{"product_id":"the-professor-in-the-cage-isbn-9780143108054","title":"The Professor in the Cage","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn English professor starts training in mixed martial arts, exploring the science and history behind the violence of men\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When a mixed martial arts (MMA) gym opens across the street from his office, Jonathan Gottschall sees a challenge. Pushing forty, out of shape, and disenchanted with his job as an adjunct English professor, he works up his nerve and finds himself training for an all-out cage fight. He sees it not just as a personal test, but also as an opportunity to answer questions that have intrigued him for years: Why do men fight? And why do so many seemingly decent people love to watch?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eThe Professor in the Cage\u003c\/i\u003e, Gottschall’s unlikely journey from the college classroom to the fighting cage drives an important new investigation into the science and history of violence. The surging popularity of MMA—a full-contact sport in which fighters punch, choke, and kick each other into submission—is just one example of our species’ insatiable interest both in violence and in the rituals that keep violence in check. From duels to football to the roughhousing of children, humans are masters of what Gottschall calls the monkey dance: a dizzying variety of rule-bound contests that establish hierarchies while minimizing risk and social disorder. Gottschall’s unsparing odyssey—through extremes of pain, occasional humiliation, his wife’s incredulity, and ultimately his own cage fight—opens his, and our, eyes to the uncomfortable truth that, as brutal as these contests can be, the world would be a much more chaotic and dangerous place without them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cu\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublishers Weekly (\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003estarred review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e: \u003cbr\u003e With humor, literary allusions, and a casual, unprepossessing style, Gottschall explores such related subjects as duels, bullying, English football, men’s “love-hate” relationship to war, and violent entertainment from gladiator games to MMA.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eBiographile\u003c\/i\u003e:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Professor in the Cage \u003c\/i\u003eis not just Gottschall's story, but a look at the history of violence itself…. you read Gottschall getting smarter and smarter about his subject as he gets closer and closer to risking his life in the cage.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eBuffalo News:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Gottschall’s writing proves much smoother and easier to digest than the mayhem he undertakes in the cage. He buttresses his work, as all academics do, with 35 pages of endnotes and bibliography, attesting to the research he undertook to complement his road to the ring. The reader learns why animals fight, why women don’t, and why eye contact and facial expressions often win bouts before the bell rings.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cu\u003e\u003cb\u003eSteven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; and author of \u003ci\u003eHow the Mind Works \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e The Better Angels of Our Nature\u003c\/i\u003e:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “What a charming and illuminating book! With scientific acumen and literary panache, Gottschall immerses himself, and us, in an ancient part of the male psyche. Among the many treats in this book are the history of recreational fighting, a limpid explanation of sexual selection, and a sympathetic portrayal of working-class men that’s worthy of a great novelist.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003cu\u003eSam Harris, author of the\u003ci\u003e New York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestsellers \u003ci\u003eThe End of Faith, The Moral Landscape,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eWaking Up\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e: \u003cbr\u003e “Jonathan Gottschall has written a wonderfully honest, entertaining, and insightful book about violence, manhood, courage, and the wisdom that can be gleaned from getting punched in the face. If you’ve ever wondered why combat is a perennial source of fascination for us, and whether this fascination can be channeled toward truly productive ends, \u003ci\u003eThe Professor in the Cage\u003c\/i\u003e is the book to read.”