"Most American"

What President Roosevelt called "the most American thing in America" began to happen again. What Philosopher James called "the best fruits of what mankind has striven for under the name of civilization for centuries" ripened once more and were culled by glad thousands.

With richly caparisoned pageantry, with fine democratic speechmaking, with orchestras, choirs, choruses, soloists, with lecturers, clergymen, suffragettes, scientists, with the President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., and the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, the annual program of Chautauqua Institution was launched upon the sylvan shores of Lake Chautauqua, N. Y. It was the 50th anniversary of the coming together of a little band of people who studied the Bible together in a Summer camp in 1874. They had been invited by Dr. John H. Vincent, preacher, later bishop, and his friend Lewis Miller, mowing-machine maker. The little band reassembled the next year and the next and many more. Their numbers grew. The original program of religious contemplation grew, reached out into other fields of human interest -- Music, Education, Art, Politics. Each year the object was to make Chautauqua a richer, more color ful, more "improving" experience. As decades passed, "Chautauqua" became a word of many meanings. It meant, as well as the parent gathering and the name of a lake, town and county in New York, a great many similar gatherings in all parts of the country. It meant a kind of rock, of that geologic period known as the Upper Devonian, outcroppings of which are plentiful at Chautauqua, N. Y. Most of all it meant the "Chautauqua idea" -- Democracy's endeavor to educate itself, as now practiced by "well over 10,000,000 people" despite the mountains of odium that have been heaped upon it by intellectuals.

Said William James: "I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spellbound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear. . . . You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality. . . ."