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What was Chautauqua?



Founded in 1874 by businessman Lewis Miller and Methodist minister, later Bishop, John Heyl Vincent, Chautauqua's initial incarnation was in western New York state on Lake Chautauqua. The programming first focused on training Sunday school teachers but quickly expanded its range and was the first to offer correspondence degrees in the United States.


Music was also a staple on the Circuits and bands were particularly popular. The band most identified with the Redpath Circuit was Bohumir Kryl’s Bohemian Band. Kryl, a protégé of John Philip Sousa, and his band were famous for their memorable version of the "Anvil Chorus" (Il Trovatore). Included were "four anvils with four husky tympanists in leather aprons....as the hammers clanged down on the anvils, an electric device sent sparks cascading around the darkened stage." Opera stars Alice Nielsen and Ernestine Schumann-Heink were also familiar faces. Numerous Jubilee Singers companies, based on the original from Fisk University, could be seen on the Circuits every summer. For the largely white audiences these spirituals demonstrated a very different way of seeing African Americans in performance than minstrelsy offered. There were also numerous singing and instrumental groups performing everything from contemporary favorites to sentimental ballads to nostalgic music from "the old country."

Readers, elocutionists, and plays could be found as part of the program, although "theater" (that is the performance of plays by actors in make-up and costume) did not enter the repertoire immediately. Gay MacLaren was nicknamed "The Girl with the Camera Mind" and her performances were one-person versions of popular shows. Glenn Frank, a popular lecturer himself, said of her "I can only say that the illusion was perfect. It was not a reading. It was not an impersonation. It was a re-creation. The original cast lived and acted again." William Sterling Battis, "The Dickens Man," portraying characters from the works of Charles Dickens, transformed himself from Little Nell to Bob Cratchit to Fagin in full view of the audience, using only a few props and costume pieces. Englishman Ben Greet had made a name for himself in the United States by importing his spare productions of Shakespeare. These had been seen at Harvard University and in Theodore Roosevelt’s White House. Even though circuit managers were nervous about their reception, they need not have been worried when the Ben Greet Players first appeared on the Circuits in 1913. As an actor said in 1925: "These people are God-fearing, God-living, and know their Bible and their Shakespeare." The Ben Greet Players were an enormous success and theater was solidly part of the Chautauqua experience from there on in.

Once the Circuits were established there was nothing during their heyday that evoked the excitement and promise of summer more than the coming of the brown tent. One manager remembered them as "the essence of an Americanism in days gone by." The Great Depression brought an end to most Circuits, although a few continued until World War II. Their arrival brought people together to improve their minds and renew their ties to one another. As a sort of diverting, wholesome, and morally respectable vaudeville the Circuit Chautauqua was an early form of mass culture. Despite the criticisms leveled by Sinclair Lewis and others, for many the Circuit Chautauqua was a welcome sight providing entertainment and enlightenment. As one spectator concluded, "[our] town was never the same after Chautauqua started coming.... It broadened our lives in many ways."

Courtesy of The University of Iowa Libraries