In the latter half of the twentieth century, Americans imagined the death penalty in ways that reflected and reinforced broader shifts in the nation's cultural and political landscape. As the core constituency of an insurgent New Right, white, middle class Americans became increasingly disenchanted with the welfare state and embraced more libertarian understandings of freedom, one in which the state refused to engage in social engineering and instead returned to its first duty: to maintain order. The death penalty was symptomatic of a state that was returning to fundamentals. The left, however ... More

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Americans imagined the death penalty in ways that reflected and reinforced broader shifts in the nation's cultural and political landscape. As the core constituency of an insurgent New Right, white, middle class Americans became increasingly disenchanted with the welfare state and embraced more libertarian understandings of freedom, one in which the state refused to engage in social engineering and instead returned to its first duty: to maintain order. The death penalty was symptomatic of a state that was returning to fundamentals. The left, however, was also implicated in this new political culture. Civil libertarians grew increasingly critical of a rehabilitation-centered criminal justice system.They looked askance at the discretion it vested in those state actors charged with rehabilitating offenders, arguing that they exercised power over inmates in a biased, tyrannical, and personality-altering way. In this ideological context, retributive approaches to punishment, including the death penalty, gained renewed respectability. To its supporters and even, at times, its detractors, capital punishment was imagined as a form of punishment that would showcase the power of individuals to exert control over their world. These claims are illustrated through in-depth analyses of how the state that killed and those it executed were represented in the legal, political, and fictional imagination. While a rhetoric of freedom initially endowed capital punishment with regenerative properties, its implementation gradually became mired in the very legalism and bureaucracy it was supposed to transcend.