One Summer: America, 1927

German stars and directors. Universal was said, only half in jest, to have German as its official language.
    A few European actors – Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo – adjusted to or even thrived in the new sound regime, but most actors with foreign accents found themselves unemployable. Jannings, winner of the first Academy Award for acting, returned to Europe and spent the war years making propaganda films for the Nazis. Behind the scenes Europeans still thrived, but onscreen movies were now a thoroughly American product.
    Though the significance of this wasn’t much noticed in America, globally the effect was profound. Moviegoers around the world suddenly found themselves exposed, often for the first time, to American voices, American vocabulary, American cadence and pronunciation and word order. Spanish conquistadores, Elizabethan courtiers, figures from the Bible were suddenly speaking in American voices – and not just occasionally but in film after film after film. The psychological effect of this, particularly on the young, can hardly be overstated. With American speech came American thoughts, American attitudes, American sense of humour and sensibilities. Peacefully, by accident, and almost unnoticed, America had just taken over the world.
     
    fn1 A little-noticed fact was that the Roxy was sold almost at once to the Fox film company for a whopping $15 million. The purchase contributed significantly to Fox’s bankruptcy in the following decade.

C HAPTER 24
     

     
    ROBERT G. ELLIOTT WAS not a murderous person by nature, but he proved, no doubt to his own surprise, to be rather good at killing people. A well-groomed, silver-haired man with a pipe and a thoughtful, learned air, he might in other circumstances have been a college professor. He certainly had the brains for it. Instead, in 1926, at the age of fifty-three, he became America’s top executioner.
    Elliott grew up in a prosperous family on a large farm in upstate New York. He studied mathematics and physics at Brockport Normal School (now the State University of New York at Brockport), but his passion was electricity, and he decided as a young man to become an electrical engineer. This was at a time in the late nineteenth century when electrical transmission was an exciting new technology. Elliott was employed setting up municipal lighting plants across New York and New England when he was sidetracked into the challenge of electrocuting criminals. This, too, was a new thing, but it wasn’t going well.
    Electrocution seemed, on the face of it, a quick, humane way of putting people to death, but in practice it proved to be neither neat nor straightforward. If the voltage was too low or not applied long enough, the victim was often dazed but not killed, and merely reduced to a gasping wreck. If a more ferocious jolt was given, theresults tended to be unpleasantly dramatic. Blood vessels sometimes burst and, in one gruesome instance, a victim’s eyeball exploded. At least once, the subject was slowly roasted alive. The smell of cooking flesh was ‘unbearable’, recalled one of those present. Electrocution, it became clear, was a science that required careful, professional management if it was to be done efficiently and relatively humanely. This is where Robert Elliott came in.
    Called in as a consultant for an execution in New York State, and having read about the suffering and failures so far, Elliott realized that the trick of a successful execution was to adjust the application of electricity continuously and judiciously throughout the process, rather as an anaesthetist controls the flow of gas to a surgical patient, so that the subject was rendered first unconscious and then lifeless in a progressive and comparatively peaceful manner.
    He performed his first two executions in January 1926, and proved so adept at it that soon states all over the east were commissioning him. It wasn’t that Elliott found any satisfaction in killing people – quite the reverse – but that he had an ability, more or less unique, to dispatch them gently. In 1927, he was executing people at the rate of about three a month, at $150 a time, and was in all but name the official executioner for New York and New England.
    Because of the lack of specialist equipment, Elliott had to make his own. Each victim was fitted with a piece of headgear that he adapted from leather football helmets bought at his local sporting-goods store. It is a macabre image,