Born in Simpler Era : Chautauqua Crisscrosses Plains Again

Even in these jaded times, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that peppery suffragette and abolitionist, can still get a rise out of people.

She appeared here the other day at her rabble-rousing best, under a big canvas tent at the foot of the Black Hills, expounding on her most radical notions to a few hundred of the local folks: proposing giving women the vote, granting them property rights, letting them divorce drunken husbands.

She even took a swipe at organized religion.

“The true enemy of women skulks behind the altar,” she dared to say. “ . . . The Bible is not the word of God. The Bible is the act of man written to keep women subordinate (and) written out of his love of domination.”

Exception Taken

Shocked, a good church-going woman in the audience took exception.

“A hundred years later,” the woman said, “I personally find some of the views that you expressed tonight against the church offensive.”

Always quick on the rebound, Stanton feigned puzzlement. “I must say, I am very surprised to come back and find our work is not completed yet.”

A little out of sync, perhaps, but intriguing interchanges like that have been popping up this summer in out-of-the-way places like Dodge City, Kan.; Alliance, Neb.; Rapid City, and elsewhere.

It was not Stanton at the lectern, of course, but Sally Roesch Wagner, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, relating in costume and character the once--and, to some it seems, still--controversial ideas of the 19th-Century feminist leader. The audience reaction was spontaneous.

Roaming the Plains

An academic, not an actress, Wagner is one of a group of scholars roaming the great plains to lecture on the great thoughts of American visionaries. They are part of a small but growing move to revive the Chautauqua bands of the early 20th Century, traveling road shows of oratory, philosophy and entertainment that were as rich a part of America’s cultural heritage as one-room schools and McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader.

In addition to the Dakotas, new wave Chautauquas have toured Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana and Illinois. Another is in the works in Florida.

Long, long ago, long before Phil or Oprah or Geraldo, long before Dan, Tom and Peter, long before cable TV or MTV or TV at all, even before Edward R. Murrow or H. V. Kaltenborn, there was Chautauqua. Three A’s, three U’s. Sha-taw-kwa.

For nearly a half-century, from the 1880s up to the Great Depression, Chautauqua was the window to cultural and educational enrichment for thousands of isolated towns from New England to the Rocky Mountains. Imagine a cross between ABC’s “Nightline,” opening night at the symphony, a Fourth of July parade, summer stock and a street carnival. That, in essence, was Chautauqua.

Musicians, actors, teachers, orators and, oftentimes, peddlers too, formed Chautauqua troupes that crisscrossed the vast expanses of America’s heartland in the summer months. For a week or so a stop, they would pitch their sprawling canvas circus tents and--for a fee--bring an eagerly awaited taste of big-city enlightenment and sophistication to a rural community. Many small towns even built permanent shelters and halls out by a local lake or park to accommodate the Chautauquas.

Bryan, Darrow Heard

The bill of fare often included the leading speakers, politicians, thinkers and writers of the day. William Jennings Bryan, The Great Commoner, thundered with eloquence for decades across the Chautauqua stage, proclaiming Jesus as the “first Chautauquan” and reciting the dramatic “Cross of Gold” speech that won him the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896. Clarence Darrow, Bryan’s later nemesis in the famed Scopes Monkey Trial, also made Chautauqua rounds, as did Jane Addams, Carry Nation, Billy Sunday, William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.

The initial goals of what became known as the Chautauqua movement were far more humble. It began in 1874 when a pair of devout Methodists opened a summer camp to train Sunday school teachers along the shores of Lake Chautauqua in southwestern New York.

As interest in their Chautauqua Institute grew rapidly, they brought in well-known lecturers and developed a highly praised reading and discussion program that gradually strayed from the religious as it emphasized classical history, astronomy, physics and other secular topics.

Spiced With Entertainment

Copycat programs quickly flourished around the nation, often spicing the high-toned fare with entertainment. Over time, the more cerebral events were overshadowed by a steady diet of ballets, bands, light operas, carnival booths, ice cream socials and beauty contests. There were barnstorming pilots, bake-offs, liniment salesmen, dances, magicians, ventriloquists and silent movies. And always the politicians.

At their height, historians estimate, Chautauquas may have played to as many as 30 million people in 12,000 communities in a given summer.

