The Execution Spectacle and State Legitimacy: The Changing Nature of the American Execution Audience, 1833-1937

Abstract

This paper examines the role of the audience in the process that transformed executions from public spectacles to hidden rituals, and makes visible the ambiguities and uncertainties that accompanied the transportation of capital punishment from its monarchical origins to a modern democratic setting. From this vantage point, the evolving responses to concerns associated with the execution audience share many characteristics with efforts to control other problematic audiences. And yet, the particular forms that audience manipulation in the context of executions took cannot be fully understood without considering the occasion that brought the audience into being. Viewed as a mirror held up to the execution, the audience, whether conceptualized as a rowdy crowd or a solemn group of witnesses, emerges as a constitutive element of the execution and, in this sense, carries the potential to grant, or deny, legitimacy to the event and, by extension, capital punishment itself. Introduction During the nineteenth century, the execution in America underwent a major transformation from a large and rowdy public spectacle to a hidden and tightly controlled ritual (Fearnow 1996; Lofland 1976; Madow 1995; Masur 1989). Typically described as uncivilized, irrational, and ignorant, the public execution crowd triggered at least three intertwining concerns for nineteenth-century reformers. First, the rowdiness of the crowd made it increasingly difficult to maintain a clear distinction between a solemn execution and a festive holiday celebration. second, the lowly members of the crowd were seen as especially vulnerable to the violence displayed, thus leading to fears that the public execution might have a brutalizing impact on those watching rather than serving as a source of moral (re)invigoration. Finally, the crowd itself, by its size and social composition, came to be viewed as a political challenge of sorts, most directly in relation to the pending execution, but also in the more general sense of carrying within itself the power to challenge the authority staging the event (ranging from disrespect and mockery to threats and riotous disruptions). Initially conceived of as a simple adjustment to the execution event-remove the execution from the troublesome crowd by bringing it inside the jail yard-the transformation came to involve a series of organizational modifications that turned the execution into an event that was qualitatively different from the public execution; these modifications included the site of execution (from public to private), the size of the audience (from large to small), the gender composition of the spectators (from mixed crowds to male witnesses), the class character of the event (from popular/mixed to middle-class/professional), the method of execution (from hanging to more scientific methods), and the jurisdiction of the execution (from local to state). How can we account for this transformation? Scholars have identified a range of historical developments that contributed to the demise of the public spectacle, such as the rationalization of authority, democratization, cultural changes, and technological/medical advances, but these insights do not immediately translate into an explanation for what the execution event was changing into. That is, the transformation of the execution, I argue here, is best viewed not as a passive and unidirectional response to inexorable external pressures, but instead as a series of evolving and open-ended responses to the problems associated with an actively criticized institution situated in the midst of the social and political upheavals of the nineteenth century. While the role of the crowd in making the nineteenth-century execution spectacle problematic is fairly well documented, much less attention has been paid to the continued role played by subsequent audiences in the various organizational responses aimed at rescuing capital punishment from the rubble of public executions. …