Chautauqua: the reasons for failure?

It's perhaps difficult for many to understand the importance of public lectures and sermons in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We tend to think of lectures as "take or leave" in our day and age--something we might go to or should go to or occasionally as something we can't miss because the person is so well-known for their PRINT persona and ideas. But imagine a public lecture as EDIFICATION AND ENTERTAINMENT, as something you would want to go to, something you would travel many miles for in an open buggy in the cold or searing heat so you could hear someone speak for two hours or sometimes more. Think of certain speakers as celebrities--well known for their platform personas, their exciting ideas, their manner of fiery speaking. As we've been reading this week, oratorical culture in the 19th c. that was being transformed in specific cultural, social, and economic ways.

Now think of Chautauqua--the lecture and circuit series founded "on the shores of New Yorks' Lake Chautauqua in 1873" (211). According to Frederick J. Antczak and Edith Siemers (referred to heretofore as A & S), authors of "The Divergence of Purpose and Practice on the Chautauqua: Keith Vawter's Self-Defense," the series in the summer "drew thousands. . . to be part of educational programs addressed particularly to teachers" (211). Rev. John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller, the founders of the series, wanted to start a series in which well-known speakers and thinkers from the east would come to speak and educate those who would soon be teaching or were teaching those in the "West"--the teachers. The program was thought of as "an early form of [an] extension program in education" (211), a precursor to the Summer Institutes for teachers that we have now.

Notables such as the philosopher William James, Thomas Edison. U.S. senators, and others would hold forth on a variety of topics of interest and public value. Religious leaders also addressed spiritual and moral issues (211). So engaged were some of the participants that they would go back to their home communities and try to establish a Chautauqua-like series, which sparked the circuit series that Vawter became involved in. The Chautauqua circuit system arose in response to that need, which I will address later in this posting.

Now why 1870? Why did that time period give rise to such a series? The explanation offered in the article is the assessment by Gould that this was a time period of social unrest and economic change, a time in which people saw "the arrogance of the railroads and the trusts, a prolonged and severe economic depression, political corruption in city, state, and federal government, a 'stolen" Presidential election (Hayes-Tilden), and a wave of bitter strikes" (Gould qtd in Antczak and Siemers 212). Sounds pretty contemporary to me! The implication was that series helped people sort through vital and pressing issues of the day such as the "eight-hour day, the conservation of natural resources, pure food and drug legislation, city planning," etc ((212). While A and S spend a few pages extolling the successes of Chautauqua, their focus is on the demise of the program. I have to admit as a reader that I didn't want to hear about the decline of the series. I wanted to hear about it in its hey-day, and I wanted to hear about its circulation and effects throughout the 19th/early 20th century communities that it touched. But this is not the story the authors wish to tell. The story to tell is about its "ultimate failure" (213) and the role of Vawter in that failure.

Ironically, Vawter was responsible for Chautauqua's success as a circuit system even as he is hailed as the reason for its failure. Vawter's idea was to create a "circuit system" where towns in proximity with each other could maximize opportunities by booking a specific speaker into a regional area. The idea was to have "centralized control on the same schedule with the same 'talent'" (214). This system was to be a way to maximize efficiency. Speakers would move from town to town on a "tight booking" system. A system of quality control was applied where speakers moving from one town to another were "advised" about how to handle themselves given their performance at the previous town. This supposedly lead to the more fiery speakers being asked to "tone it down" so as not to offend the locals. The sentiment was that local organizing committees of the Chautauqua circuit began to lean toward "pap" rather than substance and that it began to get away from the civic motives that once guided it.

While there were good things about this system--reliable booking system, guarantee of a steady circuit--there were problems. Sometimes host towns came upon financial difficulties or bad weather or local organizing boards that didn't want specific topics or speakers. Vawter worked to make local organizing committees more responsible for ensuring a good turn-out and for being liable for the monies to pay the speakers once they agreed to a booking. Chautauqua became, more and more, a business enterprise, and local organizing committees began to want to promote only "crowd-pleasers" because they wanted to be able to sell tickets and not be left with having to pay-out to make up the difference. To illustrate the difference, A & S cite an example of a 1909 bill about lecturers vs.a 1925 bill that shows how Chautauqua's public function was taken over by "entertainment" interests: Tyrolean Alpine Singers and Yodelers for instance.

But as A & S put it, this is not a neat and tidy narrative. Vawter was "keenly aware of the decline" and felt torn between keeping the circuit going financially and keeping its public purpose alive. Vawter's papers reveal this struggle between "profitability" and a passion for civic virtue. The story of what happened to Chautauqua's circuit series is an interesting and unresolved one. A & S go on to suggest a number of interpretations of the archival materials and published accounts of what happened to the circuit program. The questions appear to be about the nature of the circuit's demise: Did it fail due to bureaucracy and commodification of speakers that Vawter encouraged in order to keep the series going? Did it fail because the "local committees" dumbed it down to the point where it lost its edge and social value? In other words, did it fail because local organizing committees "sold" out to entertainment over public edification? Did it fail because of oratorical culture losing its sway? Did it fail because the radio came along as an instrument of public entertainment and the automobile came along to transport people to far away towns and cities for amusements of other kinds like drinking illegal whiskey? This last question is mine, of course ;-). But the point here in the article is to be careful about how we interpret Vawter's involvement in the demise and to be aware of what we take on when we try to determine what happened to the Chautauqua series.

At any rate, the answers to these questions are not entirely clear, but what the Vawter-Chautauqua test case reveals is interesting for the examination of oratorical culture. As A & S put it, the example of Vawter asks us to think more about how "rhetorical values are in fact institutionalized and to examine what happenes to them. . . when they are" (224). I think this article raises interesting questions about institutionalized rhetoric as well as social histories. How are we to intepret the failure of a rhetorical enterprise? When something dies, why does it do so? Competing values, shifting interests, someone's big gaffe? The point A & S make is that we must "complicate our stories, stories of the tensions between the roles of the individual and the stories for the tensions betwen prinicples of cultural discrimination and the interests of institutions in their own material survival" (224).

Some of the discussion here made me think of Sinclair Lewis's novel _Main Street_, which offers a send-up of small town culture and its desire for entertainment and conservative forces moreso than challenges. But Lewis also treats small towns as complex enterprises as well.