Introduction to Lincoln-Douglas Debate

Introduction to Lincoln-Douglas Debate John R. Prager Copyright © 1993, 2007 John R. Prager CONTENTS 1 Lincoln-Douglas Debate Format 1 2 Values 5 3 Value Hierarchies 12 4 Fundamental Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate 20 5 The Affirmative Constructive Speech 29 6 The Negative Constructive Speech 36 7 The Rebuttal Speeches 50 8 Cross-Examination and Flowcharting Skills 55 9 Evidence and Research Skills 61 10 From Policy Debate to Lincoln-Douglas 72 11 Fallacies of Reasoning 76 12 A Sample Lincoln-Douglas Debate 86 Index 97 INTRODUCTION This text developed in response to the needs of my own students during my tenure as a coach of a small school in Michigan. At the time, Michigan did not have a statewide program of competition in Lincoln-Douglas, but a handful of invitational tournaments were experimenting with the form. There were no good options for textbooks on the subject at the high school level, and so my teaching notes gradually evolved to become this text. As of 2007, which this book was last revised, Michigan continues its exclusive commitment to policy debate at the high school level. The experiments with Lincoln-Douglas at tournaments have largely stopped. Yet I remain convinced that there is great worth for the high school student in learning about value debate, both for its own sake and for spillover benefits on policy and legislative debating. For this reason, I have made this text available online as an introduction to the subject for students and coaches. If you are approaching Lincoln-Douglas after experience with policy debate, you may wish to begin reading with Chapter 10, which has been written to ease the transition between the two forms of debate. After reading that chapter, you can turn to the earlier chapters in the book. It is my duty to remind all readers that this textbook is copyrighted material, despite its availability online. Reproduction of the text is forbidden, other than brief excerpts under the fair-use doctrine. Please contact the author if you are interested in a license to make copies of this text for classroom use. — John R. Prager 1 Chapter 1 LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATE FORMAT The Evolution of Value Debate In 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas began a series of seven public debates before the citizens of Illinois. Touring by train from city to city, each attempted to clarify his stand on the issues of the day. In fact, the debates tended to center around a single issue: whether the federal government properly had the authority to forbid slavery in new states joining the Union. The debates were the heart of the campaign strategy to win a position in the U.S. Senate for the candidates. It is worthwhile for us to take a look back at the format of those early debates. Each presentation began with one candidate speaking for an hour. His opponent then had 90 minutes to respond to the initial speech and present his own side. Finally, the first speaker had 30 minutes to deliver a rejoinder and summation. To make the contests more equitable, Lincoln and Douglas alternated in the first speaking position. A series of three-hour public addresses strikes the modern student as outrageous. After all, sometimes it’s hard to stay awake through a one-hour classroom lecture. But in the days before television, the Lincoln-Douglas debates created a nationwide stir. The speeches were published and reprinted in newspapers across the nation. Although Stephen Douglas was widely conceded to have outperformed Lincoln throughout the debates — and, in fact, Douglas was chosen Senator — the contests earned Lincoln a national reputation, and positioned him for his later presidential campaign. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, college policy debate was suffering a crisis. The practices of the National Debate Tournament (NDT) organization dismayed a number of coaches and judges. Specifically, complaints were lodged against the complex theory involved in policy debate; against the spreading and speed that was perceived to undermine effective communication skills; and against the practice of debaters being required to speak on both sides of the resolution, which supposedly promoted insincerity and sophistry instead of conviction. A search began for an alternative to policy debate — “value” debate, so-called because called for a philosophical approach, rather than a legalistic approach, to argumentation. The result was the creation of a new form of college debate — team-oriented value debate — sponsored under the authority of the Cross-Examination Debate Association (CEDA). While the CEDA program is not identical either to current high-school value debate (much less the initial Lincoln-Douglas debates of a century earlier), the idea that an alternative to policy debate could be viable would profoundly influence subsequent high school developments. Today, the college debate