\u003cb\u003eJonathan Gottschall\u003c\/b\u003e is a distinguished research fellow in the English Department at Washington \u0026amp; Jefferson College. His research has been covered in the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eScientific American\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eAtlantic\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eChronicle of Higher Education\u003c\/i\u003e, and on NPR. His blog, \u003ci\u003eThe Storytelling Animal\u003c\/i\u003e, is featured at \u003ci\u003ePsychology Today\u003c\/i\u003e. His book, \u003ci\u003eThe Storytelling Animal\u003c\/i\u003e, was a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e Editors’ Choice selection and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePREFACE\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt’s the night of March 31, 2012, and I am standing half naked in a chain-link cage. I’m bouncing restlessly from foot to bare foot, trying to vent the tension building at my core. I’m surrounded by a swarm of men in Tapout T-shirts who are hooting at me over cups of beer. I can see the young man coming through the crowd to break my face, to strangle me to sleep. It’s like a nightmare.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI’m thirty-nine years old. I’m an English teacher at a small liberal arts college. My first book, \u003ci\u003eThe Rape of Troy\u003c\/i\u003e, focused on the science of violence—from murder to genocidal war—but I learned all I know from an armchair. I’ve never experienced real violence, never even been in a fight. But that’s about to change.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs I dance and pace, I watch them smear the young man’s face with Vaseline, watch them slip a mouthpiece between his lips. He’s making fists in his fingerless gloves, and I can hear my own gloves creaking as I do the same. People have the wrong idea about the gloves. They think they civilize the sport, but they are the soul of its barbarism. The fine bones of the hand are no match for a heavy skull. Knuckles shatter on heads. But if you wind the hand in ribbons of gauze and tape, then armor it in foam and leather, you turn the fragile fist into a fearsome club.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe young man strides up the steps to the cage, sinews writhing beneath his skin like snakes. The steel door clangs shut behind him, and they drive the bolts home, locking us in to battle until one of us can’t. The referee moves to the center of the cage. We will be fighting very soon, and I’m so relieved that I don’t feel the fear that I expected. There’s fear, but not the kind of terror that might unman me, might tempt me to hop the fence and run for home. Mainly I feel a sharpness of focus that I’ve never felt before. There’s nothing in the world except the young man—no sound or scent, no wife squirming in her seat, no cornerman murmuring soothingly at my back.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe referee stands sideways between us. He shouts to each of us in turn, “Fighter, are you ready?” We nod. In the next heartbeat civilization will melt away, the law will disappear, and we will meet at the center of the cage to try to kill each other. I have never seen the young man before, and I feel nothing for him but respect. And yet the crowd will cheer as I try to shut down his brain with punches, to wrench his joints, to throttle his neck until his eyes roll blindly in their sockets.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe referee yells, “Fight!” And so we do.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e • • • \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIT WAS THE CULMINATION of a journey that began two years earlier when I was sitting in the cubicle I shared with other English Department part-timers, mulling the disappointments of my academic career. I had a PhD, my name was on the cover of a few books, and I had already lived my fifteen minutes of fame (or what passes for it among university types), but I was still a lowly adjunct making $16,000 per year teaching composition to freshmen who couldn’t care less. My career was dead in the water. I’d known it for a long time. Whether this was because my effort to inject science into the humanities was before its time (the narrative that gets me through the day) or because that effort was wrongheaded (the more popular narrative in English departments) wasn’t the question. The question was whether I could summon the courage to move on to something new, or at least to provoke my bosses into firing me.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs I paced between my cubicle and the adjoining lounge, a streak of motion caught my eye, and I went to the window. There used to be an auto parts shop directly across the street from the English department. But now a new product was on display in the building’s big showcase windows. There were two young men in a chain-link cage. They were dancing, kicking, punching, tackling, falling, and rising to dance some more. There was a new sign on the building: MARK SHRADER’S ACADEMY OF MIXED MARTIAL ARTS. I stood at the window for a long time, peeping at the fighters through the curtains, envying their youthful strength and bravery—the way they were so alive in their octagon while I was rotting in my cube.