What the American Duel Teaches Us About the Austrian Empire—and the Modern Newspaper

By Orel Beilinson, Bar-Ilan University.

In 1897, the American writer Frank Norris published a story drawn from his own student days at the Académie Julian in Paris. Its hero, Buldy Jones, used to be Yale’s star varsity pitcher. Now an American art student abroad, he dominates the struggle over the scarce workspace at the studio. His opponent, a local bully named Camme, flaunts a past of dueling.

Their altercation pits American baseball against the European duel. Jones kicks first; Camme challenges him back. Wilson, Jones’s American friend now called to serve as a second, comes up with a plan: he will tell Camme that Jones

“comes from a strange country, near the Mississippi, from a place called Shee-ka-go, and there it is not considered etiquette to fight either with a sword or pistol; it is too common. However, when it is necessary that balls should be exchanged in order to satisfy honour, a curious custom is resorted to. Balls are exchanged, but not from pistols.”

In other words, he would alchemize the duel into a baseball game.

Jones is unconvinced: “Yes, and do you suppose that Camme will listen to such tommy rot as that?”

Wilson does not flinch. He has also made up a “Mexican duel” that could make this “curious custom” from the Mississippi look like a benign compromise. Before resorting to the Mexican variant, however, he reassures Jones: “You’ve no idea what curious ideas these continentals have of the American duel. You can’t propose anything so absurd in the dueling line that they won’t give it serious thought.”(1)

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Wilson proves right. Camme accepts the terms. But he is wrong to assume that the European imagination of what an American duel might mean remained malleable in the 1890s. The British magazine Idler reported in 1894 about yet another “earnest and enterprising duelist” trying to introduce the American duel into Italy. “The Italian firmly believes—which belief, by the way, he also shares with the Frenchman—that when two Americans wish to fight a duel they load one pistol, draw lots for it, and the winner shoots himself.” (2)

The American duel was first and foremost associated with the drawing of lots. It was associated with Central Europe more than with France or Italy. The chemist Henry Carrington Bolton recalled how two students in Heidelberg, “having quarreled decided that the earth was not large enough for both.” They entered a “darkened room”, “drew lots”, and swore that “he who drew the black ball would commit suicide.” The incident threw “profound gloom” over town.

The duel was so gruesome because the loser did not die immediately. He kept his promise but misaimed. Convinced that it was a point of honor, the loser refused medical care. The surrounding students refused to see him as a suicide, “for he was killed in an honorable duel.” Neither was the winner an accessory to manslaughter, they held. Bolton failed at convincing them “of their extraordinary tergiversation.” (3)

Americans were mostly repulsed by the variation ascribed to their name. Benjamin C. Truman, a correspondent of the Civil War and an authority on duels, reached for superlatives. The American duel was “the most romantic—as well as the most absurd (and, always, deadly”—manner of duels.” Its “fundamental idea” was “that neither adroitness or skill, but chance, that determined the result.” Such an aberration justified piling more adjectives—”romantic and reckless, diabolical and sinister”—before delivering the final verdict: the American duel was “as decidedly un-American as anything possibly can be.” (4)

Italicizing his insistence that the custom was “absolutely unknown outside of Continental Europe,” Truman cites examples from Central Europe. He mentions Germany, Vienna, Moravia, and Pest. How did a German-speaking drawing of lots become so identified with America in Central Europe and with Central Europe in America?

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Every round of peer review for my article, “An American duel? Honour-bound society, youth morality, and the life cycle of moral anxiety in the late Habsburg Empire,” asked me for the answer. I found none. All I found was a cutting point: around April 1862, the term “American duel” came to denote the drawing of lots that ends in suicide.

Before that, American duels could be all sorts of things. In 1857, Morgen-Post reported that two young men in Maryland fought “with Bowie knives” while “fastened by their pants to an oak beam two inches thick” until one was mortally wounded. (5) That year, Viennese readers learned that a former congressman in Texas killed his opponent, a state senator, only to be shot by the senator’s second, who in turn was shot by the other second, whom a friend of the congressman then killed: four deaths in all. (6)

Kevin McAleer, who wrote a monograph about duels in fin-de-siècle Germany, hypothesized that the designation reflected the United States’ image as the “chief patron of a diabolic modernity” in the eyes of conservative Europeans. (7) For writers like Wilhelm Riehl, one of the most influential writers in German about the malaise of modernity and a protagonist of my book manuscript, every frightful trend in Europe’s future was already visible in New York. But it is hard to find modernity in bleeding to death while tied to oak beams. Were Bowie knives or pistols more modern, or more American, than the gentlemanly sword? Maybe, but I found no reflections on the geographical origins and left it at that.

I likewise despaired at finding the chain that binds the American duel to the Russian roulette. Their similarities are numerous: chance, suicide, a geographical designation. But the first recognizable depiction of a Russian roulette comes from Alexander Grin’s 1913 short story “Зурбаганский стрелок” (“The Marksman of Zurbagan”). The name is first documented in 1937, when Georges Surdez published an article of that name in the American(!) Collier’s Weekly. By then, readers were presumably familiar with the American duel. Explaining the American duel’s migration to Russia and its possible rebranding as a Russian roulette went beyond the scope of my interest: youth and suicide.

