Intercollegiate Debate: Reflecting American Culture, 1900-1930

EMORY DEBATERS WIN SEVEN VICTORIES; TEAM CONQUERS RAGING FLOODS, CRIPPLED RAILROADS, AND BRILLIANT SPEAKERS ("Emory Debaters ...," 1927). If debaters ever were conquering heroes, this would be the moment. On April 3, 1927, Emory University student David A. Lockmiller wrote in his diary: "Work on debates again. Make progress on war debts and prohibition" (Lockmiller, 1927 April 3). Now, sixteen days later, he and his partner, Reginald McDuffee, were back in Atlanta after a debate tour at the height of the Great Mississippi River Flood, during which they defeated Birmingham-South, Arkansas, Southern Methodist, McCurry, Baylor, Louisiana State University, and Tulane. The newspaper headline printed above was as big and bold as the raging river. After years of more defeats than wins, Emory's debate team really did have a "place in the sun" ("Emory is Victor," 1925). In the late 19th century when intercollegiate debate became widely popular, victories like Emory's generated plenty of hoopla. "The old armory was packed to the rafters with cheering throngs, all in evening clothes [...] torchlight processions formed to welcome teams returning from battles on alien fields," one speech professor would recall (Phifer, 1963). On some campuses, debate contests generated ferocity and fanfare similar to college football rivalries, leading various observers to note that both activities were "sports" with similar features. But the comparison was superficial. Policy debate-a form of speech competition in which teams of two debate the worthiness of a specific policy action-contrasted with the brutal encounters of college football, on one hand, and the frivolity of campus society on the other. A fundamentally serious business, it demanded extensive research and analysis, volumes of reading and many hours of rehearsing and critiquing. If debate was a challenge to the debaters themselves, so it was for observers who found it academic and confusing. Not surprisingly, poor attendance plagued debate events right from the start, and while debate victories fostered school spirit, the real fun lay with athletics and fraternities. In an era when college students giddily sought entertainment and escapades, it is remarkable that an enterprise as cerebral as debate drew the student body's interest at all. Gazing from the pages of early 20th century yearbooks, debaters appeared in formal dress, clutching their loving cup trophies, perhaps lounging around a library table or sitting stiffly in rows of chairs. Their coaches rarely appeared in these photographs, an absence just a bit ironic because so much of what we envisage as the history of intercollegiate debate is wound up with the coaches, their lore, and the emergence of the discipline of public speaking. Between World War I and World War II, an aristocracy of coaches and academics regularly debated debate, sometimes quite fiercely, in correspondence, at meetings, and in the pages of the Quarterly Journal of Speech. They debated the purposes and goals of intercollegiate debate, the outcomes, protocol, teaching and coaching, philosophy and approach, departmental territory, professional recognition, and much more. To the extent that there is a historiography of early 20th century debate, it has been dominated by the correspondence, oral histories, and records of these notable men, and several women, who published widely and whose voluminous papers have been gathered in college and university archives. If the early debaters' experiences have seemed marginal to the story, it may be because there is scant documentation of how they went about their work on a day to day basis, for few of their recollections and reflections are extant. Typecast as eggheads, largely unaware of the crossfire among their elders, most debaters diligently followed the rituals of research, writing, and revising, their personas reflecting dedication and accomplishment. Debate was hard work; debaters boasted it, coaches decreed it, professors acknowledged it, and editors editorialized it. …