By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  “The bowie-knife,” ruled the Texas Supreme Court in 1859,

  is an exceedingly destructive weapon. It is difficult to defend against it, by any degree of bravery, or any amount of skill. The gun or pistol may miss its aim, and when discharged, its dangerous character is lost, or diminished at least. The sword may be parried. With these weapons men fight for the sake of the combat, to satisfy the laws of honor, not necessarily with the intention to kill, or with a certainty of killing, when the intention exists. The Bowie-knife differs from these in its device and design; it is an instrument of almost certain death.29

  All this helped the duel’s cause. In the 1920s in Georgia, another state with a culture of violence, no white male ever went about unarmed. “It is no wonder that thoughtful men, not only in Georgia but also over the rest of the South and the Western frontier, argued for the duel as a check on general murder,” wrote the historian William Stevens. “In a duel conditions could be made reasonably equal, and seconds often had an opportunity to effect a reconciliation.”30

  Other states took a similar view. Dueling was unlawful but far from a capital offense. In Vermont and Connecticut, the punishment was a fine and disqualification from office; Illinois passed a law against dueling at some point before 1815, but the law, never published, was finally repealed. In Rhode Island, a convicted duelist would be carted to the gallows with a rope about his neck and made to sit for an hour “exposed to the peltings of the mob” but not actually hanged.31 In 1836 Nathaniel Hawthorne reported how in old Massachusetts duelists had been severely punished. “In the U.S. now,” he wrote, “non-fatal duels cause public hissing. We should imitate the British and encourage the custom to fade away.”32 Despite this declaration, the following year Hawthorne learned from his lover, Mary Silsbee, that an acquaintance of his, John Louis O’Sullivan, “had been guilty of an attempt to practice the basest treachery upon her,” and he immediately called him out. O’Sullivan apologized profusely, and eventually the novelist withdrew his challenge.33 In general there were far fewer examples of duels in the North. A single dueling society is known to have existed in the United States—in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early nineteenth century—and that was quickly disbanded after the death, in a duel, of its president.

  With the discovery of gold in the Sacramento Valley in 1848, dueling moved westward, along with tens of thousands of Americans, many of them southerners, infected with “California fever.” Tournaments, modeled on their medieval forerunners, remained popular in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina as late as 1865 but were never the reckless or chivalric displays they had been in Europe.34 In the West, nearly all duels were fought with firearms. By the 1860s, even in California, the practice was on the decline. It was not just because of public disapproval and sterner legislation: as with the First World War in Europe, the appalling toll of the Civil War made dueling seem foolish and more obviously criminal. On the battlefield itself the Civil War cavalries charged saber in hand, but a trooper’s revolver and carbine carried more weight than his sword. U.S. troops made their last traditional cavalry charge in 1906 against Moro rebels in the Philippines, but this was already an anachronism; by then swordplay had moved safely indoors, into the confines of the movie theater and the fencing hall.

  MODERN FENCING WAS BROUGHT TO AMERICA BY THE GERMAN Turnvereiner in the late 1840S. These highly organized gymnastic societies were part of the movement for national renewal in Germany and would eventually give focus to the dueling fraternities there. They emphasized physical training through gymnastics and included fencing in their regimen. After the Civil War, many colleges and sports clubs adopted fencing along with the rest of the Turnverein program. The constitution and by-laws of the Boston Fencing Club, published in 1858, recorded that each member was expected to “provide his own foils”; “no females … under any pretext whatever.… No dogs shall be kept in the clubrooms,” under pain of a 50-cent fine. No fine is recorded for harboring a female.

  A striking proponent of fencing was James Naismith, the inventor of basketball. In 1891 Naismith was working at the Young Men’s Christian Association training school at Springfield, Massachusetts, teaching psychology, Bible studies, and boxing and other sports when his senior teacher asked him to think of an indoor game to break the monotony of constant gym during the winter months. He tried lacrosse, football, soccer, and even indoor cricket before coming up with the rudiments of basketball, using nine players on each side and with just thirteen rules. When his students showed they enjoyed the game, he wrote up his idea in the school paper, The Triangle, and from then on basketball took off. In 1897 the number of players per side was reduced to five, but by then Naismith had moved on to the University of Kansas, where he taught a range of sports.