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI began to fantasize. I saw myself walking across the street to join them. The thought of my peace-loving colleagues glancing up from their poetry volumes to see me warring in the cage filled me with perverse delight. It would be such a scandal. \u003ci\u003eThat’s how I’ll do it\u003c\/i\u003e, I thought with a smile. \u003ci\u003eThat’s how I’ll get myself fired\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOver the next months, I began to plan a book about a cultured English professor—a lifelong specialist in the art of flight, not fight—learning the combat sport of mixed martial arts (MMA). The book would be part history of violence, part nonfiction \u003ci\u003eFight Club\u003c\/i\u003e, and part tour of the sciences of sports and bloodlust. It would be about the struggles—sad and silly and anachronistic though they may seem—that men endure to be men. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne day, not long after noticing the cage fighting studio across the street from my office, I met my family for lunch. When I ordered a salad, my wife gave me a skeptical look. “Salad?” she asked. “Are you okay?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m so fat. Gotta get in shape.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen she asked why, I told her—a little shamefacedly—my whole dumb plan for becoming a cage fighter. “Why would you do that?” she asked. I fumbled for an honest answer. “You’ll be killed,” she pointed out. “You have no skills.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLearning that my wife had no respect for my skills hurt, but it hurt worse to see how casually she learned to treat my danger. Much later, when I was having trouble getting a fight here in Pennsylvania (the state commission does not make it easy for older fighters), she recommended that I fight in Las Vegas, where her brother lives. “Anthony knows a lot of fighters,” she said. “I bet he could help get you a fight.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe very idea made me clammy. “Vegas is the fight Mecca of the whole universe,” I explained to her. “I’m not exaggerating. Those guys would end my life. They would send me home to you in buckets.” A big part of me wanted her to talk me out of my whole suicidal plan. I wanted her to seize my hands and tell me through her big, pretty, man-slaying tears that it was just too dangerous and that she couldn’t stand the thought of scars on my handsome face. But instead she stared off into space like a prisoner dreaming of freedom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Yeah,” she said, “you should definitely fight in Vegas.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut my wife’s question was a good one. Why did I \u003ci\u003ereally\u003c\/i\u003e want to do this? Was I having a midlife crisis? I didn’t think so. Did taking up MMA—a sport where the whole point is to violently incapacitate the other guy before he can violently incapacitate you—seem like fun? It didn’t. Did I actually think that the cage could free me from the cubicle? Yes, I was just desperate enough to hope that it could. But there was more to it than that. I wanted to fight because I was simply fascinated by fighting, and I wanted to learn about it—and write about it—from the inside. I wanted to fight because I’d always admired physical courage, and yet I’d never done a brave thing. I wanted to fight, I suppose, for one of the main reasons men have always fought: to discover if I was a coward.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo in January 2011 I finally made the short walk from the brick and leaf of my college to the grit and stink of the local fighting academy. Beneath the English Department’s windows, I began studying the fighting arts alongside students, soldiers, frackers, an actuary, a busboy, a rock singer, a tree trimmer, and the occasional young woman. And each night I carried home, along with my bruises and abrasions, powerful insights into why violence is so attractive—and so repulsive.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen I crossed the street to try to become a fighter, I never stopped being a professor. I never stopped noticing the basic questions that hang in the humid air of an MMA gym, and I never stopped trying to answer them. There were the biggies: Why do men fight? Why do so many people like to watch? And why, especially when it comes to violence, do men differ so greatly from women? And there were the questions that seemed small at first but ended up having large implications: Why do human beings spend (waste?) so much energy on sports? Are traditional martial arts such as karate and kung fu sheer hokum? Why do fighters try to stare each other down? And why do nonhuman primates do exactly the same thing?