Uplift under the Big Top

WE CALLED IT CULTURE (272 pp.]--Victoria Case and Robert Ormond Case--Doubleday ($3).

Millions of U.S. small-towners remember the institution called Chautauqua, usually with affection. For over half a century it gave to the culture-curious and the culture-hungry a tent show of live entertainment that ranged from the Kaffir Boys' Choir to a course on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, from the measured comments of Viscount Bryce to the soaring platitudes of William Jennings Bryan. Carol Kennicott, the stifled and discontented heroine of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, went to Chautauqua in Gopher Prairie and "was impressed by the audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager to be made to think, the men in vests and shirtsleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh, and the wriggling children, eager to sneak away."

Authors Victoria and Robert Case (brother & sister) are far from agreeing with Carol Kennicott that Chautauqua was "nothing but wind and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm." We Called It Culture recalls how cheap and tedious Chautauqua could be at its worst. It also insists that at its best it brought to provincial society a leaven of excitement, entertainment and intellectual stimulus.

Right Thinking for $6. The movement (it soon became that) was started in 1874 at Lake Chautauqua, N.Y. by John Vincent, a young New Jersey minister, and a businessman friend from Akron named Lewis Miller. By 1900, what had begun as an open air "Sunday School Teachers' Assembly" for 40 young people (two weeks of clean living and right thinking for $6) had expanded into an association that ran a school of theology, a correspondence-school university and a publishing house. To the "Mother Chautauqua" pavilion by the lake came U.S. Presidents, reformers, topnotch writers, singers, and actors--a salable, satisfying mixture of uplift, entertainment and celebrities.

By 1900 there were 200 waterside Chautauquas in 31 states.But Chautauqua really became big business when it hit the road in tents. During the peak year of 1924, Chautauqua visited 12,000 U.S. towns and villages whose leading businessmen had underwritten, willingly or grudgingly, all the expenses (the management got all the profits under the "standard" contract). That year, 30 million people crowded into the big brown tents and it looked as if Chautauqua were going on forever. The following year it went into a slump from which it has never fully recovered.

The Right to Be Rich. Authors Case & Case do not examine intently enough the reasons for Chautauqua's rapid decline (the explanations advanced--the advent of good roads, movies and radio--might explain a falling-off, but not a collapse). But they tell just how the system worked and a good deal about the performers who took to the "man-killing" circuits (seven days a week, often for three months) during the summer heat. William Jennings Bryan was Chautauqua's top attraction for a quarter-century, sometimes drew over 10,000 customers.

But the alltime, sure-fire speech ("Old Dependable") was Russell H. Conwell's "Acres of Diamonds," which preached the comforting doctrine that wealth was within the reach of every man: "Get rich, young man, for money is power, and power ought to be in the hands of good people. . . .I say you have no right to be poor. . . ." Conwell gave the lecture 6,000 times, for fees ranging from $100 to $500. Each night, after deducting his expenses, he mailed the money to some "deserving" boy to help him through college. Chautauqua was like that.

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