  “Fencing equipment at the University of Kansas was acquired by chance,” his biographer records, “in 1896, two years before a fencing instructor, namely Naismith, was available. The university had purchased for its athletic department all the fixtures and equipment … of a defunct gymnasium in Atchison, Kansas. Included in the equipment happened to be the masks, foils, plastrons, and other accoutrements of a fencing class. The gear looked impressive enough, but no one knew, or cared, much about it. When Naismith came along, though, action began.”

  Although the university had remained uninterested in so frivolous a sport, fencing was becoming popular in the United States (in 1893, over twenty thousand people flocked to an international tournament fought on horseback with sabers in New York’s Madison Square Garden), and in 1894 the Intercollegiate Fencing Association was founded. Naismith had become adept at fencing before he came to the Midwest, and he liked the sport. Therefore, when he found equipment in the storeroom of the gymnasium, he dusted it off, organized classes in fencing and broadsword, and became responsible for raising student interest in fencing, with few lapses, throughout the rest of his career at the university. Naismith continued to teach fencing until he was past seventy-five, sparring regularly with his students. A skillful performer as well as a good instructor, he liked to show off the finer points of the sport by using a yardstick against a student with a broadsword—and winning.35

  By the end of the nineteenth century a number of U.S. universities considered it a mark of standing to have fencing facilities, and a majority of cities had clubs. The sword was regarded as either a deadly weapon or a slightly effete instrument of exercise for a gentleman, and clubs existed as little islands of aristocratic diversion, not greatly different from their European counterparts; but fencing made slower progress than in Europe. It was not until 1874 that the first salle was opened in New York. Its master, Karl Senac, and his son, Peter, also published one of the first—and most reprinted—American books on the sport, The Art of Fencing. When that same year masks were reworked to be more effective, they were adopted by baseball coaches as the first catchers’ masks. (As a grim postscript, Senac Senior would stuff a rag soaked in chloroform into one of the new masks when, some years later, he committed suicide.)

  In 1888 the Amateur Athletic Union had initiated national championships. Fencers were unhappy with the arrangement and on May 6, 1891, formed the Amateur Fencers League of America, with 108 original members. The following year national championships were held under the auspices of the new body. The first AFLA Rules for Competition provided that “The English language only shall be spoken by the judges (3) during the competition.” This was not the only oddity: the winner was determined not by counting victories but by tabulating the aggregate number of hits in a round robin. The three judges awarded hits for defense, attack, and “general good form.” Each competitor wore “a dark fencing suit so that white chalk marks [from the weapons’ tips] can easily be seen.”

  The U.S. War Department assumed in 1942 that its GIs would encounter an enemy trained in classic Western swordsmanship, and responded accordingly with a field manual on how to deal with swordsmen. (illustration credit 11.2)

  These rules remained in force till 1897, when white j
ackets were introduced for foil and chalk was discontinued. Dark jackets remained the norm for épée until 1911. Five-touch bouts were also discontinued. Foilists were to fence for a full four minutes; the winner was whoever was ahead when time was called. The foil target was also a movable feast: originally it ran up and down one side of the torso, from collar to hip; in 1906 it was extended to the entire torso, front and back; then in 1923 the groin was added. In both foil and saber contestants were required to acknowledge touches; failure to do so cost two points.

