« p. 88-91: A Well-Used Afternoon
Chautauqua
p. 91-101
A lot of the time, the first impressions you get over here are pretty bad. But if you have some sense and good will, and if you keep yourself from getting confused by the surface of things, pretty soon you’ll see everything that’s good behind the repulsive exterior. Even in Chautauqua, I had to fight through a few unsavory first impressions before I could finally break in.
The place takes its (Indian) name from the lake it sits next to. This lovely lake reminds you of the Cheimsee to the east. It lays a couple of miles from the Erie on the northwest end of New York, several hundred feet higher than the Erie.
You take the ship to pier and would like to get in. But it’s not so simple! First you have to go through a turnstile about as tall as a man, equipped with bars and an iron railing. It will turn for you if you pay the fare, and if you don’t want to, you can always get on the next ship! The fare isn’t all that cheap. I pay my half-dollar for the rest of today and take my bag with me into the place.
A few steps from the pier, I see something that makes me laugh out loud. A few small hills and two puddles are carved into the lake shore. On one of the hills, I notice something which looks like a primitive, white cement model of a small town. The sign tells me it is a true replica of Palestine.
The puddle in front of me is the Sea of Galilee, the cement town on the hill is Bethabara, and the hill is Gadara. The larger puddle is the Dead Sea, and the large cement pile is Jerusalem. Some of the surrounding towns include Bethlehem and Gibeon, but towards Chautauqua Lake, on the other side of the Mount of Olives, lies Hebron. So when I was on the steamship, I wasn’t traveling on Chautauqua Lake, but instead the Mediterranean.
Everything is replicated. The River Jordan is a small trickle in-between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. Mount Carmel, Dan and Beersheba, Sidon and Tyrus, everything. All this trash was donated a long time ago by an elderly gentlemen. It’s an institution. It made Chautauqua famous from the beginnings and helped make it popular.
After I cleaned up in the Hotel Athenäum and took my evening meal, I strolled towards the mountains to take a look at Chautauqua for myself. Ten steps from the hotel, I froze. I got one of those blows to the back of my neck, not from the sight of any skyscraper, but instead from the tremendous thing in front of me I had not been prepared for.
Chautauqua is a giant summer school, somebody said to me, a kind of resort, not where you soak in any holy water, but instead you listen to lectures. Professors hold lectures on literature, history, all branches of science. You sit where you want to sit and listen. It’s something like our European University Extension but it’s still uniquely American, something barely conceivable in Europe, a Karlsbad that isn’t about mineral water but instead relies on an intellectual well. Americans come here for eight weeks from the most remote corner of their enormous continent just to learn, and then they scatter to the wind and take something with them that they will never forget. You could say that the Americans here are all fed the same food. They sit in the same waters, recover, convalesce, and after a summer in Chautauqua they feel more like Americans. (We do have something like it in Europe -- maybe -- Bayreuth.)
I think of Walt Whitman’s favorite word, en masse, and I shiver like it’s something I couldn’t possibly imagine. Despite this, the word never really hit home, but now, all at once, I feel that shock to the back of my neck. Right in front of me, a gigantic illumination lights up a valley of people, a crater of people, an amphitheater whose roof rests on tall pillars but which is open on all sides. Dug deep into a mountain, the amphitheater holds thousands and thousands of people in yellow summer clothes -- it seems to me about ten thousand. None of them moved, all of them reverently silent.
Last winter, I saw Reinhardt’s Oedipus in the Circus Schumann, and the chorus that rushed in at the beginning made me feel something similar as when I looked at this silent crowd of people. (I heard later there were about eight thousand people there.)
From a small group in front of the podium, an elderly man walked up and spoke with a soft, aged voice to the eight thousand people of the valley. I could every word and breath from the old man, and I’m not only writing this to describe the quality of the space’s acoustics, but also the quality of the people who were listening.
I had, by chance, happened across Old First Night, the celebration of the 37th anniversary of the founding of Chautauqua. The old man speaking was one of the founders of Chautauqua, Bishop John C. Vincent of Indiana, and he spoke of another man who had founded Chautauqua with him, Lewis Miller, who has since then passed away.
I listened closely to the speeches. People from almost every state in the Union spoke one after the other. All their speeches were filled with enthusiasm for the democratic idea of Chautauqua, a sort of local patriotism, springing from love for the men and women who worked here and also from reverence for those who had once worked for Chautauqua but couldn’t anymore. I got an impression of history, of tradition, of patriotism, and none of it rang false. I actually had the feeling that the dead live and are with us at this moment. What I saw was beautiful and alive in a way that the living could never bring about by themselves.
Then the organ kicked in, and at once the flag, the Stars and Stripes, fell from the background and you could see what was behind it. It was the picture of a tower, about six meters high, that was etched onto the middle of a board.
In this year of 1911, the Chautauquans have built a memorial tower for their founder Lewis Miller on the shore of their lake. Bishop Vincent had dedicated the bells this afternoon, and now they needed donations to pay for everything, and not just the tower and the bells. They still need money for the poor school teachers who spend the whole summer in Chautauqua and who deserve good air, good food and good classes without having to spend a single penny, to the high honor of Mother America.
Small boys and adult men with baskets climbed into the amphitheater and returned back down. In the baskets were envelopes, and in the envelopes might have been coins, bills or checks, depending on who put what in them.
The speeches stopped. The governor stepped forward and held up a telegram, the first thousand dollars for the tower, from Mrs. Thomas Alva Edison, who at the time was in France.
