Phipps Family History: Dueling Letters

Preservation work at Old Westbury Gardens is not limited to the landscape or the structures, but also to documents. Old Westbury Gardens is responsible for the care of the John S. Phipps Archives—a collection of all types of material from letters to invoices, photographs to films that record the life of John “Jay” S. Phipps (1872-1958) and other family members.

The Gardens has been able to ensure that these materials are not subject to severe physical damage. But full efforts to catalog the archived material for research, education, and interpretation has been partial due to limited financial and personnel resources.  

Through the support of donors some funds have permitted the Gardens to employ Archivist Drew Fullshire, who specializes in historic documents, to begin the complex task of preparing the archival collection for eventual digitalization. This initiative will enable the Gardens to make these valuable materials available for researchers as well as to people who visit the Gardens both in person and virtually.

Recently Drew was asked to locate and select correspondence between Jay and his father, Henry, so that they may be shared to connect with today’s visitor the values and concerns of families who lived over a century and a half ago. More than demonstrating the parental concern for a son living abroad, these letters provide a first-hand look into the culture of America and the broader world.

A letter from Henry to Jay (above, right) and then one from Jay to his mother, Annie, are fascinating examples from this culturally and historically rich repository. This correspondence also reveals an unknown period of Jay’s life that was not recounted in his daughter Peggie’s memoir, Halcyon Days. The letters are from a period when Jay studied in Dresden, Germany, at Franklin College, a preparatory school for the Anglo-American community in Dresden. This school was one of only four European centers at which American University Board examinations were held.

In May 1891 Henry wrote to Jay, who was then studying in Dresden, about a newspaper article he recently read recounting the remarks of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. In this letter, accompanied by the newspaper clipping (right), Henry cautioned Jay against the glorification of violence promoted by the Kaiser in his support of the dueling clubs at German universities. With personal references, including memories of his childhood friend Andrew Carnegie, Henry expresses his abhorrence of a culture that promoted the “positive” values of dueling and other forms violent entertainment as an appropriate means of conflict resolution.

These popular dueling clubs were, and are—as they exist, albeit in a different manner—comparable to the American fraternity on college campuses. The dueling clubs phenomenon was so remarkable that Mark Twain even described them—albeit in his usual sarcastic manner—in Chapter 5, “At the Student’s Dueling Ground” of his semi-autobiographical work A Tramp Abroad (1879).

In a May 1896 letter (below) to his mother Annie, Jay recounts his visit to a dueling club—perhaps not completely heeding his father’s advice:

Last Friday morning Bob Mitchell, three other Yale men & I went up to a little inn just out of the town [Munich] & there saw two student duels. Members of all the five fighting corps were in the room wearing their different colored hats & bands. There were so many of us we were not allowed in the room so saw the first duel through the window. The men were very evenly matched & fought out their thirty rounds without cutting each other very badly. We saw the second duel from the open doorway & stood so close to the fighters that after one of the strokes blood splattered on Mitchell’s face. In the second duel the men were new at the game & not evenly matched so that one man was terribly cut up & after about 10 rounds he was wounded too badly to go on.

It is interesting that, more than two decades after these letters were written, Jay would enlist in the U.S. Army in the Air Service immediately after the U.S. declared war on Germany. And the archives contain Jay’s notes which he would use to teach aspiring officers about the causes of the Great War, including Germany’s martial culture.

~Paul Hunchak, Director of Public Programs and Visitor Services