Rock Paper Scissors

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Ella Gardner
Question

Is the Rochambeau game (rock-paper-scissors) named after the French army general who served during the American Revolution?

Answer

Maybe, but in a roundabout way.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that this question is apparently not something that has elicited a lot of serious historical research up to now ("Where do I find historical evidence for a simple game played by children that requires no equipment?" and "Will I hurt my chances for tenure if I spend much time researching such a seemingly trivial subject?"), so I will have to go out on a limb here with my own theory, which is based only on circumstantial evidence. Because this is just my theory, I am going to have to explain how I arrived at it.

Clearing Out the Undergrowth of Misinformation

First, a confession: Although I began playing rock-paper-scissors when I was a child, I had never heard it called "Rochambeau" until you sent in your question. Asking around, however, I discovered that some of my colleagues, raised in various places around the country, had vaguely heard of "Rochambeau," but with some of them I was not able to figure out if they had definitely called the game of rock-paper-scissors "Rochambeau" when they were younger, or whether they had merely watched a certain South Park episode in which Eric Cartman challenged another child to play "Rochambeau," but which he explained as consisting in a kind of duel carried out by kicking each other (Google "Rochambeau" and "South Park" to find a link to the clip, but I hereby give you a "language warning" for this).

Nevertheless, more Googling makes it clear that "Rochambeau," used for rock-paper-scissors, has an older and wider provenance. Mathematicians and evolutionary biologists, for example, who have recently become interested in "multivariant" selection systems over the past 20 years or so, have written about rock-paper-scissors and have typically cited the game as "rock-paper-scissors" and then added "Rochambeau" or "Roshambo" in parentheses after it. So that carries the word back at least a couple of decades.

As an illustration of the severe limits on using Wikipedia for research, the English-language Wikipedia entry on rock-paper-scissors (or rock-scissors-paper, etc.) says that the game is called "Rochambeau" in French. But the French-language Wikipedia entry on the game lists the Francophone countries' names for it as: pierre-feuille-ciseaux, papier-caillou-ciseaux, roche-papier-ciseaux, pierre-papier-ciseaux, and feuille-caillou-ciseaux. It then says that the game is called "Rochambeau" in the United States. I wondered whether "Rochambeau" might be an English-language corruption of a French triplet beginning with "roche" (rock), but I have nothing else to offer in this speculative vein, so this is not part of my theory.

A Historical Connection with Count Rochambeau?

Next up was to consider the alleged connection with the Comte de Rochambeau, the French general who was a hero of the American Revolution.

Over the past decade, rock-paper-scissors has become a quasi-formally organized sport with international tournaments. Two American brothers, Douglas and Graham Walker, organized the World RPS Society, with tournaments, a website, t-shirts, and posters, and they have also published a light-hearted guide to playing "professional" rock-paper-scissors, which includes a brief and half-serious history of the game. Their Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide (2004) offers one theory about how the game became "synonymous with" the Comte de Rochambeau:

"It is widely believed that an ill-advised throw of Scissors (or Ciseaux) resulted in his being uprooted from his ancestral home to become the marshal of the French forces during the American Revolution. His arrival is widely credited with the introduction of RPS to the United States."

But this is all unlikely. Rochambeau (and Lafayette and other French military officers) were quite eager to come to America to fight with the Americans, and had to resist others' efforts to keep them in France so that their military experience would not be missed there.

Another mention of the supposed historical connection with Rochambeau is in physicist Len Fisher's Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life (2008):

"George Washington is reputed to have played it with Cornwallis and the Comte de Rochambeau to decide who would be the last to leave Cornwallis's tent after the signing of the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. (The story goes that Rochambeau won, which is why the game is still called Ro-Sham-Bo in some quarters.)"

But Washington, Rochambeau, and Cornwallis did not negotiate surrender terms together in a tent; nor did they even meet together on that occasion. Cornwallis sent Washington a message under a flag of truce, proposing a cessation of hostilities so that officers appointed by each side could meet and "settle terms of the posts at York and Gloucester." After speaking with his own staff and with Rochambeau and his officers, Washington responded in writing that he wished to see Cornwallis' proposed terms of surrender before he could agree to the talks. Cornwallis sent back another written message to Washington, listing his terms. Washington then decided that he could not accept the terms as written, but that they were enough to begin negotiations, so he agreed to the ceasefire and to send representatives to the Moore house on the York River behind the Americans' lines, where Cornwallis had proposed the meeting take place.