Right away, a young boy started placing bricks on the screen. Ten bricks, each of which stood for one hundred dollars. He stopped at the tenth. But he didn’t stop very long, because another ten came on top of that, and then another ten and then fifteen. With every new addition, the eight thousand applauded. The tower grew higher and higher -- a fairly accurate representation of a campanile I had seen from the steamship. Ten more bricks, then five, then three, then five.
More speaking, more singing. The choir sang My Old Kentucky Home, that wonderful old Negro song. The organ played it and eight thousand people hummed along softly. Then more speeches: senators, judges, university men, factory men, farmers from the west. Everyone stood up, one after the other, and spoke about their position, their province, about America. In the meantime, more music: Way down upon the Swanee Ribber . . . And then the lively, whooping Dixieland, the hymn of the South. People from the southern states welcomed it with delighted whistles and small shouts, a sort of cultivated tantrum, but even those from the north sung along word for word. In less than an hour, the tower was complete to the gables. About nine thousand dollars were collected in one hour: construction costs for the tower, maintenance costs for the people. Then, with The Star-Spangled Banner, the valley set into motion and dissipated into the surrounding location, a forest with houses built narrowly together. The next day I was in the middle of all of it. And today I’m complaining that necessity drove me away and I was unable to stay for a week or even a month among these great Americans, these people of Chautauqua.
A young student from my hotel explained the institution to me. Professor E.J. Flügel from Cornell University in Ithaca lectures in the summer about German language and literature. The governor of Chautauqua, President George E. Vincent of the University of Minnesota, took me around, showed me everything and explained Chautauqua to me.
I’d like to write down a single day’s program, the program of Friday, August 4, 1911. I counted 49 lectures listed on the daily schedule. I’ll list some of them now. A lecture about modern social movements in Europe. About forests and birds. About kindergarten. About Shakespeare. About non-Christian beliefs in the Union. A lecture about the history of banks in America, given by the president of the largest bank of New York. About the preparation of ice cream. About the church and labor problems. About the personality and art of G.K. Chesterton. About Björnson’s A Glove and women’s issues. About missionary work in large cities. And in the evening a concert with choirs and soloists in the large amphiteather: Beautiful Ellen by Max Bruch and The Crusader by Niels Gade.
I listened to lectures in the amphitheater, in the wonderful Hall of Philosophy, a Greek temple in the middle of the forest, in the buildings of the Methodists, the Prebyterians, the Nonconformists. (Christian Science is banned from Chautauqua!) In the kindergarten lecture, I watched the teacher play with the delightful American boys and girls, and I listened to lectures on many subjects from the best professors of American universities. I watched people learn beautiful carts in the teachers’ workstations. I was on the baseball field and watched swimming and rowing matches carried out on shore. I was in Pianoville, the remotest corner of Chautauqua, where great names have their own violin and piano farms, chicken coops of beginning piano and violin virtuosos. I saw for myself, sometimes from the inside, sometimes from the outside, all of the wonderful places, buildings and houses filled with teaching, learning and living.
Professor Flügel and Governor Vincent, the son of the bishop, explained to me the inner mechanisms of this American educational metropolis. It is created and intended for the educated citizens and teachers of the middle class. Teachers (who are women in America) maintain a uniform base of knowledge, so that anyone who lives too far away to have constant access to printed instructions can, if she has the desire, become a university student here for eight weeks. The bars at the entrance to Chautauqau are there so that the superficial seekers of summer resorts around the lake don’t take away from the place its thirst for knowledge. Anyone who wants to learn there pays with good American money for instruction, also paying for some of the poorer students, the scholars. In all, there are about fifty of those here.
There are sixty-five professors here, who work like slaves for their eight weeks. Today, there are fifty thousand people present in Chautauqua. Aside from the lessons for schoolteachers and the lectures on all fields, there is also a special course on a specific subject. This year, it’s American issues, last year it was the cultural issues of England and next it will be the cultural issues of Germany and France. Chautauqua gives out books for these courses year round, which the students take with them and bring back to Chautauqua in the winter! This year the titles are: The American of the 20th century by H.P. Robinson, the Washington correspondent for the London Times; The Spirit of the American Government by Professor Allen Smith of the University of Washington; Material and Methods of the Novel by Clayton Hamilton and Twenty Years in Hull House by Jane Addams, the great social reformer of Chicago.
I’ve received and read brochures and reports from men and women like James Garfield, Mac Kinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Drummond, John Fiske, Julia Ward Howe, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, Frances Peabody, Susan Anthony and Lew Wallace (just to list a few names known in Europe), that have lived, read and spoken in Chautauqua. It’s probably not too difficult to gather up all these degrees and honors and take them home, so long as you take proper care. A nice old man from Kentucky, who spoke to me in the hotel (he had taken me for a Scottish Reverend, but was only a little disappointed when I cleared it up for him), explained to me that he would soon be 68 years old and has taken his wife and daughter to Chautauqua for thirty years. For the past three years, all of them have graduated. For a few days, I enjoyed the finest life that the modern bourgeoisie can experience in the Old or New World. If I ever meet my neighbor from the Kaiser Wilhelm again, I want to tell him that I saw all of America in one place without ever having to watch the smart set dancing in Newark.
Chautauqua is a place for the well-to-do citizen, and there’s nothing here for uncultured men. He gets nothing here, because that’s not the plan. Chautauqua is not a social experiment. There are too many lovely, bored women sitting with their embroidery at the feet of their professors. But it’s not such a bad thing to take your week’s vacation in an intellectual atmosphere among educated people who are ready to learn. That’s not a bad place to start for social causes. The bourgeois are like that, even if they’re not as prepared to learn as the proletariat. In Chautauqua, maybe, if you look enough into it, you’ll see something in the future that’s not on Chautauqua’s schedule.