"Remembrances: The 1947 NDT"
W. Scott Nobels, Professor Emeritus, Macalester College

When Bill Southworth asked me to contribute to a set of "remembrance pages" dedicated to fifty years of the NDT, he was both informed and gracious. In determining a time period about which I should write, he recalled accurately that I had participated successfully in the first NDT in 1947 and that I had taught, directed, coached and judged debate for several decades thereafter. After suggesting for me the period of the 1950's, the 1960's or the 1970's, Professor Southworth very tactfully added, "For obvious reasons we are short on the 1950's." The obvious reasons remained unspecified, but at age seventy-two, having directed debate programs from 1949 through 1992, I was neither puzzled nor offended by his oblique reference to my shrinking group of geriatric survivors. I hope to see a few members of this small but hardy 1947 contingent at the 1996 NDT.

Since I do belong to this group, and since I was a very close observer-participant at our 1947 national tournament, I want to center my remembrances on that first NDT. I will describe the tournament, suggest insights into the ways in which it both reflected and influenced the forensic community of its day, and compare and contrast this earliest national tournament with its long line of growing and changing successors.

THE STRUCTURE AND ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURES OFTHE 1947 NDT

One of the most interesting features of the 1947 tournament was the identity of its sponsor and host, the U.S. Military Academy. I still recall my surprise at hearing that Army was hosting our first truly national tournament. The USMA was drawing counsel from some of our forensic leaders, but the Academy would set the format and the rules, administer the tournament and assist in judging. I think I can speak for the first group of students and teachers at the NDT when I express respect and admiration for the efficiency and graciousness with which the tournament was handled. Many of the selection and scheduling procedures gave way within a few years to different and arguably improved approaches, but the USMA learned from experience and cooperated generously with suggestions for change. The one disadvantage about which USMA sponsors could do nothing was the Academy's geographical position in a far corner of the U.S.A.

Some of the features of the 1947 tournament make for interesting contrast with later versions of the NDT. The tournament proposition was not unusual; it was the national topic: "Resolved that labor should be given a share in the management of industry," but the manner of selecting participants was but one on several features which more recent debaters and judges might consider surprising, even astonishing. The USMA appointed seven district committees of three debate directors each to decide the four teams to represent their district. Although selection procedures that first year were a bit loose and perhaps open to unintended subjectivity, the committees did their job well. Twenty-seven selected teams joined the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy to produce a good twenty-nine team field. The intended group of thirty teams was reduced by one when one team canceled belatedly. Our Army hosts demonstrated their resourcefulness in coping with this odd number of teams by simply adding a "Round 2 =" and by giving a bye in one of the first four rounds to each of the four "Round 2 =" teams. Quick arithmetic has already told the reader that one round still had an uneven number; our hosts simply posted a round five which included "Dummy vs. Texas Christian University." TCU won.

Although the uneven number of teams posed no real problem, the small number of teams from which to select sixteen for the elimination rounds did produce competitive imbalances. Two teams, Southern Cal and College of St. Thomas, survived with losing records of 2 and 3; USC then won their way to the final round, where they dropped a close 3-2 decision to the winning Southeast Oklahoma team.

Few of our major tournaments today employ pre-tournament scheduling of all preliminary rounds; when the first NDT did so, it produced some unusual results. Having selected the field on a geographical basis, our tournament directors also paired all five preliminary rounds geographically, using no power matching until the elimination rounds. Given the paucity of national scope tournaments, such a procedure made much more sense than it would in subsequent national scope tournaments. It did, however, allow some less successful teams to meet significantly stronger opposition than did several more successful teams. Three teams qualified with 5-0 records: Army, Navy and Vermont. Their opponents' records were respectively: 9-16, 7-17, and 10-15; by contrast, Southern California's opponent record was 15-10, and four of their five opponents qualified in the top sixteen. Within a very few years, power-matching alleviated the possibility of such imbalances. Moving from on the three judge panels was also an early improvement in tournament structure.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE: DEBATERS AND JUDGES

Comparisons of the 1947 NDT debaters with later participants suggest a student profile which differs in several ways. 1947 debaters were older, were more exclusively male, were relative strangers to each other, and were "dressed up."

I cannot offer precise data, but I believe from personal observation that many 1947 debaters, in and out of the NDT, were two or three years older than the typical debaters before and after them. World War II interrupted the debating careers of large numbers of college students, both by armed forces duty and by alternative ways of supporting the war effort. Many of us returned to our interrupted debate careers, certainly older and perhaps more mature. My colleague, Jerry Sanders, had spent more than three years in the Marine Corps and I almost four in the Navy. We were twenty-two and twenty-three respectively, and we were not the oldest competitors there. The first NDT drew from the top debaters already on the circuit and from some of the top debaters returning to it. It was a quality group.