  On April Fools’ Day 1905 a new and unconventional set of regulations was recommended for all foil competitions. “Judges are requested to give points for the general bearing,” exhorted the lawmakers,

  for form shown in defense and attack, and for the value of the touch itself. A good parry, even if not followed by a touch, should be credited with some value. Touches made in poor style should not receive the consideration of a well-executed touch, which should be worth at least two points in comparison. Rushing, pounding, failing to cross foils, or to make the parry, dragging the feet, throwing forward the body, dodging, coming on guard poorly, failing to use the left hand correctly, or offending against form in any way, should be counted against such offenders; and should the opponent have better form or fewer faults, it should be counted in his favor and so expressed in points in the judge’s score.36

  It was a noble if doomed attempt to govern fencing on aesthetic principles, a decade at least after Europe had given up the battle. These criteria set America apart for nearly twenty years. At the poorly supported and badly organized 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, only the United States and Cuba fielded teams, and the isolation of American fencers was not felt. At the London Games of 1908, the organizers decided that since foil was an art the result should not be recorded by the mere scoring of touches, so an exhibition event was held. The British captain, Theodore Cook, declared, “Foil fencing is the instrument of perhaps the most graceful and most courteous form of athletic exercise in the world and its whole spirit is destroyed by mere combativeness.” Following the Games of 1912 and 1920, however, the Americans returned home keen for their sport to be integrated with the European model: in 1923 it finally was, with the same target area and scoring systems.

  A 1937 attempt to improve foil fencing: each weapon was equipped with small suction cups, which stuck to the spot where a hit was made. The heart and other vital organs are diagrammed and points awarded accordingly. The system’s inventor, Ray Gross (left), awarded 100 points for a hit at the heart, 20 points for the right breast. (illustration credit 11.3)

  Foil was the leading weapon throughout this period, with saber and épée some way behind. Between 1920 and 1956 America won two individual medals at the Olympics—silver for foil in 1932 and bronze for épée in 1928—along with four team bronzes. Then came the Hungarian Uprising and the diaspora of 1956: suddenly the country was flooded with top-class Magyar fencers. It made a difference—the saber team came fourth in 1960—but not a significant one. There were already leading masters in place—Aldo Nadi on the West Coast, Giorgio Santelli at the New York Athletic Club, among others—but somehow the sport remained resolutely a minority interest, appealing only to a moneyed white upper middle class.§ The Rome Olympics of 1960 saw perhaps America’s best chance of a gold medal. Albert Axelrod, an ebullient, volatile New Yorker, came in third in the foil after demolishing the best talent of Western Europe, but failed to disturb the two excellent young Russians who took first and second places. After 1960 American teams became the worthy also-rans of international competition. Then arose the explosive issue of race.

  SOME YEARS BEFORE THE ROME GAMES, “INTER-SETTLEMENT RECREATION Fencing League tournaments” were instituted to bring more young people into the sport. One year, the winner of the girls’ foil event, Violet Barker, was given membership in the prestigious New York Fencers Club as part of her prize. Some days later, clutching her new card of admission, she went to the club to participate in an AFLA competition and encountered the patrician figure of Warren Dow, a formidable ex-Olympian who had been association secretary during three different presidencies between 1942 and 1948, and who effectively ran U.S. fencing. “What are you doing here?” he asked. Barker was black. She explained. Dow asked for her card and, standing in front of the club’s heavy oak doors, tore it in two. “We don’t let niggers fence here,” he told her.

  Both Barker (a hairdresser in Harlem) and her coach were too poor and felt too powerless to lodge an official complaint, but soon after that two black members of Columbia University’s fencing team were denied access to the even more prestigious New York Athletic Club, and their coach, the newly appointed Joseph Velarde, insisted that his whole squad enter the NYAC by the front door like everyone else. When his request was refused, the team set off back home. Two stories appeared in The New York Times, representations were made, and eventually a committee of the AFLA was convened. Dow was present and made his feelings clear: “If we let them into this club that will be the end of fencing at the NYAC, and that will mean the end of fencing in the United States.” He looked around the table, facing each member in turn, then added, “Look, we know how we’re going to vote, let’s get it over with and go back to fencing.” “No, Warren,” someone said quietly, “you don’t know how I am going to vote.” To everyone’s surprise, it was the association’s president, Miguel de Capriles. Turning to the others, he said, “Gentlemen, it’s time we addressed the fact that fencing has changed from the aristocratic thing that it was to the democratic thing it now is.” His speech carried the day.37

