The Chautauqua Moment

##### " ‘Dancing Mothers’: The Chautauqua Movement in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture" by Russell L. Johnson, in American Studies International (June 2001), 2108 G St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20052.

Theodore Roosevelt called it "the most American thing in America." Born in the summer of 1874 at Lake Chautauqua in western New York, the chautauqua movement enjoyed a 50-year reign over American cultural life.

When they began a summer-training program at Lake Chautauqua for Sunday-school teachers, Protestant ministers John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller had no idea they would inspire "a vast national cultural movement," says Johnson, a professor of U.S. history at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. But within two years, similar assemblies for mass uplift "began springing up in small towns and cities across the nation." Organized and run by local committees, and often held in a large tent near a river or lake, the chautauquas would run for about a week. Mornings were typically given over to Bible study, and afternoons and evenings to a mixture of lectures, musical acts, debates, dramatic readings, birdcallers, and bell ringers.

Early in the 20th century, "circuit chautauquas" developed, as entrepreneurs put together traveling extravaganzas and required local committees to guarantee a certain level of ticket sales. During the early 1920s, Johnson says, "chautauquas brought their unique blend of education, inspiration, and entertainment" to as many as 10,000 municipalities a year. For "tired, isolated men and women," chautauquas had much appeal, said one acid critic later in the decade. "Even the twittering of a bird imitator gave relief from the silo, the cowshed, the cooking, and the greasy dishes of the depressing lives these people led. Even a lecturer with nothing much to say was a relief to husbands and wives who, for years, had even less to say to each other."

The chautauqua was not just a rural phenomenon, Johnson notes. It was "one of the first attempts to deliver a truly national culture to the masses—a culture linking rural and urban, East and West, North and South. Although the Midwest, and especially the state of Iowa, became the center of chautauqua activity, programs were held in all regions of the nation and in the largest cities," including New York and Chicago.

The early 1920s, Johnson notes, saw "the emergence of rival means of delivering a national culture to even the most isolated parts of the nation: radio and motion pictures." Only some 500 cities held chautauquas in 1928. By the 1950s, only one chautauqua was left—in Mediapolis, Iowa. It was no longer "the most American thing."