There remains an entire family resemblance waiting to be identified. Two, actually. First, one could map the various geographically determined duels that appear in the nineteenth-century press. There were Japanese and Venezuelan duels, for example, but they attracted much less controversy and enjoyed far shorter afterlives than the American duels. Second, one could map how both the American duel and Russian roulette came to characterize a society with low regard for the value of life. Grin’s story thematizes the artificial, self-centered flirting with death that can emerge in the face of existential emptiness. I, on the other hand, moved inward: what does the American duel tell us about Austria?

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When the American duel emerged into public life in 1862, the first instinct of the legal profession was to legislate it away. But they were not sure how. Was it a duel, extortion, incitement to suicide, or homicide? Was it a breach of private morality, an affront to public order, or maybe a case of contract law? Was it something that the existing criminal code could absorb, or was new legislation necessary? On the one hand, I found some of their solutions elegant enough to avoid legislation. On the other hand, I am grateful for their continued debate—it exposed important frictions in Austria’s legal transformation circa 1850.

Legislative efforts repeatedly failed to produce a coherent doctrine. At fault was an unwillingness to determine what honor was and how it worked. In a state where all were equal before the law, this was a tricky question. Europe’s “traditional” order divided the population into legal corporations, each with its own rights and duties. The aristocracy, in particular, was entitled to peer juries. Thus, it got to apply its own standards for the impugning and restoration of honor. In a Rechsstaat, a state governed by law, this was no longer possible. The state now had to define what honor was and apply this definition broadly. Was it a legally protected interest like body and liberty? Was it an asset one had, like property? Was threatening someone with the loss of honor, then, more like robbery?

The American duel raised important questions about the state’s monopoly over justice and violence. More conservative jurists, like the dueling students, found honor to be a social force outside the law and the state. If someone kills himself because social expectations leave him no choice, then there is no culpable person on the other side. The sense of honor, they claimed, is internal. Thus, from the point of view of the state, persecuting the duelists made sense: it was an impermissible form of private justice. But the duel was then of the same kind. And yet, jurists found the American duel easier to condemn. By tracing the debates around the American duel, I was able to show multiple frictions in Austria’s transition into the rule of law.

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A skeptical peer reviewer noted that the legal debates, albeit interesting, were few and short-lived. That is true. There was an initial debate in 1862 that bled into 1863 and ended by 1864. Then there were legislative campaigns, which were also episodic. But press coverage was persistent. Into the interwar period, newspapers in major cities reported on cases near and far at least once a month. I wanted to find out why this seemingly marginal phenomenon, whose origins were murky and existence disputed, continued to appear in the press. In other words, why do some tropes survive and others fail? And how?

The American duel operated on a simple formula. A young and frivolous person bets on his life, loses, and often acts on his obligation with significant delay. Many stories reported on suicides taking place years after the fact, when the winning side suddenly resurfaced and threatened to expose the youthful affair and deprive the loser of the honor he had so far retained. The middle pages of Austrian newspapers were filled with short stories. Some were as short as three lines. If you imagine the bourgeois reader sitting at home, going over the dense middle pages with the occasional gasp or sigh, the American duel fits perfectly. Short, predictable, and always alarming.

I also show how the American duel captured broader anxieties about youth. Jurists were so eager to legislate because they were genuinely panicked. Students and soldiers were killing themselves over romantic troubles, minor insults, or even without any reason at all. This panic, I argue, also contributed to its longevity. Trying to reform the ways of the youth, the worried adults continued to remind the world of a minor practice that was perhaps nothing but a fancy. It appeared not only in newspapers: American duels entered sermons and novels, available in church and school libraries. Someone was bound to enact what they had read at one point or another…

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Frank Norris has Jones’ American second joke that Europeans would believe any absurd “American duel.” They did not. By then, they had developed a rather strict image of what an American duel was. And this form teaches us more about Austria than about America. It engendered such anxieties that made its unclear provenance seem unimportant enough to ignore. Nevertheless, just as I hope the article will convince historians that such minor tropes are worth pursuing from emergence to demise, I hope that scholars of Austria’s relationship with the United States will also be tempted to find these minor and fictitious representations of one another – they are no less revealing.

(1) Frank Norris, “This Animal of a Buldy Jones,” In The Apprenticeship Writings of Frank Norris, 1896—1898, ed. Joseph R. McElrath and Douglas K. Burgess (American Philosophical Society, 1996), 2:28–34.

(2) “Duels and Duelling,” The Idler Magazine 5 (1894), 222.

(3) H. C. Bolton “Reminiscences of Bunsen and the Heidelberg Laboratory, 1863–65,” Scientific American Supplement, no. 1254 (1900): 20109-20110.

(4) Ben C. Truman, The Field of Honor: Being a Complete and Comprehensive History of Duelling in All Countries (Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1884), 526-527.

(5) „Ein amerikanisches Duell,” Morgen-Post, April 25, 1857.

(6) „Ein amerikanisches Duell,“ Die Presse, October 29, 1857.

(7) Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany (Princeton University Press, 1994), 80–81.