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129 




C UL TURE 
UNDER CANVAS 

THE STORY OF TENT CHAUTAUQUA 

BY 

HARRY P. HARRISON 

AS TOLD TO 

KARL DETZER 



HASTINGS HOUSE, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK 



COPYRIGHT, <5) 1958, BY KARL DETZER 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced 
without the written permission of the publisher 

Pubhshed simultaneously in Canada 

by S. J. Reginald Saunders, Publishers, Toronto 1. 

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57-12799 
Printed in the United States of America 



TO 
MY WIFE, ETTA PARSONS HARRISON 



Introduction 



Mark Twain was walking on a San Francisco street one misty evening in 
1866, when a bibulous stranger halted him and announced: "My name's 
Sawyer." His tongue was thick, his voice loud, and there could be no doubt 
that he was unhappy. "Hear you're goin' to give a talk." To steady himself 
he grabbed Mark Twain's lapels. "I haven't got a cent, but if you knew 
how bad I wanted to laugh, you'd give me a ticket." 

Mark Twain considered. His proposed lecture, first of the uncounted 
thousands that he would deliver in the course of forty years, was only three 
nights off. His pockets were nearly empty. He could find no steady work in 
either of his trades as printer or reporter. He had done a little writing here in 
the west, but he had not used his real name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 

The Sacramento Union recently had published an account of Twain's 
trip to Hawaii. Readers had found it amusing and an editor friend, seeking to 
be helpful, had suggested, "Hire a hall, advertise. Sell tickets at a dollar each 
and give a funny talk." 

As the date approached, Twain did not feel funny. He felt distressed. 
What if no one came? If no one laughed? But this drunken stranger, ap- 
pearing out of the night, actually wanted to hear him and wanted to laugh. 
Twain gave the man a ticket and detailed instructions. Next day he gave 
tickets and similar instructions to four hearty friends. The ni^ht of the 
lecture the five were scattered through the "Opera House" that Twain had 
rented for $50 to be paid later. At each secret signal from the stage, they 
guffawed until the audience joined them. The evening was a huge success. 

Mark Twain thereafter talked his way around the world, usually to roars 
of merriment. Usually, not always. Five years after his first attempt, he wrote 
to his booking agent, James Redpath of Boston, refusing a date. 

vii 



"I never made a success of a lecture in a church," he explained. "People 
are afraid to laugh in church." 

This shrewd observation called attention to a national characteristic that 
was to worry lecture managers for nearly half a century before they did 
something constructive about it. That something was called "Chautauqua." 
It separated the pulpit and the platform and substituted footlights for the 
religious dimness of the Sunday-school room. To accomplish this, it went 
outdoors. Once launched, it became a mighty influence in American enter- 
tainment and education, in politics and the nation's culture. 

In the intervening years, while Mark Twain was making a million dollars 
on the platform, and losing it all in fantastically bad investments, America 
was a lecture-loving nation. In churches and halls from the Alleghenies to 
the Rockies, a people thirsty for culture and hungry for information paid 
its dimes and dollars for an evening's program. Often the society into which 
they grouped themselves was called a "Lyceum." 

The Greeks had coined the word. Aristotle taught in the walled garden 
of the "Temple of Apollo Lyceus." In the streets nearby, Athenian crowds 
gathered to listen to their philosophers and poets, foot-loose and unpaid 
Until one day some entertainer became so popular that the citizens were 
willing to pay to listen to him, and on that day "Lyceum" was born. 

In America in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a Yale graduate, 
ambitious Josiah Holbrook, used the word to name his "association of 
adults for the purpose of self-education." Boston had subscribed to the 
idea in 1830, with Daniel Webster as its first leader, and the Massachusetts 
and New York legislatures had even formed state Lyceum boards. Their 
purpose, to improve schools, organize libraries and museums, provide 
classes for adults, was purely educational, with no idea of a return in dol- 
lars for anyone. 

In 1831 the American Lyceum Association was founded to unite a chain 
of societies for weekly lectures and debates. "A good pulpit," Ralph Waldo 
Emerson called it. It was a pulpit for men only; women were not invited to 
speak. The system flourished for years; then the meaning of the word 
gradually changed and "Lyceum" became the organized lecture business 
that it is today. 

^Migrating homesteaders had little room to carry books. New England 
culture had centered in the schoolhouse and meetinghouse where a few 
fluent men aired their views and many other persons listened. Oratory was the 
literature of the masses. Most of it was solemn, stemming from long, grim 
sermons like those of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. America's first 
stump speech was not delivered from a stump but from Plymouth Rock, 
which spread its gloomy shadow far across the land, all the way to the plains 
of Kansas, almost to the end of the nineteenth century. 

Between 1850 and 1900, New England remained the revered heart of 
American culture. Boston, Cambridge and New Haven, and to a lesser de- 



Introduction ix 

gree Philadelphia, were the seats of learning most highly respected in the 
prairies. The bleak philosophy of Cotton Mather and the gray Quaker con- 
science had ridden west together in homeseekers' flatboats and Conestoga 
wagons. New England, never slow to take advantage of a profitable oppor- 
tunity, soon was sending its long-winded sons in droves to talk to the muddy 
back country. 

Under this influence the new west, weary of listening to its unlettered self, 
tried to recapture some of the intellectual splendor and the spiritual expres- 
sion it had left behind the mountains. If it did not have the eloquent New 
England clergyman for daily fare, or the sight of white steeples above a 
village green, next best was to embrace the evangelistic "camp meeting." 
Morality was a topic for any platform. Exhorters, riding tirelessly in search 
of souls to save, turned naturally to the south which was not yet on the 
social defensive and was more interested in plain religion than in talk of 
"democracy" or "Yankee land." Back-hill folk, in particular, acquired a 
taste for exhortation under the stars. The "camp-meeting" joined the 
literary club as a social institution. 

Each raw settlement tried to minister to the spiritual and intellectual 
needs of surrounding woodlands and newly broken prairies. Fast-growing 
Cincinnati, sloshing through its mud streets, called itself, and seriously con- 
sidered itself, "The Athens of the West." Its Young Men's Mercantile 
Library Association and its equally active Mechanics' Institute sponsored 
most of the eloquence. In six years, between 1850 and 1857, the members 
of its Lyceums listened to twenty-six lectures by Amos Bronson Alcott, 
"most transcendental of the New England transcendentalists," whose daugh- 
ter, Louisa May, would outshine him in the post-Civil War era with her 
best-selling Little Women. 

Across Ohio, from the Maumee to the Muskingum, forty-five other com- 
munities boasted lecture courses which, in twenty years, brought Alcott and 
more than a dozen other famous New Englanders to hundreds of ecstatic 
audiences. In Toledo the sponsors were a dedicated group of women in a 
Suffrage Association, cooperating with a daring crowd of young men who 
called themselves the Radical Club. In Zanesville a Young Men's Literary 
Association imported speakers; in Sandusky it was an Arts Association, 
in Warren a Polemics Club. Chillicothe, combining physical and mental 
cultures, depended on a Gymnasium and Library Association. 

Speakers usually stuck to safe subjects. Most sponsors, in their serious 
quest for the Better Life, slammed their doors with equal finality on both 
the controversial and the frivolous. Therefore Alcott, in his lectures and 
"conversations" delivered all over the new "Northwest," as far even as 
Michigan, avoided vegetarianism which he practiced, slavery which he 
deplored and temperance which he approved. He also neglected to men- 
tion several of his alarming innovations in New England schools. 

Among these were the facts that as a teacher Alcott had spared the rod 



x Introduction 

to a point that shocked stem pedagogues, had introduced the "honor sys- 
tem" of discipline, experimented with organized play, started a parent- 
teicher club, even tried to educate white and Negro children in the same 
class. Neither did he discuss from the platform his ideas on agriculture, to 
which he clung stubbornly, despite the fact that his failure as a farmer 
had been spectacular. Sympathy for dumb beasts had caused him to sub- 
stitute manpower for horses in the fields; for reasons which he never quite 
made clear, he also refused to use manure as a fertilizer. He raised only 
"aspiring vegetables" which grew upward, eschewing the lowly onion and 
potato, that lived in darkness under the ground. All these ideas he believed 
in enough to fight for them in New England, but not enough to discuss 
them in the middle west. 

Carlyle, after meeting Alcott, wrote to Emerson of "the good Alcott, 
with his long, lean face and figure, his gray, worn temples and mild, radiant 
eyes; all bent on saving the world by return to acorns and the golden age 
... a venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can laugh at without lov- 
ing." 

But there was no Don Quixote jousting in Alcott's lecture titles; in 
Ohio he talked safely about Friendship, The Family, Social Life, New 
England Authors, and Health and Beauty. In each, no doubt, he stood 
resolutely on the side of the angels. 

Fluent Henry Ward Beecher, who at home could shake Brooklyn's 
pious foundations with scholarly or moral contention, in Ohio lectures, 
between 1855 and 1862, also confined his discourses to Patriotism, Beauty, 
Social Manners, Table Talk and Immortality. For each of these he re- 
ceived a staggering sum ranging from $50 to $150, and some of his listen- 
ers suspected that he had talked just for the money there was in it. 

Beecher was not a stranger to western country. Born in Massachusetts 
younger brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame 
he was graduated first from Amherst, then from an Ohio seminary. 
His first charge, in 1837, at the Ohio river port of Lawrenceburg, Indiana, 
was a struggling Presbyterian congregation of nineteen women and one 
man. Even then the ladies liked Henry Ward Beecher! Lawrenceburg 
today has slight interest in remembering him; it is too busy turning out 
millions of gallons of Seagram's Seven Crown Whiskey to bother its head 
about a struggling preacher and a "dry" at that who lived there more 
thaif a century ago. 

From that first struggling church Beecher, still a Presbyterian, moved 
to Indianapolis. Here, with patches on his homespun pants, he joined the 
volunteer firemen. Here, too, began his reputation as a lecturer, and he 
was in demand throughout Indiana with Ms discourses on Industry and 
Idleness, Gamblers and Gambling, or The Twelve Causes of Dishonesty. 

At Indianapolis the young man developed his talents as a showman- 



Introduction xi 

preacher. Later, in Brooklyn, after he had shifted from the Presbyterian 
to the Congregational faith, he would use this showmanship to lure 2500 
persons into Plymouth Church each Sabbath morning. He was of less 
than medium height, of more than medium girth, with a ruddy face and 
long hair that hung over his shoulders, yet according to all reports, he 
was "dramatic." For one thing, he stood not in a pulpit, but on a platform 
in the semicircular hall, and shifted rapidly to face first one part of his 
audience, then another. Not only his delivery, but his subject matter was 
exciting, and New York newspapers sent reporters across the East River 
on the ferry to keep the public informed on what Clergyman Beecher was 
saying. Among other things he preached in favor of woman suffrage, ad- 
vised disobedience of the fugitive slave law, and railed at gamblers. Several 
Sundays this fervent anti-slavery orator engaged handsome young Negro 
women to cringe in chains on the platform, below a box that represented 
an auction block, while he went through the spectacle of a slave auction. 

After eight crowded years, Beecher returned to the middle west for a 
series of lectures. Even out here he was famous now, and among the friends 
who had helped make him so was Oliver Wendell Holmes, with a limerick 
that all America recited: 

"The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher 

"Called a hen a most elegant creature. 

'The hen, pleased with that, 

"Laid an egg in his hat . . . 

"And thus did the hen reward Beecher." 

In 1855 when Beecher took to the road on his second lecture series, an- 
other Brooklynite travelled the same territory with a livelier subject. Phineas 
Barnum was everything that Beecher was not and, undoubtedly to the 
churchman's chagrin, Ohioans welcomed him with enthusiasm. Barnum, 
reared in a Connecticut inn, not in the Beecher family's Puritan atmosphere, 
was manager of Scudder's fantastic American Museum in New York. His 
dabbling in lotteries, his delight in hoaxes, his exploitation of colored 
Joyce Heath who, when she died, was more nearly eighty years old than 
Barnum's advertised one hundred and sixty were already in the public 
record. 

Barnum had presented Midget "General Tom Thumb." Songster Jenny 
Lind's 1850 concert tour had been under this showman's spectacular di- 
rection. Like Beecher, he offered Cincinnati a speech on philosophy. But 
his was The Philosophy of Humbug, in which realm he was already known 
as "The Prince." 

Beecher had annoyed the Ohio public by arriving as a lecturer under 
the auspices of an agent, a Chicagoan named Wells. Enraged local asso- 
ciations, accustomed to monopolizing the field, had started a newspaper 
campaign against him. Agent Wells demanded $125 for one evening. Cin- 



xii Introduction 

cinnati, Cleveland and Columbus boycotted the series, with only a handful 
of the faithful turning out to hear the idol of the east, and Beecher wrote 
letters to the newspapers defending the use of a lecture agent. 

The next year, unencumbered by the grasping Mr. Wells and once again 
handling his own bookings, Beecher returned and all seemed forgiven. He 
talked one night to twenty-three hundred persons who jammed an audi- 
torium and sent away disappointed hundreds who could not get through 
the doors. His subject was the old standby, Patriotism 

Another lecturer who remained extremely popular for a long period 
was globe-trotting Bayard Taylor. He was twenty-eight years old when 
he first set out on the Lyceum road, but he had more experiences to talk 
about than most men twice his age. In the inky tradition of so many 
lecturers, he had begun life as a printer's devil, but at nineteen already had 
a book of verse to his credit. By the time he was twenty-one he had covered 
Britain, France, Italy and Germany, most of the way afoot, on a journey 
of two years that cost him five hundred dollars. He made more than that 
from his travel articles in the New York Tribune and the Philadelphia 
Saturday Evening Post, then collected the material in a book that sold 
well. 

At age twenty-four Taylor was on his way again, this time crossing 
America ahead of the railroads and, after filling many notebooks in the 
California gold camps, he returned to New York by way of Mexico. His 
volume based on this experience, entitled El Dorado; or, Adventures in the 
Path of Empire, sold ten thousand copies in America, three times as many in 
Britain. Also, from the trip he brought back many soft Spanish phrases for 
use in later verse, and some rollicking ballads of the gold camps. 

Without tarrying long enough to see the new book, the young man crossed 
the seas and began working his way up the Nile and into central Africa: 
object, travel literature. He was twenty-seven when he sailed from Egypt 
for Calcutta. After a brief sojourn in China, where he scribbled notes end- 
lessly, he fell in with Commodore Matthew Perry, who was about to open 
the door to Japan. Naturally Taylor went along. 

Arriving home at Christmas, 1853, with two more books and sheaves of 
new verses ready for the printer, the traveller set out at once on fifteen 
years of lecturing, in which time he gave eighty-five talks in Ohio alone, 
several thousand others all the way from Maine to Wisconsin and the 
Carolinas. Between tours he found energy to accept several diplomatic 
(posts, each of brief duration, which permitted him to add Russia to his far- 
flung subject matter and the River Neva to his poetry. 

On Taylor's lecture tours, in which he discussed The Arabs, Japan, India, 
Moscow and The Philosophy oj Travel, he was described in the newspapers 
as "handsome, six-feet, four-inches tall, with ruddy complexion and bright 
blue eyes." Women adored him. 

Like Barnum's, Taylor's style was informal; "easy and gentlemanlv," a 



Introduction xiii 

newspaper wrote, "a man of and from the people who put on no airs." 
His travel talks eventually gave way to more abstract discussion of Ameri- 
can society. 

In contrast to its hat-tossing reception of Taylor, audiences in the mid- 
west welcomed Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes with restrained enthusiasm. 
Despite his humorous writings, the people did not find him witty on the 
platform. 

Perhaps at the moment the good doctor did not feel witty. He followed 
the practice of delivering several lectures in succession; after all, travel to 
this remote area was not too easy in 1855, and if one jounced and rolled 
all the way on a sooty train from the "Hub of the Universe," as Dr. Holmes 
had christened Boston, it should be for more than one hour's appearance. 

Humorists of the era were a race apart. Mark Twain, having bought his 
first success with five free tickets, was able to maintain it by entirely ortho- 
dox means. He had reversed the trend. Instead of coming from the east, 
he travelled across country toward it. Handsome, urbane, even better 
dressed than the best-dressed-man-in-town he introduced the cream- 
colored silk formal evening suit Twain poked fun at himself and at the 
foibles of the human race in general. But he pushed home his punch lines 
with a sabre, rather than with the dull barnyard shovel employed by many 
well-paid humorists of the period. 

Usually humorists had made their reputations with the printed, misspelled 
word. The more exaggerated the misspelling, the more devastatingly funny 
it was considered. This type of humor, naturally, was hard to translate from 
the printed page to the lecture hall. So comedians on the platform sub- 
stituted gross mispronunciation and backwoods Americanisms. They posed 
as midwestern villagers or New England farmers, shrewd and iconoclastic, 
but with verbal hayseed in their hair. 

Except for Mark Twain, the most successful dispenser of platform hu- 
mor in the decades following the Civil War was Henry Wheeler Shaw, 
who called himself "Josh Billings." His big, far-reaching voice and New 
England country twang were come by honestly, for in his younger years 
he had been an auctioneer in Lanesborough, Massachusetts. His Essa on 
a Muel, published in 1860 in The New York Weekly, was widely quoted 
and gave him some celebrity along the Atlantic seaboard. When he first 
wrote it, he spelled the words properly and no one read it But "mule" 
became "muel" in the second edition and sales zoomed. Later he recited 
the "essa" on the lecture platform, together with What I Kno about Hotels 
and The Pensive Cockroach, which might have been grandfather to the 
"archy" of Don Marquis. 

Billings' Farmers Allmmax were full of his sound, unsoundly spelled 
philosophy. "Most people," he wrote, "repent ov their sins bi thanking 
God they aint so wicked as their nabors." 

There was a great deal of deep discussion of "manifest destiny" among 



3Q V Introduction 

politicians at the time, to the confusion of most of the people. So Billings 
wrote a piece about it, calling it "the science ov going tew bust, or enny 
other place, before you git thare." He also gave it as his considered opinion 
that "manifest destiny ... is like the number ov rings on the rakoon's 
tale, ov no great consequense only for ornament." 

Another humorist of the era was New York-born David Ross Locke, a 
printer and editor who, in 1860, became a columnist on the Toledo Blade. 
There he invented an ignorant, bigoted, letter-writing character whom he 
called "Rev. Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, Confident of President Andrew 
Jackson," and it was as "Nasby" that Locke became famous on the plat- 
form. Like Josh Billings, his outrageous spelling tickled the nation's fancy. 
One book, Swtngin' Round the Cirkle, became a best seller. 

Nasby's humor had a ragged and painful cutting edge and he used it 
mercilessly in attacks on slavery and on the Democratic party. According 
to the Nation, "His humor, apart from the Democracy, is not remarkable 
. . . and sometimes coarse." 

Another humorist in the Josh Billings-Petroleum Nasby tradition was 
Charles Farrar Browne, famous as "Artemus Ward." Born in Maine, he 
had gone to work at thirteen as a printer's devil in New Hampshire, then 
followed his trade through a dozen cities until, like so many Lyceum favor- 
ites, he settled in Ohio. 

Artemus Ward not only went to work young, became famous young, 
but he died young. He had spent four years on the platform and had writ- 
ten five books, when "consumption" took him off in 1867, at the age of 
thirty-three. He had had fun, burning uncounted candles at both ends. In- 
spired misspellings marked his writings, and he even applied it to his original 
name, adding the final "e" to plain "Brown," he once explained, "as an 
afterthought." On the platform he was gawky and ungainly, and he de- 
livered his funniest lines with a blank expression and a quiet, almost hesi- 
tant style that enriched their humor. 

One of Artemus Ward's best-remembered remarks was that "Old George 
Washington's fort was not to hev eny public man of the present day re- 
semble him to eny alarmin extent." Writing from "Pitsburg," in 1858, to 
the "Cleeveland Plane Deeler," he offered to take "a show" to the city 
beside Lake Erie. His display consisted of "a Calforny Bare two snakes 
tame foxies & also wax works my wax works is hard to beat, all say they 
is life and nateral curiosities among my wax works is Our Saveyer Gen 
taylor and Docktor Webster in the ackt of killing Parkman." 

That was funny enough to make Artemus Ward famous a hundred years 
ago. 

Meanwhile, throughout the south, religious camp meetings were taking 
the place of the humorous fellows and the staid lecturers in the north. The 
man who, more than any other, was responsible for these hallelujah 
gatherings was a Connecticut zealot named Lorenzo Dow, who began his 



Introduction 



xv 

















Facsimile oj a letter from Josh Billings to Redpath. 



xv j Introduction 

preaching career in 1794 at the age of seventeen. He always put on a 
good show under the stars and as many folk came to hear him tear into 
the Pope as came to get their souls saved. 

Dow was first a Methodist preacher, but the church suspended him 
after three months and he became a non-denominational shouting evange- 
list. He preached the first Protestant sermon ever heard in Alabama and 
spread the Gospel, as he interpreted it, all the way from the Carolinas 
where he was convicted of libel to Tennessee. When he was twenty-one, 
he went to Ireland "to save it from Catholicism," but after eighteen months 
he retired in disorder toward home. 

Before long the itinerant Dow attacked Methodism, which he found 
"tainted with Popery"; then, giving up the camp meeting platform, he re- 
tired to New England, where he invented a nostrum which he insisted 
would "cure biliousness." In Lorenzo Dow the outdoor pulpit and the 
medicine show walked hand in hand. He made some converts, but his 
oratorical and theological excesses also tickled the American funny bone. 

The people, like Mark Twain's drunken stranger, wanted to laugh They 
also wanted to be uplifted and edified. Lyceum managers tried desperately 
to supply both needs. In the end, the preachers and poets lectured in 
churches, "atheneums" and libraries, while the humorists often were rele- 
gated to the less refined "opera house" or village hall. 

The twentieth century was four years old, and Mark Twain was once 
more almost penniless, when comedy and culture finally met on equal terms. 
To achieve this, a showman named Keith Vawter, like 'Twain a product 
of the middle west, put the two forms of entertainment on the same plat- 
form in a travelling tent. He married the respectability of the Lyceum to 
the spangles of the stage, naming the union "Chautauqua" after an insti- 
tution established permanently on Chautauqua Lake, New York. 

For a quarter century thereafter, Chautauqua and Lyceum covered the 
same geographical area, fed on the same deep passion for uplift, shared the 
same taboos, used the same talent, often were operated by the same men. 
Chautauqua, as Vawter and his followers developed it, was Lyceum cavort- 
ing in the fields, minus its long winter underwear. In Chautauqua the pulpit 
was out of sight, though never out of mind. 

If Lyceum chose to be amusing, it did so with scrupulous decorum. It 
laughed, but never boisterously. Chautauqua, on the contrary, was show 
business, genteel, prudent, more respectable than Phineas T. Barnum, but 
show business just the same. Lyceum, appearing in church, school and 
library, with an occasional side trip to the Odd Fellows Hall, used a plat- 
form. Chautauqua boldly set up a stage. There was a subtle difference. 

Chautauqua tents rolled back and forth and up and down America for 
nearly thirty years. Pitched in pastures, school yards and courthouse squares, 
they offered not only the soaring oratory of a William Jennings Bryan, but 
also music, drama, magic, art lessons, cooking classes, low comedy and 



Introduction xvii 

high-minded debates. Millions of eager listeners under the "big top" canvas, 
hot with summer's sun, perspired freely and soaked up both erudition and 
amusement. 

Famous men and women, statesmen and politicians, explorers and ad- 
venturers, actors and opera stars, heroes and an occasional well-publicized 
heel, each season covered the long summer trail. A few of them still hailed 
from New England, but a Beacon Hill background no longer assured a 
program spot. 

"Chautauqua week," in hundreds of communities, became the most im- 
portant five or six or seven days in the whole year. "The most American 
thing in America," Theodore Roosevelt called it, a statement that few tried 
to challenge in the first quarter of the century. 

Those persons old enough to remember it think fondly of the frosting 
on this Chautauqua cake and forget the intellectual calories underneath. They 
remember the handsome Singing Hussars, the Mikado opera companies, 
the magician's white rabbits or the cute little number with blond curls sing- 
ing Tipperary, and forget the debates, the arguments over legislation. 

Men talked freely from this new, informal platform. Taboos that had 
made the nineteenth-century Emersons and Alcotts stick to ringing praise 
of "Beauty" and "Kindness" were abandoned. To be sure, a few honey- 
voiced speakers clung to the inspirational line. Another New Englander, 
Judge George Alden, still urged a man "to know himself"; Robert Parker 
Miles pleaded for man "to let his light shine." In and out of Congress, 
oratory was still the favorite form of literature, but it was a new kind. A 
new kind of speaker planted his feet firmly on the platform in the tent 
and said exactly what he believed. Independent thinkers like Catholic 
Bishop John Ireland of Minnesota did not dodge the subject of temperance 
as Yankee Alcott had felt compelled to do. Sponsors of daring ideas ut- 
tered them freely and all America went home to think. The Edward 
Amherst Otts and the Judge Ben Lindseys discussed marriage, the Harvey 
Wileys dared demand pure food, "Fighting Bob" LaFollette attacked "Spe- 
cial Privilege" and Senator Albert Cummins the railroads. Inside the big 
brown tents, millions of Americans first heard impassioned pleas for a 
Federal income tax, slum clearance, free schoolbooks, world disarma- 
ment. 

Travelling Chautauqua, which took to the road in 1904, had a glamorous 
and footloose life. It died in 1932 under the hit-and-run wheels of a 
Model-A Ford on its way to the movies on a new paved road. Radio swept 
it into the ditch, and the Wall Street crash and the subsequent depression 
gave it the coup de grace. 

It is important to realize that Chautauqua tents went up at that mo- 
ment in history precisely half way between Pickett's cavalry charge at 
Gettysburg and the bomb run over Hiroshima. The frontier had moved; rail- 
roads spanned the continent; But there still remained in the southwest a 



Introduction 

few blank spaces on the maps. Horsepower still meant horses. The America 
that watched the first Chautauqua tent rise in an Iowa meadow in 1904 
and the America that saw the last tent come down, twenty-nine years later 
in a little Illinois village, were separated by a period that marked swift 
changes in a people's thinking, in concepts of both humor and morality, in 
public and private manners. 

Early Lyceum had endured a Civil War; tent Chautauqua survived the 
Argonne and Belleau Wood. The movement had reached from T.R. to 
F.D.R., from the surrey with a fringe on top to a speedometer that could 
register seventy miles an hour. In that fraction of history the nation had 
experimented nobly with prohibition and made education universal, as 
the old Lyceums had dreamed it should be. It had wrapped radio bands 
around the continent, taken to the skies in airplanes, fallen madly in love 
with Mary Pickford, and as quickly forgotten her. 

Tornadoes wrecked Chautauqua tents. In Kansas, one summer, winds 
blew pianos off the stage. Artists dodged falling tent poles. The lights went 
out Floods washed away bridges the troupes were trying to cross to reach 
the next town by curtaintime. Cows bellowed and freight trains hooted in 
the midst of soprano solos. Backers lost their shirts and railroads lost tents 
and stage sets. 

But the show went on. ... 

K. D. 



Acknowledgments 



The authors are particularly indebted for assistance to Carl E. Backman 
and Miss Amy M. Weiskopf of the Chicago office of the Redpath Bureau; 
to former circuit owners Crawford A. Peffer, Charles F. Homer, Louis J. 
Alber and Benjamin Franklin; to Librarians Dorothy Higbie of Cornell 
College, Clyde C. Walton, Jr. of the University of Iowa, Opal Carr of the 
University of Oklahoma, Stanley Pergellis of the Newberry, Chicago; and 
the staffs of the Library of the University of Arizona, of the Public Library 
of Traverse City, Michigan, and the Reader's Digest Research Department, 
and to Professor Albert T. Cordray of Michigan State College. 

Former Chautauqua talent who generously contributed many facts 
include William Rainey Bennett, Attene Pettit Collmer, Dean Jagger, 
Blanche Pinkerton Jones and the late Hilton Ira Jones, Everett C. Kemp, 
Fay Pettit Maddy, Caroline McCartney, Magdalen Massmann, Jess Pugh, 
Clyde Tull, Jewell Bothwell Tull, and William W. Weatherwax. 

Thanks go also to many former Chautauqua staffers, including Don Al- 
ford, Oscar Allanson, Oliver E. Behymer, O. O. Bottorff, Herbert Boughey, 
Richard R. Eddy, Earl H. Gammons, Rail I. Grigsby, the late Hugh T. 
Gruell, Raymond Harrington, Charles Hedges, William Knox, C. B. Mc- 
Intyre, Joseph Meade, H. Z. Musselman, Hugh Orchard, Paul K. Scott, 
Richard A. Taylor, H. R. Templeton, Miss Jean Thompson. 

Others who assisted include Editors J. H. Smith of Pulaski, Tennessee 
and A. W. Hamblin of Bedford, Iowa, J. Elder Blackledge of Indianapolis, 
Mrs. Arthur Esgate of Washington, D.C., Mrs. Mathilda Anderson, Mrs. 
Carl Nelson and Fred Send of Suttons Bay, Michigan. 

H. P. H. AND K. D. 



Contents 



INTRODUCTION vii 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xix 

1. 
STRIKE UP THE BAND 1 

2. 
"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN . . ." 9 

3. 
TALENT FOR SALE 18 

4. 
MR. JAMES REDPATH 31 

5. 
CHAUTAUQUA LAKE 39 

6. 
VAWTER HAS AN IDEA 50 

xxi 



xxjj Contents 

1. 
THE CURTAIN RISES 56 

8. 
BEDFORD IN THE MUD 69 

9. 
CHAUTAUQUA TAKES HOLD 77 

10. 
UP GOES THE BROWN TENT 83 

11. 
MUSIC IN THE AIR 97 

12. 
"LET'S FACE THE ISSUE ..." 116 

13. 
MOTHER, HOME AND HEAVEN 136 

14. 
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE 156 

15. 
IT TAKES ALL KINDS ... 169 

16. 
THE PLAY'S THE THING 189 

17. 
THE BIG TIME 205 

18. 
MAIDENS FAIR 217 

19. 
THE CLOCK TICKS ON 229 



Contents xxiii 

20 
TROUBLES FOR THE TREASURER 244 

21. 

EW> OF AN ERA 257 

22. 
HERITAGE 271 

275 



List of Illustrations 



Facsimile of a letter from Josh Billings to Redpath xv 

"Everyone Can Afford to Attend Chautauqua" 19 

Facsimile of a greeting from Thomas Edison 43 

Cartoon by Packard 68 

Drawing of William Jennings Bryan by Ross Crane 92 

"Ralph Bingham and John Bunny" cartoon by Packard 115 
"Political Headliners at the Chautauquas" drawings by Ross Crane 119 

Other Chautauqua Headliners 140 

Cartoon by Packard 155 

Poster announcing Humorists Bill Nye and A. P. Burbank 111 



XXV 



Illustrations inserted between pages 130 and 131: 



Bishop John H. Vincent 

James Redpath 

President Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan 

William Jennings Bryan arrives at a Chautauqua stopover 

Edgar Bergen in his Chautauqua days 

The White Hussars 

Typical audience outside the tent 

Season-ticket holders at Marengo, Illinois 

A tent-Chautauqua audience 

A tent on the circuit 

A Chautauqua boosters parade 

Ladies Harp Ensemble 

Daddy Groebecker*s Swiss Yodelers 

xxvii 



xxvm List of Illustrations 

Dunbar's Handbell Ringers 

Keith Vawter 

Opie Read 

Group photo famous Chautauqua personalities 

Princess Watahwaso 

Phil Clark and his Marching Men of Song 

The Deluxe Artist Singers 

Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink 

Alice Neilsen 

Jessie Ray Taylor, impersonator 

Julia Claussen with Harry P. Harrison 



CULTURE 
UNDER CANVAS 



Strike Up the Band 



The Community Band was playing on the depot platform, waiting for the 
train. The Big Chautauqua Special, bringing crowds from Northport, 
Omena and Peshawbetown, was due at seven o'clock. Band Leader Theo- 
dore Esch pulled out his big watch and looked at the time uneasily. Seven 
P.M. exactly, and no sight nor sound of the train. 

His men were beginning to be uncomfortable in their Sunday shoes. 
For thirty minutes they had been waiting in a stiff half circle, fifteen seri- 
ous musicians in brand-new uniforms, blue coats with brass buttons and 
choker collars fastened tight around perspiring necks. Except for Jim 
Hogan, first trombone, every player was on hand. Hogan had got bad 
news this morning about his boy, in a base camp overseas just two weeks. 
He didn't feel like any skylarking tonight. 

Everyone else did, though, everyone in town. Excitement had been 
mounting for a week and now that the big night actually was at hand, peo- 
ple were half wild. Even the air tingled; you could feel it. It made you 
want to sing, laugh, dance, slap your neighbor on the back, wave at your 
friends, cry "Hello, there! By gosh, this is something . . . nothing like it 
before in this town. . . ." 

It was Tuesday evening, August 7, 1917, Chautauqua's opening night 
in the old lumber port of Suttons Bay, Michigan, and no ordinary Chau- 
tauqua, either. This was the ultimate, the last glittering word in exciting 
grandeur, the world-famous Redpath DeLuxe Seven Day Circuit, coming 
to Suttons Bay fresh from artistic and civic triumphs in the state capital at 
Lansing, before that in South Bend, Indianapolis, Louisville. Next week 
it would even open in Chicago, in Jackson Park, site of the '93 World's 
Fair. Suttons Bay . . . population 400 . . . was justly proud, every 
member of the local committee especially so. Proud, but a bit uneasy, too, 

1 



2 Culture Under Canvas 

of course. Proud because this, by all odds, was the smallest community in 
which the great DeLuxe Circuit ever had hoisted its big tent. Uneasy be- 
cause so many unexpected things could pop up to mar what should be a 
glorious week. 

Within the hour, over at the Hose House, committeemen had held a 
last-minute meeting. They could think of nothing else to do. Everything 
was as ready as it ever could be. And with this big, expectant crowd . . . 
they tried to count it. Scores of single admissions were milling here near 
the station. The Committee had guaranteed a fat $2000 ticket sale out 
of their own pockets and several hundred singles tonight at fifty cents each 
would help. Of course they had sold the season tickets. That had been 
easy, even six hundred at two dollars and a half each, after the advance 
copies of the program arrived. First-night attraction was the "world-famous 
Bohemian orchestra" and smart local merchants were quick to take ad- 
vantage of that happy fact. A world-famous Bohemian orchestra! 

So up to the Bohemian Hills men had gone, by twos and threes, pockets 
full of the elegant pasteboards, to extol in a hundred parlors the glories 
of the coming show. Carl Lund, the cobbler, and Barber Fred Send had 
been most successful; if they skirted close to the edge of truth with their 
description of an orchestra full of "Bohemians fresh from Bohemia," it was 
certainly in a good cause. Those Bohemian farmers, most of them with 
eighty acres and big families and solid bank accounts, had not been too 
hard to sell on the proposition that it would be a disgrace to the memory 
of the old country to leave anybody in the family at home. One man on 
the Gills Pier road, sampling his black cherry wine when Lund arrived, felt 
so mellow and nostalgic that he shelled out $62.50 for twenty-five tickets. 
. . . "Bohemians should stick together.*' There had been many other 
incidents to enliven that ticket campaign. The Redpath Chautauqua office 
in Chicago had sent up a most personable young lady to help with the sale. 
Her name was Springsted, and it had been the town's most eligible bachelor, 
hypnotized by her charm and beauty, who inadvertently introduced her at 
the pep meeting as "Miss Bedstead." 

Band Leader Esch looked again at his watch. Five minutes past seven. 

The special train was still four miles from town, thumping southward 
through the long, soft Michigan twilight. Its single day coach and the ca- 
boose were jammed. People sat three to a double seat or stood swaying 
in the aisles, big families with wide-awake babies, moon-eyed couples, gay 
young blades, old folks, grinning high-school kids. There were lumbermen, 
fishermen, storekeepers, fanners, teachers; Norwegians and Swedes and 
Bohemians, a few Frenchies'and Chippeway Indians two hundred in all. 

Only the Indians sat silent. Everyone else was singing. The car windows 
were opened wide and happy voices floated out past the new cherry orchards 
and across the Michigan countryside, while the flat wheels of the day coach 
ticked away like a giant metronome. 



Strike Up the Band 3 

"K-k~k-katie, beautiful Katie, 

"You're the only g-g-g-girl that I adore. . . ." I 

The festive spirit of the occasion touched even Conductor Charley 
Decker, a man not easily stirred out of his immense, square-jawed dignity. 
To his surprise he found himself singing lustily along with the rest and 
up in the locomotive, Engineer Lee Mann threw frugality to the winds and 
wasted steam joyously, tooting the throaty whistle. 

He tooted more loudly and long at the county road north of town. The 
crowd waiting at the Suttons Bay depot heard, this time, and began to 
cheer. In their excitement they even mauled up one of the committee mem- 
bers, but he didn't mind. Why should he? The crowd was good-natured. 
And getting bigger. Editor K. Gus Smarey of the Provemont Courier, who 
had hitched a five-mile ride to be on hand, vowed that this was the greatest, 
happiest, finest-looking lot of people ever collected in the whole county. 
They had poured in all day, sweltering hot though it had been, home folk 
and resorters from all over the area arriving in wagons, cars, spanking new 
Maxwells, Reos and Model-T Fords, even one old White Steamer manned 
by a Frenchie from over Provemont way. Farmers from as far as Good 
Harbor and Cedar City had driven in long before noon, with tents and 
cooking gear piled in their buckboards, and were camping along the bay 
shore. There wasn't an empty bed in the town and the livery barn had been 
doing a rushing business filling straw ticks. 

The town looked fine, too. It still was light enough for visitors to see 
how really pretty Main Street was, with everything polished and shined up 
and strings of Chautauqua pennants stretched across the road. Up and 
down the entire two blocks from Lars Sogge's grocery to Nixie SteimePs 
Suttons Bay House Hotel, merchants had draped their stores with bunting 
and had not been stingy about it either; and along the walks on both sides 
of the street the G.A.R. and the Spanish-American vets had set up new 
poles with brand-new American flags. Their color still showed even now 
in the twilight; so did the classy red and green felt hats that the young 
ladies were wearing, with the words "Redpath Chautauqua" printed on 
them . . . those Chautauqua folks certainly could think of everything! 

George Smeltzer, the village drayman, who yesterday had hauled the 
heavy tent from the depot to the Chautauqua grounds, had dressed up his 
old gray horse in a gorgeous green-and-white cotton blanket with the 
word "Redpath" painted on it and tonight he still found it necessary to clop- 
clop busily up and down the street. Today George had hauled the piano 
and the xylophone from the noon train and reported later that the xylophone 
fellow was mighty pleased with the careful way George handled his precious 
instrument. 

The orchestra and most of the artists had arrived earlier on the noon 

*K-k-k-katy by Geoffrey O'Hara. Copyright 1918/Copyright Renewal 1945, Leo 
Feist, Inc. Used by special permission Copyright Proprietor. 



4 Culture Under Canvas 

train. A reception committee, headed by Township Supervisor Oliver Han- 
son and Village President Ernest Hughes, had welcomed the group at the 
depot. Mr. Hughes, the popular undertaker, was a man who knew human 
nature, and he said that they all, four men and three women, seemed like 
very nice people. He did think, though, that Mr. Giuseppi Bartolotta, the 
tenor soloist, looked more like an Italian than a Bohemian, in spite of the 
name "World Famous Bohemian Orchestra." 

At noon also, there had been a crowd here at the track and John 
Ott, the Maxwell dealer, had certainly put one over on the Dodge agent, 
Frank Clark. Ott turned up in a shiny new Maxwell touring car with its top 
strapped down and Chautauqua pennants floating out behind, and before 
Clark knew what was going on, all the famous artists rode off in the Max- 
well to the houses where they were to be entertained. 

Ten minutes past seven. In exactly thirty-five minutes the curtain would 
open in the tent on the vacant lot on the nameless "back street" behind 
Gronseth's shoe store. It had gone up once already. There had been a 
short musical program this afternoon and an entertainment for the kids. 
The heroic woman who called herself the "Story-Hour Girl" had begun her 
frantic task of training all the children for an evening performance of the 
"Mother Goose Festival" later in the week. But tonight was the real be- 
ginning. 

Leader Esch lifted his silver cornet. Here came the train. The slow sweet 
notes of A Long, Long Trail swelled out against the noise of the engine. 
Visitors piled off front and back platforms, on both sides of the track. They 
were in a hurry, but two hundred is a big crowd of people and it took time 
to unload Charley Decker helped the last woman off carefully, old Mrs. 
Dunlap with her two canes. She was eighty-five if a day, but she had taught 
music forty years and she wouldn't miss a feast like this for the risk of a 
dozen broken hips. She had with her two great-grandchildren, girls in sashes 
and plenty of starch, who were supposed to give her a hand but who were 
so goggle-eyed at the Community Band that they forgot great-grandmother. 