  Black children from all walks of life began to fence. One was to transform the sport in America. Peter Westbrook was born in 1952 to a mixed-race couple living in the Hayes Homes housing project in Newark, New Jersey—one of the poorest and most violent areas in the state. Westbrook’s father, Ulysses, had been a GI during the Korean War; his Japanese mother was a war bride. The young Westbrook’s memories are of his father beating his mother; his father putting out cigarettes on his mother’s face; his mother on the floor, her leg bleeding. Ulysses left for good when Peter was six, but by then the boy had already used a knife to carve a “Z” for “Zorro”—a television favorite—on his mother’s coffee table.

  A life in the projects was not what Mariko Westbrook wanted for her son, and she was soon mapping out his escape. Peter would travel to school with cardboard masking the holes in his shoes and grew up a thief and a fighter—a good fighter, he says; taunted for his ancestry, he had to be. He not only scrapped in the streets but boxed in the Police Athletic League. In his autobiography, published in 1997, he described this early world. “I often think about the kids from my neighborhood,” he writes, “how they never had a chance. I would say that 90% are dead, 8% are in jail, and I have no idea what happened to the remaining 2%. Stinky, Buddy, Carter and Horse are the nicknames of some of my buddies that didn’t make it. Drugs or homicide took their lives: one was shot in the back for robbing a store, another murdered by a rival.”38

  Not the normal background for a champion. By the time he was fourteen Peter had started to fence: “My mother could trace her lineage back through many samurai. This was a source of great honor, great pride. For her, fencing was a sport of nobles. She thought, If I get Peter into fencing, he’ll meet noble people. But it wasn’t all that stuff about her family that got me interested. She offered me five dollars if I took a lesson.”

  The inducement worked. He won an athletic scholarship to New York University, gained a place on the 1976 Olympic team, and in 1984 took a bronze medal at the Los Angeles Games. In answer to those who saw the L.A. Games as “soft” because so many Eastern Europeans were absent, he made the world championship finals in 1989. For more than twenty years he dominated saber fencing in America, qualifying for six Olympics and winning the national title an unprecedented thirteen times. His lithe, catlike movements made him look like a boxer, which he had once been: his right shoulder leaning slightly down and forward, his b
ack arm held out wide.

  Sometimes he met with racial slurs, but used them to spur him on. If he had a white opponent, he conjured up a white face and recalled an insult from a white man. He never saw his father’s face when he attacked—his father had hurt him only indirectly, he explained. He was always a picture of calm and courtesy on the strip, impassive, but judges standing close by could hear him muttering obscenities under his breath, too low for the referee to pick up.

  “I could have killed somebody every day,” he told a New York Times reporter.39 “It’s a great fuel for the sport, but it started to seep out in life. Somebody might step on my toes in the subway, I’d start a fight with my fists.” He went into therapy. When he eventually came around to writing a memoir, he chose the title Harnessing Anger. In the passages where he touches on his early experiences his words have an edge that few other writings on the sport can match:

  I had one objective only: to win. If I am fencing with you my whole heart and soul are concerned. How can I do this gracefully and effortlessly? I absorb your body language the way a dry sponge absorbs water. My objective is to get to know how you think, to anticipate your next move. I try to become aware of your slightest weaknesses, the ones you don’t even know you have. Then I capitalize on them. That’s how I can defeat you.

  Having grown up on the rough side of the tracks, he had no qualms about preying upon his enemies’ weaknesses.

  To do this in life is a crime, but to do it in the sport of fencing is to create beauty and art. It’s all about negative manipulation and emotional intimidation. With each opponent I immediately try to gauge, How weak is this man? How many times will I have to beat him down in order to shatter him? I try to think beyond a single match. I ask, Can I scare him so bad that he’ll bow down to me forever? How can I keep him as my prisoner for life? I don’t think that people who have grown up in mainstream society know how to do this.