In Praise of Dueling

I have come up with a way to solve some of these long-standing, mind-numbing business, religious and political disputes that clutter-up our morning papers:

Bring back the old code duello. Dueling.

Jerry Yang: Call-out Carl Ichan. Be done with this silliness.

Brett Favre: Challenge Packer GM Ted Thompson. Give us all a break.

Archbishop of Canterbury: Duel Bishop Robinson, with the winner to lead the Anglican Community (“lead,” of course, being a relative term in this case).

Valleywag vs. TechCrunch. Jennifer Aniston vs. Angelina Jolie (on pay-per-view, of course). We could even settle some very old scores, like Anita Hill calling out Clarence Thomas.

In fact, we could avoid the next 100 days of campaigning with a call to arms by our presidential candidates. (Indeed, if Obama wants to look more like the old dead guys on our currency, he should challenge McCain to a duel. Our beloved Founding Fathers had more than their fair share of scrapes.)

I’m not looking for anyone to die, mind you. But I do think some twist—say, paintballs at 20 yards--would be great. With dire consequences to follow. (See more below.)

This spectacularly good idea comes from my current read of Joyce Appleby’s Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans. I guess I’d always known about Alexander Hamilton being shot and killed by Aaron Burr, but I was frankly stunned by the prevalence of dueling in America in the years following the Revolution.

In Europe, Appleby tells us, fights over women and gambling provoked most of the duels, which served as a way for leisured men in aristocratic circles to protect their honor. In fact, the duelists were often army officers and particularly handy with firearms.

Dueling was uncommon in colonial America until European officers serving in the Continental Army brought the practice over. America adopted it with a vengeance, though, choosing politics over women and honor as their most common flashpoint. Estimates were that more than 100 Americans died in duels in the first 20 years of the nineteenth century, with scores more wounded.

Here’s a brief sampler:

Before being killed by Burr, Hamilton had had ten previous brushes with challenges, one of them with future president James Monroe. Hamilton lost a son, Philip, to a duel. It turns out Philip’s sin had been loudly mocking a Jeffersonian speaker.

Michael Taney, father of the chief justice, killed a neighbor in a duel.

Richard D. Spaight, a prominent Virginia politician, was killed in a duel resulting from a particularly heated congressional campaign.

Andrew Jackson, who enjoyed his reputation as a duelist, slew a young political opponent in cold blood. The man, having grazed Jackson in a first shot, had to stand at the mark while Jackson recocked his gun.

A narrowly-averted duel between John Randolph and Thomas Jefferson’s son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, was triggered by a trivial debate over a salt tax. Mann issued the challenge to Randolph from the floor of Congress. Meanwhile, in 1809, a Federalist from North Carolina dueled Jurist John George Jackson, President James Madison’s brother-in-law.

The editor of the New York Advertiser wounded a prominent Philadelphia publisher; another duel between the editors of the Boston papers the Independent Chronicle and the Columbian Centinel ended in the murder of the son of one of the editors and a spectacular trial.

The law did very little to stop dueling, or to indict duelers. In Tennessee, legislators discovered that lawyers fought almost 90% of the duels anyway. Tennessee did require a disavowal of dueling for admission to the bar.

In 1806, Congress had the good sense to prohibit army officers from sending challenges to other officers.

Finally, in 1838, a duel between Representative Jonathan Cilley of Maine and William Graves of Kentucky, attended by several other congressmen, produced sufficient outrage that Congress passed an anti-dueling law. No one was ever charged under it.

Oh, and for sheer macabre fun: An election day duel between first cousins on adjoining Virginia plantations left one of them dead. They took up a duel with muskets at six paces after rejecting 1) leaping together from the dome of the Capitol, 2) fighting on a barrel of powder, and 3) meeting hand to hand with knives. The winner, Congressman John McCarthy, was, however, seriously wounded.

Those of you familiar with the history of American jazz know that jazz musicians have long had a form of dueling, known as “cutting,” or “cutting contests,” that dates back to the late nineteenth century in New Orleans. Two bands, traveling the streets atop horse-drawn wagons to advertise a nighttime dance, might bump into one another at a busy intersection. Some wag would chain the wheels of the wagons together so the loser could not escape, and the two bands would try to blow one another into oblivion, thus capturing the larger nighttime crowd.

Pianist Willie the Lion Smith made his reputation in the backrooms of Harlem, asserting his supremacy on the keyboards to all-comers. Duke Ellington called him a “gladiator at heart,” and if Smith found a keyboardist trying to steal his throne, Ellington remembered:

Before he got through too many stanzas the Lion was standing over him, cigar blazing. Like if the cat was weak with the left hand, the Lion would say, “What’s the matter, are you a cripple?” Or, “When did you break your left arm?” Or, “Get up, I will show you how it’s supposed to go.”

(Lion subsequently lost his title, as did Fats Waller and James P. Johnson, to a partially-blind prodigy from Toledo, Ohio, by the name of Art Tatum. Even if you hate jazz I would encourage you to find a Tatum recording or two; they sound to me like a classical pianist sitting in the lap of a jazz pianist, all four hands playing at once. That would have been a cutting worth seeing.)

There are other great jazz duels—Coleman Hawkins getting mowed down by Lester Young in 1933 Kansas City, and even the legendary Charlie Parker being run off the stage when he couldn’t keep up in a jam session as Basie drummer Jo Jones tossed a cymbal at his feet.

You see, America was built on head-to-head, winner-take-all combat.

Hence, my idea to rejuvenate an old established American practice would work as follows: Paintballs at 20 yards. (Hand-to-hand knives would also be offered, but discouraged.) The messiest contestant loses. The dire consequences for the loser: House arrest for two years. Ankle bracelet. Orange jumpsuit. All outgoing technology (computer, phone, Blackberry) forbidden. Message: Just go away. Please. And just be glad you didn’t have to jump from the roof of the capitol building.

How cool would that be? And it’s hard to argue with James Madison or Duke Ellington.

My advice to you is to hit the target range. Buy stock in paintball companies. Stay out of scrapes and off the front page.

This thing has legs. I’m sure of it.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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