The band had broken circle and lined up four abreast. The snare drum- 
mer gave a couple of long rolls and The National Emblem filled the air 
and bounced back in a thrilling echo from Larson's Point across the bay. 
At the first blast, half a dozen fanners had to leap down from their wagons 
and hold their horses' heads. The crowd shied off for a moment, then 
straightened out and followed the band, troops of bare-footed boys in the 
lead. 

Up at the Chautauqua grounds a long line stretched out at the box office. 
Superintendent and crew boys, sizing it, already had rolled up the canvas 
walls of the tent and put plank benches around the outside, enough for 
four hundred extra persons. The planks had come on loan from Mr. Chad- 
sey's lumber yard and the superintendent had agreed generously to an- 
nounce that fact when he addressed the crowd. 



Strike Up the Band 5 

The Community Band halted in a circle in the road before the tent. The 
last two numbers were to be Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet and 1 Want a 
Girl and the men certainly gave everything they had, playing them. People 
cheered and again wiped their faces beaded with perspiration from walking 
so fast and funnelled excitedly into the gate. It might be even hotter inside 
the tent, but who cared? There was no delay. As soon as every seat was 
taken, all the elegant new folding chairs as well as the planks, the stage 
lights flashed on and the curtain opened on the handsome young Redpath 
superintendent standing there in fresh white duck pants and blue coat, 
smiling and showing all his teeth. 

Folks said afterward that the fellow certainly knew how to talk. He 
began by saying that Buttons Bay was the greatest little town in the world; 
everybody knew that, why otherwise had the Redpath Seven Day DeLuxe 
Circuit stopped here? Then he went on to tell enthusiastically about all the 
wonderful attractions which would fill the big stage the coming seven joy- 
ful afternoons and seven gala nights. A few choice season tickets might still 
be for sale, he added. Just a few. Then he introduced the crew boys, except 
the one sitting on a paper sack full of cash in the box office, and explained 
that these young men were well-known college athletes working to make 
money for next year's school. When he suggested that they deserved a hand, 
the audience responded loudly. 

Now the famous Bohemian orchestra took its place on the stage. Joseph 
Mach, the polite young director who also played the violin, had his three 
young ladies take a bow first . . . they were the cellist, violinist, and the 
pretty one at the piano. Then the clarinetist had a turn and James Hurt, an 
artist with the xylophone, who could play the drums, too. You could hear 
the old fanner from Gills Pier road, who had bought the twenty-five tickets, 
clapping harder than anybody else for the three young ladies. This, because 
they were wearing real Bohemian costumes with a lavish lot of color and 
plenty of embroidery on their aprons and caps, in contrast to the men in 
sober black tail coats and white ties. 

Mr. Bartolotta, the tenor, a handsome fellow with a big, dark mustache, 
announced his own numbers. It was true, he had an accent that certainly 
wasn't Bohemian, just as Undertaker Hughes had thought. A Neapolitan, 
somebody else said he was, but it didn't really matter after the crowd once 
heard him sing Silver Threads Among the Gold. "Soul feeling," the news- 
paper described it next day. He had a few numbers with foreign names, but 
chiefly good American songs like The End of a Perfect Day and Somewhere 
a Voice Is Calling. 

The orchestra opened with Hungarian Rhapsody. Then it played Water 
Lilies by St. Qair, a Beethoven minuet which old Mrs. Dunlap applauded 
for all she was worth by knocking her canes together, and then a Kela Bela 
waltz and other numbers which the Bohemian audience liked. For his own 
solo Mr. Mach offered Kreisler, but the high point of the evening was Mr. 



6 Culture Under Canvas 

Hurt's athletic rendition of Finniculi, Finmcula on the xylophone, "accom- 
panied by the entire orchestra." He must have been a tired man that night, 
for the crowd liked it so much that he generously repeated it three times. 

The evening's speaker was the Reverend Martin D. Hardin of Chicago. 
People had read about him in the advertising folders and so some of them, 
particularly the young folks, were a little disappointed in his looks. He 
had been billed as "a man looking for peace with a gun in his hand," and 
he not only had no gun but he was quite mild in expression. His subject 
was America and the World of Tomorrow. It was a deadly serious speech 
and the platform superintendent, introducing him, said that William Jen- 
nings Bryan had once called it "the greatest appeal to the Christian con- 
science made during this world crisis." The audience agreed that it was 
quite a speech and not very much too long. 

Motion pictures of Yellowstone Park finished the evening. When the 
crowd left the tent, people were saying that the following six nights would 
have to be mighty choice to equal this opening performance. 

They were choice, too. The Beulah Buck Ladies Quartet dressed in 
colonial costume, a Spanish cellist, and the Oratorio Artists all were on 
hand for one night each. The Artists were a mixed quartet out of New 
York. Its baritone, a pleasant-looking young man named Frederick Wheeler, 
had a solid chin, big hands, a pearl in his black necktie and an idea that 
this crowd would like the Road to Mandalay, and he wasn't wrong. The 
second evening Harry L. Fogelman of New York his friends called him 
"Gattiing Gun Fogelman" because, they said, he could deliver three hun- 
dred words a minute talked on An Analysis of Success and Failure. Mr. 
Fogelman, the leaping, athletic type, also was known as "the Billy Sunday 
of Business," and he told the Suttons Bay merchants that he had small 
sympathy for those unpleasant muckrakers who cast aspersions on captains 
of industry. 

Of course, the afternoon crowds were not so large, women for the most 
part, who had to hurry when the program ended to get home and fix sup- 
per and be back on time for the evening performance. One of the after- 
noon speakers was George L. McNutt, "the Dinner Pail Man," with a lot 
of good, sensible ideas on How to Meet the High Cost of Living. Another 
was the Reverend B. F. McDonald of Newark, Ohio. His title was Moon- 
shine, and some people thought he didn't make it too clear as to what kind 
he was talking about. 

Every afternoon there was a half hour of community singing, led by 
another acrobat, this one a former clergyman, who also helped the Story- 
Hour Girl ride herd on her young charges in the forenoons. Because the na- 
tion was at war, the songs for the most part were martial, like Maryland, 
My Maryland and Hail, Columbia, but every day when the leader asked 
the audience what it wanted, the same bass voice from somewhere down 
in front demanded Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep. Folks could sing it 
pretty well before the week was over. 



Strike Up the Band 7 

As the days went on the programs became even better. TTie fourth night 
opened with the Spanish cellist, followed by beautiful and aristocratic 
Princess Watahwaso. She was a full-blooded Penobscot Indian from Maine, 
"flower of one of the last pure Indian families," the program said. She 
sang tribal songs, told tribal legends, and danced in tribal costumes, in- 
cluding a feathered war bonnet, to the astonishment of the Chippeways 
from Peshawbetown, who always sat huddled together in the rear of the 
tent. Suttons Bay remembers the Princess to this day as a charming, gifted 
young lady. "Bright Star" her name meant. Mrs. Carl Petersen, at whose 
house she was entertained, says she never had a more appreciative house 
guest. 

As if two attractions were not enough for one evening, Fraulein Marie 
Mayer of Oberammergau, Germany, a woman in her upper forties, lec- 
tured next on the Passion Ploy, in which she once had taken the part of 
Mary Magdalene. It seems that the Redpath management had felt some 
worry about whether or not this fraulein would appear. Even if she was a 
first cousin of Anton Lang, the Christus, America was at war with Ger- 
many. But she proved to the satisfaction of Washington that she hated 
Kaiser Wilhelm, so here she was. 

There was no Sunday evening performance, which was just as well, for 
people and artists needed a day of rest. Saturday night the crowd had 
overflowed the tent to hear Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, with "an all- 
star New York cast of thirty, including the orchestra." Arthur Aldrich, who 
actually had played on Broadway, took the part of Nanki Pooh, and single 
admissions went up to seventy-five cents. 

This was a big night for everybody, particularly for Lars Sogge's daugh- 
ter. The Sogge house stood across the street from the Chautauqua grounds 
and his daughter, Rose, a musician of great talent everybody knew, was 
very ill. Hearing of her desire to see the play, the Redpath superintendent 
kindly took down the canvas wall opposite the house and Miss Rose 
watched and listened from her bed by the window. It was a memorable 
night, too, for Mrs. Charley Abbott of Detroit, whose husband owned the 
power plant that supplied the county with intermittent current. She lost the 
big diamond out of her engagement ring somewhere in the tent and super- 
intendent and crew helped hunt it, unsuccessfully, until dawn. No one ever 
did find it, not even the small boys who scrounged through the grass all 
the next week; one reason, it had rained torrents Sunday night, almost in 
itself a catastrophe. Water poured down until the little creek meandering 
past the grounds overflowed and spread like a flood toward the tent. Crew 
boys at dawn had thrown up a low dike and, as the water ran off, spread 
straw so that not one lady at the next performance even soiled her best 
shoes. 

Monday night's program opened with the Mother Goose Festival, in 
which platoons of local children took part The crowd was immense, what 
with loyal uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents and all the 



8 Culture Under Canvas 

neighbors dutifully attending. They thought it splendid, even though 
the dark-haired young Story-Hour Girl sat down on the ground behind 
the stage when it was over and told the superintendent that she had passed 
the limit of human endurance. 

A good, solid, "vital" lecture had been scheduled for that evening, too, 
by Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin of Montana, "subject to congressional 
duties." Congress was in emergency session so she did not appear. Some 
people thought it was just as well, for Suttons Bay was a patriotic village 
and had small sympathy for anyone who talked about peace at any price. 
Miss Rankin, a leading pacifist, had voted against war, and Spanish- 
American veterans in several cities had passed flag-draped resolutions 
against her. Instead of presenting the Congresswoman after the children's 
show, the superintendent ran off two special reels of moving pictures. The 
women were disappointed, even if the veterans were not. 

There was no let down, however. The last night not only brought the 
special train from the north again, but a dozen chartered boats from Trav- 
erse City, sixteen miles up the bay. Again tickets were seventy-five cents 
for this program, and cheap enough, too, to hear the great Giuseppe Crea- 
tore in person directing his world-famous band. No one argued Creatore's 
nationality, nor his musicianship. A swarthy man with a headful of upstand- 
ing black hair and a mustache of heroic proportions, he seemed to pull 
magic sounds out of his troupe by physical effort. No one else, not even 
the Bohemian xylophone player or Gattling Gun Fogelman, had half ap- 
proached his energy. The red, white and blue folder claimed his direction 
was "cyclonic," which indeed was no exaggeration. He lunged and leaped. 
He swung his baton like a baseball bat, jabbed it like a javelin, sank almost 
to the floor as he pleaded for andante tranquilino effects. His men re- 
sponded. The only rest they got all evening was when the Redpath super- 
intendent stepped out to talk persuasively about next year's contract. For 
the final number the entire audience rose and, led by the sensational 
Creatore, sang The Star Spangled Banner, then applauded so wildly and so 
long that the conductor made his worn-out men play it over again. 

Thus ended the visit of the great DeLuxe Circuit. If there had been a show 
the next day, people would have staggered back to hear it, but since this 
was the last, they just folded their souvenir programs carefully, nodded 
good nights and went home to bed. It would take weeks to digest all they 
had heard. 

Most of the children had to be carried aboard the train back to North- 
port. There was no singing. Except for folks saying enviously that Suttons 
Bay certainly was to be congratulated for putting on such a glorious treat, 
there was little talk. The engineer blew his whistle only once for a grade 
crossing. Nearly everyone, even old Mrs. Dunlap, slept. 

That was Suttons Bay. That was Chautauqua. That was small town 
America in 1917. 



^Ladies and Gentlemen . . . 



I heard my first lecture, the first of ten thousand, in 1893 in the little opera 
house at Anita, in western Iowa, in the heart of that vast midwest area 
known later as "the Chautauqua belt." It was a snowy night. "&"*3bzen 
bright kerosene lamps Tighll^ffielfoom, smoking slightly as hanging lamps 
were wont to do, when a fat young man in a stylish Philadelphia suit bounced 
up to the platform and said, "Ladies and Gentlemen . . ." 

His name was Ralph Bingham. He had hopped off the Rock Island 
local that afternoon, wearing fawn-colored gloves, a big fur collar on his 
coat and a pearl stickpin in his elegant flowered-silk tie. Everyone in Anita 
and the surrounding country who could scrape together the twenty-five- 
cents admission fee, in that year of panic, had crowded into the room. 
I had three nickels and a dime, so I was there. I had just turned fifteen. 

Ralph Bingham was more than a lecturer. He was actor, humorist, mu- 
sician, storyteller, philosopher, and gentleman. He played the piano and 
violin, sang, acted out amusing stories. He was droll, debonair, beaming, 
sparkling with good humor. He began his program that night and many 
nights thereafter with a gay song called Ta-ra-ra Boom de-ay and, off 
to that hilarious start, kept up the same pace for an hour and a half. 

Ta-ra-ra Boom de-ay already had survived two seasons on Broadway. 
I don't remember the name of the musical show in which it first was sung, 
or who was the dashing lady in red who lifted her long skirts, daringly dis- 
played her petticoats, and gave a can-can kick with every <c boom." Of course, 
it was new to Iowa, and though there were no red skirts, Bingham kicked 
up his heels when he sang it and impressed and delighted all of us, in 
little Anita. In fact, the crowd enjoyed everything he did. Whether he 
winked, scowled, yawned, whistled or hummed, the people liked it; but they 
laugjhed hardest when he laughed, which was much of the time. 

9 



10 Culture Under Canvas 

The first story was Brother Jones' Sermon. Bingham was a southerner, 
born in Richmond, Virginia, Probably half the stories of his long, success- 
ful platform career were pleasant tales of colored folk. "Darky" vernacular 
was popular in those days. There was no sting in its humor; to the people 
in my town it was simply the way some folks happened to talk, as a Swede 
"just over" from the old country or a Yankee peddler from down-east might 
"talk funny." The Victor Company later made records of this Bingham 
monologue, and of many Bingham acts, and all sold widely. They are typi- 
cal of the kind of humor that drew uproarious laughter before the turn of 
the century. 

"Brother Jones," as Bingham told it, took his text from "the 14th verse 
of the 14th chapter according to the gospel of etomology." It read: "And 
de Lord cured the multitude of divers diseases." 

Bingham sat at the piano for most of the "sermon," strumming out 
chords as the spirit moved him, reciting some lines, sing-songing others: 

"My beloved brethera and sistern, de Lor' cure de multitude of divers 
diseases! Does you all get dem words? . . . Let me 'lucidate . . . divers 
diseases! Does you notice? It don't say nothin' bout p/w-ral-a-sis or *nu- 
mon'ya, nothin' 'bout jan-dice or yaller fever. Nothin' 'bout little ol' com- 
mon mis'ries like m'laria, or Zy-phoid, or chills an' fever. . . . 

"An' de Lor' cure de multitude of divers diseases! Oh my chillen, my 
lambs, my pillars and bolsters o' de church! If you get de jan-dice, little 
oF tube o' salve Ma cure you . . . 'nM-mon'ya, little oF pill box kin cure 
you . . . n'ralgee, little oF sawbones kin saw you . . . but oh-h, my 
brethern! If you once get de divers, unh-unh, you're gone! You're de dead 
cock in de pit! 

"Nobody but de Lor* hisself kin cure de divers! Nobody but de Lor', my 
lambs . . . k'chew! . , . nobody but de Lor' hisself . , . k'chew! . . . 
k'chew! 

"Brethern an' sistern, we will now take up a c'lection . . . K'chew! . . . 
an' disband de meetin', for some o' dem lowdown white trash sittin' back 
dere has done throwed red pepper on de stove . . . K'CHEW!" 

Sneezing was a favorite expression of humor in the 90's and even much 
later. Jess Pugh, the entertainer, made a sneezing act famous in later Chau- 
tauqua. The people in Anita, Iowa, in 1893, laughed at Bingham's out- 
burst just as hard as they were expected to and he beamed and went rol- 
licking on to another story. This one, also a popular Victor record later, had 
to do with a possum hunt. 

It seems that a crowd of men down south went possum hunting one 
night. "Grandpaw," who couldn't walk very well, wanted to go, too. His 
sons didn't like the idea but the old man insisted, so they finally carried 
him all the way in a chair. They treed a big bear, thinking they had a pos- 
sum, and when the bear dropped to the ground, everybody ran, dogs, men, 



"Ladies and Gentlemen ..." 11 

rabbits, everybody. Half way home one son suddenly slowed and said, 
"Why, gosh sakes, we done forgot gran'paw!" 

"That's sure too bad," his brother said, keeping right on running. "We 
can't go back atter him, though. Poor gran'paw! The bear'll sure eat him 
up!" 

But when they got home, there sat grandpaw rocking. 

"How you get home, gran'paw?" they asked. 

"Me?" grandpaw said. "I come home 'head o' the dogs." 

People back east were singing The Bowery and After the Ball that first 
winter of Grover Cleveland's second administration. The mid-west had 
heard echoes of such light-hearted songs, but this was straight-laced, God- 
fearing Iowa. My parents kept a deck of playing cards in our parlor, even 
though we discreetly put them out of sight when certain neighbors came to 
call, but a "Bow'ry ablaze with lights" and dancers not starting home till 
"break o' morn" smacked in our part of the country of plain wickedness. 
Bingham, being smart, left out some New York songs. Instead he sang 
Daisy Bell 

Even in our small town the bicycle had arrived, presumably to stay. 
None of our neighbors wore black tights and none of them went scorching 
off cross-country on a "century-run," a hundred miles between dawn and 
dusk of a summer day. But occasionally when the roads were dry we had 
seen a crowd race by. There were plenty of bicycles in our village, never- 
theless, and one young married couple had even skylarked around the pre- 
ceding summer on a tandem. So everybody knew what this young man was 
singing about when he banged the keys and launched into: 

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true! 

"I'm half crazy, all for the love of you! 

"It won't be a stylish marriage, 

"I can't afford a carriage, 

"But you'll look sweet 

"Upon the seat 

"Of a bicycle built for two!" 

Bingham sang all the stanzas and repeated the chorus and men whistled 
and stomped their feet. Here was something brand-new and up-to-the- 
minute, their kind of song, American to the core and their kind of America. 
He had many more songs and more stories, the last one about a colored 
picnic. To get to the picnic spot, a crowd of young people rode on a train 
for the first time in their lives and it bounced, and to illustrate the bounce, 
fat Bingfram hopped away from the piano and jumped up and down, sing- 
ing, on the stage. 

Here ended the comedy. He closed his program with a serious three- 
minute sermon, a practice he continued in one form or another all his long 
career as an entertainer. "The lecture platform stands for good clean fun," 



12 Culture Under Canvas 

he said. "I've never yet used a story in Lyceum that I couldn't tell with 
my mother and sister in the audience. Dirt isn't funny. 

"H anybody tells you young men that you can't have fun without indulg- 
ing in dirt," he advised, "look him straight in the eye and tell him in plain 
English that he's a liar." 

Looking back on it, that speech may sound a bit corny, but in the de- 
clining days of the 19th century it appeared to be plain Iowa horse sense. 
It was the brief echo of the New England sermon, whispering its way 
across the prairies. It was the spirit of Lyceum. It wasn't yet smart to be 
cynical in rural America, Everyone in our audience was impressed. 

Bingham was in his early twenties. He had started on the platform as a 
six-year-old "boy wonder," touring the states and Canada under his fa- 
ther's management; at twelve he was a star in his own right and continued 
as a top-notch performer for thirty more years. He died in 1925. I little 
guessed that night in Anita, Iowa, that some day I would manage this in- 
triguing man's Chautauqua and Lyceum bookings, sending him out to cast 
his hilarious spell on other country boys. I probably saw him perform hun- 
dreds of times, one of the last occasions at the Lamb's Club in New York. 
I still believe Mm to be one of the great entertainers of our era and his short 
speech that night in Anita set an antiseptic standard for Chautauqua 
programs with which I was concerned, from beginning to end. He was the 
proverbial "funny man" who could laugh and grow fat, always fastidiously 
dressed, with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down tight. He was 
a hero, particularly in Philadelphia, in later years. He made his home there 
between lecturing trips, and the sports writers used to say that the Phillies* 
ball team would wait to crack a three-bagger until beaming "Bing" came 
into the stand to take his seat. 

Ralph Bingham charged the batteries of one boy's ambition, at least, 
and by the time I was nineteen years old I was principal of the Wiota, Iowa, 
school, just seven miles southwest of Anita. I stood six feet, two inches 
tall and was capable of keeping order in the classroom, if nothing else. But 
my most exciting duty for two years was to manage Wiota's winter Lyceum 
course. 

Our committee had $150 to buy four glorious evenings of information 
and entertainment. That was a lot of money, with the price of Iowa corn 
in Chicago both of those winters averaging between nineteen and twenty- 
one cents a bushel. The speakers cost j>25 to^$35 each, depending on their 
fame, so before we signed jfie Contracts ^welutd to be sure we were right. 
Years afterward, when Chautauqua was big business and I was managing 
four lively circuits, if I found myself impatient with some small-town com- 
mittee unable to make up its collective mind, I used to remember those 
Wiota days and that $150. 

Of course Ralph Bingham was the star of the Wiota course and he beamed 
with the same good spirits and was as funny as ever. He was billed as an 



"Ladies and Gentlemen . . ." 13 

"entertainer" this time, not as a "lecturer," and therein lay a subtle differ- 
ence. One could laugh freely at an "entertainer" and his nonsense without 
ever having to worry about laughing in the wrong place. In those days the 
more pompous speakers usually proclaimed somewhere in their perorations 
that "this is the message I bring," expecting everyone to listen solemnly and 
profit by it. Not Ralph Bingham. Instinct told him that even here on the 
half-empty prairies, a speaker had best poke fun at stuffiness. So he bounced 
up on the platform again, faced an already-smiling audience about two 
hundred and fifty there must have been, most of them having driven ten 
miles in open sleighs and announced in mock-serious tones, U I don't have 
a message for you tonight." Then added, "I'm not a messenger boy." 

There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight was just coming into 
its own as a popular song. It reached its peak as the men returned from 
the Spanish-American War. But even before the war, and even as far west 
as Iowa, young men in barbershops on Saturday night were singing it. 

In Anita that night, for the first time, I heard Bingham play it as a hymn, 
then as a march, then as a dirge, and finally as ragtime, a stunt he kept up 
for many years to the glee of hundreds of audiences. He called this act 
Bill Johnson and His One Tune, explaining how Johnson, a bashful lum- 
berjack, stumbled into a church that needed an organist and admitted, "Yeh, 
I kin play," and he could one tune. So he played it for a church service, 
then for a funeral, then at a wedding, finally for a wedding dance. 

The piano in the Wiota school was new; it had replaced the old reed 
organ that fall at a cost of $97. It was an upright, of course, and its elegant 
golden-oak case had that glassy polish which in those days was the last 
word in decoration. Squatting on a round piano stool with his fashionable 
long coattails flaring out behind, Bingham always looked like a gnome, par- 
ticularly to the newspaper cartoonists with whom he was a great favorite; 
not a sober, shriveled gnome, but an enthusiastic fellow whose highest pur- 
pose in life was to make the world happy. Years later, one summer in 
Chautauqua in South Dakota, he was playing the piano so hard that he 
fell off the stool. It was not intentional, but the people, who came to look 
upon everything he did as a prank, thought it was, and he let it go at that. 
He didn't intentionally split his trousers, either, the night he was appearing 
at Billy Sunday's Winona Lake Chautauqua, but the dreadful having hap- 
pened it happened so frequently to agile performers that they faced the 
catastrophe in their dreams Bing simply sat down on the floor, beamed, 
and said, "I'll do the rest of the show from here," and did. 

One of Bingham's most popular monologues after the advent of the 
Ford automobile was Mrs. Rastus Johnson's Joy Ride. This also was 
recorded by the Victor company. In this act a young colored boy named 
Wesley is taking his best girl for a ride in his new car, saying, "Ain't she a 
lolly-paluzer! Lissen to her purr, honey! Some kyar, I'll teU the world . . ." 

He is singing, "This little flivver with a funny little liver is good enough 



14 Culture Under Canvas 

forme . . . ," when the car stops and the boy tries to crank her. Bingham, 
for his sound effect in this particular monologue, in addition to a hammer 
and dishpan and what not, used the two old reliable tin cans and rosin on 
a string. 

The boy is saying, "Doggone ol' self-starter's balkin* on me, honey 
lamb! . . ." when there comes a "knock, knock, knock . . ." and he cries, 
"Whew, that's hard work . . . whew! Harder'n pickin' cotton. . . ." 

The girl suggests, "Mebbe you is out of gas, Wesley. . . ." 

"Mebbe you is out your head!" he shouts back, "I oozed five gallons in 
yest'idy! Where you 'spect I been since then? San Franfornia? Califrisco? 
. . . don't talk, woman, don't talk. . . ." Bang, bang . . . *Tse the doc- 
tor a'tendm' this infant ... she got enough gas to drown a pottahippamus. 
... Oh, Lord, oh Lord . . . well, mebbe she do need a gill or two of 
gas ... h'm, it's dark in here, woman . . . can't see ... gimme a 
match. . . ." 

BANG! BANG! BANG! 

"Whoa, whoa, Henery! She done exploded!" 

The girl says, "Nev 9 mind, Wesley, she's insure for $60. . , ," 

"But I ain't insure . . . you git a ladder, woman! Get me down outten 
this h'ar 'simmon tree quick!" 

Laughter again was uproarious. 

One winter the Wiota lecture course had a magician, nameless now. 
The prospectus described him as "mystifying" and "refined" and he cer- 
tainly proved to be both. He was the first man who ever made a rabbit 
do anything worth while in prairies plagued with too many rabbits, and his 
refinement was apparent to all. For our magician not only knew how to 
bow from the waist, but he was rigged up in formal court dress with knee 
breeches, silk stockings, buckled patent-leather pumps and a swallow-tailed 
coat which no doubt was amply supplied with hidden inside pockets. 

The magician's fee is no longer a matter of record, but the male quartet 
cost $50, a sum which gave pause to even the most spendthrift members 
of the committee. But when the four bushy-haired young singers had 
rendered Good Night Ladies as their final encore and taken their last bow, 
everyone agreed that it had been worth the high price. The baritone was 
short and plump and what he could do to the low notes in Old Black Joe 
was beyond belief, and the tenor was tall and lean and, like the magician, 
refined. 

Of the three lecturers on those winter Lyceum courses, I was later to 
manage two on circuit Chautauqua. They were "Colonel" George Washing- 
ton Bain and Lou J. Beauchamp. The other, the Reverend L. B. Wicker- 
sham, a valiant Methodist clergyman from Atlantic, Iowa, appeared the 
second winter with his famous tear-jerker, Chickens Come Home to Roost. 
I say "valiant" because twenty years later Mr. Wickersham was still deliver- 
ing the same speech, for Britt Chautauqua at that time, in almost the same 



"Ladies and Gentlemen . . ." 15 

territory. Taking no stock in the comforting theory that what is past is past, 
he preached the unhappy gospel that whatever wickedness a young man 
does in his youth, he pays for. If he has wasted his early life, any attempts 
to make good later are doomed. Laziness, extravagance, the use of tobacco, 
a taste for beer, fooling around the pool hall, loafing on street corners, all 
are homing birds that will fly back eventually to their original hen coops. 

"Colonel" George Washington Bain was billed as a "temperance speaker 
from Kentucky," which state everyone in Iowa at that time suspected was 
a whiskey-dnnking, horse-racing region with strong Confederate leanings, 
a state that usually voted Democratic. At any rate, in Kentucky or else- 
where, "Colonel" Bain had acquired first-hand information on the demon 
rum and he revealed it in Wiota under the title The Safe Side of Life. He 
changed that title afterward to // / Had to Live My Life Over Again and 
spent another quarter of a century elaborating on it. Wiota approved heart- 
ily of his bone-dry talk. One of his later speeches h6 called Boys and Girls, 
Naughty and Nice, and the young people, crowded together in the back 
rows of the tents, laughed as loudly at it as he did himself and took it to 
heart. Bain was middle-aged when I first advertised him, had been lec- 
turing even then since the Garfield administration, and he lived to see Her- 
bert Hoover become President. 

Genial Lou Beauchamp was billed in later years as the "original hu- 
morous philosopher," but like "Colonel" Bain, in my early days he was a 
temperance speaker. The reformed drunkard had a special appeal in the 
90's. The latest gubernatorial campaign in Iowa had involved "temperance." 
The "dry" Republicans had unseated, after four years, what they called 
the "Demi-john party." The state never yet had made actual prohibition 
stick, but it had local option and audiences in general heartily approved 
the character, who after years of bibbing, could turn his back on the demon 
rum. Beauchamp not only frankly described himself as this type of 
shocking, and therefore fascinating, person, but he glossed over no horrid 
details of his story. An Ohio product, self-educated he had spent his early 
years among the Creeks and Choctaws he was a poet of sorts and liked 
to sprinkle his eloquence with his own homespun verse. He was an impres- 
sive looking man, with wavy hair and handlebar mustaches, and he gave 
our little community a good moralizing speech packed with gentle humor, 
called, by a stroke of genius, Take the Sunny Side. 

Like Ralph Bingham's serious words, Beauchamp's remarks undoubt- 
edly would be classed as corny today. Styles in speeches change about as 
often as styles in hats, and perhaps for just as obscure reasons. One man's 
corn, I was to learn later, can be another man's inspiration. Beauchamp in 
Wiota did use one shocking simile which caused many a decorous citizen 
to keep his eyes straight front. Describing a speech he had heard, he said it 
was "like a Mother Hubbard, covering everything and touching nothing." 
That was daringly close to indelicate in the midwest in those days, when 



Culture Under Canvas 

tything remotely suggestive was banned not only from public entertain- 
ent, but also from polite conversation. Beauchamp's remark took, how- 
rer. More than one speaker used it later as his own product, Congressman 
dam Bede among them, in his debates with Emil Seidel. 

As the years went on, Lou Beauchamp delivered Take the Sunny Side 
ousands of times, in almost every summer Chautauqua across the land, 
fer and over in winter Lyceum, often two or three times in the same city, 
>vering altogether 1,300,000 miles, an enterprising mathematician once 
jured. So far as his managers could determine, he was one of a handful 
" lecturers who never in his whole career had a bad press notice. He was 
irticularly popular in Cincinnati, where as a young man he had edited 
le of the dailies, but so far as reappearances went, cities like Chicago 
id Washington, D.C., called him back fifty and sixty times. He offered an 
isortment of tides in later years phrases like The Age of the Young 
r an, Blunders of Humanity, New Ideas on an Old Subject, this last one 
lered particularly for Sunday programs. All of them told how to make 
e best of life, but none of them ever was as catchy as Take the Sunny 
de. Beauchamp made thousands of dollars in Chautauqua and Lyceum, 
>ent much of it on book collecting, lost everything he owned in an Ohio 
>od, lectured feverishly after that, but died as he started, with little 
oney. His sense of humor carried him through many a platform crisis. It 
as probably the same quality that influenced him, the reformed drinker, 

the peak of his career, to refuse an eldership in the Presbyterian church, 
jecause," he said, "looking back on my life I realize I am not sufficiently 
gnified for such an exalted position." 

Citizens in the prairie states learned a great deal from these speakers 
ho visited their dimly-lighted platforms before the Spanish-American 
far. A restless yeast was at work in America. People west of the Mississippi, 

fact all the way from Kentucky to the far Dakotas, felt uneasiness, many 
1 them discontent That discontent was to grow, before the 1890's ended, 
to a steadily moving social and political upheaval that lasted almost to 
e First World War, and to put that upheaval into convincing words and 
tempt to correct its causes, great speakers took to the lecture platforms. 

The same year that an ambitious young school teacher in Wiota, Iowa, 
as excitedly spending $150 for a lecture course, William Allen White in 
sarby Emporia burst out with his angry editorial, What's the Matter With 
ansas? People in Iowa and Kansas and a dozen other states were aware 
at something was seriously wrong. They were restless as only pioneers can 
?. It was restlessness that had sent many of them into the Plains states in 
^beginning, with free land as a secondary lure. 

Now most of the free land was gone. The restlessness remained. Back 
ist, great fortunes were being built out of railroad empires into which the 
sstern fanner believed he was paying too much for his freight. Rocke- 
ller had joined the kerosene-producing companies into a single unit 



"Ladies and Gentlemen . . " 17 

that could charge what it wanted to fill the farmer's coal-oil lamps. Whiskey, 
sugar and metals prices were dictated by a few men in New York. 

Fanners seethed. They organized. In the west and south the rural anger 
fused impatient groups into Granges, a Greenback Party, a Colored Farm- 
ers' Alliance, a People's Party of Kansas, until finally, at Omaha, Nebraska, 
in July, 1892, representatives from thirty-two states had formed the Pop- 
ulist Party. 

Editors along the Atlantic seaboard recoiled in horror at the new party's 
platform. It demanded a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, 
conservation of natural resources, a postal savings system, a shorter work- 
ing day in industry, and as if all this were not un-American enough, the 
government ownership of railroads. Among local leaders who flirted with 
the Populists was an obscure young Nebraska politician-editor named Wil- 
liam Jennings Bryan. In every western state other challengers of the old 
order lifted angry voices while half the continent listened. 

New words came into the language and old words took new, sinister 
meanings. "Wall Street," in western ears, had a dirty sound. "Monopoly," 
"the Trusts," and a little later "the Octopus" and "the System," all of 
which referred to evil "Big Business," were the subjects of unflattering 
speeches, editorials and cartoons. The Populists did not win the election. 
Democrat Grover Cleveland went into the White House in 1892, but there 
were a million Populist votes. 

In Iowa and Kansas, Nebraska and the far Dakotas, rural and small- 
town folk read whatever they could find about the new movement, sweep- 
ing the prairie and Plains states, for freedom and a fairer share of the 
national wealth. They wanted to know what all the shouting was about, 
and they wanted their own yearnings and indignations put into ringing 
words by eloquent prophets of social reform. Weary of mud-road isola- 
tion, they thirsted for knowledge, for the exposition of new ideas not ac- 
cessible to them in the ordinary course of their reading in the daily or 
weekly newspapers. And above all, they were hungry for escape from their 
own flat horizons into the fascinating world that lay beyond. If they could 
not see it with their own eyes, they could perhaps behold it with that "inner 
eye" of the imagination of which the poet speaks. Lecturers who "had been 
there" could evoke these exotic scenes for their enjoyment. These were the 
people for whom circuit Chautauqua was finally conceived, the kind who 
supported it with quarters and half dollars, who got the most out of it, who 
unconsciously shaped its moral concepts and established its intellectual 
levels, and when the time for the annual guarantee for next summer's pro- 
gram came around, signed on the dotted lines. These were the people who 
caused a period of twenty-five years to be known as "the Chautauqua era." 



Talent for Sale 



The infant 20th century found America in an argumentative mood. Argu- 
ment blossomed into oratory and oratory sold tickets, not only to the 
widely advertised debates in the east, but to Lyceum courses in the prairie 
states. When naval heroes of the Spanish-American War began to quarrel 
loudly over the credit for victory, the people immediately took sides. The 
Army "embalmed beef" scandal, the unsanitary recruit camp at Chicka- 
mauga which caused more casualties than did the Spanish guns, efforts of 
politicians to ride Admiral George Dewey into the Presidency on his war- 
time popularity, all led to strenuous debate. 

Then, in 1901, Queen Victoria died, ending an era for the British Empire 
but not for rural towns in mid-America. There, as the entertainment busi- 
ness learned unhappily, Victorianism long outlived the Queen. However, 
that same year, in September, another death did affect the lecture platform. 
A madman assassinated William McKinley, a cautious President who never 
rocked the boat. His vigorous successor, throwing caution out the White 
House window, set a pattern for political debate that lasted a long gen- 
eration. 

Theodore Roosevelt gloried in battle. When he cried out against "those 
poor spirits ... in the gray twilight that know not victory or defeat," 
a robustious crowd of dedicated reformers with strong voices and convic- 
tions flocked immediately to his banner. Audiences cheered these orators 
who, with Roosevelt, attacked "the doctrine of ignoble ease," the "idle 
rich," "malefactors of great wealth." The wide midwest was waiting for 
that kind of talk and willing to pay the price, within reason, to hear it. 

Men had a little money in their pockets in that spring of 1901 . Iowa corn 
had gone up to thirty-six cents a bushel, but by the same token a good 

18 



Talent for Sale 



19 



three-piece suit cost six dollars and a half. So as spring advanced, boys 
like myself, working their way through school, began to thmlc about sum- 
mer jobs to pay next year's expenses. What to do? The harvest fields 
offered a dollar a day and board, for twelve hours of hard work. A barn 
carpenter's gang earned about the same money. There was little else to 
choose. 



REDPATH CHAUTAUQUA 




EVERYONE CAN AFFORD TO 
ATTEND CHAUTAUQUA, 



Drawn by Alton Packard 



Then in April, as vacation neared at Cornell College, in Mount Vernon, 
Iowa, a lecture manager named Keith Vawter came to the campus searching 
"live wire salesmen" to work that summer signing up communities for next 
winter's lecture courses. Such a job certainly sounded better to most stu- 
dents than one with a sweaty threshing crew. For ojie thing, it meant travel 
in far places, away out beyond the state line. And the only journey I had 
ever made up to this Jime had been a trip to Chicago with two carloads of 
cattle. 

Keith Vawter had the best room in the village hotel. He was a small, 
brisk, pleasant, well-dressed man of thirty-two. I stood six feet, two inches 
in my not-to-well-pressed campus clothes. He listened politely to my un- 
exciting story, but when I mentioned the Wiota Lyceum courses, he ques- 
tioned me about the way I had handled them, what talent I had chosen, 
how the local ticket sales had developed. Then he made his proposition. He 
would pay ten percent commission on all programs an agent sold, guaran- 



20 Culture Under Canvas 

teeing train fare as a minimum. Would I try my hand in a few towns, not 
next summer, but at once, during the ten days of spring vacation? 

Thus began a splendid association, which in one form or another, was 
to stretch through three decades. Vawtefs background was curiously like 
my own. We both were sons of Civil War soldiers. Our families, like those 
of most other lowans, were Protestant Republicans. My father was a 
farmer who also ran the village grain elevator; Vawter's was a clergyman 
who, the story goes, under the pseudonym of "Sergeant Oats," had written 
the once-famous Prison Life in Dixie, memories of a Confederate prison 
camp. After a try at college his son had sold books, then organized the 
Standard Lecture Bureau, a one-man effort operating out of Des Moines. 
He booked talent, hired lecturers, wrote publicity and letters in swift long- 
hand, swept the office floor, collected the commissions. Yet despite such 
varied labors, he was a glass of midwest fashion, urbane, confident, always 
giving the impression of professional success. 

My task, as Vawter outlined it, seemed a simple one. A school super- 
intendent at Brookings, a county seat in eastern South Dakota and home 
of the new state college, had already inquired about a Lyceum course. I was 
to go there, try to sell the town a full winter program, then venture west- 
ward on the new Huron, Pierre and Deadwood division of the Chicago and 
Northwestern Railroad, on the lookout for other good business. 

Here was adventure! South Dakota was an infant state. Except for a 
few towns sprinkled along its eastern border and the roaring gold camps 
in the Black Hills to the west, it was raw frontier. Only yesterday there had 
been Indian battles. The Rosebud and Yankton Sioux, blasted out of their 
choicest hunting grounds, still were retreating sullenly into the badlands. 
Righteous homeseekers, unrighteous traders, shrewdly visionary railroads 
were pushing north and west, spreading the cultural benefits of civilization 
and at the same time appropriating from the Indians a million and a 
quarter acres of virgin soil. 

Looking back on it, this would seem an unpropitious place and time to 
try to sell oratory or introduce the niceties of life. The, star a&*ac1iofc> on 
Vawtei^sjigt, was, strangely enough, a persuasive, honey-voiced orator 
named Russell H. Conwell. whose benign philosophy it was that a man 
need not seeTfalaTfor money or success; they lay in his own back yard, 
i-say ^strangely," since for some reason this philosophy appealed to those 
South Dakota frontiersmen who had done just the opposite with their own 
Hvesr-Sliey had not stayed in their own back yards. They had gone west. 

In that era the Reverend Mr. Conwell, with his Acres of Diamonds, 
was the world's most famous lecturer, now forgotten by most of the world. 
In 1901 he already had delivered the speech more than 5000 times, in a 
score of countries besides his own, and was to repeat it on still another 
thousand occasions. It was purely a sermon, but a surprising one, because 
hjturned the tables on most sermons and took as its theme, "You have no 



Talent for Sale 21 

right to be poor." Larded with anecdotes, it gave name, date and place to 
prove in the best Horatio Alger manner that a man was foolish not to make 
money. He should get rich and help his fellows. 

