The Chautauqua Institution

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The Chautauqua Institution

During its first eighty years, more famous men and women, including American presidents, appeared under the auspices of the Chautauqua Institution, located on the shore of Lake Chautauqua in an obscure part of northwestern New York, than at any other place in the country. Built in 1874, Chautauqua was headquarters for a phenomenally successful late nineteenth-century religious and mass education movement that satisfied a deep hunger throughout America for culture and "innocent entertainment" at reduced prices.

Philosopher William James visited the site in 1899 and was astonished by the degree to which its small-town values informed nationwide programs. The institution reflected the inexhaustible energies and interests of two founders, Lewis Miller, a wealthy Akron, Ohio, manufacturer of farm machinery (and Thomas A. Edison's future father-in-law), and John Heyl Vincent, who at eighteen had been licensed in Pennsylvania as a Methodist "exhorter and preacher." Both had grown up in rural America, and both were especially knowledgeable about the tastes and yearnings of their fellow citizens.

Long before James's visit, Miller had helped finance revival meetings in a hamlet near Lake Chautauqua, but attendance had declined. While searching for a way to continue his vision of the Lord's work, Miller read some of Vincent's writings, came to the belief that financial salvation was attainable if some new purpose for the site could be found, and contacted Vincent. Vincent disliked razzle-dazzle evangelism but agreed that training young men and women as Sunday school teachers could be the worthy purpose that Miller sought.

A Sunday School Assembly was formed and enjoyed immediate success. However, a looming problem was that as the school's enrollment steadily increased, so did concerns about chaperoning students. Miller and Vincent feared possible scandals in sylvan glades, unless idle time could be filled with regular and wholesome educational and entertainment programs. To direct such activities, they engaged William Rainey Harper, an Ohio-born educator, who would later be John D. Rockefeller's choice to serve as president of the University of Chicago.

Like Miller and Vincent, Harper never opposed an idea because it was new or unproven. Four years after the Sunday School Assembly began operations the Chautauqua Literary Scientific Circle came into being. One measure of its success was that within twenty years, ten thousand reading circles, all of which took their lead from the institution's example, were operating throughout America. One fourth were in villages of fewer than five hundred people, and Chautauqua served them diligently, providing reading lists and other materials.

But innovations at Chautauqua did not stop with the training of Sunday school teachers and reading circles. As early as 1883, it chartered itself as a university and would remain one for twelve years, until established universities began to offer summer courses. Some three hundred "independent" or loosely affiliated similar institutions used Chautauqua as a model without charge by the institution. As early as 1885, a Chautauqua Assembly was held in Long Beach, California, where rollers breaking on wide stretches of white sand and bracing sea air further encouraged those who sought spiritual and intellectual enlightenment during summer months.

For the benefit of those who could not afford travel to New York, California, or independent Chautauquas, "tent chautauquas" came into being. A tent would be pitched in a meadow and lecturers engaged to inform locals on history, politics, and other subjects of general as well as religious interest. Among the speakers, William Jennings Bryan is said to have given fifty lectures in twenty-eight days. The average price for admission was fifty cents, and no drinking or smoking was allowed. A Methodist Dining Tent or Christian Endeavor Ice Cream Tent supplied all refreshments.

Just after the turn of the century, Chautauqua was a "cultural phenomenon with some of the sweep and force of a tidal wave," wrote historian Russell Lynes. Women, who heretofore had little chance to attend college, for the first time had an organization aware of their educational needs that sought to begin opening up opportunities for them. By 1918, more than a million Americans would take correspondence courses sponsored by the institution. A symphony orchestra was created there, and in 1925 George Gershwin composed his Concerto in F in a cabin near the Lake.

In the late 1920s, however, the advent of the automobile and the mobility it offered the masses seemed to signal Chautauqua's end. Not only were untold millions abandoning stultifying small towns for the temptations of metropolises, but those who stayed put had easy access to cities for year-round education and entertainment.

In 1933 the institution went into receivership. Somehow it refused to die. By the early 1970s, with buildings in disrepair and attendance lagging, it appeared finally to be in its death throes—at which point it renewed its existence. Richard Miller, a Milwaukee resident and great-grandson of founder Lewis Miller, became chairman of the Chautauqua board. He began an aggressive fund-raising campaign and built up financial resources until at the end of the twentieth century the institution had $40 million and held pledges of another $50 million from wealthy members.

More importantly, the Chautauqua Institution reached out for new publics even as it preserved its willingness to continue a tradition of serving people with insatiable curiosity about the world in which they lived and a never-ending need for information. Although the tone of its evangelical heritage remained, Catholics were welcome, about 20 percent of Chautauquans were Jews, and members of the rapidly expanding black middle class were encouraged to join.

"This is a time of growth," declared eighty-five-year-old Alfreda L. Irwin, the institution's official historian, whose family had been members for six generations, in 1998. "Chautauqua is very open and would like to have all sorts of people come here and participate. I think it will happen, just naturally."

—Milton Goldin