“If only children nowadays could live in the state of anticipation that we did back then,” said Gertrude Menning, recalling her days as a child in tiny Corsica, S.D.

For Menning, as well as many other senior citizens on hand for the Rapid City event, the new Chautauqua stirred memories of magical summers filled with music, speeches, games and the tantalizing aroma that wafted from fresh-baked pies and overstuffed picnic hampers.

“We were in an isolated community and this was our only culture,” said Helen Casebeer, who grew up in northeastern Montana.

Myrna Haight, another in the Rapid City crowd, said Chautauqua week was always the highlight of her summers as a child in Le Mars, Iowa. Many families in that northwestern Iowa town would pitch their own tents and camp for the week around the Chautauqua site in a city park. Some summers, Haight’s mother would sew as many as seven new dresses for her daughter--one for each day of Chautauqua. She remembers seeing a performance of “The Mikado,” and hearing Alma Gluck, the famous operatic soprano. And then there was the year the great Bryan came to town.

“I was pretty little, but I remember that we kids sat on the grass in front of the front row of seats with our mouths wide open,” she said.

Original Still Thrives

The original, more sober New York institute still thrives today, but the end came swiftly for its traveling cousins with the coming of the Model T Ford, radio and talking movies. They offered new, flashier diversions to an entertainment-starved public and helped end the sense of isolation in many far-flung communities.

With television, video recorders and other mass entertainment to compete with, the goals of the Chautauqua revivals are, by necessity, far more modest than the original. The oldest and best-known of the revival efforts began in 1976 in North Dakota as a Bicentennial production of that state’s not-for-profit humanities council.

By 1981, the North Dakota program had become so popular that neighboring states clamored for a piece. Redubbed the Great Plains Chautauqua, the program is now underwritten in part by a federal grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and travels through South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas as well as North Dakota on its annual eight-week run.

Another troupe operates in Kansas, and at least two cities in North Dakota--Grand Forks and Devils Lake--have organized their own Chautauqua programs.

Academic Program

The Great Plains program leans heavily toward the academic. But, in a throwback to the good old days, some of the smaller towns along its route use the visit as an excuse to toss a local festival complete with singers, dancers, souvenir booths, pot luck suppers, baby beauty contests and pet shows.

To lure video-saturated patrons under the tent at night as well as to related daytime book discussions and history workshops, organizers have thrown one significant sop to show biz. Instead of dry discourses, scholars present their lectures--and field questions from the audience--in the character and dress of historical figures who played significant roles in shaping American thought and philosophy.

Then, still in character, they field questions from spectators in what amounts to an audience-participation history lesson. In addition to Stanton, this year’s “speakers” include Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

“I grew up hating history, all those dates that I didn’t care about and facts that seemed useless,” said Wagner, who portrays Stanton. “With this kind of Chautauqua, there’s a chance to make these people come alive.”

George Frein, who moderates the tent shows in the character of Henry Adams, a 19th-Century writer and historian, said the tour provides him with a refreshing break from the humdrum of the classroom.

“You know how freshman students are,” said Frein, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Dakota. “They are blase and bored with life and certainly (with) the great questions of man. Trying to talk about Socrates is a little difficult. It’s nice to get out and talk to older people and see how much you can accomplish without threats of tests.”

Chautauqua participants have developed a kind of inverse dynamic to measure their success. In general, the smaller the town they visit, the bigger the local turnout. Crowds filled all the folding seats and stood five deep outside the tent when Chautauqua played last month in Fullerton, Neb., a town of only 1,500.

Drove 500 Miles

“They talk about things we just don’t normally talk about in Fullerton,” said Leigh Metcalf, a high school teacher. He was so taken with the Fullerton performance that, a few weeks later, he drove the 500 miles to Rapid City to watch the shows again.

On occasion, some members of the audience seem to get too much into the spirit of the program. Recently in Alliance, Neb., one man rose in anger to challenge the Stanton character after Wagner had delivered the feminist leader’s sermon about Christianity and the oppression of women.

“ ‘Mrs. Stanton,’ ” Wagner recalled him saying, “ ‘I’ve heard you all week long speak out against our God and I’ve heard you speak out against men, and this morning you talked about the persecution of witches and that being a destruction of female culture. Is it possible, Mrs. Stanton, that you might be one?’ ”

The rest of the audience hissed him like a snake.