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen I first joined the gym, I expected to write a book about the rapid rise of cage fighting in America and what its massive popularity says about us—not just as a nation, but as a species. I thought MMA was bad for the athletes who did it and bad for society at large. I saw cage fighting as a metaphor for something darkly rotten at the human core. But my library research convinced me that MMA tells us nothing particularly interesting about our place or time; everywhere and always, people have loved to watch men fight. And my gym research—sparring, interviewing, and finally fighting myself—upended all my other preconceptions. In short, I set out to write about the darkness in men, but I ended up with a book about how men keep the darkness in check.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne big idea threads through all the chapters to come: While always anchored in MMA, \u003ci\u003eThe Professor in the Cage\u003c\/i\u003e is about the duels of men, broadly defined. Most historians trace the origins of the duel back to Europe in the 1500s. But far from being a Western invention, the duel is not even a \u003ci\u003ehuman \u003c\/i\u003einvention. Animals have their fights, too, and biologists refer to them tellingly as duels, sports, tournaments, or, most commonly, ritual combat. \u003ci\u003eRitual combat\u003c\/i\u003e—think of elephant seals clashing in the surf, or deer locking antlers—establishes dibs on all good things through restrained contests that diminish risk. The same is true of human contests, only more so. Humans, especially men, are masters of what I call the monkey dance—a dizzying variety of ritualized, rule-bound competitions. These events range from elaborate and deadly duels (pistols at dawn), to combat sports such as MMA or football, to the play fights of boys, to duels of pure language (rap battles, everyday pissing contests). They often seem ridiculous and sometimes end in tragedy. But they serve a vital function: they help men work out conflicts and thrash out hierarchies while minimizing carnage and social chaos. Without the restraining codes of the monkey dance, the world would be a much bleaker and more violent place.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eONE\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTHE RIDDLE OF THE DUEL\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe trouble with this country is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJohn Berryman\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe first cage fight in the history of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) occurred on November 12, 1993, pitting karate against sumo. There were no rules. There were no rounds. There were no weight classes. There were no gloves. There was no mercy. There was also no ring.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe UFC’s creators wanted the fighting space to drive home the whole point of the sport—which was that it \u003ci\u003ewasn’t\u003c\/i\u003e a sport. It was, in the words of its first announcer, Rich “G-Man” Goins, “combat in its most basic equation: Survival or destruction.” The creators considered locking the fighters in an electrified cage surrounded by a moat full of famished alligators, but they decided that was a bit much. Instead, the men would fight in a chain-link octagonal cage, which one announcer likened to the “pits” used in dogfighting. Once the fighters entered the cage, officials would bolt the door behind them, and the only way out would be through the other man. To quote the G-Man again: “The rules are simple—two men enter, one man leaves.” (It’s probably no coincidence that in Mel Gibson’s 1985 dystopian fantasy \u003ci\u003eMad Max Beyond Thunderdome,\u003c\/i\u003e the crowd chants “Two men enter; one man leaves” as gladiators fight inside a steel cage.)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe first fighter to step into the UFC cage was a mountainous Hawaiian sumo wrestler named Teila Tuli. He walked through the crowd wearing traditional island garb resembling a checkered muumuu, paired with a ski hat. He handed his hat and gown to his cornermen, then danced around the cage in his Hawaiian skirt, looking loose and confident. Teila Tuli was six feet two, sleekly bald, and massively obese. At more than four hundred pounds, he was fat in all the ordinary places—thick in the hams, belly, and jowls. But at some point he maxed out the fat-storage capacity of the ordinary places, and so his body started laying in cellulite bags wherever it could. Tuli had several bags pinned between his chest and upper arms, as well as a blubbery roll fitted like a pillow to the back of his neck. Even so, he was a magnificent animal, with huge muscles twitching beneath the fat. Despite the bulk, he moved as nimbly as a dancer and dropped effortlessly into deep stretches. Teila Tuli was a formidable athlete.