Conwell himself had done exactly that. With the fees from Acres of 
Diamonds later there were royalties from a million reprints he had 
founded Temple University in Philadelphia and helped thousands of boys 
to attend it; before he was done, he had given them half a Trillion dollars, 
all from lecturing fees. His purpose never changed; neither did the speech. 
He tried other titles as time sped on, but like Lou Beauchamp with Take the 
Sunny Side, Conwell found that the public wanted only Acres of Diamonds. 

It is impossible to guess what this indefatigable man felt when he stepped 
out on a platform to deliver that .same lecture he had already delivered tjmft 
and time again* His was a brilliant mind, before he took to lecturing he 
had been a soldier, foreign correspondent, lawyer, then a great Baptist 
preacher, with such crowds coming to his Philadelphia church that admis- 
sion finally had to be by ticket. He had associated with Longfellow, Beecher, 
Holmes, Emerson, Whittier, Grant, Garfield, remaining to the end a hum- 
ble man who never in his fabulous life could supply a manager with a news- 
paper clipping about himself, because he never saved them. 

Certainly Conwell knew as well as others that Acres of Diamonds was 
neither a great literary work nor a masterpiece of oratory. It is entirely 
possible that he was as baffled by its appeal as were the students who dis- 
sected it, seeking some clue to its fantastic popularity. Among these curi- 
ous students had been Vawter himself when he signed Conwell. Why, he 
asked, was this particular lecture so popular? If a Lyceum agent could 
discover what was hidden in its words or delivery, why thousands and 
thousands of adult men and women crowded in again and again to listen, 
if that agent could find other such speeches and other such speakers, and 
pour them out across the nation, his fortune would be made. *"* 

What was the key? Was it the sentence, "Your wealth is next to you. You 
are looking right over it. 9 '? 

"Wherever there is human need," Conwell advised, "there is always a 
fortune . . . greatness consists in doing great deeds with little means, in 
the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private ranks of life." 

Or was the key possibly in the phrase "Get rich"? Instead of scoffing 
at wealth, as most "inspirational" speakers did, Conwell was urging peo- 
ple to make money, actual cash in hand, not just treasures laid away in 
heaven. The men and women listening so avidly to him had worked hard. 
They not only remembered the pioneers' struggle for survival, many of 
them still were experiencing it. True, he exhorted them all, fathers and 
mothers, boys and girls, particularly the boys, to be good citizens. But also 
rich citizens. 

Money wasn't the root of aH evil, he argued. He dared anyone to find 
any such foolish statement in the Bible. The evil lay in the love of money. 



22 Culture Under Canvas 

Get rich by honorable and Christian methods and use the wealth for good. 
And that wealth, those acres of diamonds, lay at one's feet. "Money has 
power!" he shouted. "For a man to say, 1 do not want money/ is to say, 
'I do not wish to do any good to my fellow man/ " 

So it wasn't wicked to be rich after all? Was this the pleasant doctrine 
that the crowds thronged to hear? Keith Vawter pondered, but never could 
be sure. And even if it were, what other "inspirational" lecturer would be 
bold enough to use such an unorthodox theme? Neither Vawter nor any 
other lecture manager ever discovered the answers and Conwell carried on 
to the end in a class by himself and no one succeeded him. A few tried. 
In 1926 a complacent young man, hearing that the great Conwell had died 
the year before, came into the Chicago office of the Redpath Bureau and 
announced, "I have come to take his place." 

Conwell was a big man physically, who slouched as he walked out on the 
stage. His lecture was two hours long. He put vigor into its delivery; cajoled, 
scorned, argued, imitated; then he took his fee, mailed a share of it promptly 
to a boy who needed it, caught the first train out of town and the next night 
uttered the identical words with identical gestures and identical effect to 
another audience. Redpath Manager Crawford A. Peffer tells how, after 
ending a tour, Conwell would come into the Philadelphia office and relate 
harrowing tales of this hardship and that, of poor hotels and early morn- 
ing trains. "I would be at the point of tears," Peffer relates, "when suddenly 
he would stop and say, 'Well, that's that. Where do I go next?' " 

Conwell was fifty-eight years old that summer when I booked him in 
South Dakota. He bad delivered his first lecture in Westfield, Massachusetts, 
in 1862, when he was nineteen years old, and from then on until he died he 
spoke on an average of 150 to 200 nights every year. In a period when many 
orators and entertainers were content to pay their own expenses and receive 
$75 to $1U$ a week, Conwell sometimes received a thumping $200 for a 
single appearance. He had been a poor boy. A bowl of oatmeal often had 
been all he had to eat. He hadn't liked poverty. He put a high price on him- 
self and got it, and then gave the money away. 

I never had heard Acres of Diamonds when I started out to sell it. If I 
feared difficulties in handling such an expensive product, I soon learned dif- 
ferently. The school superintendent in Brookings, South Dakota, and his 
lecture course committee had heard of the great Conwell and they itched to 
see him in the flesh. Theirs was a lively town of nearly 3000 persons. It 
had stout wooden sidewalks on both sides of mud streets, and in addition 
to its state school, it boasted two newspapers and several banks and was 
the trading center of a great wheat- and flax-growing area. Naturally it 
yearned to be a cultural center as well. So it did not take long to get the 
signature of a banker, a teacher and a land lawyer on a binding contract 
with Vawter's Standard Lecture Bureau, which I proudly countersigned as 
agent 



Talent for Sale 23 

The railroad ran west out of Brookings across flat, treeless plains, already 
broken here and there for corn and good Dakota wheat. The new Huron, 
Pierre and Deadwood division had not yet reached Deadwood in 1901. It 
was a single-track line with flimsy bridges over shallow creeks, and along 
the broad open reach of country between Brookings and the Missouri 
River, occasional new towns spotted the right of way. Every few miles 
an intrepid band of pioneers, full of rosy confidence in the bright future 
of the western plains, had laid out the beginnings of a settlement. Some- 
times these new towns were only a dismal cluster of sod-roofed houses, 
with a short muddy street, but there were a few "cities" Huron, also with 
a small college; Miller, Highmore and the new state capital of Pierre. 
Huron had nearly 3000 people and Pierre, chartered as a city only the 
previous year, claimed 2000. 

Having slain the dragon at Brookings, I started west excitedly, my pockets 
full k of Vawter's blank contracts, my heart full of hope. The fare, handed 
over to the conductor on boarding the train, was two cents a mile. With such 
a scattered population, it did not pay the railroad to operate passenger trains; 
passengers must ride the freights in the sun-baked comfort of the caboose. 
At the few "eating houses'* scattered along the right of way, meals cost 
twenty-five cents. Since I slept in the caboose, expenses remained low. 

The train, being an "accommodation, 3 * kept no regular schedule, simply 
halted anywhere as long as necessary for the crew to unhitch the locomotive, 
shunt cars along sidings, haul package freight out of the boxcars or enjoy 
a meal. This meant that in some towns the stop was thirty minutes, in 
others three or four hours. 

The crew, interested in any errand that took a traveller into this half- 
empty countryside, was excited with my success in Brookings. So, leaning 
heavily on the men's kindness, I made a practical arrangement. As we 
neared a town I washed my face in the tin basin in the caboose, put on my 
collar and necktie, slicked down my hair and leaped off before the wheels 
stopped turning. 

On Main Street I made for the bank, if the place boasted one, and in- 
troduced myself as a "travelling representative of the Standard Lecture 
Bureau of Des Moines, Iowa." If there was no bank, I chose a lawyer by 
his shingle or the proprietor of the most prosperous-looking store. I had a 
brief speech ready. Certainly, I pointed out, this beautiful new community, 
which had progressed so far so fast, deserved the cultural advantages of a 
Lyceum course next winter. I brought out my list of personalities, brochures 
on their specialties, explained the way a Lyceum course was set up, with 
a local committee of prominent citizens in charge. 

Ten minutes before the train was ready to leave, the engineer would 
signal with three long blasts of the whistle. This gave me a chance to end 
a conference and run for the siding, telling my prospect that if he would go 
ahead and form bis committee, I would be back in a few days. At the next 



24 Culture Under Canvas 

stop I made another contact and, at the locomotive signal, ran again. When 
the slow train retraced its route east-bound, I revisited the towns. The men 
to whom I had talked on the trip out did not disappoint me. In a matter of 
minutes or hours, I had the necessary signatures on the dotted lines. 

South Dakota grew into fertile Chautauqua ground. Among our crews and 
talent in the big years, this region became famous for the worst storms, the 
worst transportation difficulties, all kinds of problems, from rattlesnakes to 
Indian audiences that didn't understand an English word. Hilton Ira Jones, 
a scientific lecturer in the golden days of Chautauqua, used to tell a story 
about going out on a summer circuit to Buffalo Fort Indian Reservation to 
make a speech to the Sioux. The session was held in a big frame council 
house and on the back wall, Jones noticed, was a long row of sixty penny 
spikes, too high for anyone to hang his hat on, so what their use was he 
couldn't imagine. When the Indians arrived, however, each squaw with her 
papoose strapped to a board, Jones to his amazement saw them hang up the 
babies on the spikes; then to a string six or eight inches long on each child's 
wrist they tied a piece of fat meat as a pacifier. 

Jones was just well started with his speech, giving each sentence to an 
interpreter, when a commotion started among the papooses. A baby had 
swallowed his meat. It stuck in his throat and, choking, he began to fling his 
arms back and forth. Finally, still with no attention from the squaws, the 
infant waved his hand so hard that the meat came up, with a sound like a 
cork popping out of a bottle. The papoose gasped, then went back to 
sucking the meat, but all through the rest of the lecture, one child after 
another exploded his cork. Jones finished, a little envious undoubtedly of 
Russell Conwell, who in the early 1900's had had few Indians in his audi- 
ences. 

Besides Conwell, on those first programs, Vawter offered, and I sold, 
Jacob A. Riis, the Danish immigrant friend of Theodore Roosevelt. There 
was no mystery about the success of this speech as there was about the 
great ConwelTs. Riis, who had turned public attention to the horror of city 
slums, was not only a great humanitarian, but also an orator of great skill. 
His subject that year, and many later years, was How the Other Half Lives, 
which also was to be the title of his first book. Though I had not heard 
ConwelFs lecture before I sold it, I had had opportunity, in Iowa, to hear 
Riis. His was an ugly, frightening story of political corruption. 

Riis was a lean, sad-faced man of fifty-two the first year I booked him. 
A slight Danish accent, which he kept to the end of his life, helped rather 
than hindered his oratory. He knew how to "soften" an audience into tears, 
then launched into denunciations of his and the plain peoples' enemies. 
One story no audience ever forgot concerned "my little dog." Riis had come 
to New York from Denmark in 1869, the "Black Friday" year when the 
gold market crashed. He was twenty years old, friendless, poor, and all that 
first cold winter his only true friend was a pitiful stray dog. They huddled 



Talent for Sale 25 

together in doorways, keeping each other from freezing, and the bewildered 
young immigrant shared with the dog the scraps of food he collected. 
Finally, one bitter night, he applied for shelter at a police station near the 
Bowery. 

The brutal lieutenant in command told the stranger to come in, but to 
leave his dog outside. Riis demurred. He explained in broken English that 
the dog and he must stay together. 

"The lieutenant, before I could stop him, picked up my little dog that 
I loved so much, and swinging him by the hind legs, beat out his brains on 
the stone steps of the station house. 'Now come in,' he said. 'No reason you 
cannot be comfortable tonight.' I walked the streets until morning, weep- 
ing." 

The audience by this time was sobbing. Then Riis related how, after he 
became a reporter for The New York Sun, he told the tragic story to 
Theodore Roosevelt, when he was police commissioner in New York City. 
Roosevelt was touched. The tale, "T.R." often said, influenced hi in run- 
ning his department, and Riis and he became close friends. 

Like Conwell, Riis talked of rich men. But not ConwelTs Jdnd. Riis's 
rich men took brutal advantage of the poor. How the Other Half Lives 
caused angry listeners to want to tear down the temples of heartless wealth 
and cruel injustice, just as Riis's earlier written words, exposing conditions 
in New York's festering "Five Points" area, near the foot of the Bowery, 
had sparked the city's great slum clearance crusade. 

Riis had jabbed the public conscience with sharp words and pictures of 
filth and wickedness, hungry old folk, wan listless children, crime and poli- 
tics and fat landlords hand in hand, until the city destroyed the Five Points 
slum. A park occupies the spot today. 

Every Riis lecture appearance was a call to arms. He urged the plain 
people to organize against looters in high places, so that America could 
become a land of equality. There was enough work, food, money to go 
around. Why allow a selfish minority to grow wealthy at the expense of 
the majority? "-**. 

Riis fitted well into the social and political thinking of the hardy South 
Dakota settlers at that particular time, for they had become annoyed at 
the standpat Republicans. Though most of them were of solid Republican 
stock, not only had they voted a Populist governor into office, but the year 
before they had lined up overwhelmingly behind 



in his second unsuccessful joust for the Presidency^JacobRSs was their 
kind of speaker. He talked of the here-and-now, of men's pocketbooks and 
the feed sacks in the back of the wagon. I had no trouble selling him. 

The next year when I booked Riis he was beginning to stress the ballot 
box. Appearing in South Dakota his second season, he argued that as an 
American he didn't care what ticket men voted, if they sent fearless repre- 
sentatives to their state capitals and to Washington. Actually Riis did care 



26 Culture Under Canvas 

deeply what ticket men voted. When Theodore Roosevelt bolted the Re- 
publican party ten years later, Jacob Riis used any platform he could get, 
including Chautauqua's, to urge the election of the Progressive candidate. 
After "T.R.'s" defeat, Riis continued doggedly with the same theme, lec- 
turing steadily; in fact, his last illness began while he was speaking in New 
Orleans. 

Among other attractions on the 1901 Vawter list were vivacious Kath- 
erine Ridgeway and Leland T. Powers, one of the most accomplished actors 
of his day and the first "play reader" to take to the Lyceum road. Miss 
Ridgeway, as usual, was to give short readings of poetry, prose and drama, 
a "miscellaneous program" it was called. The fact that she recently had 
come back from England, where Londoners, with the Prince of Wales in 
the audience, broke all records for encores, was enough to sell her in the 
wilds of South Dakota. 

There were more important reasons, to be sure. In her field Katherine 
Ridgeway was already as popular as Conwell in his. She had first tried 
her wings in 1896 with the Temple Quartette of Boston, but within two 
years she was heading her own Concert Company of reader, pianist, soprano 
and tenor. By the time she toured South Dakota for Vawter in fact, all 
the years from 1900 down to her last stage appearance during Franklin D. 
Roosevelt's first administration she put on a hefty two-hour program alone 
except for an accompanist. 

Competition was keen among readers. They tried to keep their program 
numbers their own property for a year at least and Miss Ridgeway often 
retitled hers they were chiefly cuttings so that her rivals could not lo- 
cate them for their own use. One method was to omit the name of the 
author, occasionally even the title itself. Miss Ridgeway's recital always 
opened with a long number, usually a selection opposing war. She had 
tasted the bitter aftermath of war as a child in Georgia, and besides, her 
intention was not just to "entertain" an audience, she wanted it to do a 
bit of thinking. She used Negro dialect frequently; with her antecedents 
such stories were naturals for her. 

One of the best-known Ridgeway Chautauqua programs later on was a 
condensation of a "peace" play, In the Vanguard, by Katrina Trask. The 
short recitation most often requested was a four-stanza poem by Thomas 
Bracket, for which Miss Ridgeway's husband, Percy F. Hunt, later of the 
faculty of the New England Conservatory, composed music which he played 
as she read. This was called Not Understood and is typical of the moralistic 
type of verse the public liked in that day. It began, slowly, to music: 

"We move along asunder, 
"Our paths grow wider, as the seasons creep 
"Along the years. We marvel and we wonder 
"Why life is life and then we fall asleep 
"NOT UNDERSTOOD. 



Talent for Sale 27 

"We gather false impressions 
"And hug them closer as the years go by, 
"The virtues often seem to us transgressions 
"And thus men rise and fall and live and die 
"NOT UNDERSTOOD. 

"How trifles often change us, 
"The thoughtless sentence or the fancied slight 
"Destroy long years of friendship and estrange us, 
"And on our souls there falls a freezing blight 
"NOT UNDERSTOOD. 

"Oh, God, that men could see a little clearer, 
"Or judge less harshly where they cannot see 
"Oh, God, that nations would draw a little nearer 
"One another. They'd be nearer Thee 
"AND UNDERSTOOD." 

Miss Ridgeway had her tear-jerkers, of course, and the one old Chau- 
tauqua audiences still sometimes quote is Christmas Morning at Home, a 
poem that her friends claimed would send any wayward young man stum- 
bling out from the lecture hall determined to write his mother that night 
a long overdue letter. In those forty years of trekking hither and yon, winter 
Lyceum, summer Chautauqua, Miss Ridgeway often explained her repu- 
tation as a good trouper by saying that one-night stands were the life of 
Riley after what she had endured as a girl. Her father, a penniless Confed- 
erate officer named Ridgeway Hogan hence the daughter's stage name 
had left Georgia after the Civil War for the mountains of Washington 
State. At fifteeen smart Katherine was teaching school in the lumber camps, 
"boarding 'round" the district, sharing a bed with as many small children 
as happened to be in her host's family. At Whitman College, a Presbyterian 
school in Walla Walla, she chanced to hear an elocutionist, and, possessed 
from then on with the idea of becoming one herself, she managed to get to 
the Boston School of Oratory where she earned part of her keep by leading 
a blind man on his walks. Riding a railroad division like the Huron, Pierre 
and Deadwood wasn't too trying after that beginning. 

One experience I had with Katherine Ridgeway, while I was still a 
young booking agent, permanently influenced my own ideas about good 
speakers political, clerical, or any type. Our bureau was already listing 
the Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis, called about that time from Chicago 
to famous Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, where the congregation apparently 
hoped that the eloquence of Henry Ward Beecher and Lyman Abbott 
would descend upon him. I happened to be in Boston when Miss Ridge- 
way and the clergyman were there and the three of us met for lunch. In 
the course of the meal Miss Ridgeway asked whether we would like to go 
to the theatre that night to see Joseph Jefferson in Rip Van Winkle. I an- 
swered that the house was sold out. 



28 Culture Under Canvas 

"I'll get tickets," Miss Ridgeway said. "Mr. Jefferson is a friend of 
mine." 

This incident itself shows how the long battle between church and stage 
was shaping up, in the east at least. Newell Dwight Hillis went unques- 
tioningly with us to the theatre that night, whereas the great preacher whose 
pulpit Hillis had just inherited had waited most of his life before he dared 
attend a play. It had not been too many years before, in 1885, at a banquet 
for Sir Henry Irving, that Beecher, liberal theologian though he was, con- 
fessed that he never set foot inside a playhouse until he was seventy years 
old. He was then seventy-two. 

At the final curtain of Rip Van Winkle, Miss Ridgeway said, "Let's go 
backstage. Mr. Jefferson will be delighted to meet both of you." 

The great actor greeted us warmly. I was thrilled, of course; I was a 
country boy, just out of an Iowa classroom, and Jefferson, still in the 
white beard and tattered clothes of Rip Van Winkle, was the most famous 
actor of his day. But the Reverend Mr. Hillis obviously was unhappy about 
something. We had hardly got into the actor's dressing room when he 
ask;ed: 

"' "Mr. Jefferson, how does it happen that you, who perform in what frankly 
is fiction, are turning people away every night, while we, who present 
JStemal Truths, must preach to empty houses?" 

Wise old Joe Jefferson put down the rag with which he had been wiping 
off make-up. "That's easy to understand, sir," he said. "You see, we present 
fiction as if it were the eternal truth. And you, I am afraid, present eternal 
truth as if it were fiction.!/ 

""* A -certain "ambitious young booking agent learned a lesson from that re- 
mark, whether anyone else in the party did or not: find speakers who make 
truth sound like truth and there would be no trouble about return engage- 
ments for them. 

Miss Ridgeway's poverty-stricken beginnings may have conditioned her 
to the ham-and-egg life of a trouper, but there certainly was no hint of 
them in her ravishing appearance on a stage. When she walked out into 
the lights, a long expressive "ah-h-h" was wont to escape involuntarily 
from the women in her audience. Play readers always wore elegant cos- 
tumes their own, not those of any character being impersonated and 
Miss Ridgeway's tall, statuesque figure, draped often in billowing yards of 
chiffon or lace, usually white with a long train, her arm-length white kid 
gloves, the elegant feather boa around her shoulders, the enormous ostrich 
plumes on her big hat, when she wore a hat, caused envy in every fem- 
inine heart. 

Leland Powers, another real actor from the top of his erudite head 
to the tips of his shining patent-leather pumps, was to give readings from 
Beau Brummel the first year I booked him in South Dakota. His practice 
was to condense the play to less than an hour and, without costume or 



Talent for Sale 29 

make-up, footlights, props or scenery, take all the parts, acting as well as 
speaking the lines. Like Conwell, he was a $200-a-night man. In com- 
parison, Ralph Bingham, in spite of the demand for him, drew only $60 
to $75 at that period. 

Powers, who had gathered his first laurels in Boston and Chicago, also 
became a tremendous hit in South Dakota. It probably was a first experience 
in real drama for nine out of ten of his listeners that winter, accustomed only 
to muddy versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Local pride there on the edge 
of the badlands probably helped Powers' popularity. His pristine white 
tie, his "full dress suit" gave blue-jeaned villagers a moment of glamor. 
The sidewalks might be wooden and the streets deep in mud, but Powers 
stood there for all to see, proving by his elegance that nothing was too 
good for a raw, proud town. They approved of his formal clothes just as 
they did of Katherine Ridgeway's beautiful gowns. 

When the ten-day spring vacation ended that year, I had sold $4900 
worth of entertainment My commission was $490. 1 was the richest under- 
graduate in eastern Iowa. What I did not guess was that I had a job that 
would last almost a lifetime. 

When Vawter sent me out to South Dakota again in 1902, after my 
sophomore year in college, he added western and northern Iowa to the 
territory and, if that region lacked erudition the following winter, it was 
not the fault of Vawter's Standard Bureau. The headliners were the same: 
Conwell and Riis repeating their lectures, Powers with readings from David 
Copperfield and The Rivals, and again lovely Katherine Ridgeway. She 
was commanding $75 a date that year, fabulous for a woman reader, and 
could have appeared six nights a week if the train service had permitted. 
Within five years, for herself and her pianist, she was getting $200 for an 
appearance, 

Dr. John B. DeMotte of DePauw University at Greencastle, Indiana, was 
also on the 1902 list for a deadly serious lecture on the power of habit 
bad habit. DeMotte, like Conwell, had been lecturing up and down the 
land for many years; his career ended in 1904. His offering was called 
Python Eggs, and it was his grim contention, delivered in dramatic fashion, 
that small bad habits, nurtured in the breast of an unsuspecting victim, 
are like the eggs of the python: they finally hatch into serpents that destroy 
their hosts. South Dakota and western Iowa evidently thought they needed 
that sort of advice, for they were willing to pay for it. DeMotte received 
$50 a night. 

On that second trip in 1902 I again expanded not only my pocketbook 
but my horizon. It was a fine year and a fine place to watch America grow. 
I remember arriving at Geddes, South Dakota, on the day new land was 
to be opened to settlers. The little town was a cauldron of excitement. This 
was one of the last openings; free land was almost gone. Pouring in were 
hopeful people in wagons and spring carriages, all with fast, lean ponies. 



30 Culture Under Canvas 

The homestead area lay southwest of the village, down along the Missouri 
River bottoms, and as dusk fell the settlers lined up facing the future. 

Land agents had stretched a rope; at midnight a pistol shot signalled 
them to drop it and the thunder of hooves and the rattle of wagons filled 
the night. Dust rose in a cloud that caught at the throat. Long after the im- 
patient adventurers had left the town, plunging forward in the darkness 
to unknown destinations, one still could hear the distant rumble of their 
charge. It was the sound of a nation exploding. Here was virgin land, in 
quarter sections of sandy loam, enriched by the blood of its original owners. 
This land was to make homesteads, wheat fields waving yellow in the 
afternoon summer sun, grain elevators standing high against fiat horizons. 
It took little skill to sell a lecture series in that time or place. Food, shelter 
and water were the first concern until the stakes were driven and the land 
claims filed, but after that came something else. The people, soon weary 
of lonely emptiness, of dust and endless distances, wanted to see the lights 
twinkle, hear and look at men who wore elegant clothes like Leland Powers, 
women who spoke in soft voices like Katherine Ridgeway. They wanted to 
laugh, and along came a young man with a handful of tickets. 

That is how most Chautauqua managers got into the business of talent, 
tickets and tents. Lyceum was only a step on the way, for only two years 
after my second South Dakota trip the fertile mind of Keith Vawter began 
to think about revolutionizing Chautauqua by taking the programs in tents 
to the people. The circuit plan was Vawter's creation, but the founda- 
tion and background for Chautauqua itself had been long in building. 

Three Americans before Vawter were responsible for it and each in his 
own way contributed genius, imagination, courage and hard work. They 
were James Redpath, John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller. 



Mr. James Redpath 



One frosty evening in December, 1867, Novelist Charles Dickens appeared 
in Boston's Tremont Temple and in the immense audience sat a bearded 
crusader, pamphleteer, war correspondent and shrewd promoter named 
James Redpath. 

This was Dickens' second American visit. He was world famous, a con- 
troversial personality. His American Notes had irked people in the United 
States by its acid comments on life and manners in the young republic. It 
was a habit of visiting celebrities to criticise us severely. Mrs. Trollope 
rubbed us the wrong way, too. But Dickens^ caustic comments had evi- 
dently not diminished his popularity. Speculators anywhere in America 
could buy up blocks of tickets to lectures by the author of David Copper- 
field at three dollars each and then seH ffiem for fifteen. 

Authorities differ on how much Dicketts himself netted on this hectic 
trip to America. Some put it at $60,000. Paul Pearson, a Chautauqua man- 
ager, once figured that Dickens' share for his sixty-seven appearances in 
1867-8 came to $228,000, an average of $3000 a reading, considerable 
money for the post-Civil War years. Whatever it amounted to, Dickens 
was unhappy. 

In print and on the platform the visitor complained about the discom- 
forts of the lecturer's life. He "caught American catarrh." He experienced 
a bad fire in Boston, a flood in Albany, a snowstorm in New York. Gas jets 
in the halls where he appeared gave a "garish light" The railroad trains 
on which he rode were "truly alarming ... we were beaten about . . . 
the train either banged up hill or banged down hill." 

The handling of his baggage Dickens called "outrageous" and in the 
middle of his tour President Andrew Johnson distracted the thoughts of 

31 



32 Culture Under Canvas 

even the most literary minded by getting himself impeached. All this, 
Charles Dickens let it be known, left him "much disgusted." 

James Redpath already had discussed the practical problems of the tour 
with Dickens 7 manager. But after listening in Tremont Temple to the un- 
happy novelist himself, Redpath put his agile mind to work overnight and 
at breakfast next morning he outlined to his family an idea that had come 
to him in the night. 

"There should be a general headquarters," he is quoted as saying, "a 
bureau for the welcoming of literary men and women coming to our country 
for the purpose of lecturing. They should be made to feel at home among us 
and the business of arranging routes of travel and dates for lectures should 
be in charge of competent workers and an established fee agreed upon." 

Redpath discussed his own idea that December day with Dr. Samuel G. 
Howe, in the physician-philanthropist's office at 36 Bromfield Street, Bos- 
ton. Dr. Howe, in turn, consulted his wife, Julia Ward Howe, author of 
The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Naturally, the idea of any kind of lec- 
ture bureau appealed to that flaming abolitionist. She herself was a lecturer. 
Among her close friends were the leading platform figures of New Eng- 
land, individuals valuable indeed to anyone thinking of building a string of 
famous speakers. Dr. Howe was rich and open-handed. Why not, his wife 
suggested, offer the inventive young Redpath a desk in the Bromfield Street 
office? The doctor agreed and presently that desk became the first head- 
quarters of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, before long to be known as the 
Redpath Bureau. 

Born in Scotland in 1833, Redpath was seventeen when his family came 
to southern Michigan, where the parents settled on a raw, new farm but 
not ambitious James. The son neither settled nor turned his hand to the 
plow. A born crusader, already a writer of sorts, he soon found himself a 
job on a Detroit daily newspaper, and before he was nineteen, Horace 
Greeley, learning somehow of this young man's evangelistic zeal, and 
reversing his usual advice to youth to "go west," summoned this particular 
individual east instead, to the powerful New York Tribune. 

Journalistic restraint was a virtue rarely practised in those days. Like 
oratory, much current newspaper writing, including James Redpath's, 
could be extravagantly grandiloquent. The young man was also of a posi- 
tive nature; the world was always black or white, never gray. Therefore, 
since he hated slavery he hated it violently, and so he soon contrived for 
himself an assignment in the slave-holding south. 

Redpath's press dispatches were sensational. They endeared him to the 
anti-slavery faction in New England and apparently also to Mr. Greeley, 
for in the next few years Reporter Redpath travelled recklessly north to 
south, east to west, picking up extravagant gossip or unhappy facts, all 
in favor of freeing the slaves. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill opened those 
territories to the possibility of slavery, he rushed at once to "Bloody Kansas," 



Mr. James Redpath 33 

there took sides vehemently, wrote, harangued, organized, joined in the fist 
fights, became a dedicated partisan of Captain John Brown, whose molder- 
ing body soon would become a battle song. When war finally arrived, young 
Redpath, as a New York Tribune correspondent, attached himself to Sher- 
man's army, eventually sent the first dispatch on the fall of Charleston. 

Admirers of the Redpath family credit it with inspiring the first "Decora- 
tion Day." Some give the honor to James, some to Mary Cotton Redpath, 
his wife. At any rate, near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865, while Red- 
path was superintendent of education for the freedmen, either Mary or he 
chanced to see an uncared-for military cemetery. Its "rows of half-filled 
graves" held two hundred and fifty-seven Union soldiers, and angry at 
the neglect, Redpath enlisted the aid of enough newly-freed slaves to raise 
and clean the mounds, and on May 1, while Lincoln's body lay in state in 
Chicago, Showman Redpath, in Charleston, held one of his first spectacles. 

Flags waved, drummers drummed. A clergyman, a general, thirty startled 
colored men and Redpath himself, spoke, and the exercises ended with a 
review of a full army brigade all of this, the Charleston Courier related 
next day, before "an immense gathering, fully 10,000 persons." The col- 
ored men had erected a "fine substantial fence," the newspapers reported, 
and "the graves at the close of the procession had the appearance of a 
mass of roses." 

So at the ripe age of thirty-two, with the war ended, Redpath had re- 
turned north to discover himself famous among the very people he wanted 
to impress, the writers, poets, preachers and teachers of New England. 
He went back to his writing; it was two years later that he happened to 
listen to the controversial Dickens. 

From the beginning James Redpath's lecture bureau was a success. The 
great and the near-great, who had been journeying to Ohio and other ac- 
cessible corners of the land, suddenly discovered that here was a man who 
for a small fee would eliminate much of the risk and some of the hardships 
of the lecture business. Moreover, he could promise most speakers six 
paid engagements a week, and if one happened to be an ordained minister, 
there could be a Sunday engagement as well. 

In Redpath's first booking season of 1868 he shared, at least to some 
extent, in the management of Mark Twain's east-bound tour. Next year 
a few cautious New Englanders were ready to join his bureau. Bayard 
Taylor, Barnum, Humorists Billings and Nasby, other purveyors of en- 
tertainment, who up to now had "managed" their own western trips, turned 
their troubles over to Redpath. Beecher, whose 1855 experience with an 
agent had been unhappy, found that Redpath, on the other hand, eased 
the way, partly because he cooperated with local groups instead of trying 
to ignore them. 

By 1871 Redpath's growing lists included Charles Sumner, Wendell 
Phillips, Edward Everett Hale, James G. Blaine, and a dozen other scholars 



34 Culture Under Canvas 

and public figures. From the not-so-frail group of "feminists," who already 
were agitating for women's right to vote, he offered such names as Lucy 
Stone, Mary A. Livermore, Anna Dickinson. 

Lucy Larcom for a number of years had given readings of her poems. 
New England respected dark-haired Miss Larcom as a self-made woman; 
in her childhood she had worked in the Lowell, Massachusetts, cotton mills. 
In her readings she always included her famous title, Hannah "poor lone 
Hannah, sitting by the window binding shoes . . . faded, wrinkled . . . 
'Is there from the fishers any news?' . . . old with watching . . . Hannah's 
at the window, binding shoes." 

School children of the period committed Hannah to memory. No pro- 
gram of recitations was considered complete without it. A prolific versifier, 
Miss Larcom had hundreds of published poems and ballads to draw upon, 
including a stirring nineteen-stanza defense of spinsterhood. 

Many of the lecturers, no matter how restrained they managed to be on 
their trips west, were controversial figures on the Atlantic seaboard. None 
was more so than Senator Sumner of Massachusetts, the successor to Web- 
ster in the Senate as leader of the abolitionists. His violent Crime Against 
Kansas speech, with its opening words, "The wickedness which I now be- 
gin to expose . . ." had so roused one southerner that he clubbed its author 
almost to death and for three years Senator Sumner made no speeches. 
To make matters worse in the minds of certain editors, Sumner also was not 
only a Free-Soiler, but also talked recklessly about prison reform. No- 
toriety, of course, made him a box-office success, despite the fact that 
audiences in some localities might have difficulty fathoming the Greek and 
Latinjrfirases with which he sprinkled his prose. 

It is apparent that James Redpath, the flaming agitator of the John 
Brown days, sent out to lecture men whose opinions, for the most part, 
coincided with his own. Another reformer, as controversial as Sumner, but 
with diction easier to understand, was Wendell Phillips, most outspoken 
of all the abolitionists. Phillips used a new platform approach. Instead of 
following the popular ornate style, he spoke in a quiet, conversational tone, 
larding his speech with homely colloquialisms. But he pulled no punches. 
He had happened to see Editor William Lloyd Garrison mobbed in Boston 
in 1835 because of his opposition to slavery. The incident made an agitator 
of the well-born Phillips. But not only his outspoken defense of the aboli- 
tionist cause made him suspect among many politicians. To their dismay, 
he had the effrontery to go out among the people and recommend a new 
method of picking public employees, without reference to party loyalty. 
Some day it would be called "civil service." 

James G* Blaine, the "Man from Maine," was a mere political fledgling 
when he permitted Redpath to place his name on his list of lecturers. In 
later years the "plumed knight," as Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll dubbed 



Mr. James Redpath 35 

Blaine in the 1876 Presidential race, was to become the most controversial 
figure on the American political scene. Despite IngersolTs eloquence, 
Blaine was defeated in the first try by Rutherford Hayes, largely because 
of the now long-forgotten "Mulligan Letters" scandal. However, in 1884, 
he actually won the Republican nomination. The campaign that followed 
was studded with billingsgate; Geveland, his Democratic opponent, was 
held up to general opprobrium as the alleged father of an illegitimate child. 
Elaine's prospects were ruined almost at the last moment when a hotheaded 
Protestant cleric dubbed the Democrats the party of "Rum, Romanism and 
Rebellion," and Blaine, by neglecting to disavow him, lost the Irish-Catholic 
vote. Blaine lost to Cleveland by the narrow margin of 1149 votes in New 
York State, which put that great commonwealth into Cleveland's column. 
Of course, Elaine's adherents screamed, "We was robbed." 

When Blaine began his swing around the Lyceum circuit, bitterness over 
freeing the slaves had been followed by bitterness almost as vehement over 
allowing them to vote. Blaine, in his lectures, aroused public support for 
his defense in Congress of impartial suffrage. Actually, the Fourteenth 
Amendment of the Constitution was substantially his idea. 

Steadily James Redpath pushed up his clients' rates. The records show 
that Emerson, for one early appearance, had accepted five dollars, plus 
three quarts of oats for his tired horse. Thanks to the new bureau, before 
the New England philosopher said farewell to the platform, he was earn- 
ing five hundred dollars a night. The one thousand dollars that Beecher 
received for a lecture on the Boston Lyceum course is said to have been 
the highest guaranteed fee James Redpath ever paid. -- 

The business department continued to be difficult for Redpath to handle, 
however. Money details worried him. Most of these, from the start, he 
left to the judgment and decisions of a friend in nearby Maiden, George L. 
Fall. Neither of them ever became rich from bureau receipts. But public 
education profited and for Redpath that was enough. If speakers benefitted 
too, well and good. The goal was improvement and new and happy direc- 
tion for the American platform. Although not a frivolous man, neither was 
Redpath a glum one, and he knew that the public wanted its risibility 
tickled, as well as its intellect improved. 

"The Lyceum lecture is a failure," he said, "if it succeeds in imparting in- 
struction alone. It should afford pleasure as well." He had in mind clients 
like Josh Billings who imparted little instruction and much pleasure. 

Edward Everett Hale, pastor of Boston's Old South Congregational 
Church for more than forty years, certainly was not listed as a humorist, 
but his droll speech and whimsical side remarks delighted everyone, par- 
ticularly when he spoke extemporaneously or read from his own fiction. 
His stiff-necked home town of Boston came in for not-so-gentle spoofing, 
and occasional sharp jibes, from cities less reserved and less sure of them- 



36 Culture Under Canvas 

selves. In the west and south it was the disrespectful habit of local humor- 
ists to say that Boston exported no articles of native growth except granite 
and ice. 

"We have improved," Hale replied in one speech, taking amused note 
of the charge. "We have added roses and cabbages, and I assure you that 
the granite is hard granite and the ice is very cold ice." 

In spite of Kale's reputation as a wit, his most quoted words, over the 
years, became an uplift motto, out of one of his short stories: "Look up 
and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend 
a hand/' 

Half a dozen "do-good" groups appropriated the words. From a story 
essentially romantic, In His Name, came similar missionary-society in- 
spiration. Religious overtones notwithstanding, audiences found Hale en- 
tertaining. His Man Without a Country had first made him famous; to Red- 
path's own satisfaction, it had given strength to the Union cause in the 
North. Of all the personalities handled by the Redpath agency, Hale 
more than any other transferred his enthusiasms later to the Chautauqua 
movement as it was to be launched in New York State. 

In 1875, at the age of forty-two, Redpath wearied of the confinement 
of an office and sold his Boston bureau to two employees, George H. 
Hathaway and Major James B. Pond. However, Redpath did not retire. 
He shortly was managing a headline-making tour for Colonel Ingersoll, the 
Congregational minister's son whose silver-tongued atheism caused pulpits 
to quiver and good folk to pray in public for his benighted soul. It was 
in the midst of this tour that Ingersoll nominated James G. Elaine for the 
Presidency at the Republican convention in Cincinnati on June 15, 1876. 
His brief address, full of patriotism and lofty sentiments, counteracted 
somewhat his more lurid reputation as an atheist. 

"James G. Blaine," Ingersoll declaimed, "has . . . the audacity of 
genius . . . the grandest combination of heart, conscience and brain . . . 
beneath the flag. Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, he marched 
down the halls of Congress and threw his shining lance against the brazen 
foreheads of the def amers of his country. ... In the name of the great 
Republic, in the name of all her soldiers dead upon the field of battle, in 
the name of those who perished in the skeleton clutch of famine at Ander- 
sonville and Libby, whose suffering he vividly remembers . . . Illinois 
nominates that prince of parliamentarians, that leader of leaders, James 
G. Blaine." 

The lecture tour ended without the anti-church orator being struck dead, 
as many pious citizens had predicted would happen and Redpath, possibly 
thankfully, gave his attention again to the arts. He organized several opera 
companies and sent them through the east. Then, in 1880, he turned 
his back on oratory and the stage both, and resuming his connection with 
the New York Tribune, he went to Ireland as a correspondent. 



Afr. James Redpath 37 

In Ireland, as in Kansas before the Civil War, instead of reporting ob- 
jectively, Redpath leaped actively into the fray. He not only wrote vio- 
lently of the violent deeds of Captain Charles Boycott and other heartless 
land agents, but he rushed back to America and himself took to the plat- 
form to tell the sad story of "the holy land of Connaught and Munster." 
While doing so, he collected $125,000, which he forwarded to Ireland 
to relieve its suffering. It was in these speeches, he later claimed, that he 
made Boycott's name into a common verb. 

Meanwhile the Redpath bureau, without Redpath, found itself marking 
time while its new owners tried, without too much success, to adjust them- 
selves to one another. Australian-born Hathaway was a solid citizen; he 
booked safe and respectable lecturers and maintained an excellent set of 
books. The reputation of the bureau was in his hands and he intended to 
keep it unsullied. 