circuit is still in a state of transition. Both the CEDA and NDT programs survive, although CEDA no longer confines itself exclusively to value topics. Value topics thrive, however, in a number of other debate programs, using a variety of formats. In 1976, high schools throughout the United States began a series of Bicentennial Youth Debates to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This program comprised both the customary team-oriented policy debates and also “Lincoln-Douglas” debates: one-on-one competition focusing on philosophical issues rather than 2 government policy. This was the first nationwide instance of non-team value debate throughout America. The name “Lincoln-Douglas debate” was chosen to reflect the continuity of style from the original Senatorial contests to the present day. The success of the Bicentennial Youth Debate program inspired the National Forensic League — a nationwide high school honor program promoting speech — to add Lincoln-Douglas debating to its roster of sponsored activities. The 1980 NFL endorsement also encouraged a number of state speech organizations to incorporate Lincoln-Douglas debate into their programs. Since then, value debate has grown in popularity nationwide, even to the point of attracting more students than policy debate in some areas. However, the NFL adoption of Lincoln-Douglas has not been without controversy. Critics pointed out that, despite ten years of college history with value debating, there was no clear body of debate theory dealing with value resolutions. In fact, the initial rules adopted by the NFL didn’t seem to define what L-D was so much as what it wasn’t: it wasn’t policy debate, everyone was sure of that, but all distinctions became vague beyond that point. Besides specifying the time limits and number of debaters, the 1980 NFL document provided just four rules. Paraphrased, they were (1) that emphasis in the debate must be on abstract reasoning; (2) that evidence is less important than in policy debate, and should be applied much as in oratory and extemporaneous speaking contests; (3) that only major positions should be signposted; and (4) that decisions should be awarded based on a system of values. Clearly, L-D was to be construed as a form of value debate — but nothing beyond that point was clear at all. Since 1980, there has been a torrent of publications in learned journals searching for a consensus on value debate theory. In many cases, authors each advocated their own particular jargon while dismissing that of others. The coach, student, or judge searching through the literature is more likely to come away confused, rather than enlightened. Yet at the same time high school Lincoln-Douglas debating has flourished. Debaters haven’t necessarily waited for the theory to evolve; they just want to debate! The present text endorses this pragmatic approach. The confusion in L-D theory is akin to the state that policy debate was in by the 1960s. It remains to be seen what paradigm(s) will emerge from the rubble. In the meantime, this textbook suggests a conservative approach that is acceptable to most judges and to some debate theorists. Other possible approaches to Lincoln-Douglas may emerge in the course of the next decade, but the pattern included here is likely to be among them. Lincoln-Douglas Format Imagine that we have been assigned the task to devise a format for Lincoln- Douglas debates: that is, to set the time limits and patterns for speeches. How would we begin? After all, policy debate experimented with a variety of formats before settling on the now-standard four-person cross-examination contest in the mid-1960s. Let’s begin by retaining the number of debaters from the original Stephen Douglas- Abraham Lincoln debates: two debaters, one Affirmative, one Negative. Since a four-person debate takes involves an hour of assigned speaking time, we’ll be striving to set time limits for speeches of about half that length. This means that one L-D debate will require about as much time investment for each speaker as policy debate. Fifteen minutes or so of speaking time is still much more than other speech contests demand of their participants — we don’t want to burden the contestants with more. As an added bonus, a complete Lincoln-Douglas debate will easily fit 3 into most school class periods, even allowing for a critique; few schools now have class periods long enough to accommodate a policy debate round. There are five principles from our policy debate heritage that we’ll wish to retain for Lincoln-Douglas debating. First, we’ll keep cross-examination periods, in which the speaker who just completed a constructive speaker is interrogated by his or her opponent. These periods allow for direct investigation of the opponent’s arguments. Probing for weaknesses through direct questioning would seem critical in this form of debate, given the brevity of the contest.

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