Necktie Party

By THE NECK--August Mencken--Hastings House ($2.50).

Few things delight the Brothers Mencken more than a broken neck. Henry L. has been breaking them, as a critic for years. Now his younger bachelor brother, August, a Baltimore civil engineer, has taken time out to collect this anthology of descriptions (from contemporary sources) of 100 more or less sensational hangings.

Engineer Mencken begins with Arthur Gooch, hanged in 1936 for violation of the Lindbergh kidnapping law, and works back along the rope to the Haymarket anarchists; to Charles Julius Guiteau, who shot President Garfield; to the Molly Maguires, the Irish miners who terrorized the Pennsylvania coal fields; to John Wilkes Booth's accomplices, including Mary Surratt, first woman ever hanged in the U.S. He also includes British body-snatcher William Burke, who added a wrinkle to the illicit business of selling bodies for medical dissection by creating his own corpses, and added a verb to the English language--to burke (to murder without telltale traces).

> Most gruesome hanging in the book is that of James Madison Wyatt Stone, Washington restaurant proprietor who murdered his wife. Stone was so fat that his head was jerked off by the hangman's noose while his body fell to the ground.

"After the body had been placed on a bier the head was arranged on it as neatly as possible."

> Luckiest hanging was that of Will Purvis, 17-year-old Mississippian, convicted of shooting a neighbor in a Bible-belt feud. Hundreds watched the body fall, then tumble to the ground as the noose slipped. When the crowd cried: "Hang him!" the official doctor climbed on the gallows, asked for a show of hands from those who really wanted to see the boy die. Nobody raised his hand. Years later another man confessed the murder.

> Weirdest hanging was that of 38 Sioux Indians, personally selected for hanging by President Lincoln. He believed that they were the most ferocious of 303 braves left alive by U.S. forces sent to catch the murderers of some 490 Minnesota men, women and children. Impassively the Indians listened to the prison chaplain, who "tried to infuse them with courage to hold out bravely and show no sign of fear. While Father Ravoux was speaking to them old Tazoo broke out in a death wail in which one after another joined until the prison room was filled with a wild, unearthly plaint which was neither of despair nor grief but rather a paroxysm of savage passion, most impressive to witness and startling to hear. During the lulls in their death-song they would resume their pipes and with the exception of an occasional mutter or the rattling of their chains they sat motionless and impassive until one among the elder would break out in the wild wail. . . ."

They sang even on the gallows. "The tones seemed somewhat discordant and yet there was harmony in it. Their bodies swayed to and fro and their every limb seemed to be keeping time. The drop trembled and shook as if all were dancing. The most touching scene on the drop was their attempts to grasp each other's hands, fettered as they were. . . . Three and four in a row were hand in hand swaying up and down with the rise and fall of their voices. One old man reached out on each side but could not grasp a hand. His struggles were piteous and affected many beholders. . . . Each one shouted his own name and called the name of his friend. . . ."

In his foreword, H. L. Mencken (who as a newspaperman has witnessed nine excutions) says that By the Neck was not planned as a "book of horrors," but to show how men behave in the face of "dreadful doom." He believes his brother's book is the first attempt to bring together "a mass of objective data relating to an important phenomenon of civilization."

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