The other partner, Major Pond, was by nature a showman. Thirty-seven 
years old when he bought into the agency, he had until now drifted from 
one adventure to another. Son of a New York blacksmith who had taken 
his family to central Illinois by way of a Great Lakes schooner and a 
covered wagon, young Jim Pond had struck out for himself at fifteen. 
First, like so many wanderers of the time, he learned the printing trade; 
then, like Redpath, he went to "bloody Kansas." 

When war came, Pond enlisted with the Third Wisconsin Cavalry and 
soon found himself in Kansas again, a lieutenant fighting guerrillas. At 
Baxter Springs in 1863, he repelled an attack by the notorious "QuantrelPs 
Band." Confederate General William C. Quantrell, believing that "any- 
thing's fair in love and war," had dressed his riders in captured Union 
uniforms and carrying a Union flag, had infiltrated into the Northern lines. 
Pond was commended for gallantry in action and left the army a major. 

After the war the young veteran worked his way west to Utah and into 
a reporter's job on a Salt Lake City newspaper. While there, a rich lecture 
possibility dropped into his eager hands. Ann Eliza Young, a somewhat 
confused young woman who claimed that she was Brigham Young's nine- 
teenth wife, sued Young for divorce. Pond quickly signed her for a lecture 
tour. 

The lady paved the way for huge audiences by bursting into print with 
scandalous stories of secret goings-on in "Mormon harems." Her semi- 
literate letters to the press and public figures were full of piety and sex. 
So far as curious crowds went, it was a triumphal tour, and at its end 
James Redpath recognizing showmanship when he saw it, had asked Pond 
to join the Boston bureau. 

Friction betweeen Pond and Hathaway did not openly develop after 
Redpath went his way, but in 1879 Hathaway bought Pond's share in the 
company and the younger man moved to New York and opened Ms own 
office. A number of personalities on the old Redpath list went with him, 



38 Culture Under Canvas 

among them Henry Ward Beecher. From then, until the clergyman's death 
in 1887, Pond travelled almost continuously with him 300,000 miles in 
twelve years, he once figured. 

For more than twenty years Hathaway, as sole owner, carried on the 
Redpath name and tradition in Boston, but with shrinking success. He 
believed in solid meat-and-potatoes fare and that is what he offered, with- 
out glamor or excitement. Then in 1901, evidently convinced that younger 
blood was needed in his organization, he cut the business into three slices. 
He kept one slice and made it the head office in Boston with himself as 
president. Another slice went to Crawford A. Peffer, a man of both vision 
and vigor, who was to run the Philadelphia headquarters with the title of 
vice-president. 

The third slice was bought by Keith Vawter, who closed his own bureau in 
Des Moines and moved to Chicago as western manager. James Redpath 
was out of the picture and Vawter, the man who was to put high-class 
entertainment into a travelling tent, was in. 

Redpath himself did not live to see Vawter's Chautauqua circuits. But 
tHe pioneer's influence on them, when they came, was two-fold. He had 
created American Lyceum in the sense that it is known today. This in time 
inspired Chautauqua circuits and he gave them both his name. Actually he 
gave more. He bequeathed to both movements a practical foundation, 
a taste for controversy and an abiding sense of decency. His ideals and 
prejudices, enthusiasms and taboos guided them. 



Ghautauqua Lake 



In the meantime, the church had not been idle. Slowly, in a rural county 
in western New York, it had been establishing its own medium for enlarg- 
ing the horizons of the people. Where Pennsylvania and Lake Erie squeeze 
the Empire state into a jut of land, lies an inland lake, some eighteen 
miles long, shaped like an uneven crescent. The lake is called "Chautau- 
qua," a word which a local historian, Obed Edson by name, claimed was 
of Seneca Indian origin and meant "jumping fish." In 1788 George Wash- 
ington, who often spelled by ear, referred to the lake, in a letter, as "Ja- 
daqua." 

On its northwest shore, a hundred years ago, lake steamers called at the 
stubby dock of a hamlet known as Fair Point. There in a grove a band 
of Methodists held camp meetings, the same kind of religious gathering 
that was to spread through the south and the west, festivals full of sound 
and fury, dedicated to the laudable purpose of saving souls. Each summer 
farmers from miles around hitched up their teams, piled their families, 
tents and cooking supplies into buckboards and drove to the lake for 
a few days of swimming and salvation. They erected an "assembly tent," 
later built a "pavilion" with a good stout roof, still later a cookhouse and 
dining hall. But after a dozen or more seasons, the attendance declined. 
Why, no one knew. 

Among the financial backers of the Fair Point institution was an Akron, 
Ohio, manufacturer of farm machinery named Lewis Miller, a man of 
inventive bent who had made considerable money. Years later his daughter 
was to marry another inventor named Thomas Alva Edison. More im- 
portant to the sleepy town of Fair Point on Chautauqua Lake, Miller was 
deeply religious. He regretted the decline of the camp meeting and when 

39 



40 Culture Under Canvas 

one summer it finally did not open, he became a trustee to manage the idle 
property. 

Miller, from early youth, had been an enthusiastic teacher in Methodist 
Sunday schools and in the late 60's there came to his attention a series of 
articles in a church magazine urging better education for Sunday-school 
teachers. These articles were signed by the Reverend Dr. John Heyl Vin- 
cent of the Methodist Episcopal church. 

Vincent had long shown signs of religious leadership; at eighteen he was 
licensed in Pennsylvania as a Methodist "exhorter and preacher." By 
twenty-five he became an "elder," and with a copy of Dante in his pocket 
went out to preach in Illinois, taking over presently the church in Galena, 
where lived an obscure whiskey-drinking veteran of the Mexican War, 
named Ulysses S. Grant, who was clerking in his father's leather store. 

Merchant and minister became close friends. It was Vincent, standing 
on a freight car, who delivered Galena's official oration when Soldier Grant 
left for the Civil War. It was Vincent who welcomed the returning general 
home, and then, when this hero could find no words of his own, orated for 
him. The tongue-tied Grant appreciated Vincent's flattering remarks that 
day at Galena, and years later, as the eighteenth President of the United 
States, repaid him for them handsomely at Chautauqua Lake. 

Vincent was an able speaker. By 1864 he was minister of growing 
Chicago's Trinity Methodist Church and here he became distressed by the 
mediocrity of the Sunday school. Children in uncomfortable Sunday clothes, 
confined for an hour a week on hard chairs in dimly lighted rooms, recited 
like parrots dull lessons from the church's "Question Books." The teachers 
were uninspiring, the lessons dreary, and Vincent, determined to do some- 
thing about such a disappointing business, established in Chicago "a cor- 
respondence course" for Sunday-school teachers. 

Back in Ohio, Lewis Miller read the Reverend Dr. Vincent's writings 
with continued satisfaction. The two men, with so many ideas in common, 
met at last and in their conversation Vincent repeated his conviction that 
the discouraging Sunday-school problem in the end must be solved by the 
proper education of teachers. 

"There should be a summer school in Akron or New York or Phila- 
delphia," he is quoted as saying, "where we could give our teachers a short 
course in Biblical history and geography, in interpretation of the Scriptures 
and in moral philosophy." 

Here was Lewis Miller's long-awaited opportunity. If he could combine 
the Lord's work with getting the camp site on Chautauqua Lake out of its 
financial hole, why not? He pointed out to John Heyl Vincent that classes 
there, under God's open sky, would permit students to concentrate away 
from the city's gas-lit temptations. Vincent demurred. The fact that Fair 
Point had been a camp-meeting ground caused him uneasiness; he dis- 
liked noisy, razzle-dazzle evangelism. But at last he agreed and the two 



Chautauqua Lake 41 

churchmen made plans for training teachers at a "Sunday School Normal 
Institute." 

Thus Vincent and Miller, six years after the night in Boston when James 
Redpath listened to Charles Dickens, embarked on a venture which, joined 
later to Redpath's booking agency, eventually would develop into the tent 
Chautauqua circuits. 

The Sunday School Assembly at Fair Point on Chautauqua Lake opened 
August 12, in 1874, lasted sixteen days and was attended by forty eager 
young men and women who paid $6.00 each for bed and board, instruction 
and inspiration. As superintendent, Dr. Vincent took vigorous charge of the 
academic program, led the singing and prayers, taught classes in Bible 
reading, and to aid the study of Biblical geography, built on the sand a 
great relief map of Palestine, possibly one of the first attempts in this coun- 
try at visual education. 

As the school grew, the rigidly chaperoned recreation that had been 
promised parents became an enlarging problem. Miller and Vincent, fearful 
that some scandal beyond their control might develop in the sylvan glades, 
agreed that a regular program of entertainment must fill the idle time after 
lessons. Before long this innovation became part and parcel of the in- 
stitute, and more and better teachers were hired. These included William 
Rainey Harper as educational director. 

Ohio-born Harper filled the post at the school on the lake for six years, 
until he became president of the University of Chicago. Never a man to 
oppose an idea because it was new, Harper immediately revolutionized 
Chautauqua Lake's educational program; later, at Chicago, he did like- 
wise. Conservative critics, who had watched Harper suspiciously in the 
east, in the west were to find him outright radical; in an irreverent press, 
Chicago's new and later distinguished institution of learning became known 
for a period as "Harper's Bazaar." 

As college president, Harper did not drop his interest in Chautauqua. 
His talents as a scholar were offered regularly to the independent assemblies. 
Once, with clergyman Franklin Weidner, president of Chicago Lutheran 
Seminary, he gave an evening's lesson in Hebrew. The two men, both 
students of Oriental languages, set up a blackboard on which they wrote, 
in Hebrew, the first verse of Genesis. They coached their audiences to read 
in unison; when the first verse was learned, they went on to the second. 

Vincent, who found all dullness most distasteful, had not objected when 
Director Harper enlarged the Lake's curriculum to offer knowledge, not 
only of the Bible, but also of the modern world. He agreed to classes 
in the arts and crafts, literature, science, physical education, even in what 
today is known as home economics. Music remained sacred, of course. 
Not until 1880 is there any record of any music not sacred at Chautauqua 
Lake. In that year a brave soul dared play Carl Maria von Weber's ro- 
mantic Invitation to the Dance. 



42 Culture Under Canvas 

The great sand map depicting Holy Land geography was abandoned as 
the enrollment grew, with one unseemly episode probably speeding its 
demise. Passengers, landing one dark night from a lake steamer, were 
searching for their sleeping quarters when one man lost his way. Good 
Chautauquans later pointed out that this was a "travelling salesman" per- 
haps not in complete harmony with the moral philosophy of the camp. At 
any rate, as the stranger wandered in outer darkness, his wayward feet led 
him straight across the Reverend Dr. Vincent's elaborate sand map. He 
struggled up the steep Judean mountains and having attained their height, 
he lost his footing and plunged face first into the Dead Sea. 

In time, the name of the school also changed. Students and summer 
visitors, swarming to the lake shore in ever-larger numbers, filling its or- 
derly rows of tents, packing the new frame hotels, did not bother to say 
"Assembly," or "Institute," or "Normal School." They merely were "at 
Chautauqua." Visitors to the spot in current years find a classic touch in its 
main building, a Grecian temple in a grove of hard maples and long- 
leafed pines, its front elevation a fagade of pillars. Its buildings represent 
millions of dollars in investment today; thousands of persons still patronize 
its summer programs and schools, continued successfully over the years on 
a non-profit basis. 

John Heyl Vincent eventually became Bishop Vincent, which surely did 
not hurt his institution, but in the meantime his quick mind had raised the 
question: Why should teaching be confined to a summer session and nine 
months of the year be left a cultural desert? So he started the Chautauqua 
Literary and Scientific Circle, a home reading course and correspondence 
school. 

Naturally someone had to furnish the books. Therefore the Chautauqua 
Press was set up, governed by an unsalaried "committee of six." In 1885 
its catalogue listed ninety-three titles. They were "paperbacks," undoubt- 
edly the first ever printed in the country, smaller than today's, however. 
They measured three by five inches, approximately the size of the "little 
blue books" that E. Julius Haldeman was to make famous in later years 
in Lawrence, Kansas. They numbered seventy to one hundred pages and 
sold for ten cents. They included poems by William Cullen Bryant, a be- 
ginners' astronomy, a life of Socrates, the educational theories of Horace 
Mann, a history of art, readings from the classics and a half dozen his- 
torical titles by Bishop Vincent himself. 

"Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circles," meeting to discuss books, 
sprang up in several thousand towns; their members usually were women, 
though in Arkansas, the records show, an ambitious country storekeeper 
recruited the men loafing on his cracker barrels. As a measure of the 
circles' popularity, in the late nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, 
is the fact that in distant Iowa alone, where some fifty towns participated, 



Chautauqua Lake 43 

cities as large as Des Moines had to be divided among several "circles." 
At one time this state capital had thirty groups in action. 

The Miller-Vincent enterprise had a host of imitators throughout the 
country. By 1900 upward of two hundred copies of the New York original 
were popping up like toadstools, most of them beside lapping waters, from 
New Jersey and the Maine woods to California and Oregon. 

Owners of these summer institutions did not beat about the bush. They 
called them "Chautauquas" and neither Miller nor Vincent objected. Pro- 
grams at these "independents," as they came to be known, were planned 
primarily for customers in the immediate neighborhoods and they lasted 
each summer from a few packed days to a month. For talent the managers 



A letter from Thomas A. Edison to the Chautauquas, 
September 75, 1923 



Greetings to all the Chautauquas who 
have set aside one day in recognition of 
the original movement started by those 
two men of imagination, Lewis Miller and 
J. H Vinoent; a movement based on an idea 
whioh has now spread over the whole of our 
country and, in fact, over the world; an 
idea whioh has been and will continue to 
be of immense educational value to all the 
people, and, therefore, of first importance 
to their welfare* 




44 Culture Under Canvas 

turned to the winter Lyceum bureaus, enlisting the great and famous, the 
in-betweens, sometimes the notorious. They billed the best musicians, ora- 
tors and humorists available, all the time eyeing enviously the star-studded 
taleotthat constantly distinguished the boards at the "mother" institution. 

Undeniably more famous men and women, including Presidents of the 
United States, have appeared at Chautauqua Lake in eighty years than in 
any other spot in America. For despite its Wesleyan ancestry, the Chau- 
tauqua Lake Assembly became not only non-denominational, but, more 
important, it reached beyond the pulpit for exciting orators, men of ideas, 
be they orthodox or not, popular or unpopular. Both Vincent and Miller 
had small sympathy for unreasonable sectarianism, so the great outdoor 
assembly under the trees today it would be called a bowl soon responded 
to the voices of ministers and laymen of almost every Protestant faith. If 
they were thinking men and had good, carrying voices, that was enough. 

,But it also helped, Vincent well knew, if their names were in the news. 
Names attract crowds and the good clergyman established the policy, then 
and there, for all later types of Chautauqua, that it was much more profitable 
culturally, and was also within the proper spirit of his organization, to offer 
a program to a large crowd rather than to a small handful of already en- 
lightened faithful. 

By Vincent's time the "star system" already controlled the theatres, 
just as it dominates movie and television screens today. New York and 
Philadelphia audiences might be mildly enthusiastic about Shakespeare, but 
they were wildly so about Shakespeare plus Edwin Booth, or Shakespeare 
plus Henry Irving, or Shakespeare plus Edwin Forrest. Vincent had been 
twenty-five years old when American loyalty to Forrest, in opposition to 
a popular British actor, led to the Astor Place riots in New York, with 
Forrest's admirers dying for him. Whether the good clergyman was con- 
sciously aping the theatre when he introduced the star system at the Chau- 
tauqua Lake assembly may only be surmised today. At any rate, in the 
second year he prevailed upon the President of the United States to make 
an appearance. 

Stiff-necked churchmen were shocked and practical politicians startled 
when the newspapers announced that Ulysses S. Grant would spend a week 
"participating" at Chautauqua Lake. That he actually was a second choice 
was not mentioned at the moment. The famous personality Vincent had 
planned to use to put his institution into the headlines was Henry Ward 
Beecher. But to Vincent's dismay, the clergyman made headlines of his 
own. 

Beecher at the time had served the Plymouth Church for twenty-five 
years. He was fifty-nine years old, one of the most respected men in the 
nation, when a strange, unhappy, vindictive woman named Victoria Wood- 
hull, a member of his church, published a leering story in which she linked 



Chautauqua Lake 45 

Beecher's name with that of the wife of his friend and fellow lecturer, 
Editor and Poet Theodore Tilton. Not only was Tilton also a member of 
the Plymouth congregation, but he had been Beecher's house guest many 
times and the two had travelled together on their Lyceum rounds. 

At first Tilton refused to believe the story; gossips persisted, and nearly 
two years after the Woodhull "disclosure," Tilton sued Beecher for $100,- 
000, charging him with adultery. Mrs. Tilton, never strong mentally, there- 
upon gave out a series of contradictory "voluntary confessions," which 
from time to time she withdrew. The lawsuit lasted six months. After the 
jury had been out nine days, it stood nine to three for acquittal, and agreed 
that it never could agree. A church body, after hearing the evidence, 
cleared Beecher of the charge. The case cost him $180,000; he took to 
the road at once on a new series of lecture tours to pay off. the debt. 

At Chautauqua Lake, meanwhile, Bishop Vincent had reconsidered his 
choice of a speaker. The invitation that he had prepared for Clergyman 
Beecher, went instead to President Grant. 

Certainly the Civil War hero was controversial enough. Politicians 
blamed him, probably unjustly, for the panic of 1873 and for the up- 
surge of the "greenback" movement for cheap money that followed it. 
They hammered at him for the "Whiskey Ring" scandals in which several 
of his appointees defrauded the government, and which finally reached 
his own office where only his intervention saved his private secretary. 
As if all this were not enough, the Senate impeached his Secretary of War 
for taking bribes. Grant stopped this proceeding by quickly accepting his 
Cabinet officer's resignation. 

Outside the political arena, Grant had detractors who attacked him on 
"moral" issues. Prohibitionists loudly resented his whiskey drinking and 
anti-tobacco crusaders never allowed him to smoke a cigar in peace. He 
had been known, under stress of war, to break the Tenth Commandment 
in a loud voice. Also he belonged to no church. 

Vincent shut his eyes to such objections. He could be fairly certain that 
the President would accept. The inarticulate Grant had favors to repay, 
dating back to Vincent's speeches for him in Galena, Illinois. "The fact 
that he is the President," Vincent told his associates, "will make a point for 
our cause," no matter, apparently, how tenuous the President's connec- 
tions with religion. 

Grant's visit on Saturday, August 15, 1875, gave the Chautauqua Lake 
assembly the nation-wide publicity it needed. He travelled by slow train 
to Jamestown, New York, then he boarded the side-wheeler Josie Belle 
for the trip up-lake. In later years in circuit Chautauqua there were gala 
parades aplenty, but certainly nothing like this. Young ladies of the church 
had draped the little Josie Belle with red, white and blue bunting until, 
according to one reporter, "it looked like something out of fairyland.* 5 Be- 



46 Culture Under Canvas 

hind the steamer, with the President of the United States sitting conspicu- 
ously in its bow, trundled a procession of other craft, these, too, "gaily be- 
decked and carrying thousands of cheering enthusiastic watchers." 

Republican party leaders in New York state lent willing hands to the 
celebration. In fact, this widely publicized union of the Republican party, the 
Protestant church, the White House and Bishop Vincent's cultural enter- 
prise pleased everyone except the Democrats. New York newspapers esti- 
mated that the crowd waiting at the Chautauqua assembly grounds num- 
bered 30,000, a figure possibly padded by the excitement of the moment. 
But no matter how many persons witnessed the event, all America read 
about it. From that day on, the nation knew about Chautauqua Lake. 

Grant did not make a long speech, though it was not as short as the one 
his young son Jesse had play-acted about a few years before in the White 
House. The child, seven years old, had set out to entertain his family with 
a portrayal of "How papa makes a speech." It was unwittingly acid, and 
Grant's feelings, always hiding near the surface, had been hurt. 

The boy, striking a stiff attitude, had said: "Ladies and Gentlemen . . ." 
and then a pause. "I am very glad to see you. I thank you very much. Good 
night" 

Grant reminisced at Chautauqua Lake about his carefree days with 
Bishop Vincent at Galena, Illinois. When he sat down, he knew that he 
had done better than usual. Talking about old friendships was pleasant com- 
pared with the endless insoluble problems, the backbiting and political 
wrangling that filled his mind most of the time in Washington; also, he 
could talk better out-of-doors. 

Grant was only fhe first of a long line of Presidents, former Presidents, 
Presidents-elect and Presidential candidates to speak at the "mother" 
Chautauqua, and later at the scattered independent assemblies, and finally 
in the canvas tents. In 1880 the Republican nominee, General James A. 
Garfield, arrived at the Miller-Vincent quarters and again Republican cam- 
paign managers played up the visit for all it was worth. 

Garfield, like Grant, approached the New York grove by steamboat, but 
it was night and he slept instead of sitting nobly in the bow. The next 
morning he piously attended Sunday morning devotions and was introduced. 
He did not speak. For one reason, his voice was worn out from campaign- 
ing; for another, it was the Sabbath and even the most anxious politicians 
in that period knew that it would never do to mix politics with the Lord's 
Day worship. Garfield simply bowed and sat down and immediately the 
audience, rising enthusiastically to its own feet, startled the visitor with a 
"Chautauqua salute.'* 

Mr. Garfield was accustomed to tromping, hollering political crowds. 
This was silent applause and he never had met anything like it. Nor had 
anyone else, except men speaking on the Miller-Vincent programs. Good 
f oik in the Chautauqua Lake audience considered hand-clapping and cheers 



Chautauqua Lake 47 

a bit uncouth, particularly on the Sabbath. Also it was often difficult to 
determine whether a visiting clergyman's remarks constituted a sermon, 
which you didn't applaud, or an inspirational address, which you did. Lurk- 
ing in the background of the whole idea was the thought that, as Mark 
Twain had expressed it to James Redpath, "people are afraid to laugh in a 
church." So at Chautauqua Lake someone had suggested that an approving 
audience wave its handkerchiefs. 

Those doctors present who had heard the echoes of the new germ 
theory were highly critical of this practice of waving handkerchiefs about in 
a tabernacle full of innocent people. But those to whom the "salute" was 
an emotional safety valve pointed out that the handkerchiefs for the most 
part were clean, so why be fussy? 

A newspaper reported that Monday, when Mr. GarfiekTs party prepared 
to leave, a "great throng" crowded the dock. Since it was no longer the 
Sabbath, the Republican nominee could indulge freely in politics. After 
tossing a few barbs at the discredited "party of slavery," without mention- 
ing the Democrats, he rolled up his sleeves and attacked the "idle rich." 

Dr. Vincent had invited the Fisk Jubilee Singers from the fledgling 
university at Nashville, Tennessee, to take part in the program. This lusty 
musical group had been on the road only half a dozen or so years; for the 
next half century its succeeding members would be familiar figures on hun- 
dreds of platforms. They sang now for the departing Garfield: 

"This is the Year of Jubilee, 
"You shall gain the victory, 
"The Lord has set His People free, 
"And you shall gain the day." 

The Book of Leviticus tells that twice each century, in the ancient sys- 
tem of "Jubilee Years," a Hebrew sold into service must be freed. This held 
particular meaning for these young colored singers. The war to free the 
slaves was no by-gone memory. The crowd, however, saw political implica- 
tions for the 1880 Presidential campaign. The "great throng" took the song 
as a prophecy and the "pent-up enthusiasm of the previous day demanded 
vent." Not only did they cheer both Mr. Garfield and the Jubilee Singers, 
but the white handkerchiefs came out again, until, in the reporter's words, 
"the fluttering linens made the lake shore look as if a magical snowstorm 
had fallen on the forest." 

In the early 1900's another entertainer whose platform appearances 
spanned almost the whole life of tent Chautauqua, Poet-humorist Wallace 
Bruce Amsbary, read Riley one summer evening to seven thousand people 
at the Lake assembly. The "salute" he received he compared to "an im- 
mense cauldron of pop-corn exploding all over the vast auditorium." For 
decades the practice of waving handkerchiefs persisted. Not until just be- 
fore the First World War did a Chicago doctor, lecturing on a Chautauqua 



48 Culture Under Canvas 

circuit on causes of the common cold, finally succeed in putting a stop to 
the practice. Bishop Vincent had tried. Alert to criticism in the press, he 
finally had set a rule that he alone, from the platform, could "start" a hand- 
kerchief salute and even he only "a few times a season." In spite of him, 
his delighted audiences had continued to break out the handkerchiefs. 

A refinement of the practice cropped up in 1956 in Leningrad. While the 
American company of Porgy and Bess was playing there, eight or ten Negro 
members of the cast attended Sunday services at the Leningrad Baptist 
church and at the request of the minister sang several Negro spirituals. When 
they had finished, the Russians, like the Americans at Chautauqua Lake, 
showed their delight with "fluttering linens." Finally, as a special accolade, 
they rolled the handkerchiefs into balls and pelted the singers with them. 
The pelting was symbolic, no doubt. Roses are hard to find in the Russian 
winter and word of Bishop Vincent's ideas about germs may not have ar- 
rived in Leningrad. 

In 1881, Schuyler Coif ax, an Indiana radical who was Vice-President 
in Grant's first administration, lectured at the lake, the first of many Vice- 
Presidents to appear in independent assemblies or circuit tents. From Indi- 
ana, too, came "T.R.'s" mate, Charles Fairbanks, and one of Bryan's several 
fellows in defeat, John Kern. Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, 
Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt all were distinguished Chautauqua Lake orators before or after 
their terms of office, and in the case of the two Roosevelts each appeared 
there once while living in the White House. Their own homes were not too 
far from Chautauqua Lake, and "T.R.," who liked to fill his lungs with fresh 
country air, appeared five summers as a speaker, "F.D.R." four times. 

As for defeated Presidential candidates, they were legion. Democrats 
Alton B. Parker, Alfred E. Smith, James M. Cox and Henry Wallace, 
Socialist Eugene V. Debs, Progressive Robert M. LaFollette, Republicans 
Charles E. Hughes and Wendell Willkie, all, at one time or another, mounted 
Bishop Vincent's stage, and of course the greatest attraction of them all was 
that Democratic aspirant, William Jennings Bryan. 

The tent Chautauquas, although they never entertained a President while 
he was in office, were to book several before or after their residence in the 
White House Taft with his chuckle and heavy valise, scholar Wilson, 
first-rate speaker Harding. Vice-Presidents Tom Marshall, of the memora- 
ble epigram, "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar," and Calvin 
Coolidge both took to the road while in office. It was the fate of the usually 
non-loquacious Coolidge to be hissed off a platform, one suffocating day in 
Minnesota, by a crowd impatiently waiting for the horse races; they thought 
one hour and twenty-five minutes too long for a dull speech a state fair 
platform, it happened to be, in between Mr. Coolidge's Chautauqua dates. 

Mr. Taft, with his triple chins, chuckled his way once through a less ig- 
nominious incident. In Washington Heights in 1916, in the only Chautauqua 



Chautauqua Lake 49 

ever attempted by any system within the limits of New York City, the genial 
ex-President arrived in a hard rain storm to find only a handful of persons 
occupying a few scattered seats in a vast tent. He joined the audience in a 
hearty laugh and made his speech as if the tent were full and the handful 
of listeners went home satisfied. 

Tent circuits welcomed governors by the dozen, ambassadors and United 
States senators in platoons, congressmen in such numbers that members 
of mere state legislatures found themselves left out in the cold. Managers 
of the travelling Chautauquas had learned their lessons well from Bishop 
Vincent and Lewis Miller. Not only had these two pioneers made the New 
York assembly so respectable that even chiefs of state were glad to appear 
there, but like crusading James Redpath, they also taught their successors 
the publicity value of big names. If the names were controversial, so 
much the better. 



Vawter Has an Idea 



6 



In the early summer of 1904 I bought a pair of white duck pants. I needed 
them in my new role as platform superintendent in Iowa Falls and general 
superintendent in Bedford, Iowa. Vawter was talcing the daring plunge that 
year from winter Lyceum into summer tent Chautauqua. I was delighted, 
naturally, by the assignment, but scared, too. It was one thing to talk fast 
to a small committee on the Dakota frontier and quite another to address 
an audience of several hundred from a stage. 

It was an auspicious year, 1904, for Keith Vawter's new venture. The 
country was enjoying considerable prosperity. Chicago, capital of his Red- 
path Lyceum principality, was booming, making big wages, putting up big 
buildings, amassing big fortunes, shouting its greatness in a big midwestern 
voice. As western manager for the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, Vawter 
was now in a position to offer culture in wholesale lots to all the middle 
west. He not only could sell all the eastern Redpath list of famous orators 
and entertainers; he also had the clients of his original Standard Bureau, 
that he had operated by himself in Iowa. Moving from Des Moines to 
Chicago, he had honored me with a splendid title: "Manager of the City 
Department." I transferred my college credits to the University of Chicago 
WtTfor*alittle longer attended law school while I sold lectures. 

Business was plentiful. In addition to the great field of winter Lyceum 
bookings, there were the independent Chautauquas which operated across 
&e. country; during the summer months they all needed platform talent. 
However, as 'Vawter studied their loose organizations, he observed what 
time and effort they wasted, and Vawter hated waste. He realized that the 
individual summer groups had no over-all plan. Instead of combining to 
funnel available talent from town to town, on a well-oiled schedule, each 
manager attempted to do a job alone. 

50 



Vawter Has an Idea 51 

To be sure, there had been a few efforts at cooperation. In 1897 three 
managers in Iowa, Kansas and Colorado had tried unsuccessfully to com- 
bine in a single circuit, but after stupendous effort they had signed only 
nine widely scattered towns. George E. Vincent, son of the Bishop of 
Chautauqua Lake, later a president of the University of Minnesota, also 
had joined with four other managers to establish a loosely-knit associa- 
tion that they hopefully called the International Chautauqua Alliance. By 
1904 it had acquired twenty-four members in fourteen states, but these, 
too, were spread too thinly to take advantage of mass bookings or economi- 
cal travel time. 

More important, perhaps, was the fact that each assembly manager, 
possibly an ex-schoolteacher or a clergyman, was an individualist, working 
for no one but himself. His personal preferences, and often his own hide- 
bound prejudices, dictated his choice of program. Usually he insisted to 
the booking agent that "My people demand" this or that. As Vawter well 
knew, the truth was that his people got the type of Chautauqua fare that 
the manager or the president of the Ladies* Aid Society, who happened 
to be chairman othe Chautauqua committee, thought would be good for 
their souls. 

Thus, when the Reverend Billy Sunday was the energetic moving spirit 
of Winona Lake Assembly in northern Indiana, he discovered a never- 
satisfied yearning among his customers for equal parts of loud gospel 
music and evangelical orators charging in a solid phalanx against tobacco, 
the Demon Rum, "bad" language, short skirts and Sabbath-breaking. 

On the other hand, the committee responsible for the program at Bay 
View Assembly on Little Traverse Bay in northern Michigan thought the 
people who swarmed into its unfenced grounds, that once had been a 
camp-meeting site, were more interested in poets and poetry, art, literature 
and polite travelogues. The manager of Old Salem Chautauqua, down in 
Lincoln country near Petersburg, Illinois its seats were on the site of one 
of Lincoln's early homes leaned toward patriotic subjects, patriotic mu- 
sic, novelty acts that waved the flag. But at the great Miami Valley Assem- 
bly on the old Miami and Erie Canal, at Franklin, Ohio where sometimes 
six hundred tents housed families during the course programs had to ad- 
here closely to the tone of the mother institution at Chautauqua Lake. 

Vawter, for his part, believed that people everywhere were pretty much 
alike. If given free choice, audiences at all the assemblies scattered through 
the middle west would be interested in much the same fare. A program 
with enough variety would appeal to both Bay View and Winona Lake, 
Miami Valley and Old Salem, or any other locality where some visionary or 
alert businessman had planted his idea. 

So with map, calendar, railroad timetables and his list of available Red- 
path talent, Vawter planned a new kind of summer season. He built a 
sample program with proper balance of serious lecturers, humorists, map- 



52 Culture Under Canvas 

cians, popular music companies, play readers and a few famous preachers, 
to operate on an eight-day schedule. Being a realist, he did not offer a com- 
plete "package" in the beginning. Instead, he would break down resisting 
local managers slowly, allowing them to decide on their own serious lec- 
turers, to be selected, of course, from Vawter's list. But he alone would 
choose the entertainment features, the musical companies and quartets, 
the magicians and all specialty acts that carried heavy baggage. 

Thus he could send those portions of the program that cost more to 
transport, on a regular route, planned in advance to take advantage of 
short railroad hops and to avoid open dates. This would reduce overhead 
for his bureau and fatigue and frustration for the talent. His own winter 
lecture experience had proved that it was too hard on his pocketbook 
to move a single lecturer, say from the permanent tabernacle at Clarinda, 
Iowa, back across two states to southern Ohio to Miami Valley Park; then, 
as he had done his past season, west again four or five hundred miles to 
Kansas to the old building at Ottawa, also a one-time tabernacle, and finally 
down across Missouri to Mark Twain's town of Hannibal. 

This was bad enough. But it cost a great deal more to shift a magician 
and his wife, their two assistants and five or six heavy trunks over the same 
haphazard route* The new Vawter plan would eliminate extra travel and 
extra baggage costs and keep a larger portion of the Chautauqua dollar 
where it belonged, in the pockets of talent and booking agents, not in the 
cash drawers of railroad stations. 

Vawter also knew that, under the system then in vogue, the average 
independent operator, who probably had met few big payrolls himself, was 
spending every summer around $5000 for a two- or three-week program. 
By selling a partial package deal, eliminating rival advance men and con- 
centrating all advertising, Vawter figured that he might put together a lively 
eight-day program for $2000. But to do this he would need a test run 
with at least a dozen towns. For this experiment he chose his native Iowa. 

With the help of J. Roy Ellison, a former Nebraska Lyceum agent al- 
ready in Vawter's employ, and Lee H. Maus, a Cherokee, Iowa, school 
principal with experience in running a small assembly, (he later became 
a Redpath lecturer), Vawter booked his first tent assembly. 

The first bold spirit willing to plunge into the scheme was Elijah B. 
Jones of the independent Chautauqua in Marshalltown, Iowa. Jones signed 
for a series of programs to open July 1, 1904, and in the agreement guar- 
anteed a $2000 ticket sale. Of total gate receipts, Vawter was to receive 
the first $2500, plus fifty percent of everything above it; in turn, he would 
pay all talent and be responsible for their train fares and expenses. Not 
wanting to endanger the respected Redpath bureau's reputation should he 
fail, he did not use its name. He still owned the Standard title, so for this 
adventure he converted himself into the ''Standard Chautauqua Bureau of 
Chicago." 



Vawter Has an Idea 53 

By late winter, seven independents had joined the plan. But seven were 
not enough. Nor did softening the contract help. It was May before Vawter 
secured a total of eleven. And no other towns would join. So to fill out a 
seven-weeks 5 season, he himself plunged: he would provide his own tents 
and give the show under his own auspices in four other communities. 

Two of these towns were Iowa Falls and Bedford, both county seats. 
In each he organized a committee of "prominent citizens" to be responsible 
for the ticket sale and to guarantee a $2000 minimum. He surmised again, 
and as it proved, rightly, that a local group would be able to stir up en- 
thusiasm as no professional from outside could hope to do. Not only that 
year, but from then on until the last tent came down, this "committee of 
citizens" carried the load locally and kept the flags flying in the Chautauqua 
towns. A live committee meant a good show, and a reasonable profit. A 
poor committee often resulted in financial loss and a complete lack of 
interest among the people of the community. * "* 

Before Vawter started his adventure, he talked it over with his Redpath 
partners, Peffer in Philadelphia and Hathaway in Boston. If they objected, 
it was mildly. Besides, it was Vawter's own money he was wagering. Al- 
though the Redpath corporate set-up still theoretically was a single institu- 
tion, the three partners, Vawter, Peffer and Hathaway, to all practical pur- 
poses were independent operators. All through Chautauqua history the 
patent Redpath Lyceum Bureau functioned as a single corporation. If a 
manager of a Lyceum office wished to establish a Chautauqua circuit, he 
created a separate organization and for the privilege of using the cor- 
porate name, he paid a royalty to the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, usually 
three percent. So even-frrtKis first venture, profit or loss would be Vawtefs 
own. But ia either case, the scheme would provide pay checks through 
midsummer doldrums for Redpath winter Lyceum talent and operating 
employees. This prospect could only find approval in both eastern offices. 

Vawter booked his talent carefully. As starting date approached, how- 
ever, flaws began to appear. His determination to break the crust of op- 
position by independent managers to any kind of travelling circuit had 
caused him to temporize at the end. His fourteen towns, as finally mapped, 
sprawled not only across the whole of Iowa, but took in one small city over 
the Minnesota line and four in eastern Nebraska. Moreover, their dates fell 
into awkward sequence. The resulting miles of back-tracking, the very 
mistake Vawter had been trying to avoid, would so swell railroad fares 
that he must have realized even then that although, like Crusader James 
Redpath, he might be launching a new idea, he would not get rich from 
it. Many local managers for years had used specific favorite weeks for 
their programs. Why should they shift dates, they protested now. If this 
crazy man Vawter wanted to furnish talent, he could do so at precisely the 
moment it suited his customers* convenience. 

Years later, in 1915, on the Redpath-Columbus, Ohio, circuit, the jump 



54 Culture Under Canvas 

of seven miles between Bellevue and Clyde was the shortest I ever heard 
of in Chautauqua's history. Vawter, unfortunately, had no such good for- 
tune in this first season of tent Chautauqua. Marshalltown, the county seat 
where the season would open July 1st, was almost precisely in the middle 
of Iowa. But instead of moving on swiftly to the nearest town on the list, 
talent, that probably did not feel too fresh even at the start, must angle up 
to the north, on three railroads, to MacGregor Heights. There was sure 
to be a good crowd here, for it was a vacation spot on the Mississippi River. 

There would be no vacation for the talent, however. All they could do 
was pack up and go back over the same three railroads to Marshalltown, 
where they had started, and on down to the state capital at Des Moines; 
from there north again to little Iowa Falls, where I was to have my baptism 
of fire as a platform manager; thence almost straight west eighty miles on 
a milk train to the new packing plants at Sioux City. The next jump, long- 
est of all, swung the caravan northeast, with half a dozen transfers, this time 
to Albert Lea, ten miles inside Minnesota. 

Busy Albert Lea, on its chain of lakes, would be another good spot. 
Like MacGregor, it not only was vacation country; it also had two little 
colleges, twelve churches and a host of business people to back the Chau- 
tauqua project. But then came Iowa again. For a third time companies must 
back-track to Waterloo, stopping now for a program in "Chautauqua Park"; 
next a visit to Marshalltown again and the Des Moines coal fields, to get 
to the pretty little riverside village of Chariton; thence west to Bedford, 
where I was to be general superintendent. 

Beyond Bedford, the tiring trail led down to Glenwood, a county seat 
in the Missouri River bottoms that had six churches just half as many 
as Albert Lea but enough for members to get out a good crowd. This was 
the last stop in Iowa. Jumping the river, the route ended in the four fairly 
adjacent eastern Nebraska towns of Fremont, Fullerton, Lexington and 
Auburn, all with grain elevators, all signed by Roy Ellison. 

In the experienced later days of the travelling tents, a circuit manager, 
for that matter the manager of any public entertainment, from circus to 
concert stage, merely would have shuffled the dates into a logical geo- 
graphical sequence, saving travel fatigue as well as money. Fatigue was 
important, and those who suffered most from it were the entertainers. 

There were three "musical companies" in this 1904 experiment, all quar- 
tets, vocal or instrumental. Unlike the lecturer, who spoke his piece once 
on any platform and took off for home or another date in some other 
community, the entertainers must stay several days in every town, then 
plod on over the whole seven-week route. This, by itself, the companies 
could have endured. They were seasoned troupers, accustomed to one- 
night stands, to snatching a hot cup of coffee or the fabled ham sand- 
wich. What they really objected to, loudly, was the need to keep shifting 
their programs. 



Vawter Has an Idea 55 

For among the other points that Vawter had not meant to surrender to 
the independent managers, but actually had surrendered, was his rule as 
to how many days a series of attractions would last in any community. 
In Des Moines, they were to stretch over ten. In Iowa Falls and Bedford 
it was a nine-day program, in all others eight. With this irregular schedule 
no company could march out on the stage with a tested production. It must 
present this here, and add something else there, constantly improvising, and 
this sort of drawback was very frustrating to professionals. 

Vawter thought matters over carefully as summer approached. He was 
a stubborn man. He had to admit that there were obstacles, but a few 
things were on his side to begin with, the condition of the country. Peo- 
ple, on the whole, were in a f airly good mood. Even the fact that the winter 
of 1903-04 had been unusually cold might help; folks who had stayed in 
more than usual would be glad to get out and about as summer came. Nor 
was money particularly tight. Iowa corn prices were not doing so well as 
they might, but wheat had come up. 

