Chautauqua

Chautauqua. If you don't know what that is, read further ... the people who know are already hooked.

The July 7th Wall Street Journal brought back an idea I hadn't thought about in years. The article entitled "Before Radio, Citizenry Got Culture, Politics From Traveling Troupes" discusses the traveling Chautauquas of the early 20th century.

What was a Chautauqua? It was a traveling Carnival of the Vanities/Capitalists/Liberated. It was an intellectual tent show that traveled (mainly) the midwest.

Before radio, cars and movies put an end to chautauquas, they had touched some 20 million Americans. Their greatest contribution, wrote Victoria and Robert Case in their 1948 book, "We Called It Culture," was "awakening rural America to a consciousness of the part they were both entitled and expected to play in the affairs of the nation and the world."

For about a week, in morning, afternoon and evening sessions, the traveling lecturers, singers and players offered a heady combination of inspiration, pedantry, impersonation and debate. Jacob Riis lectured about slums. Frederick Cook and Robert Peary presented their competing North Pole claims. Robert LaFollette, the impassioned senator from Wisconsin, preached progressivism and denounced the Washington fat cats, particularly Joseph "Tsar" Cannon, then speaker of the House of Representatives.

Every great political and social issue of the day was debated on chautauqua platforms -- suffrage, temperance, prisons, poverty, taxes, elections and wars.

The whole idea was based on the original Chautauqua Institution, a still thriving intellectual resort in New York.

I write about this because I feel like I grew up there. I didn't, but it is the most influential place in my upbringing. My parents had the scheme in 1970 of buying a rental property there. I spent 4 months of weekends a year there, from 1970 to 1983, goofing off while my parents worked on the property. I also got to spend a couple of weeks there in the summer season each year from 1973 to 1980. If you get a warm fuzzy feeling over the scene in Field of Dreams where the ball player asks "Is this heaven?", and Kevin Costner replies laconically "No, this is Iowa", then you have some idea of how I feel about Chautauqua. My Dad was a little bit of an amateur historian, and boy did I hear about those traveling Chautauqua's while on our porch at the original.