessionary busi- nesses, they offered more exotic and enticing entertainment than the more “civilized” and Victo- rian White City. Second, despite Frederick Douglass’s participa- tion as Haiti’s representative, there was organized opposition (including a boycott) by African Americans to their racist exclu- sion, led by the great anti-lynch- ing agitator, Ida B. Wells. Black radicalism and cultural hybridity (even if consistently disavowed) remained two key modalities by which white supremacy and seg- regationism have been continu- ously challenged and sometimes even undone.
12 “The Last Speech of William
McKinley,” Buffalo, New York, September 5, 1901. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ amex/1900/filmmore/reference/ primary/lastspeech.html. Silent film of the president’s last speech is online at: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=OtaGGG2uP7A.
Many South Africans believed in apartheid as in inyanga (traditional healer), as in the sjambok (whip), as they believed in everything which made it unnecessary for them to forge their own destiny; they loved their fear, it reconciled them with themselves, it suspended the facul- ties of the spirit like a sneeze. Apartheid was a roof. And under this roof life was difficult; many aspects of life were concealed, proscribed. People tried to live their lives in dignity but their joy was tainted with guilt and defiance.
In South Africa, many black people spend their lives chasing shad- ows. While the expression “chasing shadows” has quixotic connota- tions in English, in indigenous languages the expression represents the pursuit of something real, something capable of action, of causing ef- fects—a chase perhaps joined in order to forestall a threat or danger. Seriti in Sesotho (my mother tongue) does not readily translate. The word is often translated only as “shadow,” unwittingly combining the meanings of moriti and seriti. The word “seriti” overlaps the word meaning “shadow,” but the absence of light is not all there is to seriti. In everyday usage seriti can mean anything from aura, presence, dig- nity, confidence, spirit, essence, status, wellbeing and power—power to attract good fortune and to ward off bad luck and disease.
The demise of apartheid has brought to the fore a crisis of spiritual insecurity for the many who believe in the spiritual dimensions of life. Today, this consciousness of spiritual forces, which helped people cope with the burdens of apartheid, is being undermined by mutations in nature. If apartheid was a scourge the new threat is a virus; invisible perils both.
Nothing forces a backward glance like a threat. The Chinese say that our body is the memory of our ancestors. This is an ominous prop- osition since apartheid is an impossible ancestor, inappropriate and un- suitable. Whenever we come under threat we remember who we are and where we come from and we respond accordingly. The word “re- member” needs elaboration. Re/member is a process by which we re- store to the body forgotten memories. The body in this case is the land- scape—on whose skin and belly histories and myths are projected— which is central to forging national identity.
One can’t travel far within this country before coming upon shad- owed ground of negative remembrances of violence and tragedy. This partly explains my peregrinations here and in foreign lands. This journey which began at home in Soweto took me to places invested with spiritual meaning in the Free State—concentration camps, burial grounds in Middleburg, Greylingstad and Brandfort—in my effort to embody the SA landscape.