It seemed to Vawter, too, that the general public was more than usually 
music conscious. The newspapers, even as far west as Iowa, had been full 
all winter of enthusiastic stories about Signor Enrico Caruso, the new Italian 
tenor, who in the autumn of 1903 had started his first tour of America. 
He had made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York 
as the Duke in Rigoletto, and people were talking about him and about 
music in general. 

A Presidential campaign also was at hand. The Republicans were to 
meet in Chicago in June. It was almost certain that they would nominate 
Theodore Roosevelt. The Socialists, in May, had renamed railroader Eu- 
gene Victor Debs. In July, after the first programs started, would come 
the Democratic convention. No one was sure what the Democrats would 
do, but probably they would accept the gold standard and Judge Alton B. 
Parker. All these free political speeches would give considerable com- 
petition to paid lecturers, Vawter reflected. But they also had the virtue 
of putting audiences in a questioning mood. 

So, rationalizing, Vawter rented his tents and with no precedents to guide 
him started out on. the long Chautauqua road. 



The Curtain Rises 



"My grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf 
"So it stood ninety years on the floor; 
"It was taller by half than the old man himself, 
"Though it weighed not a pennyweight more." 

A quartet named the Chicago Lady Entertainers led off Vawter's program 
in 1904. They were a sprightly group of vocalists under the leadership of 
Mrs. Estelle Clark, who also was a "reader." Their repertoire was cheer- 
ful and extensive. In three afternoons and evenings the four doughty 
women, keeping in step as they marched out to the platform in their high- 
buttoned shoes, their white starched shirtwaists and long black skirts, 
without once repeating themselves put on six shows, each at least forty- 
five minutes long and one of them a full afternoon. 

Henry Clay Work, whose inventive genius ranged from knitting ma- 
chines to popular music, has several songs that have lived to his credit, 
among them Marching Through Georgia and Father, Dear Father, Come 
Home with Me Now. In 1904, his Grandfather's Clock was still a favorite. 
It struck a nostalgic note that the middle-aged especially enjoyed. Hadn't 
most settlers, venturing into the west, brought their big clocks with them 
and set them up in the front parlors? The Lady Entertainers sang the song 
with proper sentiment. They followed it, in most of Vawter's towns, with 
Blest Be the Tie. Appreciative crowds applauded the one as much as the 
other. 

Bedelia was the hit in New York and Chicago that year, but the discreet 
ladies did not sing it in Iowa Falls. Not that it was wicked, it just smacked 
of the big, gas-lit cities. The words, by William Jerome, certainly would 
not have given pause to the most priggish listener. They were written to 

56 



The Curtain Rises 57 

be sung in a lilting Irish, were full of Kiilarney and Erin's Isle and a Tip- 
perary smile. The author of the lyric modestly offered himself as Bedelia's 
Chauncey Olcott, if she'd consent to be his ''Molly OV 

It was tuneful, light as a thistle, but who in Iowa ever had heard of 
Chauncey Olcott? True, he had been packing them in on Broadway, as he 
sang his way through a confection called The Minstrel of Clare, but no one 
west of the Mississippi ever had heard of him or it. And no one cared. 

The Lady Entertainers kept their feet on solid ground. Like Ralph 
Bingham at Anita, ten years earlier, they stayed properly away from any- 
thing that suggested the raffish Broadway stage. 

Their popular numbers included The Old Oaken Bucket, Ben Bolt, 
Sweet and Low, Listen to the Mocking Bird; such Civil War favorites as 
Father Abraham and defiant Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me. They sang Annie 
Laurie, which a few persons still considered a little doubtful, and Comin* 
Through the Rye, Loch Lomond, ballads the people knew and loved. Sweet 
Adeline was almost brand new; many in the audience never had heard it 
before. Dresser's Banks of the Wabash could stir up as many pleasant 
memories here on the Iowa River as it could in Indiana. Certainly the 
moonlight was as fair, the breath of hay as sweet in Iowa as anywhere else. 

As for hymns, church people were singing Love Divine just as piously 
in 1904 as their parents had, and so therefore did the wise Lady Enter- 
tainers. They trilled and rejoiced in everything they should, and for their 
third and last appearance brought down the house with Mrs. Howe's tri- 
umphant Battle Hymn, flaming words set to a familiar camp-meeting air. 

Mrs. Clark's reading selections ran in the same proper vein. The first 
day she recited Bryant's Thanatopsis, repeating the stanza that began: "To 
him, who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible 
forms . . ." One afternoon she used Longfellow's Excelsior, next day 
James Whitcomb Riley's Out to Old Aunt Mary's. Her climax for one 
program was The Charge of the Light Brigade, and this was an innova- 
tion, since women readers usually left Tennyson's vigorous narrative for 
the males to handle, but the versatile Mrs. Clark did it with splendid gusto. 

She "interpreted" a short passage from The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Ed- 
ward Eggleston's popular tale of the trials of a frontier teacher before the 
Civil War; and another from Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, by Mrs. 
Alice Hegan Rice of Louisville, Kentucky. 

Iowa still liked the bearded Eggleston, no matter what stuck-up Hoosiers 
said about his slandering Indiana in his fiction. Mrs. Wiggs was a new 
best-seller. It had appeared first in the Century Magazine and had so pleased 
Theodore Roosevelt that he entertained the author and her poet-husband, 
Cale Young Rice, in the White House. The line in Mrs. Wiggs, in which 
the little girl becomes so confused over her "hat" and her "walk" that she 
says, "So we left our short walk to home>" was good every time for a ring- 
ing laugh. Young and old, the 'audience applauded Mrs dark. 



58 Culture Under Canvas 

Except for Mrs. Wiggs, which the coming fall was to open on Broadway 
as a play with Madge Carr Cook in the title role, these were recitations and 
songs that the men and women in the audience had known in school, so 
what could be better? The tried and true still was good entertainment and 
certainly the safest from the viewpoint of a program director in 1904. 

After their three days' appearance the Lady Entertainers tied big veils 
down over flapping hats and trouped on to Sioux City, and into their places 
on the creaking Iowa Falls stage marched an aggregation called the Giant 
Colored Quartet. On one program or another, this group rendered all of 
Stephen Foster's melodies, from O Susanna and Nellie Was a Lady to 
Old Black Joe. They sang Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground and John 
Brown's Body, written to the same Sunday-school tune as Mrs. Howe's 
Battle Hymn. Finally, to the delight of everyone, for one encore they offered: 

"Ob, my poor Nellie Gray, 

"They have taken you away 

"And I'll never see my darling any more; 

"I'm sitting by the river and I'm weeping all the day, 

"For you've gone from the old Kentucky shore." 

G.A.R. buttons were conspicuous in every audience in this period. The 
Civil War still colored much of the thinking, and Nellie Gray and emotional 
songs of the freedmen belonged as truly to the rural west as to the rural 
south, were as American in thought or sentiment as Daisy Bell or Good 
Night, Ladies. 

The singers on the final three days of the 1904 series were the famous 
Temple Male Quartette of Boston, assisted now by Reader Victoria Lynn 
instead of Katherine Ridgeway. Thus Vawter opened each program with 
music. He had counted on the country being music-conscious. Children 
still "sang" their geography lessons, even their multiplication tables. Gath- 
ering 'round the family organ or piano was a certain part of any evening's 
entertainment, at least in the midwest. Everybody sang, which may account 
for the fact that musicians as a class were paid less than other entertainers. 
Records show that the men in the Temple Male Quartette were performing 
at about that time for $25 a night for the group, and out of this they paid 
their own^expenses. 

Opening the Chautauqua program with music eventually became a pat- 
tern. No matter who the speaker might be, with rare exceptions he followed 
a musical prelude lasting from fifteen minutes to an hour. "We pre-luded," 
companies used to say, coining a good Chautauqua verb, cousin to the 
later movie verb to "pre-meer." Few individuals ever objected to the 
custom. Humorist Strickland Gillilan did in later years; he wanted no 
frivolous distractions before he took the stage. But in general, speakers, 
from William Jennings Bryan down, liked the musical prelude. It quieted 
folk, let them get settled in their not-too-comfortable seats and forget any 



The Curtain Rises 



59 



chores left undone at home. Perhaps it even put them in the right mood 
for a message. 

A copy of that program in pleasant little Iowa Falls, where I occupied 
the exalted position of platform superintendent, still exists: 



IOWA FALLS CHAUTAUQUA 

Program Furnished By 
THE STANDARD CHAUTAUQUA BUREAU 



July 10-19, 1904. 



Mrs. Roudebush, 

Morning Hour Lecturer 



H. P. Harrison, 

Platform Manager 



1st BAY 

2nd DAY 

3rd DAY 
4th DAY 

5 th DAY 
BthDAY 



rth DAY 



Afternoon Concert, CHICAGO LADY ENTERTAINERS 

MRS. ESTELLE M. CLARK, Reader 

Evening Prelude, CHICAGO LADY ENTERTAINERS 

Lecture, REV. JOHN ROACH STRATTON (sic) 
Afternoon Prelude, CHICAGO LADY ENTERTAINERS 

Lecture, DR. D. F. FOX 

Evening Prelude, CHICAGO LADY ENTERTAINERS 
Moving Pictures by DR. W. ROBERTSON 

(travel talk with slides) 
Afternoon Prelude, CHICAGO LADY ENTERTAINERS 

Lecture, DR. CASPER W. HIATT 

Evening Drama, "HIAWATHA," illustrated by Moving Pic- 
tures. 
Afternoon GIANT COLORED QUARTETTE 

Entertainment, EDWIN M. BRUSH, Magician 
Evening Prelude, GIANT COLORED QUARTETTE 

Joint Debate, '"The Political Issues of the Day," 
CONG. J ADAM BEDE and 
JUDGE MARTIN D. WADE 
Afternoon GIANT COLORED QUARTETTE 

Musical Novelties and Juggling, GEORGE W. 

GARRETSON. 
Evening Prelude, GIANT COLORED QUARTETTE 

Lecture, "Moving Pictures," W. ROBERT GOSS 
Afternoon GIANT COLORED QUARTETTE 

Lecture, "Flying," DR. T. BAIRD COLLINS 
Musical Novelties, GEORGE W. GARRETSON 
Lecture, GEORGE L. McNUTT 
Evening 

(This was Sunday, so there was no evening program 

planned.) 
Afternoon Concert, TEMPLE MALE QUARTETTE 

Readings, MISS VICTORIA LYNN 
Evening Prelude, TEMPLE MALE QUARTETTE 
Lecture, The Key to the 20th Century," 

DR. THOMAS E. GREEN 



60 Culture Under Canvas 

Afternoon Prelude, TEMPLE MALE QUARTETTE 

Lecture, GEORGE L. McNUTT 

Evening Prelude, TEMPLE MALE QUARTETTE 

Lecture, DR. FRANK G. SMITH 

Afternoon Prelude, TEMPLE MALE QUARTETTE 

ChaUc Talks b y ASH DAVIS 

Evening Prelude, TEMPLE MALE QUARTETTE 

Lecture, BISHOP JOSEPH CRANE HARTZELL 



In addition to this particular group appearing at Iowa Falls, Vawter 
offered local committees a choice of twenty-five other numbers that season, 
chiefly serious lecturers, with a few entertainers thrown in to lighten the 
diet. The list was made up heavily, one realizes now, of churchmen and 
Democratic bigwigs. It included Rabbi Leon Harrison of St. Louis, Method- 
ist Albert B. Storms, "General" Zach Sweeney, shouting southern evangelist 
Sam Jones, clergyman Frank Gunsaulus of Chicago and William Jennings 
Bryan, hero of the lecture platform since the 1896 Democratic convention^ 
Methodist Bishop Charles H. Fowler and Congressman Champ Clark w 'of 
Missouri; Baptist clergyman Kerr Boyce Tupper and the Honorable James K. 
Vardaman of Mississippi; finally Congressman Charles Grosvenor of Ohio, a 
Civil War general with thirty years in Congress, who, to give a little bal- 
ance to Vawter's undoubtedly accidental political picture, happened to be 
a Republican. This may sound as deadly as a museum catalogue, but ac- 
tually these were all flesh-and-blood, highly amusing and interesting per- 
sonalities. / 

The nmerdays in the town on (he Iowa River were hot hot enough, as 
the saying went, to bake biscuits on the stage. In those years Iowa Falls, 
with its 4000 people in the middle of rich farm territory, had two rail- 
roads, a spur line of a third, and, as was to be expected in a prairie state, 
a half dozen wooden grain elevators. Ellsworth College, with three build- 
ings in midtown, was a going concern with an especially good music de- 
partment, and the town and faculty for several years had supported a 
permanent Chautauqua assembly. They had invested hard-earned dollars 
in a frame building on grounds just across from the town, reached by a foot- 
bridge a little up-river from the road bridge. So, though this might be 
my first Chautauqua, it was not Iowa Falls'. 

Our series opened on Tuesday. The stores closed at one o'clock and, by 
half after the hour, the dusty streets and roads began to show that air of 
excited activity which I came to know in later years as "Chautauqua 
bustle." Ladies with parasols, carrying cushions under their arms, began to 
walk slowly across the footbridge. There had been a study session in the 
morning, with textbooks from the Chautauqua Lake Reading Circle. A 
school teacher had lectured on the care and feeding of infants and two 
middle-aged women, both of them with big hats, arriving now at the ticket 



The Curtain Rises 61 

booth, had not agreed with what the teacher had said. "What does a spinster 
know about infants, anyway?" one was objecting. 

I put the remark away among other items to report to Vawter and 
leaned into the ticket booth and looked hopefully at the cash box. It held 
probably two hundred and fifty stubs from season tickets and $26.50 from 
cash admissions, at thirty-five cents each* 

"Keep a sharp eye on the money," I warned the ticket boy. 

I was not being fussy. I worked for Vawter, and to him, carelessness 
with money, or with anything that cost money, was an unforgivable sin. 
He took no chances and expected no one else to take any* A green crew 
boy, who didn't know Vawter by sight, challenged him at the ticket gate 
one night in western Iowa and compelled him, the owner, to buy a ticket 
before he could enter the tent. This made such a good impression on Vawter 
that he eventually promoted the youngster to circuit auditor. If you worked 
for Vawter, you took care of his money and his property. 

I recall an incident years later, in Maryville, Missouri, when William 
Jennings Bryan was speaking. Since it was the famous Bryan, the crowd 
started to gather at five o'clock. By six-thirty all seats were filled inside the 
tent and the superintendent rolled up the canvas and began selling space 
outside. Vawter arrived at seven. He opened the door to the box office 
where a young Cornell College student was working as cashier. Money, 
mostly silver dollars, was stacked high on the twelve-inch shelf. 

"Hang up a sign saying 'sold out,' " Vawter directed, "there's not enough 
space to get anyone else in the tent." Then he called a carriage, scooped all 
the money into a suitcase, took it and the cashier to the town hotel, and, 
without waiting to hear Mr. Bryan, the two climbed into a double bed, with 
the precious suitcase safely between them, and went to sleep. , .- 

No such problem faced me in Iowa Falls at half after two that opening 
afternoon, even if the crowd did look stupendous when, arrayed in my new 
white pants, I mounted the platform. There may have been four hundred 
in the audience, mostly women, They stared at me expectantly while their 
palm-leaf fans waved back and forth in unison. 

As a manager I was to wrestle later with the worrisome fact that after- 
noon audiences often fanned mpre^for the purpose of keeping .awake than 
of keejpl^^38^bt[rr'di(J not anticipate any such problem that day. I 
merely welcomed the crowd heartily in the name of Keith Vawter and his 
lecture bureau, told them what a wonderful town Iowa Falls was "here 
beside its beautiful river," invited the embarrassed chairman of the local 
committee to stand and take a bow, asked all the ladies please to remove 
their hats, put in a plug for the Reverend John Roach Straton, the eve- 
ning speaker, and fled to the back of the building to wipe my perspiring 
brow. The show was on! 

The crowd was larger at night A breeze had blown up from the river 



62 " Culture Under Canvas 

and the naphtha lights flickered and buzzed under the roof gables. The 
barefoot children of the afternoon stayed at home, but husbands in white 
shirt sleeves accompanied their wives to hear Fundamentalist Straton talk 
on Sin. He did not disappoint them. Straton was a spectacular speaker and 
had a reputation as such, a tall, lank man with a zealot's eyes and a granite 
face. When he told the people in Iowa Falls that the whale actually swal- 
lowed Jonah, he could have been the whale himself, with all his fascinating 
gestures. His lecture was a no-holds-barred attack on dancing, divorce, 
prize fighting, atheism, beer saloons and wicked city politicians but chiefly 
on liquor and atheism, which latter, in his mind, might be anything that 
was not Fundamentalism. 

Straton, a Chicagoan at that time, was to achieve considerable notoriety 
twenty years later when his fiery debates in Carnegie Hall with the Rever- 
end Charles Francis Potter caused near-riots on New York City streets. 
Unitarian Potter was a champion of evolution, Baptist Straton was not, 
but in Iowa Falls, in 1904, no one disputed anything he said. That would 
have been heresy and there were old rails waiting in Iowa fences for heretics 
to ride. 

The Reverend Frank Smith, who followed Straton a few nights later 
with Hero of the Age, a serious speech on the "ideal man, honest in his 
political life," was to continue many years with Redpath after his Iowa 
Falls beginning. Pastor then of a Chicago Congregational church, he was 
more practical than most clergymen. He wanted good government and didn't 
just preach about it. Half a dozen years later, prior to the Bull Moose 
campaign, he ran for the Illinois legislature on an independent ticket, won 
against both old parties, and served one term, while still holding down his 
pulpit. On Chautauqua programs he leaped very early into the suffrage fight. 
Gratified women didn't rise and give him the old "Chautauqua salute," 
when he assured them that they had as much sense as men and "were en- 
titled to the same blessings and benefits" this was no news to them but 
they hospitably invited him back to lecture again and again. 

Frank Smith for a long time opened with the same story in every town. 
In the previous community, he would say, he had noticed that the big ad- 
vertising poster with his picture, standing in a restaurant window, had 
slipped down from its place and lodged so that all that could be seen was 
Smith's name, and under it a sign painted on the window "Frank Smith 
. . . Open All Night." It started things with a big laugh from every 
audience. Such was the humor of the times, such the readiness to laugh. 

The night before I introduced Frank Smith in Iowa Falls, the Reverend 
Thomas Green delivered his lecture. I use the word "delivered" designedly. 
It was a polished oration, dignified, poetic, oft-repeated, called The Key 
to the Twentieth Century. 

The Key was Peace. There never would be another war, the Reverend 
Mr. Green promised that night, because civilization had reached too high 



The Curtain Rises 63 

a peak. This was a happy assurance to Iowa and Minnesota and Nebraska 
villagers. The Spanish-American War had not been such a holocaust as the 
Civil War, but sons and fathers had died, from disease, if not in battle, and 
people wanted no more war. Ever. If this very distinguished-looking speaker 
was right, if the world had moved forward and another war was impossible, 
he was telling them just what they yearned to hear. They left the tent with 
wet eyes and great hopes. 

The Reverend Mr. Green, bearded, fluent rector of an Iowa diocese of 
the Protestant Episcopal church, delivered that oration in Iowa Falls in 1904 
and in twenty-seven other assemblies that same summer in twelve states; 
its "pre-meer" had been in Emporia, Kansas, in 1902. Ten years later, right 
through the evening of July 31, 1914, he was still delivering it, by that time 
on a western circuit, still assuring his listeners that there could not be an- 
other war. But that date ended the speech abruptly, for World War I began 
the next day. 

Mr. Green's next topic for the Chautauqua audience was as pregnant: 
The Truth about Japan. "I talked with the Emperor," he said in that later 
speech dealing with a trip to the Orient "He assured me, there will never 
be a war between the United States and Japan." Of course, we had not 
billed him as a prophet. 

Ash Davis, on the final day in Iowa Falls, entertained with what down 
the years would prove to be one of the most popular of all offerings in the 
tents. I believe it can be said truthfully that Chautauqua "invented" the 
chalk talk. I have heard the same claim for the male quartet. There had 
already been a number of "chalk" artists appearing on independent plat- 
forms. Thomas Francis ("Frank") Beard, Civil War cartoonist for Harper's 
Weekly, had been one of the first. But Ash Davis developed the idea into an 
interesting study in mass psychology. 

Chautauqua was to send great artists and poor scrawlers around its cir- 
cuits as the years flew by, and almost without exception the scrawlers proved 
more popular. As a rule, great artists with brush, crayon or clay are not 
particularly articulate human beings. They say what they have to say 
through the medium of their art. On the other hand, a glib, amusing speaker 
sometimes has a small knack for drawing which can be an afternoon's 
entertainment. The American people proved time and again that tliey 
preferred good lively talk illustrated by inferior art, to great art accom- 
panied by a dull speech. 

Redpath managers tried both kinds. W. M. R. French, the first director 
of the Chicago Art Institute, had been setting up an easel on indoor Chau- 
tauqua stages as early as 1902, chatting urbanely on Wit and Wisdom of 
the Crayon. He appealed to the very literate; he was too much of an artist to 
be uproariously popular. 

Marion Ballou Fiske, dever New Englander billed as "cartoonist and 
crayon lecturer" who toured the summer stages just a few years after 



64 Culture Under Canvas 

Mr. French, had a readier tongue. She liked to have her audience "join in," 
and to accomplish this she developed a character named "Uncle Zeke." 
When the drawing was completed, she presented it to the man the crowd 
had voted the homeliest in the room. In 1908, as a finale, she was doing a 
sketch of William Howard Taf t, flattering the Republicans in the room with 
the tag, "Our next President," and after a moment getting the Democrats' 
cheers by adding, "IF he is elected!" 

By no stretch of the imagination was chalk-talker Ash Davis a great 
artist, but the people loved him. In forty-five minutes, chattering gaily beside 
his flag-draped easel, he could turn out scores of platform masterpieces, 
landscapes, animals, sketches of people real or imaginary. The crowds liked 
the real ones best. The high point came when with deft strokes Ash smeared 
his paper with streaks of color, then whisked it upside down to disclose a 
noble reproduction of the "Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World." The 
applause shook the tent, as it did for a sketch of "Teddy Roosevelt in 
Rough Rider Hat," showing all his teeth. 

The magician making the rounds for Vawter that summer was Edwin 
Brush, a performer who kept his name before the public for another fifteen 
years. He called himself an "illusionist," a high-sounding word fashionable 
in those days, and he mystified Iowa Falls with what purported to be Hindoo 
magic. This included snakes, of course. Brush was a circumspect man. 
When his dates fell on Sunday, he piously built up a special program called 
The Other Man's Game, in which he discussed spiritualism, gambling, con- 
fidence tricks, with emphasis on "the game of life from a Christian magi- 
cian's viewpoint." In later years we used magicians chiefly on the children's 
programs, knowing many adults were bound to accompany them. 

Country folk, crowding into the Iowa Falls pavilion on single admis- 
sions that Saturday afternoon in 1904, watched George F. Garretson in 
another one-man production. Billed as offering "musical novelties," which 
meant that he performed on a variety of instruments, Garretson was a jug- 
gler, too, able to keep six sparkling balls in the air as nonchalantly as he 
played Home, Sweet Home on the cornet. Jugglers were familiar, inex- 
pensive entertainment. In the century just ended they had plied their trade 
first on the street, along with the organ grinder. Garretson had nothing 
new. But the speaker that followed him did. 

T. Baird Collins is credited with being the original lecturer on aviation 
in America; whether this is true or not, he certainly was among the earliest 
Orville Wright had made his first twelve-seconds flight at Kitty Hawk just 
six months prior to Vawter's 1904 trial run. Foreseeing, ahead of many 
others, that before long men and boys in small towns would be rushing 
out to the nearest big field to watch a crazy barnstormer, Collins in Iowa 
Falls gave fabulous information to an incredulous audience. With due credit 
to the Wright brothers, he strung a wire across the little stage, suspended a 
model airplane from it and discussed wing surfaces, "speeds upward of 



The Curtain Rises 65 

forty miles an hour," mysterious wind tunnels, and an aileron, a fancy word 
not yet in the dictionaries. His lecture was a "stunt" of course, scheduled 
on the same afternoon with a similar one by George L. McNutt 

George McNutt, after his 1904 start, became a Redpath headliner, a 
likeable, fast-talking crusader who in the hey-day of travelling Chautauqua 
could average one speech a day from June until September and, after a 
quick breath, begin months of winter Lyceum. Eventually it became our 
practice to use McNutt as "first day opener," since opening and closing 
days were most important. By 1915, for instance, we were to advertise that 
in the three years just passed, McNutt had opened three hundred and thirty- 
six Redpath Chautauquas. We billed him as George L. McNutt, "D.P.M.," 
meaning "Dinner Pail Man." 

McNutt's nickname of "dinner pail" referred to a speech that he made 
about cooking. It also emphasized for the sake of the audience that he 
himself had carried a dinner pail. A Presbyterian preacher, in the late 
90's, he suddenly had walked out of his pulpit in Urbana, Illinois, deter- 
mined to find out why many church pews were empty. He put on overalls, 
at the age of forty-two, bought himself a dinner pail, took his wife and sons 
and went to work as a laborer in the steel mills. 

Satisfied after seven years that he knew a few basic facts about the work- 
ing man's point of view, George McNutt started out in Chautauqua with a 
missionary speech on the needs of labor. He was not a Jacob Riis, but he 
could take Riis's famous title of How the Other Half Lives and twist it into 
a challenging talk on How the Other Half Ought to Live. He branched 
into the subject of food by linking poor food with crime and in Iowa Falls 
in July, 1904, he prepared a meal on the platform to demonstrate his vari- 
ous ideas. 

McNutt had a contraption related to the modern pressure cooker, ex- 
cept that it did its cooking only with hot water, without any fire. Into the 
pot, on a table on the stage, he stuffed potatoes and cabbage, onions and 
celery, clamped on the lid, pulled out his handsome big watch on its long 
chain, determined the exact time and, paying no more attention, apparently, 
to the pot, began to talk about the "dawn of a social conscience" and "labor 
as an art" Finally he uncovered the steaming kettle, produced plates, forks 
and spoons, ladled his vegetables into dishes and offered them to the some- 
what suspicious audience. The crew boys ate it, if the audience did not. 

In between engagements over the years McNutt was likely to disappear 
into the nearest machine shop, put on overalls and work with the men 
again for a week or two, "getting the feel of new facts." Chautauqua people 
found him not difficult, just "different" When mealtime came and the 
others went to the hotel, McNutt preferred to sit down under a tree, take 
a spoon from his pocket and enjoy a can of tomatoes and a pint of ice cream, 
"a perfect meal." If he disappeared overnight, friends did not worry. He 
probably had put on his overalls and gone out to the nearest farm and asked 



66 Culture Under Canvas 

the surprised farmer for permission to sleep in the oat or wheat bin. "To 
rest my nerves," he would explain. 

The big name at Iowa Falls that July was saved for the last night. Bishop 
Joseph Crane Hartzell, of the Methodist Episcopal church, known as the 
"Bishop of Africa," had already been appearing in the permanent Chau- 
tauquas for years, talking excitedly about the Dark Continent, branching 
from that to Negro rights in the United States. He was sixty-two years 
old that summer, and he travelled the circuits for eight or ten more years 
and even in his old age he pulled no punches. A spade in his lexicon was 
a spade and he never avoided a subject for fear of offending someone. His 
life, dogged by violence, was a Chautauqua saga. 

A graduate of Garrett Bible Institute in Evanston, Illinois, Hartzell had 
first made headlines as a young student, when, alone, he rescued the crew 
of a schooner breaking up in Lake Michigan. After he was ordained he had 
headed south and into trouble. He enraged southerners by crusading in 
the New Orleans area for civil rights for Negroes, offended northerners by 
slashing out at still-existent carpet-bagging. The Methodist church naturally 
found him difficult to handle, but it appreciated his oratorical gifts, his 
integrity and his crusading zeal. So what could be more natural than to 
make him a bishop with all Africa his field, where he would run afoul of 
neither northern Republicans nor southern Democrats? 

A first trip to Africa taught Bishop Hartzell that American dollars were 
needed to save the black man, so he came back for a money-raising cam- 
paign. To be sure, he did not ask for money from the tent platform. Such 
a practice was frowned on in Chautauqua, except by our own privileged 
agents the last day, importuning what we prayed were satisfied citizens to 
sign up for the next year's course. Bishop Hartzell merely created a climate 
in which dollars would come in easily later. In twenty years he made thirteen 
trips to the United States and on almost every trip he took to the Redpath 
road. 

He was a "platform personality," a man who stirred up controversy 
merely by opening his mouth, who packed drama into his lectures. One 
minute an audience froze with him in an Atlantic gale, next cringed before 
wild African tribesmen attacking a back-country mission. As I have said, 
violence dogged the Bishop. He finally had retired when, on his eighty- 
sixth birthday, robbers invaded his Blue Ash, Ohio, home and since, as 
usual, he refused to run from the fight, they beat him to death. 

Although the Iowa Falls course lasted nine days, only eight night per- 
formances were scheduled, for a good reason. Any nine-day program in- 
cluded at least one Sunday. This created a problem. So far as over-all 
organization went, Vawter naturally needed to put on a Sunday afternoon 
show, but he knew well enough that no matter how pious in tone a Sab- 
bath entertainment might be, many local church people would line up 
against it. He surmised, though, that here in the midwest where any Sab- 



The Curtain Rises 67 

bath entertainment more lively than a buggy ride was frowned upon, an 
innovation such as Sunday Chautauqua would bring out a crowd tired of 
boredom. 

So Vawter offered a compromise, whether it then was recognized as one 
or not. If the local committee would permit him to sell tickets for a Sunday 
afternoon program which in no way would affront their religious scruples, 
he, in turn, would make tent and talent available at no cost for a Sunday 
evening union service. Iowa Falls in that period had one Catholic and three 
Protestant congregations Methodist, Baptist, and Congregationalism Under 
Vawter's plan each local clergyman would have a chance to make a plat- 
form appearance and utter at least a few words before what proved, when 
Sunday night came, to be the largest crowd in the town's history. 

Once the local committee acquiesced, Vawter did not pussyfoot about 
his program. So far during the week there had been a parade of clergymen 
on the platform, and more were to follow. So he omitted the clergy alto- 
gether on Sunday afternoon. McNutt, a former clergyman to be sure, gave 
his "dinner pail" speech. Garretson entertained again musically, but did not 
juggle. Collins predicted the airplane age. 

The Sunday afternoon program was a sell-out and Iowa Falls churches 
joined enthusiastically in the evening union service. The Giant Colored 
Quartette led the singing, and without benefit of loudspeaker, paeans of 
praise rolled in volume across surrounding hills. Everybody came, parents 
with sleepy children, boys with their hair slicked down for their best girls. 
It was impossible to get them all into the tent, so we rolled up the canvas 
sides and hundreds sat in the field. 

There was bound to be frequent discussion over the years about Sunday 
performances. The south in particular disliked them. Congressman J. 
Adam Bede of Minnesota solved the problem, for himself at least, by saying, 
if his date happened to be on Sunday, 'Til take as my text this morn- 
ing . . ." and then after reading it, add, "As the text says," and go on 
from there with his regular speech. 

Usually managers provided musical talent with a list of numbers suitable 
for Sundays. Occasionally a company, notably the Ben Greet Players, 
would specify in a contract that there would be no Sunday work; a few 
individuals at times insisted on the chance to rest. On some circuits at later 
dates, for various reasons, the Sunday program was abandoned entirely. 
Particularly was this true after Broadway plays were presented. But on the 
whole, over the years, managers utilized the device Vawter introduced that 
first summer. 

I remember a Swarthmore circuit program one Sunday in 1922 at 
Harrisonburg, Virginia, in which a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest and 
twelve Protestant clergymen sat on the platform while Greek-born Julius 
Caesar Nayphe gave his interpretation of the Twenty-third Psalm. Occa- 
sionally there was clerical criticism. A Pair of Sixes, for instance, with 



68 



Culture Under Canvas 



which the talented Tull Players from Cornell College, Iowa, fought Dakota 
storms in the 1920*s, had to do with a poker game. That fact in itself was 
bad enough and for Sunday performances all the worse. A few local com- 
mittees frowned at it, and once in the director's home town a clergyman 
used it as a basis for a condemning sermon. Until the final years, however, 
when the quality of programs on many circuits deteriorated, clerical op- 
position to selling tickets for a Sabbath program rarely got a gaitered foot 
into the tents. 




TH &ST EXPRESS, TWO HOVK* tfiTg f MAK$ A SPECIAL STOP AT 3WWSOKS MILLS 
TO PICK (/PTHt JLYCfUM ENTRTAIHfi. , AT <4 A.M- 8JLOtS ZZRo. 



Bedford in the Mud 



8 



The Iowa Falls course closed the night of July 19 and I hopped the next 
train to Bedford in Taylor County, one hundred fifty miles southwest on 
the Missouri state line, where the nine-day series of which I was to be 
general superintendent would open the 26th. It was raining as I arrived. 
The East Fork of the muddy Hundred and Two River that flows through 
Bedford had spread over its low banks, and the village streets, for the most 
part listed merely as "graded," were already bottomless pools of rich, black 
Iowa mud. 

It looked like catastrophe to me. But that was my inexperience. One 
learned to expect "weather" in Chautauqua. Let our fluttering banners ap- 
pear over any Main Street and skies seemed to weep and areas parched 
for months became quagmires. Let the tent be half staked and clouds 
swelled black with wind, strong enough, the crews used to say, to rip the 
feathers off a. chicken. In fact, one lecturer returned from a summer wind- 
storm in Hallock, Minnesota, claiming that the chickens in that isolated 
town near the Canadian border wore blankets to keep their feathers on. 

It rained hard for three days. Except for this I found no serious problem. 
One of the newspaper editors met me at the station. There were two 
weeklies in Bedford at that time, a national bank, a state bank and five 
churches serving the spiritual needs of some 2000 persons. The editor re- 
ported that the season-ticket sale was lagging; if we could create what later 
psychologists were to call "a climate of enthusiasm," that, too, could be 
overcome. We did create it. Citizens began selling tickets door-to-door. 
This meant farm doors, too, all over Taylor County and a few across the 
line in Missouri, so that before the first program I could report to Vawter 
that the necessary number of season tickets had been sold. In this case 

69 



70 Culture Under Canvas 

it was a thousand at $1.50 each, for a full series of seventeen programs, a 
sum less than nine cents a performance. 

The grassy knoll which the editor suggested for the tent, only a few 
hundred yards beyond the last picket fence at the end of Main Street, 
seemed the logical place for Chautauqua grounds. It was high enough above 
the river bed to be safe from flood and it had what looked like a good 
stand of grass. It also was within easy walking distance of every house in 
town and the nearby open fields offered plenty of space for fanners to tether 
their horses and park their buggies and spring wagons. In fact, as it 
turned out later in the week, some of them even set up camp there. 

Tent and poles were to arrive on the morning train on the branch line 
of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy the expanding CB and Q already 
had absorbed the old Burlington and Missouri River Railroad that first 
served this section of the county. So I hired a drayman with a two-horse 
team and a solid-bedded wagon, and at the livery barn I found a couple 
of muscular young men who craved a dollar each for eight hours' work. 
Thus fortified, I met the train. 

We had used a permanent pavilion at Iowa Falls the previous week. 
Bedford, later an enthusiastic Chautauqua town, was to build itself a wooden 
auditorium three years after our visit. Three years too late for me, however. 
In Chicago, before I started out, I had spent considerable time thoughtfully 
studying Vawter's drawings of a tent, but I was unprepared now for the vast 
bundle of soiled canvas and the enormous coils of rope which we dragged 
off the Burlington local. We hauled it to the Chautauqua grounds and spread 
it on the damp grass. 

Somehow we got it up. But after the last stake had been driven into 
the mud and the last guy rope tightened, there came the business of seats 
and stage. In later years circuits carried their own folding seats, but in 1904 
seating arrangements had to be improvised. There was very little in the 
budget for it or for the stage. The superintendent's ingenuity, plus a few 
carefully spent dollars, must do the trick. 

Luckily the lumber dealer was a member of the Bedford Chautauqua 
committee. Yes, he agreed when he heard the problem, he would lend me 
at no cost the necessary two-by-ten planks, provided we did not drive 
nails into them or saw off any ends. Those were the days of cedar shingles, 
packaged a quarter square to the bundle. He would lend us those, too. The 
bundles, laid flat, made uprights on which to put the planks. 

The stage was another matter. About nine feet by twelve and nearly 
three feet off the ground, it had to be nailed together, but if we carefully 
drove the nails only part way, making them easy to pull, and did not seri- 
ously damage the planks, the dealer would take them back also. 

As opening day approached, I began to have misgivings about the place 
where we had set up the tent. It was on high enough ground, but to reach 
it from town people must cross a field, and even our own tramping around 



Bedford in the Mud 71 

had started to reveal the deep Iowa mud under the sod. If weather con- 
tinued to plague us, by the time the last stragglers for the first day's per- 
formance reached the tent the field would be a slimy puddle. Something had 
to be done, cost or no cost. 

So I pitted courage against the memory of Keith Vawter's fine frugality 
and ordered several hundred more planks. The morning of the opening 
day I laid them, two wide, from the edge of the village to the main entrance 
of the tent. The ladies would have dry feet whether they liked our pro- 
grams or not. 

Then began the fretful period of waiting that every Chautauqua super- 
intendent was to know. With all those thousand tickets sold and the whole 
countryside keyed up, what if a railroad wreck should block the line ahead 
of the local train bringing the talent? What if Ash Davis broke his wrist 
and couldn't "chalk talk"? What if the Chicago Lady Entertainers fell into 
a quarrel at Chariton, the last stop up the line, and called off the tour and 
went home? What if wild animals, a visiting skunk, a wandering herd of 
cows got into the tent and broke up the show? 

Such dire things could happen. One later summer, just before the First 
World War, we were appearing in western North Carolina and at a board- 
inghouse in the town the night before there had been a rape case and the 
sheriff had brought bloodhounds to find the scoundrel. At our evening 
performance Wells Watson Ginn, the monologist, was reciting, with mu- 
sical background, The Man from Home, by Booth Tarkington and Harry 
Leon Wilson. 

The spotlight was playing on Mr. Ginn and strains from Sweet Genevieve 
drifted in melodiously through a window in the stage set, when the sheriff's 
pack of bloodhounds roared into the tent, down the center aisle, veered off 
to the left and plunged out under the canvas, with the sheriff's posse after 
it. The brief intrusion spoiled the effect of the soft music and annoyed Mr. 
Ginn no end. 

None of these catastrophes occurred in Bedford. The show opened on 
schedule. Even the piano was in place on the stage. In those early days 
the piano was a problem for every superintendent, because Chautauquas 
did not carry their own. Later on, the Kimball piano company of Chicago 
supplied us, furnishing the instruments free for the advertising and we 
were criticized for it, I thitilc unjustly. But in 1904 each piano had to be 
begged or borrowed hi each town, and in Bedford I made the important 
discovery that there always were owners who found it flattering to lend 
their golden oak uprights for famous entertainers to use. The one to choose 
was that which the lady music teacher, personally acquainted with every 
piano in town, said was in best tune. 

On opening night I slipped out of my muddy shoes and overalls, some- 
where found a citizen who kindly allowed me to take a bath, put on my 
white duck pants, a dean shirt and a necktie. The tent was crowded. The 



72 Culture Under Canvas 

two naphtha lamps on the center poles were sputtering loudly, it seemed 
to me, so that some of the people nearest them apparently were strain- 
ing to hear what was said. There was nothing I could do about that, and I 
could find nothing else wrong. The Chicago Lady Entertainers, sedate and 
lovely in their shirtwaists and long skirts, opened again with Grandfather's 
Clock and put their hearts in it. They responded to six encores and the 
crowd went home happy. So did I. 

Among the lecturers at Bedford was one who for many years would be a 
popular Chautauqua attraction. I had never met him before that night. 
"General" Zachary T. Sweeney was a Campbellite preacher from Co- 
lumbus, Indiana, who derived his military title from the fact that in the 
early 90's, in payment for staunch party regularity, President Benjamin 
Harrison had appointed him American consul general at Constantinople. 
A consul general was one kind of general, wasn't he, and if audiences pre- 
ferred to think of Zach Sweeney as a military man, wasn't it their privilege? 
His lecture, with proper overtones of patriotism, concerned the Middle East 
and the Terrible Heathen Turk, who liked plenty of women around his 
house and resented all fine Christian efforts to teach him otherwise. The 
audience found it impressive. 