The officers who met for negotiations the following day included Lieutenant-Colonel John Laurens, a native South Carolinian, who had previously been Washington's aide-de-camp, and (for Rochambeau) Colonels Louis Marie Antoine vicomte de Noailles (Lafayette's brother-in-law), and Guillaume Jacques Constant Liberge de Granchain. They met with British Lieutenant-Colonel Duridas and Major Ross, one of whom was Cornwallis' aide-de-camp. Negotiations lasted eight hours that day. They were extremely detailed about terms, including even the requirement for the British troops to march out with their colors masked and with their fifers not playing any British or German tunes. A final agreement was reached only during the second session, the following day, on October 19, when the same negotiators returned, having consulted with their superiors. They then brought back the Articles of Capitulation for their commanders to study and to sign "in the trenches." Cornwallis signed for the British side. Generals Washington and Rochambeau, and Admiral de Grasse, gathered elsewhere, signed for the opposing side.

That afternoon, the British forces marched out from where they had been besieged. Cornwallis was not among them. He pleaded illness, and left the formal surrender to Brigadier General Charles O'Hara, who rode up to the allied officers and asked which one was Rochambeau. He was immediately told to surrender to Washington, but when he stopped in front of Washington and offered him Cornwallis' sword, Washington refused, for reasons of military protocol, to receive a sword from the opposing side's subordinate commander. Washington directed him to surrender the sword to his second in command, General Benjamin Lincoln, which he did, and turned and rode away.

None of the details of the surrender or the ceremony itself seem like they would have been left to a game of chance.

I conclude, therefore, that the stories that try to link the game with Rochambeau himself, are likely recent and apocryphal, made up in an ad hoc fashion to give flesh to why the game was called "Rochambeau."

The Odd Lack of Written Evidence

Now we get to the nub of this matter: I did a rather tedious search in online databases of books, periodicals, and newspapers published in America from the 17th- through 19th-century and found absolutely no mention of "Rochambeau" used as the name of a game, or, for that matter, of any mention of Rochambeau playing rock-paper-scissors, or even any mention of the game of rock-paper-scissors itself being played in America at all until well into the 20th century. I certainly do not believe that my search has been exhaustive (many old newspapers are not online, for example), and there was plenty that was written that was never published, but if the game was being played by children of European descent "from time immemorial," it seems odd (but not conclusive) that I have been able to find no one mentioning it in anything published in America for the first several centuries of European presence here, even though the game, by its very nature, is not something on which writers would necessarily have thought to expend much ink, if they deigned to notice it at all.

The absence of any mention of the game does not mean, by the way, that American children did not have hand games for deciding winners or selecting alternatives—"Odds and evens," for example, has a long history in Anglo-American culture (James Boswell mentions it in his Life of Samuel Johnson).

In addition, there is evidence (by way of a conspicuous absence of another order) of American ignorance of the game as late as the turn of the 20th century: Stewart Culin, Director of the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, published Korean Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan in 1895. In it, he described various East Asian hand games, among which was the Japanese game of Janken (or Jankenpon). This was precisely what became our game of rock-paper-scissors, and is most likely its ultimate source, either via Europe or across the Pacific (perhaps through Japanese immigrants to the West Coast). Culin, however, grinds right through his description of it, placing it among his descriptions of the other East Asian hand games to which it is closely related, without ever talking about any game in his own culture, that is, without mentioning anything like, "this is identical to our game of rock-paper-scissors." This too suggests that in fact the game had not yet become a part of American culture by that time.

The Game Appears and Becomes Popular

The first homegrown mention of the game rock-paper-scissors I found is in a compilation of children’s games, Handbook for Recreation Leaders, put together by Ella Gardner, the Government's "play expert" and "recreation specialist" with the Children's Bureau in Washington and first published by the Government Printing Office in 1935. In the 1930s, the Children's Bureau helped organize or participated in many national and international gatherings of child care specialists. Gardner herself was a kind of traveling outreach specialist on the subject of recreation activities.

In the Handbook, the game of rock-paper-scissors is called, precisely, "Rochambeau." Gardner appears to have been fond of team games, so to adapt rock-paper-scissors, her Handbook has the players of each of two teams decide among themselves whether their team will present rock, paper, or scissors. Then, with the two teams facing each other, the captains of each team raise their fisted arms and bring them down in partial steps, each at the same time, saying "Ro," then "cham," and then, on "beau," revealing their sign. The Handbook presents the game along with another, called "Fox, Hunter, Gun," in which foxes defeat hunters, hunters defeat guns, and guns defeat foxes. The signals of that game included simultaneous cries and arm gestures that impersonate the characters.

