Recollections of a Dead Art: The Traveling Chautauqua
Evert M. Winks, Robin W. Winks · Indiana Magazine of History (Indiana University) · 1958
Recently, while attending programs of the Colorado Chautauqua in Boulder and the Music Festival in Aspen, I was led to think of six summers that I spent with a form of art which today is not only dead but forgotten?the traveling chautauqua. The term chautauqua itself is one which virtu ally is unknown to the youth of today, and even to many of adult years it signifies only the permanent camp or cultural center where motion pictures, talks, and musical programs are presented. The first and most famous chautauqua in New York, in which Henry Ward Beecher and William Jennings Bryan spoke, was a permanent location to which, each sum mer, those in search of the spoken word and of American cul ture would travel. But a far more pervasive influence on the American scene than such permanent centers, to which only a limited number of people could go, was the chautauqua which took its wares, its inspiration and its information, di rectly to the people. It was with such a group, in its declining years, that I worked. To the best of my recollection we were not aware at the time that we were working with a fading business. The crowds were large, the required guarantee usually was over subscribed, and we all worked harder than any dying job could have asked. Only in my last year with the chautauqua was I aware of a decline, and this most of us credited to the recession of the early twenties rather than to a permanent disability. Nevertheless, unknown to me at the time, I was working with the chautauqua during its last years of health. I was a high school student in 1916 when I received my first summer job with the Welfare Chautauqua Company of