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTuli’s opponent was a Dutch karate black belt named Gerard Gordeau, and compared with the Hawaiian he wasn’t much to look at. Gordeau was tall and skinny, with a buzz cut and scraggly chest hair. With his thin arms and almost defiantly unripped torso, he didn’t look like an athlete at all. Instead, he looked exactly like what he was: a guy who made his living as a school janitor, while competing in karate tournaments on the side. Gordeau walked to the cage wearing karate pants and a white towel draped over his shoulders. Though he was only moments away from fighting an athlete who was double his size, he looked about as troubled as a guy walking from the shower to his bedroom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen Gordeau entered the cage, Tuli’s mask of serene confidence—of manly insouciance—began to slip. Tuli moved nervously in his corner, sucking down huge lungfuls of air and spewing them out again. As the camera panned to Gordeau’s corner, it was clear why. Gordeau didn’t look like a man who was about to be sacrificed to a giant. He just stood there, flat-footed, slump-shouldered, and breathing normally through his nose, as if he were running a pulse of about forty. And he watched Tuli not with the “mean mug” of a fighter trying to intimidate, but with a serial killer’s blank stare. His look said to Tuli, not unkindly, \u003ci\u003eThis is nothing to me. \u003c\/i\u003eYou\u003ci\u003e are nothing to me.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe bell rang, and after a few seconds of circling and feinting Tuli tipped himself toward Gordeau and let gravity take over. Gordeau pivoted like a matador and stung Tuli with a hard punch as he charged by. Unbalanced, Tuli crashed face-first into the bottom of the fence. As the huge man struggled to rise, Gordeau stepped in, wound up, and soccer-kicked Tuli, full power, in the mouth. The crack of the blow was so terrible, the spray of blood and slobber so dramatic, that the referee jumped in to stop the fight. But not before Gordeau crouched down for a haymaker that spun Tuli around and left him sagging against the fence. The fight lasted twenty seconds. Tuli hauled himself upright and shuffled out of the cage, complaining through the gory hole of his mouth that he wanted to fight on. Gordeau left the cage with a fractured right fist and one of Tuli’s front teeth broken off inside his foot. Gordeau had punted Tuli’s other front tooth straight through the chain-link cage, past the announcers’ heads, and into the crowd.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e • • • \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI DIDN’T SEE Gordeau fight Tuli live. I saw the fight a few years later at a party when a friend cracked open a Blockbuster video case and jammed a tape into a VCR. He said, “Check this out. You guys won’t believe it.” I didn’t believe it. Watching Gordeau punt Tuli’s face, then watching replays of him punting it again and again, from multiple super-slo-mo angles, made me sick to my stomach. And listening as my friends yelped and giggled through the onslaught—watching as men in the Denver crowd screamed through conniptions of bloodlust—sickened me even more. I asked myself, \u003ci\u003eWhat kind of savage would want to watch this?\u003c\/i\u003e And then the next pair of fighters strode into the cage, and I found that I couldn’t look away.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat night we gorged ourselves on raw violence. When it ended, with a skinny Brazilian choking Gordeau into submission in the final fight, I staggered home feeling exactly like I’d felt after seeing my first porno as a teenager. The porn tape, like the UFC tape, was a fleshy catastrophe that raised serious ethical issues. After both experiences I lay awake trying to erase the images of swollen flesh and spattering fluids strobing in my mind. And in both cases I awoke still feeling disgusted and disturbed—but also wanting to see more. And soon. In the ensuing months I frequently visited the video store, where I guiltily lurked through the section that included UFC tapes, professional wrestling tapes, and tapes from an infamous video series called\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eFaces of Death.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI told myself that unlike the blood-drunk men raving in the UFC crowd, I had a good reason for watching. In my early twenties I was a devoted, if basically inept, karate student, and the UFC was an education about what worked in a real fight and what absolutely didn’t. I watched the tapes in a scholarly spirit, rewinding over and over to study particularly cool moves—etching them in my mind so I could drill them with my karate friends. But I didn’t try too hard to fool myself. I watched the tapes to learn, but also because I was a lot like those UFC fans cheering for carnage—I just had the good taste not to show it. I watched because the fights excited me. I watched because fighting was real, high-stakes drama with no acting and no artifice. I watched because I envied the manly excellence and courage of the fighters. I watched because—God help the human race—there’s nothing harder \u003ci\u003enot\u003c\/i\u003e to watch than two men fighting.