Soon after the government made the book available to educators, recreation planners, community groups, clubs, and parents around the country, more descriptions of the game began to appear in books, magazines, and newspapers. Bernard Sterling Mason's Social Games for Recreation, for example, published the following year, describes "rock scissors paper." And letters to the children's sections of domestic newspapers began explaining and recommending the game in the late 1930s.

There was an upsurge in the number of mentions of the game after World War II. It was initiated with articles in the Army's Stars and Stripes newspaper, written by army reporters stationed in Japan during the U.S. occupation of the country. The reporters appear to have been unfamiliar with the game from their own childhoods, calling it a kind of "odds and evens." From about that time, the game began being mentioned regularly in books, magazines, and newspapers. Clearly, by then it had become embedded in American culture. Judging by the "documentary" evidence, then, it looks like the game found its way to popularity in America through the combined efforts of Ella Gardner of the Children's Bureau and, later, G.I.s returning from Japan.

My Little Pet Theory

The author of the Children's Bureau handbook, Ella Gardner, was a Washington, D.C. native. The Children's Bureau had been in the Department of Labor, but with the Bureau's large expansion under the New Deal, and especially the Social Security Act of 1935, would soon end up with the Social Security Administration (and later with HEW and its successor, HHS).

At the time the book was published, the Children's Bureau was in the Widner building in Washington, D.C., on Connecticut Avenue. But the government was in the midst of a huge expansion, and was buying and leasing buildings all over downtown, and moving agencies from one place to another. The new Social Security Administration would quickly be moved into an apartment building that had been commandeered by the Government about a block away from the Children's Bureau. This building was the Rochambeau Apartments, at the corner of 17th and K Streets. The building had that name because it faced Lafayette Square, which has a large bronze statue of the Comte de Rochambeau.

The Rochambeau statue had been erected in 1902 and, in 1931, had been the focus of a large celebration of the sesquicentennial of the victory at Yorktown. If the Children's Bureau staff were looking for a ready place to try out games with a group of children, Lafayette Square would have been ideal. And if they were looking for a three-syllable word to hang on the game of rock-paper-scissors, "Rochambeau" would certainly have been near at hand.

But why bother with making up a new name for the game? Well, it was a Japanese game and English-speaking children might have been leery of a name as unfamiliar as "Jankenpon." Diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States were growing quite cool by the mid-1930s, so perhaps the Children's Bureau reduced the "foreign" feeling of the name "Jankenpon" by attaching a foreign name to it that was nevertheless indubitably a "patriotic" one: "Rochambeau."

The upshot is that the name "Rochambeau" does appear to link the game to the French General, but it is likely his statue, not the gentleman himself, that is responsible for the link.

So that is my theory, and I am sticking to it. At least for now. It seems more reasonable than supposing Washington, Cornwallis, and Rochambeau were playing hand games together during the British surrender. However, my theory is based almost entirely on a long chain of guesses and circumstantial evidence. If or when someone runs across some early mention of "Rochambeau" applied to the game, the entire limb I have climbed out on will be sawed off. But for now, that is the best I can come up with.

For more information

Douglas and Graham Walker's World RPS Society
The Straight Dope ("What's the origin of 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'?" July 10, 2001).

Bibliography

John E. Ferling, Almost a Miracle: American Victory in the War of Independence, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. pps. 534-539.

Henry P. Johnston, The Yorktown Campaign and the Surrender of Cornwallis, 1781, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1881. pps. 152-158.

Douglas and Graham Walker, The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide. New York: Fireside, 2004.

Len Fisher, Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
Stewart Culin, Korean Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1895.

Ella Gardner, Handbook for Recreation Leaders. Washington, D.C.: Children's Bureau, Government Printing Office, 1935.

Bernard Sterling Mason, Social Games for Recreation. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1935. p. 70.
Iona and Peter Opie, Children's Games in Street and Playground. London: Oxford University Press, London, 1969.

Post-War U.S. Occupation Forces:
"Korean 'Boys' Town'," Stars and Stripes, July 22, 1952.
William B. Colton, "Three Bamboo," Stars and Stripes, September 21, 1954.
Sandy Colton, "Jan-Ken-Pon," Stars and Stripes, August 11, 1956.

On Ella Gardner:
"Need of Playground Instructors is Seen: Supervision as necessary as school program, says Miss Gardner," Washington Post, March 15, 1927.
"2,000 Will Attend Child Conference," Washington Post, August 17, 1930.
"Recreation Series to Open Tomorrow: Many agencies cooperate in work of annual play institute," Washington Post, March 13, 1932.
"Play Institute Set to Start on Tuesday to Run Six Weeks," Washington Post, April 7, 1935.
"Rochambeau's Tenants Gone; U.S. to Move In," Washington Post, December 1, 1935.
"Government Play Expert Starts Trip: Miss Gardner to aid three states plan recreation; will give instruction in communities lacking directors," Washington Post, July 8, 1937.
"U.S. Leaflet to Teach Small Towns to Play," Washington Post, October 18, 1937.
"Ella Gardner's Rites Scheduled Today at 1 O'Clock," Washington Post, April 1, 1942.