Rabbi Leon Harrison of St. Louis and the Reverend Albert Boynton 
Storms, who followed "General" Sweeney, talked of things perhaps less 
fascinating, but considerably closer to Bedford, Iowa, experience. Storms, 
a Methodist clergyman, was the new president of Iowa State College of 
Agriculture and Mechanical Arts, now known more simply as Iowa State 
College, at Ames. Naturally, his theme was education, and he presented 
it with pedantic earnestness. There was nothing pedantic, however, about 
Harrison, the English-born rabbi of the Temple Israel in St. Louis, nor 
about Bedford's interest in him. 

Bedford was just eight miles from the Missouri line, close enough to be 
familiar with Rabbi Harrison's fame as an orator. In his late thirties, he 
still spoke as eloquently as he had at twenty-one, when he delivered an 
oration at Henry Ward Beecher's funeral. He was primarily interested in 
the poor, particularly in their living conditions, and he discussed the sub- 
ject passionately. 

The word "passionate" also described the evening address by the Hon- 
orable James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, though die two men otherwise 
could not be compared. Many times in years to come I listened from the 
back of a tent to U.S. Congressman, later Senator, Vardaman, I remember 
him as a tall and impressive-looking gentleman with a voice trained in 
cottonfield political oratory. His long black hair cascaded over the shoul- 
ders of an immaculate white suit and, like Fundamentalist John Roach 
Straton, he had the flashing eyes of a zealot. 

Vardaman had a horror story of political corruption, and he told it well, 



Bedford in the Mud 73 

but, in looking back on it, one wonders how many pertinent facts he left 
out. He claimed to represent on the platform what he called the "liberal 
element of the Democratic party in the south," and he complained bitterly 
that his opponents in rural Mississippi, "the reactionaries," had fought him 
by every foul means. But he neglected to tell, outside his own state, that 
he was accused there of extending the spoils system and of battling to 
prevent the education of the Negro because "the educated Negro would 
threaten the political dominance of the White Man." 

As with some speakers in every era, Vardaman's voice, full and rich 
and soft with the accent of the southland, was musical to the ear whether 
or not it actually informed. He stayed on the Chautauqua circuits even 
after he became a member of the Senate, where in 1917 he was one of the 
six men who voted against the declaration of war on Germany. 

Another speaker appearing in Bedford in 1904 was shouting Sam Jones, 
the evangelist. He, too, was a southerner, but there any similarity to James 
K. Vardaman ended. Jones was a fervent crusader for the Lord who could 
speak in simple, clear, careful English in a Sunday morning sermon and 
on any other day use salty hillbilly jargon bordering on the vulgar. He 
came from Georgia, not in Vardaman's immaculate white suit, but a 
tobacco-chewing, spitting spectacle in baggy trousers, unpressed and ill- 
fitting black alpaca coat, cheap shirt with celluloid collar and black string 
tie. 

Jones made a practice of starting his speech with a few rude remarks 
aimed at the bald-headed elderly men in the first row, cupping their ears 
with their hands. "Old Roosters," he called them. One of the thousand jobs 
assigned the harassed superintendent, eventually, was to keep the children 
out of the front seats and to fill them with oldsters whose hearing was on 
the decline. Jones not only made the men hear, but he made them grin 
and feel sheepish and at the same time like what he said. 

"How long's it been since any of yo' of scamps has kissed yo* wife?" 
he would shout. "Used to be a habit when she was young an' purty. Good 
habit. Better git it again. Jes* go slow a bit to start, though. I was saying 
this over at Tuscola last year and I got a letter from one oP coot. He said 
he'd tried my advice on his wife and the ol' gal thought he'd gone crazy, 
so she give him a sounding smack on the face and run fer a broom to sweep 
him out ... but things is goin' all right now, he says, and he thanks me 
for tellin' him . . ." 

Jones was a temperance speaker, a man from a good southern family 
who hit the sawdust trail after first getting considerable barroom sawdust 
in his own shoes, and in towns like Bedford he put punch into his dry 
argument with sharp, illogical figuring that left an impression on his audi- 
ence. 

"Look!" he would suddenly explode, waking up the sleepy men in the 



74 Culture Under Canvas 

front row, "What do you all think a fellow is wuth in this here com- 
munity ... a human being, I mean, in dollars and cents? Well, I kin 
tell yo' mighty quick. How many people live in this there town?" 

The answer might be: "Twenty-five hundred." 

"How many saloons y'all got?" 

"Ten." 

"What license does each saloon pay?" 

"Two hundred and fifty dollars." 

"Brethern, what y'all gittin' fer hogs?" 

"Five dollars." 

"How many pounds average is a good fat hog?" 

"About three hundred and fifty pounds." 

Jones would pause, then begin again derisively: "Y'all gits two thou- 
sand five hundred dollars fer saloon licenses. That's jes a dollar a head fer 
each and every inhabitant of this here town, an' around eighteen dollars 
fer ever' hog. . . ." He would calculate again, then blurt, "Don't y'all 
wish yo' was a hog!" 

Shouting Sam lived only two years after his Bedford appearance, but 
he packed them in at Chautauqua programs, winter Lyceums, church re- 
vivals all over the south and middle west right up to the end, with crowds 
of men and women shocked into attention either by his bluntness or the 
tobacco stains on his teeth; shamed, if they were backsliders, into going to 
church next Sunday, into voting dry next election. He was a fundamentalist 
of the old school who didn't approach the problem with any intellectual 
reasoning; he just "believed," and if the people he exhorted couldn't sing 
The Brewer's Big Horses Won't Run Over Me as if it were the national 
anthem, everything stopped right there while they learned it. 

Long after Jones' death, an Ohio businessman went out on the road for 
a small Chautauqua circuit with what he called a Transfiguration of Sam 
Jones, offering committees a choice of four Sam Jones' sermons. The stunt 
did not last long, but the fact that it was attempted shows the power of the 
Sam Jones name in the early years of the century. 

An additional representative of the clergy at Bedford who, like Joseph 
Crane Hartzell at Iowa Falls, stood out as man of action as well as orator, 
was Charles Henry Fowler. Like Hartzell he was a Methodist Episcopal 
bishop. 

Bishop Fowler was seventy-six years old the summer that travelling 
Chautauqua was born, but his voice could still fill the tent, find its way 
through die thick canvas and reverberate across the hills. Less respectful 
members of his denomination affectionately referred to him as "Whirlwind 
Fowler," and one had only to listen to him once to understand the name. 
Canadian-born, brought up on an Illinois farm, president of Northwestern 
University while still a fairly young man, in 1871 he had fought the great 
Chicago fire. Thereafter he spent a year raising funds to rebuild the city's 



Bedford in the Mud 75 

two hundred burned churches, telling the story so dramatically from coast 
to coast that his reputation as an orator was made. From then on he was 
in the Methodist mind for difficult jobs, and the harder they were and the 
farther they made him travel, the better he liked them, be it Russia, China, 
Japan, Korea or India. American audiences got one of their earliest pic- 
tures of Russia on a Chautauqua platform when Bishop Fowler related his 
experiences in organising the first Methodist church in St. Petersburg. 

I don't recall which of his famous speeches Bishop Fowler delivered at 
Bedford, except that somewhere in it, as always, the Chicago fire crackled, 
fanned to fury and then was extinguished by the power of his eloquence. 
He published many of his Chautauqua and Lyceum speeches in two vol- 
umes titled Addresses for Notable Occasions and Patriotic Orations. Bed- 
ford, in July, 1904, probably heard a patriotic oration, for the occasion was 
not particularly notable to any except Vawter and his new superintendent. 
Whatever Bishop Fowler called his speech, it was stimulating and full of 
humor, and very loud. 

Congressman J. Adam Bede made all fourteen towns on the new circuit 
in 1904 in a series of debates. Part of the time, as at Iowa Falls, his op- 
ponent was Judge Martin J. Wade of Iowa, and the pair, both Congressmen, 
argued The Political Issues of the Day. Bede, a former newspaper editor, 
had been a United States marshal during the railroad strike in 1894, and 
his experience during that unhappy incident spiced both his speech and 
his thinking. He was a Republican, later a Teddy Roosevelt Progressive. 
Wade was a Democrat, whose favorite topic before Iowa fathers and 
mothers was that the Constitution should be taught to their children in 
the schools. Congressman Bede did not disagree with that idea; nor did 
Wade disagree with Bede's belief that Socialists were public enemies. So 
their debate was scholarly and not too exciting. 

Most of the finfe;"K6wever, as at Bedford, Bede tangled less politely 
with Milwaukee Socialist Emil Seidel, a studious-looking firebrand who 
liked nothing better than a good platform encounter. Since Bede and Seidel 
had little political philosophy in common, they put on a spirited show over 
the question, Is Socialism Desirable in the US.? Seidel, a Wisconsin pattern- 
maker who perfected himself in his trade in Germany, went in slugging, 
just as he always had slugged at life. Somewhere i& his speech he always 
told the crowd that back in 1892 his own poor little ballot had been one 
of the grand total of two Socialist votes in his Milwaukee precinct, but 
now, in 1904, he was alderman of the famous Twentieth ward. He could 
not foresee that in a few more years he would be Milwaukee's mayor and 
in the vigorous 1912 campaign would be honored with second place on 
his party's national ticket. 

Bede, on the other hand, was the polished debater, a master of lively 
banter and sharp give and take. He knew better than most how to "make 
'em laugh" and his funny remarks, on stage and off, went up and down the 



76 Culture Under Canvas 

circuits. "This country ought to adopt Ireland," he once told a crowd 
near Boston, "and then raise its own policemen." Bede's habit of opening 
his debate with two amusing stories annoyed Seidel. It was all very well 
for Bede to be funny in Congress; his fellows there liked it, but Socialist 
Seidel did not. He was no storyteller and he saw no levity in the subject 
of Socialism. Bede usually started the debate and talked for thirty minutes, 
then the bespectacled Seidel took his thirty-minutes worth, after which they 
engaged in rebuttals. But at Bedford, Congressman Bede was delayed and 
he sent word for Seidel to open the program. 

Seidel not only was willing but, surprisingly, he was delighted. To the 
consternation of the platform manager and other regulars in the tent, the 
Milwaukee alderman stood up, faced the waiting audience, and told the 
first of Bede's nightly stories. The people enjoyed it and laughed hard. 
Then Seidel told the second story. The crowd roared this time. After that 
Seidel went on with his regular speech and had just finished as Bede arrived. 

Humorist Bede smoothed his hair, which he wore parted carefully in 
the middle, adjusted his flaming red tie, bowed, and launched into the same 
story the audience had just heard from Seidel. When it ended there was 
a puzzled silence. Bedford didn't intend to laugh at the same story twice 
in the same hour. Bede hurried into his second. The same silence greeted it. 
Bede turned to Seidel, confused. 

"I've told them both already," the Socialist confessed. 

The audience laughed hard, but Bede didn't. For once, like Seidel, he 
saw nothing funny in the situation. Thereafter he was careful to be on time 
and the pair slugged it out each night, giving the people a cracking good 
show. Ten years later they were still doing it. 

The whole Bedford show came off without serious hitch. The tent did 
not blow down. No member of the enraptured audience fell off his high, 
hard seat. The naphtha lamps did not explode. I had no way of knowing 
that Vawter had lost his savings in the venture. Even had I guessed, it 
would not have dented my conviction that Chautauqua was on the road 
to stay. I read it in the people's eyes and faces. Here was a strange, new 
something that they wanted with all their plain country hearts. Here, 
in the midst of summer's hard labor, had been relaxation, inspiration come 
to rest briefly on the lonely back acres of the awakening nation. 
~"fiere for nine full days had been gaiety, music, mystery, adventure, good 
clean fun. Here, in a shabby old rented tent, under the flicker of sputtering 
white lights, were dreams come true. These people would ask for it again 
and again. Chautauqua had been born for them. 



Chautauqua Takes Hold 



9 



Keith Vawter later admitted that he lost $7000 on his 1904 experiment, a 
shocking sum for those years, enough to buy many blocks of Chicago real 
estate. In addition, he had lost a hard summer's work. If he had been less 
stubborn, he would have abandoned his plan then and there. On paper 
it had seemed feasible, but out in country mud, weaknesses had bogged 
it down. He had every good reason to put aside the dream, concentrate on 
Lyceum, at which he made money without great risk, and his "folly," as 
rivals called his idea of tent Chautauqua, would soon be forgotten. 

Many managers of permanent assemblies made no secret of their de- 
light at Vawter's failure. They had refused to join his experiment and 
now they were vindicated. Chautaucpa, they repeated, was the business of 
an individual community, nothing to be dragged out on the road like a 
carnival or a medicine show. Their towns wanted their own assemblies, 
they needed no packaged program from any slick booking agent. Here- 
after, they predicted, this crazy man Vawter would stick to his own field 
as manager of a lecture bureau and let them run their assemblies as they 
saw fit. And how about trying to push him down next summer on lecture 
rates? 

These individuals did not know Keith Vawter. A high-minded gentle- 
man of superior intellect, he could be as obdurate as a Missouri mule. His 
sense of what midwest Americans wanted in good entertainment, and what 
they would pay for it, amounted almost to genius. Despite his first disaster, 
he was convinced that tent circuits not only could be profitable, but that 
they would bring pleasure to hundreds of thousands of people who could 
not afford money or time to travel any distance to a permanent assembly, 
but who would go eagerly if the show were brought to their home towns. 
To him this was a challenge. 

77 



78 Culture Under Canvas 

So while managers of independents and rival bureaus smugly prepared 
to bury Vawter's "crazy idea," he went to work to prove that he had been 
right. He needed money, however, and partly for that reason he sent me 
to Ohio the next summer to establish in Columbus an outpost of the Red- 
path Lecture Bureau. 

Until now the Redpath organization had treated this lecture-loving state 
as a no-man's land between Peffer's well-run Philadelphia office and 
Vawter's new Chicago area. They had abandoned it to the caprices of two 
other agencies, the Central Lyceum Bureau of Rochester, New York, and 
the John E. Brockway Bureau of Pittsburgh. Brockway had been in the 
business a long time. In the 1880's he had run a Lyceum course in his 
home town of Greenville, Pennsylvania. In recent years, in the east, he 
had represented the Slayton Bureau of Chicago, a group dating back to the 
days of James Redpath. Vawter believed that, of late, all of them had 
wasted golden opportunities. He proposed now to challenge Central in its 
own back yard. 

I went to Columbus keen for battle but, alas, the Ohio agent for Central 
was not a fighting man. As soon as the famous Redpath name appeared, he 
capitulated and before long he even went to work for it. In two years the 
Redpath company bought the Slayton-Brockway groups. For my own 
part, instead of drawing a prosaic salary in Ohio, I was to pay both Vawtei 
and the parent Central Bureau each three percent of gross receipts and 
pocket whatever net profit remained. We -sold winter Lyceum courses to 
big and little towns all the way from smoky Youngstown to the busy port 
of Toledo, from the winding Ohio River to Lake Erie. When the year 
ended, my own share of the profits was an unbelievable $10,000. 

Back in Chicago, in the interval, Vawter was slowly shaping plans foi 
his next caravan. This time he would overcome all foreseeable obstacles 
before rushing people, equipment and tents over the hazardous road. He 
alone would make decisions. He would permit managers to buy his pro- 
gram only if they fitted their dates into his route and his calendar. When 
and where his talent would appear, how long it would remain in any town 3 
would be his decision and his alone. Once dates were set, no one could 
change them. 

He also would offer his program as a whole, take it or leave it. Noi 
would he haggle over prices. If anyone wanted to use his talent under that 
arrangement, he was welcome. 

In the. spring^! 1207 he was ready again. It was a good year. Teddy 
Roosevelt was "feeling bully" in the White House. Down Panama-way 
Goethals was winning his fight with landslides in Culebra Cut In New 
York City virtue had triumphed and Salome and all her seven veils had 
been banished from the "Met." Best of all, Iowa corn was up toward fifty 
cents and might go higher. Certainly this time it ought to be a good season. 

Meanwhile a few other bold spirits, having eyed Vawter's trek across 



Chautauqua Takes Hold 79 

Iowa and Nebraska three years before, had dared to try to do likewise. The 
gospel of temperance inspired the first of them. In 1905 Fred W. Bartell, of 
Baptist Arkansas, dismayed that in the Presidential election the year be- 
fore the Prohibition party had failed to poll even a thousand votes in his 
state, put a reform circuit briefly on the road. C. Durant Jones, a one-time 
candidate for governor of Iowa on the Prohibition ticket, also piously 
called his first shows "Temperance Assemblies." Another temperance or- 
ganization that called itself a Chautauqua was the National Lincoln, a 
particularly biased outfit fathered by the Illinois Prohibition Party. We 
bought its remains in 1922. 

Many critics never forgot the melancholy atmosphere of the early 
anti-liquor zealots. One commentator, as far back as 1901, was George 
Cram Cook, who later, as a founder of the Provincetown Players, was to 
leave his mark on the artistic world, as did his wife, Playwright Susan 
Glaspell. Writing from Davenport, in his native Iowa, to a performer on 
an independent platform, Cook said: "You read with heart and art, and 
then a somewhat sour clerical person talked intemperately of Temperance.* 
You, I perceived, were the sugar in the Chautauqua lemonade." 

One season in those early years, twenty-one 1 separate circuits were 
operating, some on shoestrings, others with fair financial backlogs. Several 
special pleaders besides the Prohibitionists borrowed the name. A farm 
machinery manufacturer used it for a traveling exhibit; Chicago labor 
unions presented their case in a "Chautauqua" named for Opera Star Mary 
Garden. Even the Ku Klux Klan got into the act with a "Klantauqua" dedi- 
cated to bigotry and hatred. 

Vawter's own 1907 season had been a success. Aided by J. Roy Ellison, 
he pitched his tents in thirty-three Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska towns.- 
That year he introduced the "guarantee system," under which a com- 
munity, sold on the "new Chautauqua idea," put up $2000 to assure the 
show's return the following year. In 1907 and 1508, Vawtet again offered 
J. Adam Bede, the prophetic Thomas E. Green and Juggler George Gar- 
retson. He also added several new personalities. 

Among these was an undistinguished lieutenant-governor from Ohio, 
offering a lecture on Alexander Hamilton. His name was Warren Gamaliel 
Harding. Handsome, full of small-town urbanity, he was simple and warm- 
hearted and the talent, in particular, loved him. 

Old Chautauqua folk remember Harding as a brilliant orator, but can't 
for the life of them recall exactly what he said. His words, one circuit 
manager reported, "marked him as a man of the people and a champion 

1 These included Travers-Wick and Midland from Iowa, Britt (later Standard) of 
Nebraska, Central Community and International from Indiana, Acme under W. S. 
Rupe, Radcliffe from Washington, DC.; from Kansas J. Shannon White and the 
"Cadmean System/* honoring the mythical hero of the alphabet; likewise, Alkahest, 
meaning the "liquid that could dissolve pure gold.** 



80 , Culture Under Canvas 

of their rights." They affected Critic H. L. Mencken differently. "A string 
of wet sponges," he called them. 

Harding's friendliness was genuine. Back in Marion, Ohio, he had been 
a good first baseman, played alto horn in the Citizens Cornet Band and 
still owned a good small-town newspaper. In Chautauqua he was a good 
trouper. As lieutenant-governor, and later as senator, lecturing on The Big 
Stick, he stopped to chat on street corners in Chautauqua towns, often 
visited the local newspaper office, shook hands around the "back shop" 
and, to prove that he could do it, would set a stick of type. 

Our people liked to tell of the season when at Nashville, Tennessee, 
Harding's train was late, and carrying his suitcase and gold-headed cane, 
he ran from the railroad station and asked which streetcar went to the 
Chautauqua grounds. Misdirected, he rode to the wrong end of the line. 
He was an hour late reaching the tent where the Beulah Buck Musical Com- 
pany which "pre-luded" him had heroically gone twice through its whole 
repertoire, keeping the people in their seats. The point of the story was 
that this "distinguished senator" was, at heart, a man of the people who 
chose to ride a streetcar rather than in an elegant hack. 

Chautauqua people did not like Harding's wife. She was demanding and 
most talent had heard her say or at least had heard from somebody else 
who heard her say that "the way to keep a husband is never to let him 
travel alone." Taking her own advice, she spent weeks each summer on 
the road with him, Disclosures of the scandals of Harding's administration, 
" after his death, shocked Chautauqua people, some of whom tried to ex- 
plain the sorry business by saying Harding was always too good to his 
friends. Another Chautauqua speaker and another President, Bishop Vin- 
cent's friend, Grant, had suffered from the same political malady. 

For the 1907 tour Vawter also presented a Hungarian Orchestra, ten 
impressive Pueblo Indians, a Hesperian Quartette and a Negro group 
called the Sterling Jubilee Singers. This latter type of company was known in 
the trade as "Jubes." The Sterlings, four men and four women, sang well, 
Customers used to say that to hear them render The Sun Do Move was 
worth the price of a season ticket. The Sterlings also laughed a lot among 
themselves; however, it was a Sterling who, when a tent collapsed on hina 
in an Ohio windstorm, cut his way through the canvas with a razor that he 
"just happened to have" in his pocket. 

In spite of a program as good as the one in 1907, Vawter lost monej 
again in, 190,8. At the close Q the season several-lecturers, inclucfii!!g'"the 
future President of tite United States, took promises-to-pay instead of pay 
checks. This time Vawter did not blame the loss on balky independent 
managers. He realized that his cycle of six-day programs, opening on 
Tuesday, closing on Sunday, was an awkward arrangement. 

In 1910 he finally solved the problem, and all other managers hence- 



Chautauqua Takes Hold 81 

forth copied his method. 1 That year Vawter worked out the true circuit 
plan, both as to program arrangement and delivery. First-day talent re- 
mained first-day all season, second-day remained second-day, and so on 
for the seven days. Thus all groups travelled the same routes for the first 
time, and railroading and programming became simplified. Working with 
Vawter in this development, and at least partially responsible for his belated 
financial success, was Charles Francis Homer, who eventually, under his 
own name, would become a power in the business. 

Meanwhile, with Ohio-made riches burning holes in my pockets, I, too, 
had bought a share of the parent Redpath bureau. I became a fourth 
partner with Vawter, Peflfer of Philadelphia and Hathaway of Boston, and 
leaving my brother, Vernon W. Harrison, to manage Ohio Lyceum, I 
moved back to Vawter's Chicago office. 

This arrangement could not last long. Vawter worked better alone. 
So before the 1909 booking season, we split the Chicago territory. Under 
the name "Redpath-Vawter" and with Homer still his assistant, Vawter 
took the area west of the Mississippi. Under "Redpath-Chicago," I would 
concentrate on Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee 
and the Gulf states. Vawter's base was Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 

In three more years Homer and Vawter likewise separated their terri- 
tory and Horner established in Kansas City a system called "Western Red- 
path Chautauqua," later "Redpath-Horner." His enterprises swelled quickly 
into three great circuits, from Missouri and Colorado and the Arkansas 
and Texas cotton country, north into Wyoming and South Dakota. In 
programming, Horner, a man of enviable energy, encouraged amateurs. He 
enjoyed training his own talent and ultimately he opened a school of dra- 
matic art, in conjunction with his booking office. The Horner Institute of 
Fine Arts, later the Kansas City Conservatory, is still a going concern. 

Ellison, likewise, left the Vawter Company in booming 1912 and with 
Clarence H. White founded the Ellison-White system that, geographically, 
was to become the largest on the continent. With a **South Seas" company, 
Ellison even tried to crash the gates of Australia and New Zealand. A major 
contribution of this manager to the whole movement was in the field of 
transportation costs. In 1915, when his routes covered two and a quarter 
million miles, he persuaded a reluctant railroad to sell him one-trip 
excursion-rate tickets for his talent . . . not a mean achievement. 

Also in 1912, Paul N. Pearson, professor of public speaking at Swarth- 
more College, Pennsylvania, and a popular Lyceum orator, launched his 
own system, known first as the "Pennsylvania Chautauqua Association,*' 
later simply as "Swarthmore." It has been said, perhaps with justification, 

1 In 1911 Vawter's tents appeared in sixty-eight towns. His average day's travel 
was down to forty-seven miles. He employed 227 persons that summer, used twelve 
freight and baggage cars. 



82 Culture Under Canvas 

that Pearson's programs were gauged to a higher intelligence quotient 
than others. Certainly there was less razzle-dazzle on Swarthmore. 

Pearson, a devout Quaker, anxious to advance Christian education on 
all fronts, insisted that every speaker under the dignified Swarthmore banner 
actually have something to say on an important subject. He frowned on 
purely "inspirational'* oratory. His two great eastern circuits operated in 
New York and New Jersey, through lecture-conscious New England, down 
into old Virginia and a few points south. Occasionally they met those of 
our smart-showman partner Peffer, whose Redpath circuit came to be 
called "Redpath-New England." Pearson's and Peffer's lines crossed, but 
neyerjangled. 1 

In 1912 programs from all these platforms drenched the nation with 
culture and good clean fun. Tents popped up in vacant lots and all America 
swarmed down the aisles. Chautauqua had taken hold. At times, among the 
smaller operators, it was a cutthroat business, but not among the Red- 
path bureau managers. In spite of occasional misunderstandings, we were 
all for one and one for all. There certainly were towns enough and crowds 
enough and money enough to go around. Or so we thought. To those of 
us embarked in 1912 on this exciting enterprise, it looked as if it could 
last a hundred years, thanks to Keith Vawter. To him went all credit from 
the trade. When managers honored him with a dinner a few years later, 
Louis J. Alber of the Coit-Alber Lyceum and Chautauqua Bureau, summed 
it up in a toast: "You builded better than you know, Mr. Vawter, when 
your idea gave such tremendous impetus to this experiment in democracy." 

As for the Redpath-Chicago office, it was ready that season to put its 
own show on the road. With high hopes I had gone the preceding fall to 
Pulaski, in southern Tennessee, to sell the next summer's program. We 
opened there in June, 1912. 

1 Not until the First World War did any aggressive competition pitch its tents in 
Redpath territory. Then a pair of high-class showmen, Arthur C. Coit and Louis J. 
Alber, organized Coit-Alber Chautauqua with Cleveland as its base. Also in the field 
briefly before the first world conflict was C. Benjamin Franklin, who later returned 
from the war to organize the Associated Chautauquas of America. 



Up Goes the Brown Tent 



10 



Pulaski, Tennessee, where Redpath-Chicago launched its first circuit, was 
a cotton center of about 2500 persons in 1912, a sleepy little county seat 
just north of the Alabama line. History made it a good Chautauqua town. 
On the credit side it had fostered one of the south's early centers of female 
learning, later Martin Junior College; before the turn of the century it 
boasted a second seminary. (To its discredit, the Ku Klux Klan in Recon- 
struction days had swept like a fire from Pulaski across the state.) 

A statue of Sam Davis, the spy who died rather than talk, decorated its 
public square. It had a fine town hall and courthouse, its jail was empty 
and Giles County, though slipping a little in population, could produce 
a good-sized audience used to thinking for itself. In fact, one of the first 
boasts that Redpath's advance man heard, arriving in town, was that Demo- 
cratic 'Giles County had one citizen stubborn enough to vote dry in the 
last Presidential election and three who admitted openly that they were 
Socialists. 

Author Opie Read, a southerner, and therefore possibly speaking with 
prejudice, always claimed that the south was Chautauqua's happy hunting 
ground, that the southern audience, with its Anglo-Scotch-Irish inherit- 
ance, was so spontaneous and quick to understand that "instead of strug- 
gling to follow a lecturer, it ran in advance of him, helping him over difficult 
gorges." Be that as it may, we picked Pulaski for our tryotrt becaagfe of its 
geographical location. The north-bound circuit was to be Redpath-Chicago's 
first summer adventure, but we made no claim to being pioneers. Vawter had 
been that. We were simply ready to follow in his tracks. 

The previous winter we had signed up sponsoring committees in thirty- 
nine communities in Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Michigan, all virgin 

83 



84 Culture Under Canvas 

soil for tent Chautauqua, all willing to take a chance. We had gathered an 
array of talent and built a program that we hoped was varied enough to 
please all types of audiences, southern or northern. We had bought new 
tents and equipment, worked out railroad schedules, employed the most 
experienced superintendents to be found, hired nine energetic crews, each 
consisting of four college boys, to do the physical work. We had printed 
tons of promotional material, booklets, pamphlets, program folders, posters, 
blotters, stickers for envelopes, buttons, banners for Main Street, streamers 
for the noisy, canvas-topped cars lining the curbs now in the larger towns. 
Loaded down with this material, advance men had swarmed into the field 
to drum up enthusiasm and put up advertising. By June 1st we were on our 
toes. 

The 1912 theatrical season was important all the way from Broadway 
to Pulaski. In New York a lovely young actress named Laurette Taylor 
opened in Peg o' My Heart, a sentimental confection whipped up by her 
husband, J. Hartley Manners. Jane Cowl, in Bayard Veiller's Within the 
Law, began a melodramatic run of 541 nights. Elsie Janis, a Columbus, 
Ohio, girl who in five more years would become the "Sweetheart of the 
A.E.F.," kicked up her pretty heels, with Montgomery and Stone, in the 
tuneful Lady of the Slipper. 

Also, that Broadway season, a blond named Mae West joined the Dolly 
Sisters, Leon Errol and Frank Tinney in A Winsome Widow. George M. 
Cohan was singing Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway and Maud Adams 
was asking the audiences at Peter Pan whether they believed in fairies. They 
did. 

That same stupendous year William Faversham was playing Caesar, 
Madame Nazimova was emoting violently in a play full of dark hidden 
meanings, Sothern and Marlowe were bringing dignity to the stage and 
John Drew was bringing it sartorial distinction Broadway was a street 
of Thespian dreams! And so was Main Street, in Pulaski. 

A fact never to be denied is that, from beginning to end, circuit Chau- 
tauqua was a series of earth-shaking crises and startling, sometimes agoniz- 
ing surprises. Redpath-Chicago's opening in normally tranquil Pulaski was 
no exception to this devastating rule. 

Unknown to us, a would-be competitor had shown up in the area during 
the winter. After we announced Pulaski as our jumping-off place, a man- 
ager of a small independent southern booking office had rushed into the 
town with shocking stories of what would happen to honest citizens reck- 
less enough to sign up with Redpath. He hinted darkly that Redpath-Chicago 
was just a gang of tricky Yankee cutthroats and that the splendid people 
of Pulaski would rue the hour that they allowed their signatures to go on 
our dotted lines, or the money from their tannery, their cotton, flour and 
planing mills to disappear into our bottomless pockets. 



Up Goes the Bronn lent 85 

"Yankee" was still a bad word along the borders of Alabama and 
Tennessee. All Pulaski waited to see what actually would happen. What 
did happen confirmed the darkest suspicions. The Redpath tent, the new, 
elegant, expensive brown canvas that was to establish on our circuit a new 
tent style, got lost . . . and in Chicago I was in bed with the mumps! 

Vernon Harrison, pinch-hitting for Chicago from the Ohio office, reached 
Pulaski three or four days before opening date, to find our superintendent 
and crew ready and waiting, grass cut and raked on the tent site on the 
courthouse lawn, the advance sale of tickets respectably near the top. 'Peo- 
ple on the street were talking hard about the coming show. A goodly num- 
ber of them were wearing "I'll be there" buttons on their coat lapels. Our 
new posters splashed color in store windows and on billboards. Across 
Main Street fluttered the bright strings of pennants, all advertising the 
wonderful coming event, a device Keith Vawter had thought up the previ- 
ous year which soon would become the gay symbol of all Chautauqua 
towns. 

But somewhere in the five hundred single-track miles between Chicago 
and the southern boundary of Tennessee, in one of a hundred railroad 
yards or sidings, our canvas, tent poles, piano, stage backdrop and seats 
had been shunted into oblivion. Railroad officials, promising of course to 
look into the matter, added casually that such investigations might con- 
sume a week. 

"No tent?" cried the hotheads in the population. This certainly proved 
Yankee chicanery. 

Vernon Harrison, sensing the growing uneasiness of the committee, 
dared not wait for the railroads to act. He went to work swiftly on the un- 
substantial long distance telephone line which in those days sometimes, but 
only sometimes, linked Pulaski with the outside world. 

After frantic calls to Chicago and Columbus, he started hunting a 
substitute tent near at hand, close enough to reach Pulaski in twenty-four 
hours. He needed one that would seat a thousand persons, for if the com- 
mittee had sold seven hundred and fifty of the two-doEar season tickets here 
in Giles County, then at least two hundred and fifty more single admissions 
must be counted on for the "name" programs. 

Time was frighteningly short. At last, in Nashville, he found a tent of 
sorts. It was not what he needed, but an inadequate tent was better than 
no tent at all. In desperation he ordered it shipped by express on the next 
train. It proved to be old, dirty, battered. It leaked. It threatened to come 
apart at the seams in the slightest breeze. By crowding it might seat 500 
persons. 

The local committee naturally was indignant. Angrily, under the Red- 
path nose, the chairman waved his copy of the signed contract and shouted 
that signatures or no signatures, the people of Pulaski weren't going to pay 



86 Culture Under Canvas 

for what they didn't get* There were good lawyers in town who would see 
to it that the rights of southern citizens were not trampled. There were 
courts of justice in Tennessee, suh! 

The Redpath representative, acting quickly, produced his own copy of 
the contract, glanced at the signatures, then slowly and dramatically tore 
it into small shreds. He dropped them into a wastebasket and dusted off 
his hands. 

"There, gentlemen," he said, "now there is no contract binding you to 
anything. The Redpath bureau doesn't need the signatures of honorable 
men and women. We know that you are honest, we want you to know that 
we are, too. You are not obligated to pay us a single cent. But we will 
present our program just the same. I'm sorry about the tent. But when 
our own arrives, we'll put it up at once. Meanwhile we trust you. We hope 
that you trust us." 

Abashed committeemen let the rebel yell die in their throats. This hand- 
some young Yankee fellow certainly had proven himself a gentleman after 
all. But what about all those customers who wouldn't be able to get into 
this small tent and would be left outside waving their two-dollar tickets? 
What about the seats? What about a piano? The superintendent's assur- 
ances were convincing: he would find temporary seats locally, he would 
rent the best piano he could find. As for the people unable to get into the 
tent, Redpath would cross that frightening bridge when it came to it. 

Manager, superintendent, crew, everyone prayed for rain the first night 
not a cloudburst, of course, just enough to keep the crowd small, with- 
out miring the Chautauqua grounds. Providence answered. The rains came, 
heavy enough to maroon at home country folk who knew better than to 
drive on red clay roads immediately after a storm. Pulaski folk attended, 
but not in such numbers as to create a problem. The shabby little tent 
leaked in spots but it gave shelter enough. 

Next morning, the southern sun rose full of bright promise and the train, 
unexcitedly chugging down the Nashville-Decatur grade, brought Red- 
path's elegant new brown tent. The poles were up and the canvas taut in 
two hours; before the afternoon ticket holders swarmed through the gate, 
seats were in place and stage ready with its backdrop and big American 
flag, its piano and the pitcher of water. Redpath honor had been vin- 
dicated. 

The first day's program had opened with music, of course. Vawter in 
his trial run eight years before had used the dignified Chicago Lady En- 
tertainers as openers, but the world of entertainment had moved forward 
in those eight years, so instead of 1904's formalized program of songs and 
hymns, Chicago-Redpath led off with the Ladies Spanish Orchestra. If the 
seven black-haired young women were not actually Spanish, they looked 
and acted it and their first offering was the Wilhelm Tell Overture. Music 



Up Goes the Brovm Tent 87 

accelerated as the week went on, until on closing day it climaxed with 
what for the 1912 era was a lively musical show in costume. 

The Anitas, a "singing orchestra" of five vivacious young girls under 
the management of Mrs. Ralph Dunbar, and sentimentally named for my 
home town of Anita in Iowa, not only sang but played a variety of instru- 
ments. The group included a violinist, cellist, pianist, cornetist, and, young- 
est and liveliest, a "flute virtuoso" with entrancing curls, who never had 
played a flute till she got her job, and now could play the numbers on the 
program and nothing else. Her snap and girlish voice made up, however, 
for any weakness in repertoire on the flute. She was a hit with her first 
song, that sentimental favorite We Were Sailing Along on Moonlight Bay. 
The audience thought it great, but her encore convulsed them, a pert 
rendering of a ditty called Miss Gibbs, which she sang and sang until 
audience and singer both had had enough. 

"Mar-y, people call me pretty Mar-y! 

"I don't believe them, for they often tell me fibs," 

("Oh, do believe us!") 

"I'm a girl and not a fairy, 

"I don't see why you call me Mar-y, 

"When my name's Miss Gibbs! 

"Miss Gibbs, if you please. . . ." 

("Let us call you Mar-y, dear") 

"Miss Gibbs, if you please, Miss Gibbs." * 

It was a good catchy 1912 song and eighteen-year-old Miss Fay Pettit 
of Wellington, Kansas she is now Mrs. Joseph C. Maddy, wife of the 
founder of the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan caught 
the crowd's fancy with both song and reading, though her training in elocu- 
tion before she signed her contract had been as sketchy as her instruction 
on the flute. Mrs. Dunbar, in turn, "interpreted" A Child's Dream of a Star 
and as an encore read a sprightly piece about The Perfect Man: "Have you 
found him? No, not yet ... he's the husband of the widows I have 
met. . . ," sad or humorous, whichever way you wanted to take it. 

For one cycle of songs the Anitas dressed as Goose Girls, for another 
they were Japanese, and in bright kimonos told the story of the Willow 
Pattern Plate, keeping time with their paper fans and parasols and making 
a pretty picture indeed. There was also a Dutch number, for which the 
young ladies appeared in wooden shoes and lace caps and aprons over 
bulging skirts, while Mrs. Dunbar read Eugene Field's Wyriken, Blynken 
and Nod. 

Of course the girls did not dance as they sang. That would have 
been going too far in 1912. But they did clump-clump in a lively tempo. 

1 Copyright 1909 by Chappell & Co. Ltd., London. Copyright Renewed. Used 
here by permission. 



Maybe they weren't the Rockettes, but neither were they Vawter's staid 
Lady Entertainers. Let us say they were good clean fun. 

And like most other young people on the circuits the Anitas also had 
fun. When their own stint was over, that last night in Pulaski, they went 
off gaily to a moonlight picnic with the four dashing and handsome young 
men of the Strollers Quartette, who, next afternoon, dressed in magnificent 
Scotch kilts, were to entertain another appreciative southern audience, and 
with whom the lively Anitas met up after that in every town they could, 
even though one of the young men looked a little fat off stage and not so 
dashing. The Strollers' songs were most beguiling, the Anitas thought, their 
acts most amusing. In one sketch reverently called The Shades of the Mas- 
ters the four young men impersonated the spirits of Wagner, Beethoven, 
Mendelssohn and Liszt returned to earth to discuss what the musical world 
was coming to. 

With the new tent in place and the sun shining and the committee in 
chastened mood, the Redpath superintendent thought that certainly things 
were back on the right track; but no, there were to be other troubles. 

Among the lighter numbers of the programs as built up in Chicago 
were "two lightning-change artists." One was Edward Ellsworth Plum- 
stead, who did amusing character portrayals, changing costumes and wigs 
on the stage. The other was Walter Wilson, a big, long-legged, nimble im- 
personator with a deep bass voice, who pre-luded Bohumir KryPs band 
with an act representing half a dozen characters, from "hayseed" to "sol- 
dier tramp." 

Like Plumstead, Wilson diverted his audience by changing costumes in 
full view of the crowd; unlike Plumstead, he included his pants in the 
change. In preparation for this, Mr. Wilson wore a suit of white silk tights 
under his outer clothes. When he slipped out of his trousers that June night 
in Tennessee, the audience was not familiar with long silk tights, but it did 
know all about long winter underdrawers. 

Underdrawers, when discussed at all in polite society, were referred to 
in those days as "unmentionables," and they certainly were nothing to 
parade before a mixed audience of God-fearing southern ladies and gentle- 
men. No Tennessee citizen stalked out of the tent, but there was a definite 
disapproving murmur that any platform manager could understand and 
did, and the rest of the season Wilson confined his costume changes to shirt 
and coat and left his controversial nether garments strictly alone. If the 
Baptist south did not like white silk tights, what would the Methodist people 
up in Indiana say? 

Wilson played both the flute and saxophone as part of his act. He fea- 
tured particularly a serious and somewhat loud saxophone rendition of 
Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep, with variations. As musician he appeared 
in proper formal evening clothes. All audiences, beginning with the Dakota 
homesteaders, approved of evening clothes. 



Up Goes the Brown Tent 89 

The rest of the week was a success. People from all over the southern 
tier of Tennessee counties and from the northern fringe of Alabama flocked 
into town in Fords, horse-drawn buggies, farm wagons, on muleback and 
on foot. They were entranced by the music, mystified by the magic. They 
laughed at the jokes. The stirring talks uplifted their spirits. They approved 
when the committee signed the contract for the next year. 

