Category Archives: Themed Sets

Themed Set: Embarrassed Executioners

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The human body can be a hardy creature, resistant to the best-calculated plans to kill it … and the ignominy of scaffold work has seen many an amateurish headsman trod the boards.

Between the two, we reap a cornucopia of botched executions that practically seem more normal than the “successful” ones.

A few data points to that effect in these next four executions over four different centuries: no mere miscalculated drop from the scaffold, but horrifically grim pratfalls to mock the solemnity of the proceedings and leave egg on the executioner’s face.

Still, if you think that’s bad, you should see the other guy.

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Themed Set: The Written Word

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Capital punishment’s limitless literary potential has drawn the written word to it since time immemorial.

We touch through the condemned, a living creature poised on the threshold of death, that most universal and awful mystery of existence: small wonder that one of history’s most successful religions traces its foundation, its symbology, and its most sublime literature, to the execution of a Roman subject 2,000 years ago.

Conversely, the condition of a human being — even an infamous malefactor — helpless before the scaffold elicits the interest of the empathetic soul, awakens it to the compelling challenges of life.

What are justice, goodness, mercy?

What is an individual’s place (for an execution is an intrinsically social event) among his or her fellows?

Sophocles poses this question in Antigone; so does Stephen King in The Green Mile; between and beyond them lie unnumbered works both immortal and obscure, from every land and time and genre that if they have no other virtues at least concur upon one essential fact:

The death penalty makes for damned good drama.

Just as artists draw Calvary into their work, that work has drawn artists themselves unto Calvary — or the specter of the Calvary drawn artistry from seemingly modest men and women. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully” as Dr. Johnson had it, and we might observe this oft-repeated pith was issued in the most urgent context: a petition for clemency for a condemned clergyman who hanged at Tyburn nevertheless.

These stories — the fictional and the factual, borderless at the plane of the eternal; the gesture of saying what must not be said either in mortifying defiance of one’s milieu or from the ironic safety of certain death — these stories are mileposts marking a timeless path: from the bosom of a community to expulsion, where the corporeal death (however awful and real) is for its witnesses the metaphor of isolation, the lot alike of great heroes, great villains … and great artists.

From March 4 – 11, in the longest themed set yet employed in these pages, Executed Today takes an incomplete tour through the annals of artistry and execution.

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Themed Set: Unruly Britannia

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The United Kingdom came out on the winning side of World War II, but its hold on its globe-spanning territorial dominions was irrevocably weakened. As its own imperial offspring, the United States, took up the hegemon’s place, British colonies started breaking free — and those social and political sunderings frequently brought violence.

The next two days’ executions were true calendar neighbors, merely hours apart in 1942, as an empire at the end of its run fought for its survival.

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Themed Set: The English Reformation

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Simultaneous with — but in many senses outside — the Protestant Reformation sweeping continental Europe, England in the 16th and early 17th centuries shook with the day’s fatal upheaval.

If the transition from Catholicism proposed by Henry VIII appears theologically mild in retrospect, it wrought earth-shattering changes: desperate conflict between faiths in shifting dynastic alliances; the germ of a vast middle class seeded with confiscation of the Church’s enormous estates; the evolution of governmental forms — and political theory — to comport with a landscape of redistributed power.

Many thousands suffered the ultimate penalty in those days for reasons godly, venal, or a little of both. The next three dates frame the contest over a century’s time, the violent birth of modern England.

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Themed Set: The Spectacle of Private Execution in America

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The elimination of public executions in America might have aimed at public decorum, but it certainly did not remove executions from the domain of spectacle.

Inevitably, death attracts attention.

Over hedge rows — outside prison walls — in pulpits, legislatures, and the rising din of the mass media — the spectacle took new forms.

The next three dates all capture American executions after the end of public hangings … and the new ways this now-secret punishment announced itself in the communities carrying it out.

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Themed Set: The Spectacle of Public Hanging in America

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Inherited from England, the ceremony and theater of public hangings in the youthful United States and its antecedent colonies present an almost impossibly dramatic variety for characters, costumes and stagecraft. The ritual has — at least in the U.S.A. — slipped out of time into history, myth, even kitsch.

How representative of public hangings are any of the phenomenon’s instantly recognizable tropes remains another matter.

The next four dates offer a handful that alongside their inherent interest suggest — if only by illustration — the diverse circumstances that have gathered men and women under the gallows in the New World.

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Themed Set: The Fall of the Roman Republic

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Our third Themed Set installment.

During the last century B.C.E., Rome was convulsed by civil wars. When the flames subsided, the Roman Empire had been born out of the ashes of the Republic — though the powerless forms of the latter were diligently preserved by the emperors.

The three executions remembered next all took place during — and as consequence of — this epochal struggle for power.

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Themed Set: Women Against Fascism

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The entries of today and tomorrow will hardly be the last women, the last anti-fascists, or the last women anti-fascists to grace these pages.

But this small themed set offers a complementary couplet of resistance: women of almost diametrically opposed circumstances who in vastly different ways opposed fascism at the risk (and ultimately, the forfeit) of their lives.

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Themed Set: Spies

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One of the occasional conceits these pages will indulge is the predilection of history for unexpected combinations and rhythms. The next three days’ entries are not individually related, but capture a snapshot both of an avocation liable to inclusion in these pages and of an era — the great power jockeying of the early 20th century — through the lives of three men who spied upon one another’s countries.

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