Images:
Rochambeau statue in Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C.

Photo of Ella Gardner, Washington Post, April 1, 1942.

Take Me Out To The Ball Game: 100 Years of Musical History

Description

This Electronic Field Trip takes a look at the song, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," written by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer a century ago. Today, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" is synonymous with a baseball game's seventh-inning stretch, but the song was originally written to be performed on home pianos and the vaudeville stage.

Broadcast from Brooklyn, NY, this presentation explores not only the history of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", but also the influence of various musical styles of the past 100 years from vaudeville and swing to rock and hip hop.

Unpublished, as the page no longer exists.

Waters House History Center [MD]

Description

The Waters House History Center contains Montgomery County, MD census records; genealogy texts; history publications; 350,000 photographs, largely from 1968 through 1999; an architectural collection; land surveys; newspapers; and Bibles. The oldest portions of the Waters House date to the 1790s.

The resource center offers research library access.

The American West

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Logo, American West, a Celebration of the Human Spirit
Annotation

Created by a Western history enthusiast and Swedish immigrant, this gateway provides more than 500 links to educational and commercial sites related to Western history. Topics include westward expansion, western trails, Native Americans, European immigration, women of the west, gold and silver mining, railroads, outlaws, cowboys, Roy Rogers, Buffalo Bill, and "anything of interest or of significance west of the Mississippi River." In addition, visitors can post their stories, reviews, and comments about Western history.

Created to celebrate the American West, this site lacks categories explicitly relevant to issues of conquest and colonization; however, its extensive collection of links is indispensable for students, teachers, and researchers.

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence: History & Social Studies

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Portrait, George Washington
Annotation

This megasite brings together resources for teaching U.S. and world history from the far corners of the web. Most of these websites boast large collections of primary sources from the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the National Archives and Records Administration, and prominent universities. There are more than 600 websites listed for U.S. history alone, divided by time period and topic: Business & Work, Ethnic Groups, Famous People, Government, Movements, States & Regions, Wars, and Other Social Studies. While most of these websites are either primary source archives (for example, History of the American West, 1860-1920) or virtual exhibits, many offer lesson plans and ready-made student activities, such as EDSITEment, created by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A good place to begin is the (Subject Map), which lists resources by sub-topic, including African Americans (67 resources), Women's History (37 resources), and Natural Disasters (16 resources). Each resource is accompanied by a brief annotation that facilitates quick browsing.

New Jersey Public Records and Archives

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Photo, "Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., aged 1 year," c. 1931
Annotation

For historians researching New Jersey, this site's main interest will be its "state archives." "Catalog" provides access to nearly 200 pre-established searches on the archive's manuscript series, genealogical holdings, business and corporate records, cultural resources, and maps. Topics include military conflicts, society and economics, transportation, public works agencies, and photographic collections, as well as state, county, municipal, and federal government records. The other major feature consists of eight image collections with themes that include New Jersey Civil War soldiers, Spanish-American War Infantry Officers, Spanish-American War Naval Officers, Gettysburg Monuments, and views of the Morris Canal. The archives site also includes a searchable index of New Jersey Supreme Court cases, a transcription of New Jersey's 1776 constitution, and a table summarizing the holdings of the state archives. This site is a useful aid for researching the history and culture of New Jersey.

The Making of Modern Michigan

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Photo, Man with war bond ticket. . . , 1943, The Making of Modern Michigan
Annotation

This archive affords access to the local history material and collections in more than 45 Michigan libraries, including photographs, family papers, oral histories, public reports, notices, and documents. More than 3,000 items are available, on a wide range of subjects that include architecture, automobiles, churches, cities and towns, commerce and business, factories and industry, families, farming, geography and landscapes, housing, schools, and sports and recreation. The time period of the material is primarily from the post-Civil War era to the early 20th century. The material can be browsed by subject or institution and a keyword search is also available. A useful site for researching the cultural history of Michigan and its localities.

Back to the Future . . .

Quiz Webform ID
22414
date_published
Teaser

In the year 1900, what did Americans think the next century would bring? Did they make the following predictions?

quiz_instructions

In addition to looking to the past to understand our society, we also look to the future. In 1900, newspapers and magazines printed predictions for the turn of the 21st century. Decide, true or false, whether each of the following was predicted in 1900.