The program, as preserved by the Pulaski Weekly Citizen, was: 

PULASKI CHAUTAUQUA 
June 15 to 21, 1912. 



Superintendent 
Morning Hour Lecture 
Boy Scout Master 



O. W. Thomas 
C E. Varney 
R. G. Coonradt 
Program Begins Promptly 

Morning Lecture 10:00 A.M. 
Afternoon Lecture 3:00 
Night Entertainment 8:15 



Boy Scouts 9 A.M. 
Afternoon Music 2:30 
Night Music 7:30 

Saturday 
Afternoon Concert Ladies Spanish Orchestra 

Lecture "A Lesson to the Nation" Judge A. Z. Blair 
Night Concert Ladies Spanish Orchestra 

Character Studies John B. Ratto 

Sunday 
Afternoon Concert Carroll Glee Club 

Lecture *The Modern Mormon Kingdom" Sen. F. J. Cannon 
Night Vesper Service 

Concert Carroll Glee Club 

Reading 'The Dawn of Tomorrow" Mary Agnes Doyle 

Monday 
Morning Boy Scouts 

Lecture "Man's Search for God" C. E. Varney 
Afternoon Song Recital Artists from LeBmn Grand Opera Co. 

Lecture "The Man Against the Mass" Frank Dixon 
Night Grand Opera LeBrun Grand Opera Co. 

Tuesday 
Morning Boy Scouts 

Lecture "Sane and Safe Faith" C. E. Varney 
Afternoon Concert Musical Favorites 

Lecture "A Message From Kansas" Gov. E. W. Hoch 
Night Concert Musical Favorites 

Indian Lecture in Costume "Things I Saw and Did as a Savage** 
Tahan 

Wednesday 
Morning Boy Scouts 

Lecture "Philosophy of Habit" C E. Varney 
Afternoon Concert Bohurnir Kryl and Band 

Entertainer J. Walter Wilson 
Night Concert Bohumir Kryl and Band 

Entertainer J. Walter Wilson 



Thursday 
Morning Boy Scouts 

Lecture "The Value of Imagination" C. E. Varney 
Afternoon Concert Mendelssohn's Quartette 

Lecture 'Traitors to Justice" -Judge M. A. Kavanagh 
Night Concert Mendelssohn's Quartette 

Magician Reno 

Friday 
Monung Boy Scouts 

Lecrure-"The Use of The Will" C. E* Varney 
Afternoon Concert Anitas Ladies Orchestra 

Author and Humorist Opie Read 
Night Concert Anitas Ladies Orchestra 

Entertainer Ellsworth Plumstead 

And all of this for a two dollar season ticket! 

The first-day contingent started northward as soon as its evening show 
ended and the second day's talent took over the creaking stage. Then 
they, too, packed up their equipment and boarded the night train and the 
third program moved into their places. Thus for seven days, orators, 
musical companies and entertainers tried out their shining wares on 
Pulaski, made what changes seemed necessary, pulled out the song or act 
that had won only meagre applause, substituted a better one and set forth 
in high spirits for the summer's road. The seventh night all seven groups 
were on the move. 

Each outfit paused in four other Tennessee communities. Columbia, a 
larger town in the adjoining county, followed Pulaski. There, church-going 
southern matrons, banded together into the local King's Daughters, set up 
a "refreshment tent" on the Chautauqua grounds, so that perspiring per- 
formers could cool off with lemonade and home-made cakes, and inci- 
dentally shake the hands of the town's great, near-great and socially ambi- 
tious. They played Murfreesboro, where the Civil War's Battle of Stone 
River had been fought; farther west, the town of Paris; over toward the 
Mississippi River, Union City. Then, jumping the Kentucky line, they 
visited tobacco-raising Mayfield. It was here at the Mayfield Hotel, where 
a great banner across the front blazed the one word "Chautauqua," that the 
talent picked up the story, to become hoary on the circuits as the years 
went by, of the old Negro on his vegetable wagon who, seeing the sign, 
would not go into the building, and when the proprietor came out to 
discover why, demanded, "What disease you quarantined for, boss?" 

In Kentucky the troupers made eleven stops* Hopkinsville and busy 
Bowling Green with its fine old houses, Danville and Cynthiana on the 
Licking River, and half a dozen other towns greeted entertainers and orators 
with southern hospitality. The trail left Dixie at Henderson and crossed 
the Ohio River into Indiana, where seventeen Hoosier communities in the 
next seventeen days watched the big brown tents pop up in pastures and 
village squares. The average distance between the towns was approxi- 



Up Goes the Brown Tent 91 

mately fifty miles; absent were the long backtracking hops that once had 
bedeviled Vawter. 

The Indiana localities for the most part were larger than those farther 
south: old Vincennes on the Wabash River; Brazil, where the strip coal 
miners crowded the tent; Muncie, the hard-knuckled heart of the booming 
"gas belt," with glass blowers* and gas-field workers' money eager to be 
spent the town that, years later, under the pseudonym of "Middletown," 
was to be the subject of a penetrating social study of a midwestern industrial 
city by Robert and Helen Lynd. Unsuspicious in 1912 of this coming 
role, it achieved that summer, in Chautauqua minds at least, a different 
kind of glory. It had the largest committee ever to sponsor a Chautauqua 
program, seven hundred members of Muncie's Federation of Women's 
Clubs. 

Westward, at Crawfordsville and Lafayette, the seven-day course broke 
the summer vacation solstice for faculty families at Wabash College and 
Purdue University; came Huntington next, just beginning to feel its indus- 
trial oats; and the interurban town of Bluffton, where the Evening Banner 
printed an excited special edition. 

Everywhere communities covered the Victorian faces of their public 
buildings with bunting, home-town bands tooted as the troupes piled off 
the train, excited caravans rolled in from neighboring towns. After In- 
diana, the tents jumped into Michigan, with six stops in fairly large com- 
munities: Monroe on Lake Erie; Mt. Clemens with its mineral baths; 
Charlotte; Niles boasting of a history under four flags; the state capital at 
Lansing; and finally Flint, which in those days was famed as the world's 
largest producer of buggy whips. Next the trail dipped back to four more 
towns in Indiana, ending the season the first day of August at Rochester, 
seat of Fulton County. 

Thus our initial Redpath-Chicago circuit covered every type of town. 
Proud, respectable old communities and new booming cities, north, south, 
rich, poor, industrial and fanning, with audiences of strictly middle-class 
citizens with personalities and tastes of their own, but all with common 
desires. Like their parents in the days of Josh Billings, they wanted a chance 
to laugh; then to learn something they didn't know or had forgotten, or did 
know and believed in so much that they wanted to hear it again. 

The full Redpath talent list in 1912 included forty-four lecturers, seven- 
teen entertainers and thirty entertaining companies, but the headliners 
were Bohumir Kryl's Bohemian Band and William Jennings Bryan. We 
booked the bandmaster for the whole tour and Bryan for such dates as he 
could squeeze into the weeks before a Presidential election. The Demo- 
cratic National convention was just about to open in Baltimore as the 
three-times defeated Presidential candidate took to the road in Tennessee. 
When its tumult finally coded in July, Bryan began campaigning hard; 
the Democrats needed his golden voice. In seven days he averaged ten 



92 



Culture Under Canvas 



"Wilson speeches" a day, long and short; but in spite of this he managed 
to appear in thirty-four Chautauqua programs before fall, dropping poli- 
tics for The Prince of Peace. At least half of the towns were on our circuit 
out of Chicago. 

William Randolph Hearst's newspapers were attacking Bryan merci- 
lessly that summer, chiefly for having given his support to Woodrow Wil- 
son. In cartoons and editorials Hearst thundered, "Bryan is through!" But 
the campaign so overshot its mark, so enraged Bryan's admirers, that songs 
in his praise rose along our whole route in the south and middle west. 

One mid-summer day when Bryan hoisted his big body off a train at 
South Bend, Indiana, hoping to find quick transportation over the state 
line for Chautauqua's "Bryan Day" in Niles, Michigan, a waiting crowd 




Up Goes the Brown Tent 93 

with a convoy of fifty flag-draped automobiles paraded him through South 
Bend and in spite of Mr. Hearst, deposited him with cheers outside the 
brown tent in Niles. In Michigan's traditionally Republican territory of 
Charlotte and Lansing, a chorus of factory whistles and church bells an- 
nounced the Democrat's arrival. Stores closed and offices hurried em- 
ployees out to the street to wave flags as the Bryan caravan rolled past. At 
Charlotte the National Guard regimental band from the state capital was 
on hand to escort "the great Commoner" to the Chautauqua tent. We were 
indebted to Mr. Hearst for excellent free advertising that year and we 
cashed in on it. 

Marcus A. Kavanagh, Judge of the Superior Court of Chicago, speaking 
on court reform, received similar welcomes from the Knights of Columbus. 
He was a national official of the organization in 1912, and in a dozen towns 
members in uniform walked briskly with him from the station to the Chau- 
tauqua grounds. At Henderson, Kentucky, half a hundred crowded onto 
our platform as a "guard of honor"; at Brazil, Indiana, a whooping crowd 
of 2200 turned out to hear him. 

The judge had signed for this opening season with a speech called 
Traitors to Justice, because, he said, he was finally convinced that "reform 
in court procedure and law enforcemeent will never come through the legal 
profession, but through the sympathy and effort of the general public." He 
had been on the bench twenty years by then, a serious-minded, serious- 
looking man who believed in capital punishment, one of the few judges in 
the world who ever sentenced to death a man who had pleaded guilty. 
Kavanagh was gentle in his approach to law-abiding people, stern with 
lawbreakers. Few persons in the tents had ever heard in those days of a 
nonpartisan municipal government or a nonpartisan judiciary, but if they 
sat through Kavanagh's speech, and he made it an interesting speech, they 
went home well informed. And a bit ashamed, also, if they ever had dodged 
jury duty. He also disliked golf players, ". . . spending $50,000,000 a 
year on a game that requires neither courage or intellect." 

The judge travelled frequently in later years with Edward Reno, the 
magician. Reno carried a famous little purse about the size of a dollar, 
and while he idled with Judge Kavanagh at a railway station, he used to 
get the purse into Kavanagh's pocket, then pull it out and extract a six-inch 
open knife from it; or quietly slip out the Kavanagh handkerchief and put 
an American flag in its place. 

One speaker, neither fish nor fowl, who contributed nothing to either 
the political or moral scene our first season, but was good box office, was 
the Honorable Albion Zelophehad Blair, of Adams County, Ohio (not to 
be confused with lecturer Albert L. Blair, Brooklyn journalist). Albion 
Blair had been a country lawyer in the days when lawyers were not re- 
quired to have legal training. Soon after neighbors had elected him county 
judge, a notorious murder trial came up in his court He shocked learned 



94 Culture Under Canvas 

counsel by his handling of the trial, since he based unorthodox decisions 
on what he called horse sense. His opinions, delivered in somewhat startling 
language, were caught up in the press and overnight he gained celebrity 
as "the hanging judge." He expanded at once into a cracker-barrel phi- 
losopher and his unconventional comments on the passing scene, made in 
ungrammatical but pithy sentences, began to be widely quoted. "We seen 
our duty and we done it," was one of the gems from his facile tongue. He 
made the crowds laugh. If any smart-aleck young lawyer tried to heckle 
him, a rare happening in Chautauqua tents, "Judge" Blair was ready. He 
lasted, I believe, two seasons. 

The morning hour speaker for this trek was Charles E. Varney, an 
evangelist by profession from Paw Paw, Michigan, who talked to the club 
women on such intangible qualities as will power, imagination, habit. The 
most popular forenoon feature, however, was one we initiated that year. The 
idea of a "Junior Chautauqua" to keep the children busy had originated on 
the Homer circuits. Vawter had sent a "Squaw Lady" abroad in the land 
to sponsor groups of Campfire Girls; our "Story-Hour Lady" eventually 
was to follow her. But in 1912, with the cooperation of the national Boy 
Scout movement, we introduced Scouting. Attached to our staff for each 
town was a trained scoutmaster, who enlisted all willing boys into troops for 
drill, nature study and cross-country hikes. The south, with its taste for the 
military, took to the idea favorably. 

x- '"Before we left Kentucky, attendance at single shows averaged well over 
the thousand we had set as a break-even point. To get all the crowds under 
canvas for special evenings would have required a tent at least half again 
as large as those we carried. So, going through Indiana, we started to roll 
up the side walls. Then, to keep small boys and older ones from watching 
the show from outside, we set up a circle of well-guyed wooden fence posts 
ten feet apart and fastened to them a brown canvas screen seven feet high. 
With enough posts and enough of this quickly unrolled fencing we could, 
if we wished, push back the outer walls as far as fifty feet and make room 
for an extra thousand or fifteen hundred paid admissions. Later, against 
the outside of this fence, we stretched our enormous Redpath Chautauqua 
signs with block letters four feet high, on white backgrounds. It took no 
spectacles to read them from almost a quarter mile away and eventually 
we carried flood lights to illuminate them at night. 

Rolling up the sides of the tent had a second advantage. It gave the 
precious breeze a little play, for we had journeyed no farther than our 
second town down in Tennessee when we discovered the one problem above 
all others. This was the heat, the oppressive, almost suffocating heat under 
the big top on a blistering afternoon, and most afternoons on the south 
and midwest circuits seemed to be blistering. The old "Chautauqua salute" 
of waving handkerchiefs still popped up here and there, but topping it now 
was that perpetual motion I had faced first in Iowa Falls, the constant 
mopping of brows and the wigwag of the palm leaf fan. Fans never wagged 



Up Goes the Brown Tent 95 

in unison. If they had, it might have been even more disconcerting to the 
lecturer. We never escaped the heat. Wherever the tents stood in the sun, 
the audience fanned, the talent suffered and on the vaudeville stage 
comedians coined the joke, "Under the canvas the heat was in tents." 

Of course, the open sides of the tent allowed outside noise to enter. A 
performer, and heaven help him if he possessed sensitive feelings, must 
compete with children playing at the rear of the grounds, with honking 
autos or whistling trains. This is why author Opie Read, asked one day by 
a stranger for directions to the Chautauqua tent, replied with the counter 
question, "You have two railroads in this town, mister?" And when the 
answer was "Yes," Read said, "Well, then, mister, wherever those rail- 
roads cross you'll find the Chautauqua." 

Redpath-Chicago had bought nine of the new brown tents for its 1912 
trek at a cost of $3500 each. Eight would have sufficed, if everything had 
moved smoothly, but life rarely moved smoothly. Seven were in use at 
one time, the eighth was rolling to a new location. The ninth was insur- 
ance in case floods washed out the railway tracks, as they did on the Gulf 
circuit in Louisiana in June, 1927; or in case a cyclone ripped a tent in 
two, as it did in South Dakota in 1922 with the Tull Players in the middle 
of A Pair of Sixes they were all in costume except one actor who was 
caught (while changing) in garters and undershorts; or in case the stage 
caught fire, as once happened when Julia Claussen was singing the aria from 
Samson and Delilah. At such times that ninth tent paid off handsomely. 

They were in reality square tents, with a forty-foot center section in- 
serted to give length, so that each one had two center-poles thirty feet tall, 
eight quarter-poles, and many shorter ones supporting the sides. In our 
Tennessee opening and for a few years after that our center-poles were of 
wood, which meant constant trouble in getting them on and off railroad 
cars and in finding trucks big enough to haul them to the grounds. The 
metal poles we eventually used could be telescoped and presented no trans- 
portation problems, though they, too, were not immune to catastrophe. 

In Bowling Green, Kentucky, one July afternoon in the later years, 
Pianist Magdalen Massman, then accompanying the Cathedral Choir, was 
on the third page of the first song, when, crack! came the warning of the 
storm. Musicians and audience fled into torrents of rain as the huge center- 
pole bent like a hairpin. The Choir gave its night program in the audi- 
torium of Bowling Green's State Teacher's College, not too unhappy even 
if the scenery and clothes were ruined, for of course the acoustics to a mu- 
sician's way of thinking were much better inside a building. 

Our tents, all tents, seemed to have one idiosyncracy. They were so built 
that when it rained hard, water would gather in a great pocket, not at the 
sides or rear, but always, perversely, just in front of the stage. Crew boys 
would have to take a long pole with a cross board and push against the 
pocket One other July day, again in Kentucky, this time in the town of 
Owensboro, the board came loose and the boy jammed his pole straight 



96 Culture Under Canvas 

through the canvas. Barrels of water swept down across the stage, soaking 
an angry magician and his apparatus. 

The crew boys were still green the night the first show finished in Pulaski. 
But they had guy ropes free before the last note of the Star Spangled Banner 
faded and they worked all night, stacking seats, dropping the tent, hauling 
the gear to the railroad, loading it aboard the first train. Our equipment that 
year filled half a baggage car, "Chautauqua pullman" the boys called it, and 
one of their jobs was to see that it was never sandwiched somewhere in the 
middle of a milk train. Because of the seven-day program and the nine 
tents, each crew and tent leapfrogged over eight towns and arrived in the 
new location with at least twenty-four hours to spare. Thus the crew which 
had worked seven days in Pulaski passed around the next eight towns and 
unloaded in Danville, Kentucky. 

It was a successful season for everyone. In addition to Redpath-Chicago's 
thirty-nine towns, Redpath-Vawter played seventy-four and Horner from 
Kansas City one hundred and forty, making more than two hundred and 
fifty programs under Redpath management, one third of all the Chautauqua 
assemblies in the United States that summer. For our own part, we ended 
with a little money in the bank; not a great deal, but enough to pay off 
bills, repair the tents, print more advertising for the next year and go into 
'the winter Lyceum business with something besides our hands in our pockets. 
Also, we had learned from experience, just as Vawter had learned in 1904, 
what things we had best leave undone and what others, heretofore un- 
dreamed of, we must do. We learned how to cut close financial corners, but 
chiefly that year we learned how to handle tents and crowds. 

Redpath-Chicago's "lost" tent at Pulaski was the first of hundreds of the 
big canvas shelters which were to become a trademark of the circuits. From 
the day of Bishop Vincent on down, the words "tenting" or "going to 
Chautauqua" had been almost synonymous. Supplying a family with a tent 
for the week became a lively, money-making business for people in many 
communities, and up until the First World War advertisements for tents 
appeared in the newspapers near the announcement of the program. An 
eight-by-ten canvas could be rented for $2.25 for the week. A big fancy 
one, fourteen by twenty-four with six-foot walls, cost nine dollars; in 
Pawnee City, Oklahoma, I once happened to read an ad: "Tents with 
e dollar extra." 

Eventually all bureaus from coast to coast adopted our color. For sev- 
eral reasons brown was advantageous. It did not grow dingy as white canvas 
would, or show the marks of travel and muddy fields. It made the tent 
seem cooler on a sunny day whether it actually was or not. Moreover, 
it put Chautauqua in a class by itself. That was no circus or medicine show 
looming up there in the middle of a field. The brown tent after 1912 meant 
Chautauqua and nothing but. 



Music in the Air 



11 



It took all lands of music to build a Chautauqua program and all kinds of 
musicians to provide it. There were brass bands and soprano soloists, sober- 
faced choirs and male quartets. They sang everything from Richard Wagner 
to Carrie Jacobs Bond, played everything from the harp to the xylophone. 
N The musicians were men and women, young and old, but especially 
woinen, lighthearted, pretty girls having fun and frolic on the road. There 
were orchestras, duos, sextets, Swiss yodelers in genuine leder hosen and 
Alpine caps, with whom Bryan cheerfully shared the platform. There was 
the drum and bugle corps that future President Harding did not find too 
noisy, 

^ But always, and particularly, tfaerejwgj^tfae bands. 
""Every sefegspeeting town in-tire year the Chicago circuit took to the road 
had its bandstand. It graced the park down by the river or the shady court- 
house yard, where grown men played their hearts out every Saturday nigjht 
and used what leisure they had during the week for rehearsal. And small 
boys hung around as eagerly for the "practice** as for the Saturday concert 
and whistled the tunes all week. Man or woman, girl or boy, if you loved 
to sing and church rules didn't allow you to dance, why wouldn't Chau- 
tauqua, that too-short week in summer, be a "glorious thrill,'* a "musical 
experience"? 

Most of the music that exciting week was "popular," though many bril- 
liant artists travelled the circuits and offered the lighter works of great 
composers. From Maine to Texas, Dvorak's Humoresque, Mendelssohn's 
Spring Song, Franz von Suppe's Poet and Peasant Overture, Wagner's P3- 
grims? Chorus were perennial favorites. Audiences flocked to hear Victor 
Herbert, Gilbert and Sullivan and Johann Strauss. They knew what they 

91 



98 Culture Under Canvas 

wanted. Big-city critics charged that directors offered only the frothiest fare 
to people famished for Beethoven. Examinations of old programs now and 
polls of opinion at the time disprove this. 

In one such poll, a summer when going-to-Chautauqua was at its peak, 
Speaker Allen Albert and the musical group that pre-luded his lecture kept 
a diary of special requests, country-wide, from April to September. The 
top favorites, a formidable nineteen when the season ended, had no jazz 
at all and only four "popular" songs, if one puts A Perfect Day, Love's Old 
Sweet Song, Aloha Oe and 7 Hear You Calling Me into the "popular" cate- 
gory. The other choices ranged from Beethoven's Minuet in G, Rubinstein's 
Melody in F, to Cujus Animan from the Stabat Mater of Rossini. A majority 
of plain, ordinary Americans asked for, and got, The Largo from Handel's 
Xerxes, Meditation from Thais, Thy Sweet Voice aria from Samson and 
Delilah, One Fine Day from Butterfly and half a dozen other classical treas- 
ures. 

There had to be balance, however. In nooks and corners of every pro- 
gram, Bonnie Sweet Bessie or The Heart Bowed Down had to have a place 
among grand opera arias. So there were bound to be extremes, not only 
within programs, but between types of programs, and it was in this con- 
nection that critics of Chautauqua used to say unkind words. 

This was unrealistic. In contrast to grand opera, Chautauqua had no 
high-minded patrons in diamond chokers ready to make up annual deficits. 
It must pay its own way. Had every number on every program appealed 
only to the discriminating persons who asked for Cujus Animan, or only 
to those who wanted to hear the beautiful young ladies who sang Oh 9 
Promise Me at the town's most important weddings then in no time at 
all Chautauqua would have played to empty seats. Directors had to give 
variety, and to find an analogy, one need only consider radio and television 
today. No sweeping generalities about radio music could be anything but 
ridiculous. The broadcasters must widen the appeal of their medium and 
thus they offer good symphonies and operas and also a great deal of dis- 
cordant frightfulness, knowing that both types of program will be appre- 
ciated by their particular devotees. Chautauqua, likewise, had to span a 
wide range of tastes, enlightenment and experience. 

The* gusto that certain performers gave to what otherwise would have 
been only routine programs offended serious musicians, even some man- 
agers, and of course left the local music teacher in confusion. More than 
one good teacher, the week after the Chautauqua tents left town, had to 
admit ruefully to her young pupils that she neither could juggle while 
playing Dixie on the piano nor render Old Black Joe on a trombone while 
standing on her head. Nor could she play a difficult sonata dexterously 
with one hand, and the left hand at that. Nor as another well-known 
pianist did, ask a delighted, uninhibited summer crowd to name its seven 
or eight favorite compositions, and then quickly and skillfully weave them 



Music in the Air 99 

into a medley. Such accomplishments never failed to titillate listeners of 
all ages. 

For a critical manager to drop in unexpectedly to inspect a program often 
caused unhappiness among self-conscious talent. If they discovered the 
threatened visit in time, they would punish themselves with a special re- 
hearsal. Managers did drop in, however, and on one of these occasions I 
chanced to hear a charming young woman named Mae Saltmarsh actually 
accomplish the impossible by playing the piano and the trombone at the 
same time. She enchanted a large audience. It was not Carnegie Hall but 
the customers had a good time; just as they did listening to Kate Mortimer, 
the "whistling artist," 

The bands, tooting their melodious way up and down the circuits, always 
started a parade in their wake. No system ever lost money on a good 
band. Vawter once named Thaviu's International Band as his greatest 
musical drawing card over the years, a company of thirty, including a sex- 
tet of grand opera singers offering Verdi's // Trovatore. Among bands 
on the Chicago circuit, Kryl's and Creatoress by all odds were the head- 
liners, though trombone specialist Jaroslav Cimera easily held his own the 
seasons that he travelled. 

March King John Philip Sousa, who, as conductor of the Marine Band 
in his early years, earned the title of "Bandmaster to Five Presidents," 
discovered Bohumir Kryl. Sousa's own great military band played occasional 
concerts at the "permanent" assemblies. The Redpath organization, how- 
ever, never was able to tie him to a contract and he never took his aggrega- 
tion on a circuit of touring tents. 

But all Chautauqua bands played Sousa marches, as did all city bands, all 
village bands, and in lively big-top tempo, all circus bands. In our tents, 
Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, Hands Across the Sea, Semper Fidelis 
and Washington Post marches were staple fare. 

Sousa's philosophy of music influenced not only other bandmasters but 
the discerning directors who made up Chautauqua programs. The popular 
song, Sousa believed, came with the dawn of history. He contended that 
among the first ever written was that which Moses and the Children of 
Israel sang, rejoicing over the destruction of Pharaoh's army. Also, Sousa 
believed that David the Psalmist was the first bandmaster, that he organ- 
ized the first orchestra and that his troupe "numbered two hundred, four 
score and eight." Therefore, if Moses and his people, celebrating, sang, "The 
horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea, the Lord is a man of war," 
Uncle Sam and his people, under similar emotions after military victories, 
shouted There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight or Kelly and 
Burke and Shea, Joseph I. C. Clarke's Spanish-American War song for 
which Sousa wrote the music. 

Bohumir Kryl was working as a sculptor when Sousa chanced to hear 
him play Inflammatus, from Rossini's Stabat Mater on the cornet. He re- 



100 Culture Under Canvas 

cruited him at once for his band. The sculptor-musician, who also had been 
a wrestler of some prowess, was graduated from Sousa's aggregation with 
the March King's best wishes and started a band of his own. 

Kryl was a short, chunky, volatile genius with a wild mass of blond hair 
that made his big black hat seem to ride two inches above his head. He was 
an artist and, like many other such gifted individuals, was not the easiest 
of men with whom to get along on all occasions. He was extremely popular 
with Chautauqua crowds, but less so with the travelling talent who rubbed 
elbows with him all summer on the road. 

Members of his band complained to superintendents and circuit managers 
that he took advantage of their unworldliness. No musician in any category 
was well paid and the story went that a first-chair player in Kryl's band, with 
a little more money in his pocket than the others, on arriving in some one- 
horse town would rent a big room for himself, so his impoverished mates 
could sleep on the floor. 

Be that as it may, audiences gathering in the evening to hear Kryl's 
rendering of the Anvil Chorus from Verdi's // Trovatore never forgot it. For 
this spectacular number Kryl carried four anvils with four husky tympan- 
ists in leather aprons who banged out the rhythms. As the hammers clanged 
down on the anvils, an electric device sent sparks cascading around the dark- 
ened stage. 

Kryl made big money, and lost it, but in the end is said to have played 
the stock market so shrewdly that he amassed a considerable fortune. His 
daughters toured the Chautauqua circuits later, before going on the concert 
stage, Marie at the piano, Josephine on the violin. 

It was a program by temperamental Bandmaster Kryl that wicked little 
boys once disrupted in Henderson, Kentucky. Rounding up all available 
dogs, they set them free outside the canvas fence, just as a cornet virtuoso 
began his triple-tongued solo. The dogs, having ears sensitive to horns, 
especially the upper register, naturally broke into wails and the audience, 
for one price, got not only a fine evening of music but also a dramatic 
demonstration of artistic frenzy. 

Crew boys considered sad-faced Giusseppe Creatore with his handle-bar 
mustaches as much of a martinet as Kryl. They could not translate the 
angry foreign words that he yelled at his men when some poor fellow let 
slip a sour note, but from the scared looks on the Italian faces they could 
imagine. 

In those years most bandleaders and their players were foreigners or 
first generation Americans Bohemians and Italians chiefly, and how they 
went in for curled mustaches! And how folk from the farms with picnic 
lunch boxes admired the burnished buttons and gold braid, even the 'for- 
eign" look. It was to offset this appeal that a rival operator, having no 
"foreigners" to offer, one year advertised an "AMERICAN band with ALL- 
AMERICAN players." Redpath had an answer. It sent out The Old Co- 



Music in the Air 101 

lonials to depict The Spirit of '76 in powdered white wigs and elaborate 
satin costumes under an Italian conductor. If Senor Canneling had first 
tooted his trumpet in a Roman regiment, all to the good. His baton swung 
just that much livelier directing The Heroes of Valley Forge. Redpath actu- 
ally used several "all-Americans." Harold Bachmann and his Million Dollar 
Band was "ail-American," so also was Sand's Regimental. They packed the 
tents with single admissions. 

Among other Italian conductors were Ferrule who even more than most 
led with waving arms and leaping body, and young Joseph Quintano in his 
white uniform with red buttons. The Victor Brothers' International Music 
Bureau furnished most of the Italian bands. Signor Calefaty Victor was its 
president, the snappy Royal Italian Guards its number-one and highest- 
priced attraction. It was the son of the Royal Guards conductor, on the 
seven-day circuit out of Chicago, who complained bitterly all one summer 
about American musical taste. His chief scorn was aimed at By the Light of 
the Silvery Moon, popular that season. Most bandleaders, it seemed, had 
been child prodigies. Quintano, for example, was playing cornet solos in 
Italy before he was twelve. 

Sam Schildkret, director of the Hungarian Orchestra, had a theory that 
the people who needed music most were the ones who could never afford 
to pay for it, and whenever he had enough money in his own pocket, he 
rented an opera house and gave a free concert. 

Every small town with a yearning to be a city had its "opera house." 
Sometimes it was a dowdy auditorium with a stage at one end, or it might 
be the second floor above the hardware store, or, more probably, it was 
part of the Masonic Temple. It was in the opera house that Uncle Tom's 
Cabin played or Lew Dockstader's Minstrels. An occasional Shakespearian 
troupe or a rag-tag company of Midnight in Chinatown made one-night 
stands at opera houses at a price range from ten to thirty cents, with rich 
folks filling the stage boxes at half a dollar each. In later years vaudeville 
took over most of these shabby temples and fastidious actors often com- 
plained that their dressing rooms still smelled of the bloodhounds that had 
chased Eliza across the stage in a long-gone "Tom show.'* 

Sam Schildkret played to standing room only any night he rented a haH. 
A genius with the flute, he had been entertaining Americans since the 
Chicago World's Fair in 1893. He was another example of the versatile 
type of trouper. If the engineer of a fast train didn't plan to stop for the 
handful of show folk determined to make their next date, Schildkret stopped 
it. At a station in Indiana one night he built a fire on the tracks. 

Boarding a train scheduled for "no-stop" always called for ingenuity. 
Fat Ralph Bingham once wired a division superintendent to stop the train 
"for a large party." He was the large party. Another group, stranded in 
Bristol, South Dakota, lighted a station lantern and set it in the middle of 
the track to flag down a fast night express; in the party was William Jen- 



102 Culture Under Canvas 

nings Bryan, and but for him the profane conductor who piled off while 
the crowd piled on would have allowed none of them to stay aboard. 

Bands pulled the crowds into the tents, but Chautauqua was born to the 
accompaniment of a male quartet. These vocal ensembles went out by the 
dozens, from the days of the famous Temples of Boston a group that 
came into being for the dedication of Boston's Masonic Temple and whose 
reader, Miss Fay Davis, dashed off the platform once in the college town 
of Wooster, Ohio, when a mouse appeared. 

There were the Whitney Brothers; the Mendelssohns; the Dunbar Quar- 
tet and Bells; the handsome young Panama Singers, high-stepping along in 
white sailor suits with a tune called Who Dug That Ditch? Uncle Sam! The 
Chicago Glee Club disbanded in 1915 after sixteen years and 3901 engage- 
ments. The Music Makers introduced the African marimbaphone, a wind 
instrument that became as fancy a drawing card as the Russian balalaika. 

But the aggregation most fondly remembered is probably the Weather- 
wax Brothers. This lively group roamed from the Atlantic seaboard to the 
Rockies from 1901 until the last tent came down without missing a single 
curtain and with more dates for time on the road than any other attraction 
Redpath ever booked. 

The four brothers, farm boys from Charles City, Iowa, came from a 
singing family. "The singin'est family you ever saw, us five brothers and 
Pa an* Ma, we'd sing for socials an' bazaars, July 4ths an' G.A.R.'s; in 
fact we'd go to anything an' nose in an' start to sing." The McKinley cam- 
paign was one of the first events they "nosed" into. In 1909, deciding they 
had wasted their sweetness too long on the desert air, four of them took 
to the rural road, and for small change sold their musical wares, plus per- 
sonality, across Iowa and Minnesota. Then Keith Vawter happened to 
hear them, and their longtime ticket was written for Redpath. 

In November, 1911, Vawter commented in a letter, "A good quartet, 
to keep in the limelight, must be a cracking good vaudeville show for an 
hour and a half." The Weatherwax Brothers, subscribing to the idea, early 
supplied themselves with silver trumpets, two B-flats and two E's, and 
with a fast-paced program of harmony and heart-throbs, melody and 
monkeyshines, they achieved the limelight and stayed there. Asa, the old- 
est, now dead, and William of Clarence, Iowa, sang first and second tenor; 
Lester, now of Wichita, Kansas, baritone; Tom, at present of Des Moines, 
Iowa, bass. The four brothers, departing from Chautauqua's customary 
white pants, wore light gray suits, all alike, to "pre-lude" a performance, 
but in the evening when they carried the whole show on their four pairs 
of broad shoulders, they dressed in what William still calls "claw-hammer 
coats." 

Lester delivered the serious reading. Best audience reaction always went 
to Man in the Shadow by Richard Washburn Child, author and post-World 



Music in the Air 103 

War I American ambassador to Italy. Novelties were left to William. If 
a new "original" was needed for the afternoon concert, Brother Bill simply 
dug up his pencil and sense of humor, down in Athens, Georgia or Zanes- 
ville, Ohio, or wherever the tent happened to be, and wrote it. His most 
famous number became his Essay on Grass. In it he started out glibly: 

"Oh, the gentle grass is growing 
"In the vale and on the hill: 
"We cannot hear it growing 
"Still it's growing very still. . . ." 

and then he would stutter and forget. 

A horrified brother would rush from the wings to prompt him: ". . . and 
in the spring it springs to life. . . ." More stumbling, more prompting, in 
whispers at first, but as the actor's pretended confusion grew, so did the 
prompting voice, until in the end it was sheer madness. The Marx Brothers 
didn't invent zany antics. 

James Whitcomb Riley was the midwest's hero at the moment and night 
after night Bill recited Little Orphant Annie and The Raggety Man. The 
song repertoire covered a wide range, from Poe's Annabelle Lee to Gib- 
ney's Song of the Vikings. Rousingly, the four "warriors from the north 
land cold" boomed Gibney's lines: 

"The wind is blowing from off the shore 
"And our sail has felt its force, 
"For our bark bounds forth o'er the crested wave 
"As a wild and restive horse. . . ." 

Gradually, however, as the years went on, the Weatherwax theme song 
became Dr. William Pitts' The Little Brown Church in the Vale. 

It was Lester's task to introduce this number, with a brief speech explain- 
ing that a little brown Congregational church, "painted brown because 
brown paint was cheapest," actually did exist at Old Bradford, near Nashua, 
Iowa. The song caught. Before long, when the quartet bore down lustily 
in its: 

"Come, Come, Come, Come, 

"Come to the Church in the wildwood . . ." 

the audience either cheered or joined in. In June, 1955, when the congre- 
gation of the Little Brown Church celebrated its one hundredth birthday, 
the surviving Weatherwax brothers of the quartet that had made it famous, 
sang again on the program, and at its end shook hands again with every- 
body in the audience, the way they always had done in Chautauqua. 

Another quartet on the road as early as the Weatherwaxes were the 
good-natured, fastidiously dressed Whitneys Alvin, William, Yale and 
Edwin, sons of Methodist temperance lecturer, E. J. Whitney. All four 



104 Culture Under Canvas 

were of a positive nature. Naturally they sometimes argued a bit over 
how a song should be sung. One brother would think a phrase should 
be boomed out, another not. Words sometimes got bitter, till finally Alvin 
would shout, "We agree!" and the argument was over. After a few years 
"We agree!" became a catch phrase for other talent. 

Their songs ranged from folk to classical, from Rio Grande Rag to 
Danny Deever and "I'm Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, I give my 
horse good corn and beans." Eugene Field had died before the Whitneys 
achieved their top fame but his sentimental poems were still bittersweet 
gems to many American parents and the Whitneys' most popular encore 
was their barbershop rendering of Field's Little Red Drum: "I'm a beautiful 
red, red drum and I play with the soldierboys . . . there's Tom and Jim 
and Phil and Dick and Nat and Fred . ." 

This arrangement and one of Edwin Whitney's recitations, The Darky 
and the Boys, became wide-selling Victor records. Like Ralph Bingham's 
vernacular pieces, The Darky and the Boys typifies the mild humor that 
a large cross-section of the public listened to with relish in the 1910*s. 
Graveyards, it seems, held a particular appeal. Whitney's story concerned 
a pair of boys gathering walnuts. After the two had stuffed pockets and 
blouses with nuts and even tied their trouser legs at the ankles and filled 
them, too, they started home. The first shade tree they came to, where 
they could sit down and divide the nuts, was inside a high wall around a 
graveyard. Climbing over the wall, one boy dropped two walnuts and left 
them outside on the ground; he would pick them up later. 

Out of sight under the shade tree, they dumped all the nuts into a pile 
and started to share them equally, the first boy saying, "I'll take this one," 
his friend echoing, "111 take this one." 

An old colored man, happening along the road, heard the voices inside 
the graveyard . . . "I'll take this one . . ." "I'll take this one . . ." 

"Oh, God," he cried, "this ain't no place for this here oP man," and 
down the road he pelted as fast as he could run . . . "Pitty-pat, pitty-pat, 
pitty-pat ..." till he met a white friend to whom he cried: "Massa, Massa, 
I just come past de graveyard and I hear de Lawd and de Debil in dar 
dividin' up the folks . . ." 

"You're crazy," said the white man. 

"I hear 'em, swear to God I do ... Come, you'll hear it . . ." 

Back the pair went and, sure enough, the voices still were going on . * . 
"I'll take this one . . ." "I'll take this one . . ." 

"Does you hear, Massa?" 

"Yes, I hear . . ." 

"I'll take this one . . ." "Ill take this one . . ." "Well, that's all," one 
boy said, "except the two outside the fence . . ." 

"And they tell me," Whitney continued, "that the white man beat the 
Negro running." 



Music in the Air 105 

Dapper Edwin Whitney stayed on the road as a reader after his brothers 
ended their singing careers. As late as the 20*s he was filling both summer 
and winter engagements. 

From the day at Chautauqua Lake when the Fisk Jubilee Singers enter- 
tained President Garfield, down into the early 1920's when the public 
finally tired of plantation songs, singers from Dixie Land, "sometimes up, 
sometimes down," were easy, popular acts to sell. As interest finally waned, 
directors tried to keep the idea alive by expanding a program from a group 
of simple songs of the south into a pretentious epic. In one of these attempts 
the talented Dixie Chorus of eight men carried a thousand-dollars' worth of 
costumes and settings that ranged from an African jungle to a southern cot- 
ton field. 

Male choruses in general became as popular as quartets and a Chicago 
producer named Ralph Dunbar, one of the brothers in the first Dunbar 
Quartet, was a genius at building and training these fairly complex organiza- 
tions. The pretentious Dixie Chorus was his, and he sent out dozens of 
others, for it was a poor circuit indeed that did not boast at least one 
Dunbar company each season for some twenty years. These teams travelled 
under many names the Dunban Singing Orchestra, made up of six 
girls, and the Royal Dragoons, the Troubadours, the Imperial Grenadiers, 
the Russian Cathedral Choir, and of course, Dunbar's Original White Hus- 
sars. The Hussars were a hit wherever they appeared, so popular, in fact, 
that the adaptable Ralph Dunbar found it necessary on occasion to send 
out several "original" Hussar troupes, of course into widely separated parts 
of the nation. 

The size of a Hussar, Dragoon or Grenadier chorus ranged from nine to 
twenty-five men, depending on the importance and financial condition of 
the circuit that booked them. They not only sang remarkably well, but 
Ralph Dunbar had instilled in them the fundamentals of smart show business. 
The evening program usually started with the singers in formal dress. Orig- 
inally they had worn Russian costumes, but the audiences could take just 
so much Russian and no more, even in those days. So following an inter- 
mission, in which the soloists entertained, the troupe would reappear as 
a vested choir. After three or four solemn numbers in this costume it again 
was time for a change. 