Unfortunately, I must report that the 1947 NDT debaters were almost all male; only one female was in the field of fifty-eight debaters. On a happier note, Leona Felix and her male partner from Vermont compiled a 5-0 preliminary record and emerged as the top seed. Why was Leona the sole representative of the nation's women debaters? I recall that Southwest Louisiana had at least two 1947 female teams equal to most teams at the NDT; why were they not there? Some readers will remember, and others should be told, that for many years men and women debated in separate divisions; even the National Pi Kappa Delta tournament provided such forensic apartheid. "Separate" did not per se mean "unequal" but such assumptions were often made. Attitudes have changed and numbers have increased. Mark this down as an area in which the forensic community has made significant, though perhaps insufficient, progress since its earlier days.

I think one of the best features of today's debate community is that the word "community" has some real meaning. As travel has become easier and faster, as budgets have grown, and as tournament circuits have turned from regional to national in nature, debaters and teacher/coaches have formed friendships all over the country. By the time participants gather for the NDT, or for CEDA Nationals, they will know many, perhaps even most, of all the people who are there. Certainly the most successful will know each other. And when active debaters graduate, whey will often continue to be friends for many years.

Very few debaters at the 1947 NDT knew each other or even knew about each other. Travel was mostly by car or by bus, not airplane; and tournament circuits were regional at best, not national. The Southeast Oklahoma team, for example, knew debaters from only four of the twenty-nine teams, and we had debated only two of them. Our tournaments had been no further north (except at the PKD National in Ohio) than Nebraska, no further east or south than Mississippi, and no further west than our own campus. Except for teams in our limited area, nobody knew who we were or what kind of a year we were having. This was despite a very good 1946-7 record. We had won fifty-seven out of fifty-nine debates; we had won all eight of our elimination tournaments; and we once had what could possibly still be a record forty-eight consecutive wins. And we knew no more about our NDT opponents than they knew about us. We knew that Louisiana College was strong because we had met them, and we had heard rumors that Northwestern was having a great year. To my regret, the 1947 NDT brought together a brief community of mostly strangers. To my further regret, we did not have sufficient opportunity to establish many continuing friendships. One exception for Jerry and me was Jim McBath. All three of us became active debate directors, and all served as AFA President; we saw each other often. I consider it now a great strength of the NDT that it has contributed to close and continuing friendships year after year among a large group of intellectually and rhetorically gifted people. I know that some of us old timers envy that.

In previewing this section of my "remembrances," I referred to our 1947 debaters as "well-dressed." To say that we were "better dressed" than debaters of later periods would be a very subjective judgment, but I can say that our attire did seem designed more for a special occasion. Men, for example, wore suits and ties and avoided any impression of sloppy or flashy dress. Debaters of the '80s and '90s might describe us as stiff or formal. I will spare readers the description that some judges and debaters in 1947 have sometimes applied to the attire of the '80's and '90's.

The informal unstated dress code of the '40's and '50's (things started to get a little looser in the '60's) sometimes might have been a little too severe in the hands of a few judges. I was invited to include some anecdotal narrative in my "reminiscences," so here's an example of what Jerry Sanders and I perceived to be an excessive application of a unwritten dress code. At the 1947 tournament, our train schedules between Oklahoma and New York had gotten horribly fouled up. After taking a taxi from New York City to West Point (I often worry about what the 1948 Southeastern debaters did for a budget), we arrived fifteen minutes late for round one. That may have been forgivable, but we also committed the unpardonable sin of being unshaven and absent jackets and ties. Despite our explanations and apologies, our first judge at first refused to hear us; after some persuasion by one of the army officers, he relented enough to hear us but not enough to resist giving us our only loss of the tournament. His ballot critique was dominated by a tirade against people who did not show sufficient respect for the serious activity in which we were engaged. Jerry and I tried to be big enough not to take special notice that the punctual and impeccably dressed team of our first round judge won only one debate at the 1947 NDT. Poor Jerry caught it in both directions: underdressing and overdressing. One of the army major judges expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that Jerry was wearing several individual events medals on the watch chain which adorned his vest. My moral, I suppose, is this: all debaters should be alerted that if their judges appear to be old enough to have developed their judging standards before the 1960's, they may want to "dress up" a little and to look as good as they sound.