Quiz Answer

1. [The American] will live 50 years instead of 35 as at present—for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare.

True. In the 20th century, transportation and sanitation advances led to the rise of developments around cities. Streetcars, trains, and, later, highways made it possible for workers to commute to urban centers for work and to travel outside of the city for their home life. Suburb development grew exponentially after World War II with the rapid spread of mass-produced housing such as Levittown.

2. Fleets of air-ships, hiding themselves with dense, smoky mists, thrown off by themselves as they move, will float over cities, fortifications, camps or fleets. They will surprise foes below by hurling upon them deadly thunderbolts. These aerial war-ships will necessitate bomb-proof forts, protected by great steel plates over their tops as well as at their sides.

True. Several aspects of this prediction came true, including the move to aircraft as a central defensive and offensive weapon. Later in the 20th century, the U.S. government spent significant resources on the research and development of a national missile defense system under the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), established in 1984.

3. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient although they will not hear the crowds cheer or the guns of a distant battle as they boom.

False. In its actual form, this prediction foresaw the ability to see "live" events across the globe and also predicted the ability to hear events as they happened: "The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move".

4. The owner of a [flying] machine, or even the man who did not own one, by patronizing the express lines, could live 50 miles away and yet do business in the city day by day, going by air line to his home each night.

False. Theodore Waters of the New York Herald actually predicted that workers could easily commute 500 miles to work each day, flying home each night, a further visualization of transportation innovation as well as of the relationship between work and home as the notion of suburbs emerged.

5. Coal will not be used for heating or cooking. It will be scarce, but not entirely exhausted. The earth's hard coal will last until the year 2050 or 2100; its soft-coal mines until 2200 or 2300. Meanwhile both kinds of coal will have become more and more expensive. Man will have found electricity manufactured by waterpower to be much cheaper.

True. Well into the 1800s, Americans met their needs by harvesting energy and materials from plants, animals, rivers, and wind. By the 1830s, though, large-scale coal extraction had begun in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and beyond. By the 1910s, more than 750,000 coal miners dug and blasted upwards of 550 million tons of coal a year. Fossil fuels changed daily life in America, from travel to shopping, daily life to leisure. America's industrial ascendancy, however, caused problems for humans and the environment and in 2009, the threat of diminishing supplies is a serious concern.

6. Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today. They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking. Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons. The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed.

True. In the early 20th century, new household technology was both accomplished and inspired by the tremendous increase in American industrial production. As in industry, mechanization and scientific management were part of a larger reorganization of work. And as in industry, efficient housekeeping was partially a response to labor unrest—both the "servant problem" and the growing disquiet of middle-class wives. A major proponent of the new housekeeping, Christine Frederick published books, articles, and pamphlets on scientific management in the home with a focus on greater efficiency, from cooking to washing dishes. This plan, in some ways predictive of the late 20th-century shift to pre-cooked meals in stores and restaurants, likely drew on this emerging ideology.

7. The living body will to all medical purposes be transparent. Not only will it be possible for a physician to actually see a living, throbbing heart inside the chest, but he will be able to magnify and photograph any part of it.

True. X-rays were first identified in the late 19th century, but were not widely used for medical research and treatment in 1900 when this prediction was written. Since 2005, X-rays were listed as a carcinogenic by the U.S. government. The author likely would not have envisioned the 21st-century field of endoscopy that allows medical professionals to see and photograph many parts of the body through a small tube.

For more information

Contemporary understandings, issues, and conflicts lay behind the predictions of the past, as they do behind today's.

Learn about one of the first planned suburban communities—Levittown, NY—at Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb, or try the website of the Levittown Historical Society and Museum.

For more on the development and strife in the coal industry as it grew, try Thomas G. Andrews's Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, from Harvard University Press. Though it focuses on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, it looks at coal as a coming-together point for industry, class, nature, and the human manufactured world; for more on the Massacre, try the Colorado Coal Field War Project, which provides an overview, photographs, lesson plans, and other materials on the Massacre and the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913 through 1914.

Read a 1912 article by Ladies Home Journal editor Christine Frederick on the efficient, scientific method for washing dishes or an excerpt from her 1913 guide The New Housekeeping, at History Matters. Cornell University's Home Economics Archive also provides a collection of books and journals on the reimagining of domestic life between 1850 and 1950.

And do you have any eager readers in your classes? The young-adult-level memoir Cheaper by the Dozen lets students (and casual readers) into life growing up with Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868-1924), advocate of scientific household management and motion study in the same years as Christine Frederick. Warm, humorous, and personal, the book, written by two of Gilbreth's children, memorializes a time period and a very unique family.

Sources
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