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd I watched because I was deeply confused. As I took in the footage of Gordeau shattering Tuli’s teeth, the questions of this book were already forming in my mind. Why do men fight? And why are seemingly decent people drawn to watch? I didn’t know it at the time, but that night I began a research project that would last almost twenty years and culminate in this book.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEN GARDE!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo begin, I have to take you back more than two hundred years to tell the story of a different fight—a story you only think you know.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBefore dawn on November 23, 1801, Hamilton, his second, and his surgeon eased aboard a wobbly dinghy, and a ferryman rowed them away from Manhattan (and its laws against dueling) to the Jersey side of the Hudson River. Hamilton crunched through the forest into a clearing, where his adversary was already busy with his own second, clearing away branches and pacing off the agreed distance—ten paces, or around thirty feet. Hamilton stood off to one side, eyeing his opponent through the slanting dawn light, feeling no hatred toward him. He was thinking, \u003ci\u003eHow strange and stupid this is.\u003c\/i\u003e He was thinking, \u003ci\u003eDon’t let your hands shake\u003c\/i\u003e. He could hear the seconds droning through their last, pro forma attempts at reconciliation. Although both Hamilton and his opponent had much to be sorry for, neither could say so for fear of appearing cowardly.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe two men would fight with a pair of dueling pistols that belonged to Hamilton’s uncle. The pistols were handcrafted, gorgeously filigreed objects of art and death. With dark walnut stocks and gleaming barrels, they were about the size of sawed-off shotguns, and with their .54-caliber balls they could open a man about as wide. The seconds loaded the weapons, each using a ramrod to pack in powder, ball, and wadding, then handed them to the duelists by the barrels. Hamilton took his place and tried to avoid his adversary’s gaze. It was his first duel, and he could not believe how close together they were standing. They could almost duel by spitting.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe don’t know for sure, but the men may have arranged themselves in classic dueling stances that were designed to shrink the profile and shield the vital organs. If so, they would have positioned themselves sideways to each other, sucking in their bellies and tucking their chins to hide their necks. They would have turned their hips in hopes of taking a low shot in the buttock and not the groin. Thus contorted, they would have stood with their pistols dangling, awaiting the command to fire. When the command came, they would not have fired with their arms extended to full length. Instead, they would have fired with their right elbows cramped tight to their ribs so their pistols and arms could shield their torsos.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Present!” said one of the seconds, commanding the duelists to raise their weapons and fire. But neither man did. They just stared at each other across the stillness of the clearing, their breath clouding the morning air. They stared at each other for a long time, perhaps hoping that someone might still call this madness off and they could embrace and part as friends. After a full minute had passed, Hamilton raised his weapon. The clearing erupted with two near-simultaneous explosions. The two lead balls passed each other in flight, one sizzling wide into the trees, and the other steering around Hamilton’s gun arm to bite into the soft flesh beneath his ribs. The ball punched a fist-size hole through his innards before exiting through his left side and lodging in his opposite arm. Hamilton fell face-first to the earth. Once back in Manhattan, he lay in bed for more than twenty-four hours, writhing in agony and trying to die bravely.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd now we come to the part of the story you probably don’t know. When Hamilton’s father received news of the catastrophe, he raced to his son’s bedside. The father—Alexander Hamilton, the man whose handsome face still graces the ten-dollar bill—climbed carefully into bed with his doomed son Philip and gave vent to his grief. One of Philip’s friends was looking on and said that Alexander’s sorrow “beggared all description.” The nineteen-year-old Philip was Alexander’s eldest and favorite child, the one he’d doted on as a baby and later called “the brightest, as well as the ablest, hope of my family.” When Philip was buried, Alexander had trouble walking to the graveside; as one observer wrote, he had to be half carried to “the grave of his hopes.