The NDT judge profile for the 1947 differed markedly from the profile for subsequent tournaments. Judging at the first tournament could more easily be described by two separate profiles, civilian and military. The judging panel was divided into twenty-six debate directors and eleven USMA officers. I can report little about the academy judges: we knew only that they had been former debaters and/or had worked in some way with the Academy teams; most apparently had heard debates on the 1946-47 national resolution. The Academy judges were assigned much less frequently than the civilians, but I can recall no dissatisfaction with their performances when they judged. The twenty-six civilian judges were a different group from most of those who have adjudicated at subsequent NDTs. In general, they were older and more established as scholars in argumentation and debate. None were graduate students, part-time assistants, or recently graduated high achiever debaters. They were experienced directors of forensics who had been around for a while. Several were authors of highly-regarded textbooks--scholars like Glen Mills, Alan Nichols, Robert Huber and David Potter. I do not mean to suggest here that these were necessarily better judges than the younger judges who have for many years been more numerous in the NDT pool. Adding years is certainly no guarantee of adding wisdom, especially in a specific area like judging debates, and being a published scholar may not always translate into highest aptitude for evaluating competitive events. What I will suggest is that age, theoretical scholarship and the combination of directing debate and teaching rhetoric are likely to produce different and perhaps predictable standards and habits in judging. This was a group of judges certain to understand and almost certain to prefer traditional argumentation and debate theories and to utilize a combination logical-persuasive model of advocacy. They generally wanted their argumentation straight down the middle. One of the names of the game in any era is judge adaptation; that adaptation is different and perhaps more difficult now than it was at the 1947 NDT.

DEBATE THEORY AND PRACTICE AT THE 1947 NDT

This set of comments picks up where the analysis of judges left off. What judges reward, debaters try to deliver. Most of our 1940's and early 1950's debaters did play it down the middle. The kind of theory found in O'Neill, McDurney and Mills THE WORKING PRINCIPLES OF ARGUMENT characterized debate at the first NDT. Presumption, burden of proof, and stock issues were all taken very seriously. "Need, plan, benefits" was the standard structural pattern. Even comparative advantage affirmative cases did not show up until late in the 1950's. Affirmative speaker responsibilities were the same round after round. 1AC proved need, and if they wanted to win, that included inherency. 2AC engaged in some refutation and rebuttal, presented a plan, and argued the advantages of the plan. Negative approaches also showed little structural variation from each other. 1NC refuted the 1AC need arguments. Since NDT was inexcusably slow in adopting cross-examination (not until the 1970's), 1NC frequently posed from two to three to a whole barrage of questions for 2AC, mostly about the affirmative plan. Topicality was only occasionally a major issue, and ultra-narrow approaches and stretches on word meaning were perilous affirmative undertakings. 2NC argued whatever seemed strategic, but concentrated primarily on plan-meet-need and disadvantage arguments. Lacking a cross-ex feature, good 1947 debaters gave special care to the coordination of the negative block, and 1AR battled stern coverage necessities. In general, all rebuttal speakers strove to stay ahead of the flow, however that could be done.

Use of evidence offers another contrast between the debating heard at West Point in 1947 and debating of more recent vintage. Let's get one fact out of the way fast: most of us did not use nearly as much evidence as more modern debaters employ. We typically carried a couple of briefcases of sample cases apiece, one of which held a card file and the other which held mostly original materials. I can't remember any 1947 teams for whom evidence transportation was a major problem; I cannot recall any 'mobile libraries' clogging the halls of the academy in 1947. Were 1947 debaters less energetic? I think there may be some alternative explanations. Consider first that the rapid rate of debating so widely practiced now would not have been tolerated by most coaches, certainly not by the many lay judges for whom we debated during the year. Add, too, that in an era more devoted to a public audience persuasion model, more time was necessary for non-evidentiary kinds of persuasion. The way evidence was used also offered a contrast; 1947 NDT debaters worked harder at persuading judges that their sources were highly credible and their data sound. The general persuasion model also tended to direct more attention to style, particularly in the close attention to language.

I believe that the major differences between NDT debates in 1947 and those to be heard in 1996 and beyond reflect changing models about the nature of educational debate. One concentrated on a combined argumentation/persuasion model; the other concentrates on an information processing model of argumentation. One worked from a more general audience model; the other visualizes a specialized audience. From these theoretical differences spring other more tangible variations, such as evidence use and delivery and style.

Label me "old fashioned," for I prefer strongly the broader rhetorical model for educational debate. But also label me "mellow," for I have managed to refrain from arguing that basic issue in these comments of remembrance.

CONCLUSION

As I write this, I am looking forward to attending and celebrating the fiftieth National Debate Tournament. My thoughts will not focus so much on differences and changes in the NDT as upon the values that have been constant from number one to number fifty. I consider intercollegiate debate a premier activity in our attempts to educate this nation's citizens, especially its leaders. Such an activity deserves our best efforts to enhance motivation for students to achieve at their highest possible levels. For fifty years the NDT has provided that kind of motivation; it both showcases the intellectual and rhetorical levels which so many of our students have reached and spurs others to reach those levels.

When I reminisce about My own participation in the first NDT, I will also think about the hundreds of debaters who have followed me. I will do so not only with a warmth and nostalgia, but also with great pride.