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd yet, less than three years later, still mourning Philip and knowing he was in the wrong, Alexander had himself rowed away from Manhattan to the Jersey banks of the Hudson, directly across the river from Forty-second Street. There, at Weehawken, on a lovely summer morning, he was greeted by the vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr. When the two men fired, Hamilton fell, perhaps cut down by the very same pistol that had killed Philip. (Hamilton and Burr certainly used the same \u003ci\u003eset\u003c\/i\u003e of pistols.) Gut shot like his son, Hamilton’s death throes lasted thirty-eight hours. His agony was, according to his surgeon, “almost intolerable” and not much deadened by opium.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePhilip Hamilton was killed by one of his father’s many political adversaries, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer named George Eacker. One night at the theater, young Philip, possibly drunk, stormed Eacker’s private box with a friend and abused the lawyer for criticizing his father in a speech. Afterward Philip wouldn’t apologize for his insults. He was too enraged over the way Eacker had insulted him in reply, calling him a “damned rascal.” These were, quite literally, fighting words. A man called someone a rascal—or a puppy, a jackanapes, a coxcomb, or a liar—only if he specifically wished to provoke a duel.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAaron Burr called out Alexander Hamilton for more serious affronts. Hamilton was outwardly friendly to Burr when they met on the street or socialized in each other’s Wall Street homes. In later years Burr would sometimes speak of “my friend Hamilton—whom I shot.” But Hamilton deeply distrusted Burr’s politics and character and said that he felt “a religious duty to oppose his career.” Rather than confront Burr openly, however, Hamilton opted, in the parlance of the day, to slit Burr’s throat with whispers. Hamilton may have had a hand in newspaper accounts that accused Burr of, among other depravities, treason, being named as the best customer of no fewer than twenty whores, and twirling buxom girls at a “nigger ball.” Burr believed that Hamilton was smearing him, and his suspicions were confirmed when Hamilton was quoted in a newspaper calling Burr a “profligate” and a “voluptuary in the extreme,” with implications that he had said far worse.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn the eve of his duel, Hamilton tried to put his affairs in order. He updated his will and wrote a letter to his wife, Elizabeth, whom he addressed as “best of wives, best of women.” The letter explained that he was fighting Burr with the greatest reluctance and only after exhausting all other options. This was true. Burr and Hamilton had traded endless letters back and forth through their seconds, with Hamilton working lawyerly dodges and splitting verbal hairs, trying to weasel out of the mess on a technicality. He was reluctant to fight because he didn’t hate Burr and he felt that dueling was radically at odds with good Christian behavior. Moreover, Hamilton knew that if he died, his family would struggle to pay their debts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo why, when they had so much to live for, did the Hamiltons, father and son, recklessly risk their lives over such paltry stuff? Alexander Hamilton was a co-author of \u003ci\u003eThe Federalist Papers \u003c\/i\u003eand the architect of the American financial system. Couldn’t he do the cost-benefit math?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo us moderns the killing of a former Treasury secretary by a sitting vice president seems fantastically exotic. (Remember the uproar in 2006 when Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally wounded a friend in a quail-hunting accident? Well, imagine the hullabaloo if Cheney had killed Clinton’s former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin in a shoot-out on the Virginia side of the Potomac, and had then gone on the lam.) But a little more than two centuries ago, there was nothing particularly strange about the Burr-Hamilton affair—not the high social and political status of the combatants, nor the way that the effect (a deadly gunfight) seemed so out of proportion to the cause (gossip). Throughout the five-hundred-year history of Euro-American dueling culture, aristocratic men were generally prepared to kill each other at the drop of a hat. In sharp contrast to modern times, in those days it was educated, rich, and powerful men—blue bloods, newspaper owners, congressmen, future presidents, British prime ministers—who were most likely to shoot or stab each other over disses.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt’s easy to see why men fight over precious and necessary things such as food, wealth,\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304745226469,"sku":"NP9780143108054","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780143108054.jpg?v=1767741091","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-professor-in-the-cage-isbn-9780143108054","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}