Then came the flashing white uniforms, white boots, white busbies with 
glorious pompoms. With military precision the smartly turned-out Hussars 
went through an intricate close-order drill with gymnastic overtones. Nearly 
all of the young troubadours played a brass or wind instrument and they 
made the canvas shake with Smiles and The Rocky Road to Dublin, in 
rich close harmony; or, for the more discerning in the tent, the Soldiers' 
Chorus from Faust, the Pilgrim^ Chorus from Tannhauser. They often 
opened with El Capitan in the south, with Are You From Dixie to 
create a happy riot at the start. And always somewhere in the program 



106 Culture Under Canvas 

Civil War veterans wiped their eyes as the group swung into The Boys of 
the Old Brigade, with its rousing, accented chorus: 

"Where are the boys of the Old Brigade 
"Who fought with us side by side? 
"Shoulder to shoulder and blade to blade, 
"They fought till they fell and died . . ." 

"And died," a booming bass voice would repeat. 

Of course the final number was the national anthem, American not Rus- 
sian, for most of the Hussars were midwest college boys earning their 
next year's tuition and keep. 

El Capitan, the tuneful musical show which DeWolf Hopper took to 
the road in the 1890's, vied with Gilbert and Sullivan operas in the pop- 
ularity of its revivals. When Admiral Dewey's squadron sailed up Mirs 
Bay to attack Manila in the Spanish-American War, the band on the Rag- 
ship Olympia played El Capitan. On the day of the Admiral's triumphant 
parade in New York City, the march that Sousa's band thundered as it 
passed the reviewing stand again was El Capitan. 

Sousa had written the music and some of the lyrics for the libretto by 
Charles Klein. All through the Chautauqua years, choruses and bands 
delighted audiences not only with the name song, but with other lyrics 
from the book, such as Sweetheart Fm Waiting and The Typical Tune 
of Zanzibar. 

One year the White Hussars became Black Hussars and once Dunbar 
shifted to White Hussar Girls, but they never were as popular as the stal- 
wart young men. Dunbar in his youth had been in vaudeville. Later he 
chose as his musical director Al Sweet, a former bandmaster of the Ringling 
Brothers Circus, a stern driUmaster who, like Creatore and Kryl, put the 
fear of God into his men. Talent, crew and the shocked people of Rich- 
mond, Indiana, never forgot the way Showman Sweet publicly "cut down 
to size" the careless young man, a little on the fat side, who appeared on 
the platform one afternoon with disreputable brown shoes beneath his 
white flannel trousers and blue coat. White flannels might shrink in the 
local laundry till they burst their seams and tight shoes blister the feet, but 
a boy wore what was fundamentally correct if he worked for Sweet. 

Chautauqua's mixed quartet swelled into companies of every contrasting 
type and size. A topnotch example was the Oratorio Artists to whose ranks 
at various times Elsie Baker, contralto, and Soprano Florence Hinkle both 
gave prestige. For years, Redpath-Chicago sent out impersonator Walter 
Eccles and his College Singing Girls, eight proper and personable young 
ladies in street skirts just an inch off the floor, and, in their shorter dresses, 
discreetly well-gaitered. Eccles* monologues, we emphasized, "always in- 
clude one good story or poem that helps and uplifts." 

There were many, many others. The sedate Cathedral Choir of four 



Music in the Air 107 

men and four women offered religious music for half of their concert. The 
Beulah Buck Quartet introduced Marjorie Paddock as a soprano. Mrs- 
Buck, who had been a country schoolteacher before she took to elocution, 
doubled as reader and soloist, a practice which kept costs down for the 
home office. 

For years, too, there were the six laughing Killaraey Girls, bewitching all 
the young men in the audience with Irish folk songs crew boys, on most 
circuits, were asked not to "date" local girls, but no edicts could be laid 
down forbidding the dashing young blades of a community to wait after 
the performance for the prettiest girl entertainers. 

It was the Killarneys* clever reader, Rita Rich, who popularized the old 
ditty: 

"Sing, Kate, sing! 

"You're thirty-five in the Spring. 

"Don't let him go 

'Till he buys you a ring. 

"Sing, Kate, sing!" 

Hard-working Ada Roach served an apprenticeship with the Killarneys 
before she took out her own company. In her most popular program she 
featured Charles F. Homer's play-opera, The Heart of the Immigrant, tak- 
ing the part of the Irish girl. She closed her show rousingly with I'm a Citi- 
zen of the US. A. and in between sang Smiles as often as a Smzfes-crazy 
audience demanded. It was the girls of the Ada Roach Company in 1915, 
when their Ford bogged down in the mud near Bloomfield, Nebraska, who 
tramped six long miles carrying their own suitcases to make their curtain. 

Williamstown, West Virginia, remembered for many years the Fourth of 
July in 1915 when the young ladies of one company went for a "quiet 
walk" and a bootlegger whom the sheriff was chasing sought safety close 
at their heels. Unaware of him, the young ladies walked on, until the posse 
started shooting. Then they found that they could run, too. Another story, 
concerning another sheriff and another troupe, went across the routes that 
same year. It was in Oklahoma and the Harold Tregillus Concert Company 
was putting on its musical act when hilarious cowboys began to shoot up 
the town. A deputy rushed into the tent for the sheriff, who was whooping 
it up with delight in the front row. "Get up and leave now?" he answered 
the deputy. "I should say not. Let 'em wait till the show's over." 

Managers found the Smith-Spring-Holmes Orchestral Quintet easy to 
sell, possibly because the name of its reader-soprano was,Coyla May Spring 
and that of her cello-playing sister Lotus Flower. Townsfolk reading such 
delectable names in the prospectus felt impelled to see their owners. Neither 
the girls' looks nor Lotus Flower's smile was disappointing. Nor their 
music. 

Looks never mattered with the male singers. A boy in the Lyric Glee 
Club, going into his hotel one night, heard one woman ask another 



108 Culture Under Canvas 

how she had liked the concert. The answer was, "They're a homely bunch, 
but oh, Lord, how they can sing!" 

Romance blossomed in the Smith-Spring-Holmes company. Lotus 
Flower Spring married Guy Holmes, flute soloist; Coyla May Spring, 
Composer Clay Smith but neither girl would give up the name Spring. 
Smith, who did his first trouping with Barnum and Bailey, used a trom- 
bone, we advertised, "of eighteen-karat gold." 

The Kellogg-Haines Singing Party, a highly-trained group named orig- 
inally for Soloist-teacher Stella Kellogg-Haines of St. Louis, advertised 
"vaudeville stunts avoided," and made a specialty of elaborate costumes 
to fit elaborate high-class acts. Costumes of some kind were almost a must 
for musicians of this period. Grandmothers, even some of the mothers, 
dreaming happily of other times, had brought native costumes with them 
from the old country, stored now tenderly in an attic trunk, and music of 
the homeland struck a deep note when rendered by singers arrayed in the 
dress of that beloved homeland. If the company were not actually "for- 
eign," if it were just plain American, with no hint of far places, it still 
could be "colonial" or "early American" in its dress. 

Redpath records show that by and large people never tired of foreign 
groups, though the songs themselves, preferably, were in English. Trailing 
the famous Hussars were the Imperial Russian Quartet, this one actually 
composed of Russians. There were the sprightly Alpine Singers and such 
specialized orchestras as the Ladies Spanish or the Yugoslav Tamburica. 
There was one choir of five African Kafir boys and another group called 
the Tyrolean Yodelers, with its startling switches from normal to falsetto 
register. Mrs. Potter Palmer had brought them to Chicago for the World's 
Fair and they kept their name until the mid-1 920's. There were Scotch, 
Welsh, Gipsy, Hawaiian, Mexican, Filipino, Bohemian and Polish com- 
panies, the Mercedes Ladies Zither Quartet and many others as exotic, each 
emphasizing its own national folk dances and folk songs. The native land 
of the Musical Guardsmen never was made clear, but to judge from its 
resplendent uniforms it hailed from either Ruritania or Graustark. 

Among these imported groups the jubilant Hawaiians with their steel 
guitars possibly were the worst trial a superintendent had to bear, perhaps 
because he tried to Americanize them too fast. At every stop, before leis, 
sashes, ukeleles or guitars emerged from the battered luggage, every Ha- 
waiian searched the new town for a place to swim. They had been raised 
in water and they swam like eels, preferably without clothes. Their code 
of manners naturally was different from that of the troubled superintendent, 
and next to water, what they desired most was to sleep together under the 
platform of the Chautauqua tent. The management forbade it, not because 
it questioned the morality of this custom, but would the people of Sawbuck, 
Illinois, or Wheatfield, Kansas, understand such goings on? Occasionally, 
of course, the love of swimming had its values. En route to Watonga, Ok- 



Music in the Air 109 

lahoma, one rainy season, Lecturer E. L. Rogers and the Hawaiian Players 
came to a bridge several feet under water. The Hawaiians, holding their 
instruments and their clothes high on their heads, leaped in joyfully. His- 
tory doesn't tell what happened to the marooned lecturer. 

Of all companies of talented young women bouncing over muddy roads 
with baggage, instruments, property trunk and a lecturer or two, all usually 
crowded into two Ford touring cars, none had more fun or gave more 
concentrated pleasure than the six Military Girls. This was a Redpath- 
Homer musical company in which the sparkling Miss Fay Pettit of Redpath- 
Chicago's 1912 Anitas became a member. With her in the Military Girls 
were her twin sisters, Gladys, soprano and pianist, and Ailene, violinist. The 
latter, like Miss Fay, was still in her teens when she joined the first com- 
pany, and with her twin became a happy example of that rampant Chau- 
tauqua custom, romance on the road. Both girls married Chautauqua super- 
intendents. Not until after the tents folded did I know that among all the 
talent the summer trek was brightly called "the mating season." 

Another one-time member of the Military group was Soprano Laura 
Townsley, a character singer who became a protege of Mme. Schumann- 
Heink and, still later, the "Mary McCoy" of radio; in the 1930's she went 
on the road again as "Mitzi" in Blossom Time. In this as in all companies, 
personnel shifted from year to year. Girls got married or competitors hired 
them; young men, having tasted sweet applause, became bold and took 
out their own troupes. 

The Military Girls played flutes, cornets, violins, piano and trap drums. 
In their first publicity picture their drums innocently faced the wrong way, 
because at the time none of the young women had yet learned how to play 
a drum. Such was youth and derring-do. Managers soon used these girls 
exclusively as "openers." They were Chautauqua personalities, collecting 
adventures wherever they went. Any conveyance would satisfy, even en- 
tertain them, horse and buggy or freight, or if rains had weakened a bridge, 
a hand car. One August day, crossing sun-baked Kansas, they joyfully 
peeled onions and potatoes in the caboose of the freight train and cooked 
a stew for the crew. 

Invariably the Military Girls made their dates. If the 4:00 A.M. train 
whistle awakened them when the boardinghouse alarm clock failed, well, 
five minutes had to be enough; astonished brakemen helped them aboard 
the train in kimonos over their night clothes. Their costumes on the stage 
were of hot khaki with long, lined sleeves, their military caps were heavy 
and tight, boots and collars high, but if asked, they denied that they were 
hot. u Oh no, not at all, just comfortable" even the afternoon when one of 
them dropped her drum and fainted on a stifling Texas platform. 

The Pettits objected to nothing, except a possible breach of propriety. 
One sister, -arriving for spring rehearsal with Redpath-Horner in Kansas 
City, discovered that the skirts of the new tailored uniforms were fifteen 



110 Culture Under Canvas 

inches off the floor. To be sure, there were respectable thick woolen bloom- 
ers underneath the skirts and these bloomers were tucked into high leather 
puttees, but the sister protested to Manager Horner, "No decent girl would 
appear on the stage in so disgracefully short a skirt." She capitulated after 
Miss Fay modeled the uniform. 

As a further distinction, this company was the first on the road to solve 
the perplexing problem of how girls could manage to get their hair washed. 
In those years nice women never patronized men's barber shops. The Mili- 
tary Girls made a deal: would the barber let them come in after he closed? 
He would. 

A successful troupe had to be ingenious. The Dollie McDonnels, play- 
ing Findley, South Dakota, at about this same time, found as opening hour 
approached that their trunks had not arrived. They gave their concert in 
clothes loaned by their hotel landlady and next morning thanked the fate 
that had kept their trunks safe elsewhere, for the hotel burned down before 
their train left. 

The Military Girls' acts, songs, and recitations all were advertised as 
purely "American." They featured such poems as Paul Laurence Dunbar's 
Cushville Hop, his Cornstalk Fiddle, and the Indian legend of the drowned 
girl who sprang back to glory and grace as a water lily. Their best remem- 
bered act, however, described in the programs as an "action song," was 
Broomstick Cavalry, in which with brooms for guns and Miss Fay as the 
Captain, they sang Carrie Jacob Bond's 

"Say, how would you like to be a soldier? 
"A soldier in a uniform of blue, 
'"With a cap and cape so bright, 
"Buttons shined like stars at night, 
"And a pocket full of bullets, 

Goodness me!" 

Press notices of this act were universally good. Charm, vitality and grace 
had values. 

Family teams, though successful in scattered instances, could be the bane 
of a director. A husband might be a true musician, his wife mediocre, or 
vice versa, but if a manager wanted one of them he must hire both. Also, 
regrettably, an "artist" who sounded wonderful at spring rehearsals occa- 
sionally turned out to be no genius in mid-summer heat, or could handle 
a few selections, but be unable to carry a whole program. When that hap- 
pened we usually cancelled the contract and substituted another performed. 

Child labor laws were still more talked about than existent in 1912 
and since the Chautauqua season coincided with school vacations, it was 
not unusual for children to troupe with their parents and perform with 
them. It seemed to me, at times, that some families had no other home 
than the tent. The child who could play or sing need not necessarily play 
or sing well to win an audience; her tender years would do that for her. 



Music in the Air 111 

Mr. and Mrs. George Lincoln McNemry of the Harmony Concert Com- 
pany, for instance, presented their five-year-old daughter as a full-fledged 
member of their group. At New Haven, Michigan, one summer, seven bou- 
quets went up to the platform for the child's skill or daring with tam- 
bourine, triangle and xylophone. 

In the Townley Concert Company, son Gorham, aged twelve, did female 
impersonations for similar applause. In other groups ambitious boys, or 
perhaps just obedient ones, pounded at drums, and hair-ribboned small 
misses performed bit parts, if only with sleigh bells. There were dozens 
of companies made up altogether of children. Curly-haired Blatchford 
Kavanagh, in his black velvet suit with white lace collar and red bow tie, 
the "original" in Henry B. Roney's Boys, grew from childhood to manhood 
on the circuits. The Chicago Boy Choir originated in a Sunday School mis- 
sion four baby-faced youths in every kind of costume, from kilts to sur- 
plices, playing bagpipes or marimbaphone with equal facility. 

Life for these children may have been exciting but it was not easy. The 
stranger who, late one night, asked a Chautauqua child sleepily waiting for 
her parents in a Chicago railway station, "Honey, what time do you go to 
bed?" undoubtedly got the true answer: "I go to bed when we get any- 
where." 

All of these versatile and gay performers, young or middle-aged, most 
of them serving as "pre-luders," lightened the customer's diet, but it was the 
Alice Nielsens and Tamaki Miuras, the Julia Claussens and Elsie Bakers 
and Florence Hinkles, who brought splendor and beauty into the tents 
and established Redpath's reputation for polished musical performances. 
Men and women sat silently for a long breathless moment after Irene 
Stolofsky finished Paganinni's D Major Concerto for the violin. Here was 
the stuff of dreams. Schooled or unschooled, farmer's wife or city club- 
woman, who could fail to enjoy it? And how, before radio, would they 
ever have heard it if Chautauqua hadn't come their way? 

On Main Street arrived such names as Augusta Lenska, Russian-born 
contralto; from the Chicago Operatic Company, Marjory Maxwell and 
Myrna Sharlow, baritone Arthur Middleton. Violinist Estefle Gray ap- 
peared many seasons with her Russian husband, Mischa Lhevinne. Miss 
Gray fitted into the nomad's life. She had gjven her first concert at the age 
of eight and from then on no emergency upset her. Even when she fell on 
the street and smashed her Cremona violin, she went on with a substitute 
fiddle until a wizard repaired the great instrument. She was on the road 
to provide music and not rain nor heat nor gloom of night kept her from 
it. Once in North Bend, Nebraska, on the Homer circuit, she played while 
rain leaked through the tent over her till the violin strings broke. It was while 
she was with Homer, too, that in the middle of Sherwin's After the Lights 
Are Out, the lights did go out. She played right on into the Danse Macabre 
of Saint-Saens, with its portrayal of death and hobgoblins. Near the end 



112 Culture Under Canvas 

of that composition, a cock crows, as a warning that the day approaches, 
and at this particular moment the lights came back on. Lights in the 
Chautauqua tents often seemed to be controlled by the devil. Once in 
Paris, Texas, they went out while Lawrence Lewis of the Chicago Artists 
was singing Lead, Kindly Light. 

Marie Stoddard and Frederick Wheeler both got their start toward the 
concert stage with the Oratorio Artists. Louise Stallings, New York mezzo 
soprano, appeared with various groups, eventually with her own top-notch 
company. Metropolitan star, C. Pol Plancon, sang one season with the girls 
of the Aida Instrumental Quartette; smiling Baritone David Bispham re- 
cited Shakespeare to the music of Mendelssohn as beautifully in Tennessee 
as he had at Covent Garden. 

Singer Charles Edward Clarke usually appeared with his Polish wife, 
Rachel Steinman, the violinist; their dog, Teddy, spent his time under the 
platform digging for bones. Clarke, a Canadian, almost invariably opened 
with a light air from the opera Pagliacci, then balanced his program with 
a musical reading of Longfellow's narrative poem about the once-proud 
King Robert of Sicily, "brother of Pope Urbane ... in his foxtail coat 
... on a piebald steed. . . ." It supplied good music, good humor, good 
verse, a bit of "inspiration," and, as Clarke sensed, filled the old rule that 
people often like best the things with which they are most familiar. Most 
listeners in the tent, at some time or other, had sung, read or recited the 
lines in Longfellow's closing stanza: 

"The Angel smiled . . . 

"And through the open window, loud and clear 

'They heard the monks chant . . . 

" 'He has put down the mighty from their seat 

" 'And has exalted them of low degree!' " 

It was a musical program, but some people, at least, went home thinking, "I, 
too, like King Robert of Sicily, shall strive to be a better man." 

Our Bergen-Marx Company was made up of Baritone Alfred Hiles Ber- 
gen, Hans Dressel, a London cellist, and Leon Marx, who before he was 
twenty was playing first violin in Chicago's outstanding Theodore Thomas 
Orchestra. It was on Bergen, American-born composer of the pretentious 
Indian cycle, Song of the Birch, that the Redpath Lyceum bureau pioneered 
with a $120,000 insurance policy, the first ever taken by a booking agency 
on a voice. Until then only musicians' hands had been thought to deserve 
protection. 

' lMi "The really great men and women of both stage and concert hall, who 
came to spend frequent summers in Chautauqua, almost without exception 
were easier to get along with than the would-be greats and the almost- 
greats. They were secure, untroubled by petty jealousies, and most of those 
I knew were folk of simple tastes, with manners more than skill deep. 



Music in the Air 113 

Among them was Mme. Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who shared her 
knowledge of "this business," as she called her world of music and enter- 
tainment, with any eager youngster at hand to listen. 

When I was a young agent selling talent for Lyceum, Keith Vawter 
sent me one season on tour with Mme. Schumann-Heink and I discovered 
then, as I found later when she filled occasional Chautauqua engagements, 
that this big-hearted woman took her art seriously, but never herself. She 
could joke about herself and did frequently. Once in Chicago when she 
was appearing under Redpath direction, a small car was sent to her hotel 
to take her to the concert hall. The door of the car was narrow. She tried to 
get in, failed, tried again. 

An attendant finally suggested: "Why doesn't Madame get in sidewise?" 

Schumann-Heink, turning 'round, chuckled and demanded, "With 
Schumann-Heink, which way is sidewise?" 

She was in her late, well-padded forties on that first tour, I in my early 
twenties, and in her hearty Teutonic accent she always called me "My boy." 
On the evening of her first concert at about 8:30, I went to her dressing 
room to report happily that the house was a sell-out. To my amazement I 
found her in a frightening condition. 

"Oh, my boy!" she cried, rocking back and forth and holding her big 
arms around her ample middle. "I so sick! Schumann-Heink cannot go 
on. No, it is too bad! Schumann-Heink must disappoint all these people. 
Schumann-Heink very sick!" 

To say that I was more distressed than she is to put it mildly. I thought 
of the thousand paid customers, waiting bright-eyed and eager to hear this 
tremendous voice. I thought of the loci committee to whom I must break 
the devastating news. When I asked her just where and how she felt ill, 
she only motioned me away. And then came the knock at the door: "Time 
to go on!" 

Mme. Schumann-Heink stood up immediately. She straightened her dress, 
touched her hair, gave me a ghost of a smile and sailed out in front of the 
footlights. Beaming over the ovation, she began to sing Mozart's Sextus. 
Poor woman, I thought, how she must be suffering! At the end of the con- 
cert I hurried toward her. How was she feeling now? 

"Ach, gut!" She beamed at me. "Schumann-Heink feel fine. We go eat** 

The next night in another town the same frightening incident occurred. 
Again she rocked and moaned. She would not be able to go on. Again she 
sang superbly and came off feeling fine. The third night again, as the mo- 
ment of her appearance arrived, she was miraculously cured of whatever 
caused her anguish. This time I made bold to ask. How could anyone be 
so wretchedly ill up to the second of curtain time, then in a trice be com- 
pletely cured? 

"My boy," she said, patting my arm, "if you stay in this business, is one 



114 Culture Under Canvas 

thing to remember. Every artist ... /a ... every artist feel sick before 
every performance. The one that does not feel sick, that one is no artist! 
Remember that." 

I remembered, all the years I sent big tents up and down the land. The 
lecturer who did not meet efach new audience with a hollow feeling in 
his stomach was not much of a lecturer. The actor or musician who saw 
the footlights turn on without a wave of uneasiness, sometimes amounting 
to nausea, was at best a second-rater. Art never takes anything for granted. 

One of our towns on that first Schumann-Heink tour was Lima, Ohio, 
where relatives of mine lived, among them an elderly bedridden aunt who 
loved music. 

"What street she live on?" the great lady asked. 

I told her and she said nothing more, but after the concert the world's 
greatest contralto climbed into a taxi, located the house and in a bedroom, 
without accompaniment, sang Auld Plaid Shawl and A Red, Red Rose. 

I recall another experience, also in Ohio on that same tour. A local im- 
presario had brought Schumann-Heink to town. He had paid Keith Vawter 
his thousand dollars in advance, but at noon before the concert it began 
to rain and at curtain time the auditorium was only half-filled. The local 
manager, rapidly becoming frantic, counted his gate receipts and discovered 
that he was three hundred dollars in the hole. When I reported that fact 
to Schumann-Heink, she said, "My boy, tell this man Schumann-Heink, 
she do not want his money! She return whatever it is, the loss." 

"But you can't do that," I protested. 

"Ach, yes, my boy," she answered, "Schumann-Heink can. If you stay 
in this business, is one thing to learn. Never let them lose money on you. 
If Schumann-Heink go out now and sing like the angel, and that man, he 
lose money, then Schumann-Heink, she no good! Her voice, it is kapuL 
But if Schumann-Heink go out and sing off key and the management make 
money, then he tell everybody, 'Schumann-Heink, she sing like the angel/ 
Now, go tell the man." 

Mme. Schumann-Heink never did a full season of concerts under canvas 
tents, but she did fill many special dates for the Redpath organization. I 
never knew a time when her simple, warm-hearted modest manner did not 
win her friends. At Springfield, Illinois, in 1914, the little eight-year-old girl 
who had just heard the great lady sing Child's Prayer, and who, as 
Schumann-Heink started for her car, was overheard singing it to her doll, 
got a hug from the great lady and the basket of roses that had just been 
sent up to the platform. 

A few seasons after Redpath-Chicago began stringing its banners across 
Main Street, its management brought one pleasant old American custom 
into fine flower. It happened by accident. In Lansing, Michigan, a storm 
stopped the show. To keep people from getting too restless, a local clergy- 
man jumped up and started them singing. It was such a success that the 



Music in the Air 



115 



Chicago office hired the man for the next season and from then on pro- 
fessional song leaders, known as u tune heisters" by disrespectful crew boys, 
became regulars in the organization. 

The "tune heister" did not need to know a great deal about music, but 
plenty about mass psychology. Success also depended in large part on 
gymnastic ability, and it was advantageous to possess a fine set of teeth, 
for an appreciative smile, usually of the ear-to-ear variety, was a most 
effective tool. Summer audiences put their hearts into / Want a Girl, Your 
Old Gray Bonnet, Juanita, Sweet Adeline, Down by the Old Mill Stream. 
They made the tents quiver with Love's Old Sweet Song and The Long, 
Long Trail 

"Tune heisters" still are with us and occasionally, at some luncheon 
club, I see an old Redpath boy, balding and expanding in girth, leading 
his brothers in song. He was no artist, he never had been. But he gave 
the folks a good time. On any program, in any town, in any season, what 
more could one ask? 




Ralph Bingham and John Bunny. 



ff Let's Face the Issue . . ." 



12 



It is a pleasant August evening in 1912. Charley Stover, clerk at the 
Hoosier Drug Store, leans forward in his third row seat to make sure that 
he hears all the well-dressed fellow on the platform has to say. Charley, 
just turned twenty-one, will cast his first vote come November and a voter 
must understand the issues. The Muncie Star said so just this morning. 

The fellow on the platform this evening is talking about how senators 
should be nominated and elected by the people, rather than by politicians 
in the legislature. He isn't reading his speech. He doesn't even have any 
notes. But he certainly is full of his subject. What he says makes Post- 
master Ep White so mad that Ep gets up and stomps out of the tent. But 
Charley Stover can't see why anybody should get mad at such a sensible 
idea. He'd like to have a hand in picking his own senator. 

Programs on all Chautauqua circuits, Maine to California, reflected the 
excitement of political campaigns, but especially was this true of the rous- 
ing Presidential race of 1912. That was the BuU Moose year, when Teddy 
Roosevelt with his righteous anger at Wall Street, William Howard Taft 
coming out flat-footed for high tariffs, and Socialist Gene Debs, between 
jail terms, all lost to New Jersey's Governor, Woodrow Wilson. Both 
in the campaign itself, and in the fiercer nominating conventions that "pre- 
luded" it, speakers on all sides of all fences were Redpath headliners and 
many of them had been for years. 

These men had not been introduced in Chautauqua as politicians. They 
had talked on "good government." But who could keep a fervent party 
man, billed for a nonpartisan speech, from emphasizing his side of the 
story? Or how many Charley Stovers would really want him to? 

Some of the politicians who sought summer speaking dates did it simply 

116 



"Lefs Face the Issue . . ." 117 

because they wouid oe running for office again in another year. Some 
were lame clucks, jobless and lull of unuttered. oratory, but many of them, 
busy, tired men wno took to the dirt, heat and no&e of the road, piimg 
off the day coach at 7:27 P.M. for a 7:30 lecture, exhausting their voices 
in big tents without microphone, did so because they were passionately in- 
terested in some particular piece of legislation. 

So far as Charley Stover and many others were concerned, it was a one- 
sided show; the fellow on the platform had his say and that was that. They 
could go home and think over what he presented as immortal truth, but 
rarely could they challenge him from the floor. The day of questions and 
discussion periods had not arrived. The first Chautauqua forum was tried 
out in the east in 1919; it never became a regular feature in the midwest. 

When I first started out with my own circuit, the lecturers numbered 
between fifty and sixty percent of our talent, in comparison with entertain- 
ers and musicians, a ratio reversed by the end of the decade. Some chron- 
iclers of the story make the charge that too many of these lecturers 
were "reactionary" or afraid of offending the "moneyed interests that signed 
the guarantee." One objector, who tried unsuccessfully to get a job on my 
circuit, claims baldly that "liberal speakers were not wanted." Apparently 
he had not seen the cartoon in the Indianapolis News in the fall of 1908 
labeled "A New Figure in the Political Arena." The "new figure" was a 
husky Chautauqua gladiator holding a shield called "Facts" and a sword 
of "Political Independence." Fleeing in terror were the "Standpatters," 
"Machine Politicians," "Yellow Dogs." 

In denying the reactionary charge, one must immediately face the fact 
that the words "liberal" and "reactionary" never have meant, and probably 
never will mean, precisely the same thing on Manhattan Island as they do 
in Manhattan, Kansas. Nor is the political climate the same in 1956 as 
it was in 1904, or in 1912 or 1920. The proponent of lowered trade bar- 
riers, for example, is not considered quite the dangerous fellow today that 
large segments of the population once believed him to be. But at least 
Charley Stover and his companions sitting in the Hoosier tent were not 
afraid of listening to anyone's ideas. There was no shush-shush of public 
issues those years in America, no undemocratic fear of speaking out. The 
ten million people who crowded into the tents during Chautauqua's hey-day 
wanted, and got, the pro and con of a problem. 

In Congress and in many state legislatures, lecture managers had at their 
disposal a steadier flow of real oratory than is available now, and undoubt- 
edly the public listened more eagerly to it than it would today. For one 
thing, the speaker did not have to compete with soap operas and no fifteen- 
minute radio periods cramped his flow of words. There were gifted orators 
by the dozens and Chautauqua grabbed them, and the orators grabbed 
Chautauqua, to air all colors of opinion. They praised and condemned social- 
ism, Hie protective tariff, Wall Street, rural cooperatives, votes for women, 



118 Culture Under Canvas 

the Yellow Menace, free verse. Political extremes reached from the bitter- 
ness of Jacob Riis in the days of my first expedition into South Dakota, 
down to the "normalcy" of Warren Gamaliel Harding. 

Between these limits we offered every political and social hue. Even 
cigar-smoking Republican czar Uncle Joe Cannon had his day, beginning 
with the old independent assemblies. So did "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman of 
South Carolina, who earned his nom-de-barnyard by threatening, "I'll stick 
mah pitchfork into his fat oF ribs," meaning the ribs of President Grover 
Cleveland. 

People chuckled whenever they saw Tillman's name on a program be- 
cause that generation never forgot the Tillman "cow" cartoon. It was 
drawn by Tom Fleming for Bryan's 1896 campaign, and used again in 
1908 when Bryan ran on the anti-trust issue; but Tillman was responsible 
for the idea illustrated by the cartoon- In the drawing an elongated cow 
stood astraddle the Mississippi River, eating corn, with her front legs 
in St. Louis and her hind legs in New York, where a gentleman in a high 
hat, labeUed "Wall Street," milked her. In other words, New York milked 
the cow while the west and south fed her. 

Cannon, the hayseed personality from Illinois whose racy tongue wor- 
ried every manager, kept at Chautauqua until one day in Kansas he collapsed 
on a platform just a few weeks, as it happened, after another Redpath 
orator, quiet George W. Norris, of Nebraska, had stripped him of power 
as dictator of the House of Representatives. Norris, respected everywhere, 
lectured every summer, chiefly on the Horner circuit, while he fought 
"Cannonism." 

Often in the same week's program in the same town, there were lec- 
turers as dissimilar in both looks and ideas as silver-tongued Albert J. 
Beveridge of Indiana and Muckraker Lincoln Steffens, a shabbily dressed 
little man with heavy spectacles, rumpled hair and a small beard; or the 
blind Oklahoma liberal, Thomas P. Gore, on the heels of standpat Simeon 
D. Fess, of Ohio; or Democratic Bos Champ (for Beauchamp) Clark fol- 
lowing Labor Leader Samuel Gompers, whose lecture, Toilers Organized, 
What Are Their Aims, was so long and heavy that sometimes even his 
best friends went to sleep in the middle of it; or hidebound Prohibitionists 
like J. Frank Hanly of Indiana at the other end of the pole from Progressive 
Robert Marion LaFollette of Wisconsin. These, and many others as diverse 
in viewpoint, all had had a fair hearing on some Chautauqua platform, or 
were still having it, when Redpath-Chicago tackled its first circuit in 
Tennessee. 

My own experience with "Fighting Bob" LaFollette dated back to my 
booking-agent days when he was governor of Wisconsin. Later I managed 
his lectures for perhaps a dozen years. Short, handsome, with blue-gray 
eyes and six inches of hair sticking up on top of his head, he was a scholar- 
politician who believed every word he uttered, and couldn't be influenced 



"Let's Face the Issue . . ." 



Political Headliner* at the Chautauquas 




120 Culture Under Canvas 

with money, fame, security or social advantage. The first time I heard him, 
he did not mention politics. He talked about Hamlet. He delivered a 
learned lecture on the Melancholy Dane. In his superb voice he read the 
most quoted passages from that most quotable play, and then for his mid- 
west audience he interpreted the lines, translating them into modern Eng- 
lish and relating them to the times in which we lived. 

Later, after LaFollette became a storm center in the United States 
Senate, his Chautauqua talks took a new turn. Into the crowded tents on 
August afternoons he carried the reformer's flaming zeal. No poetry, no 
dramatic climaxes lightened his political lectures. He just gave facts. After 
an hour he took off his coat. Another hour and off came his necktie. His 
target then was "Special Privilege," his theme the unfair advantage that 
politicians, dancing to the tune of Standard Oil, the railroads, Wall Street 
or the beef trust, were taking of the poor. With fighting eye, fighting chin, 
fighting voice he got down to brass tacks in the matter of high tariffs. 

LaFollette had one weakness as a speaker. He talked too long. Aware of 
this, his wife supplied him one summer with a Swiss wrist watch with an 
alarm and occasionally even sent one of their two sons, Robert Jr. or Philip, 
out on the road with their father, to stand in the wings and wave him 
into silence. We discovered that if we billed LaFollette for afternoons, the 
audience, absorbed though it was, might get so tired that it failed to come 
back at nigjht. If we put him on at night, people might stay home to rest 
the next day. So we settled it finally by presenting him, when possible, on 
Saturday evenings. One Redpath superintendent, when asked what "Fight- 
ing Bob" talked about, said, "About four hours. The first two hours the 
farmers wanted to rush to Washington and shoot Speaker Joe Cannon. 
After that they were for Cannon and wanted to shoot LaFollette.'* 

Senator LaFollette was one of that able group of men and women tour- 
ing under the Chautauqua banner who brought to the American people the 
realization that the United States was their government and that they 
should take a hand in running it. Of course, we were not being guided 
whofly by altruism in booking members of this group; it was also good 
show business. 

If one goes back over the list of speakers and the record of gate receipts, 
one striking fact emerges. In what today is considered the conservative 
rural stronghold of the midwest, liberal speakers, the ones who attacked 
the status quo, who did verbal battle with the "interests," got larger fees 
and packed more customers into the tents, than did the more conservative 
thinkers. The "outs," of whatever party, then as now, could be counted on 
to be more dramatic than the "ins." They gave a better show pointing out 
errors than officeholders possibly could give in defending their records. 
Also, a man out of a job would suddenly remember that there was such 
a thing as a lecture platform. When the Republicans were in power in 
Washington, through the first years of tent Chautauqua, our speakers were 



"Lefs Face the Issue . . ." 121 

Democratic three to one. After 1912 when the Democrats were in, more 
Republicans took to the platform. 

Speaker Champ Clark's repeated appearances in midwest Chautauqua 
certainly contributed to his sweeping victory over Woodrow Wilson in the 
Illinois preferential primary in 1912, the first ever held in that state. Clark, 
who began lecturing for the Redpath bureau in the late 1890*s, was neither 
reformer nor crusader, but simply a canny, ambitious officeholder, who 
signed up summer after summer with the frank Admission, "I need your 
stage. It gets me votes." 

In the fall of 1910 I went to see Clark at his home in Bowling Green, 
Missouri, to write the contract for his next lecture tour. For two or three 
days I travelled with him as he tramped through his district mending fences, 
speaking by kerosene lamps to a dozen voters here, a half dozen there. 
Redpath was paying congressmen $300 a week in that period, senators 
$500. He was a congressman, so I offered him $300. He refused. 

"I'm going to be Speaker of the House," he said. "I want $500." 

He was right; he became Speaker the following April, with the first Demo- 
cratic majority since 1893. We settled for the $500. But when summer 
came Congress stayed in special session. Clark could make only ten of his 
scheduled sixty dates and it cost the circuit $7000. 

"There's one great virtue in Chautauqua money," Clark told us once. 
tk You don't need to explain where you got it And Chautauqua never tells 
you what to say." 

Even on the platform Clark was always frank about his ambition to be 
President. One hot summer night in Georgia I heard him begin his speech: 
kt My title this evening, ladies and gentlemen, is 'Picturesque Public Men' 
... in the Congress of the United States, where I propose to stay until 
I am dead, defeated or promoted." Within a few days after Woodrow Wil- 
son defeated him for lie Presidential nomination at the Baltimore con- 
vention, Clark was out on the road, filling his dates in Kentucky and Indiana 
on my 1912 circuit. He was a very disappointed man and for the first time 
his famous wit carried a sting of bitterness. Of course he blamed his defeat 
on Bryan. Nebraska had "instructed" for Clark, and Bryan had withdrawn 
that support in the belief that Clark had become indebted to the "interests." 

Clark never forgave Bryan and it became important, in succeeding years, 
that we route the two men as far apart as we could. Bryan always regretted 
the rift, always tried to patch things up with dark. Eight or ten years later, 
when friends were honoring Clark with a birthday party in Bowling Green, 
Bryan, who had a Chautauqua date elsewhere, was so determined to go 
that he "bought off the committee" and went to Bowling Green to the 
party. He was repaying a courtesy. In 1910, dark, then his most loyal 
friend, had made one of the most complimentary speeches at Bryan's fiftieth 
birthday celebration. 

Normally easy-going, dark, like Bryan, got along famously with the rest 



122 Culture Under Canvas 

of the talent. "A meetable man," they called him. He made himself one of 
them, but when a group walked down the street in some Chautauqua town, 
it was Clark at whom the people stared. His big, tall, erect figure, solid 
nose, long mouth, thin shining white hair, his gates-ajar collar, his coat 
with its satin-lined lapels didn't belong to any Mr. Nobody. To be sure, 
he was not always temperate. Try hard as he might, no manager could 
hide under a basket the story that the famous Speaker of the House alighted 
one morning from a train in Pennsylvania, carrying his shoes, unable to 
appear on the platform that day. But in a wave of honest contrition he 
sent Redpath headquarters what he thought its commission would have 
been if he had kept his engagement. 

One of Clark's lectures, particularly popular with Bible-loving Chau- 
tauqua audiences, was called Richer than Golconda, a collection of stories 
proving the effect of the Bible on law and custom. Another dealt with 
Daniel Webster, another with Aaron Burr. A long time later Clark's son, 
Bennett Champ dark, was also elected to the House and lectured for Red- 
path; political speakers were in the discard and the tents were down before 
the son became a senator. 

Blind Senator Gore of Oklahoma sandwiched his lecture appearances on 
our 1912 circuit in between his speeches for the Wilson campaign, which 
he opened officially in Illinois for the Princeton professor. "The blind man 
eloquent," Bryan always called Senator Gore. Except for one speech link- 
ing Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Gore's favorite platform topic always was 
"good government as against the grafter and his graft," so it was only 
to be expected that in tumultuous 1912 he would portray Woodrow Wilson 
as the hero of that doctrine. 

Another Redpath-Chicago lecturer who managed to get in work on the 
side for Candidate Wilson was Harvey Wiley, the "pure food" man, who 
was filling his initial dates for us that year and who bolted the Republican 
party in this campaign. We liked to allude in print to Woodrow Wilson 
himself as a "one-time member of the Redpath family," but it had been in 
Lyceum, not on the tent circuits. 

The most vociferous partisans, however, were on the Theodore Roose- 
velt bandwagon; not just the lecturers; even men from the entertainment 
lists sometimes cancelled good, money-paying dates so they could cam- 
paign for "T.R." Headliners like Governor Hiram Johnson of California 
who was Theodore Roosevelt's running mate, San Francisco's great graft 
prosecutor, Francis Heney, Judge Ben Lindsey of Colorado who had been 
a runner-up for the Vice-Presidential nomination, ex-Congressmen Victor 
Murdock and Adam Bede these and others on our 1912 summer list 
stumped hard for Teddy Roosevelt between dates, and if any loophole ap- 
peared they stumped on the dates, too. Chautauqua paid for their bread 
and butter and clean shirts and they worked for the Progressive ticket for 
nothing. And all the tempestuous summer Bede continued to debate So- 



"Let's Face the Issue . . ." 123 

cialism with Emil Seidel, the Socialist party's Vice-Presidential candidate, 
while Seidel campaigned between acts for Eugene V. Debs. 

Governor Herbert S. Hadley of Missouri, with the Redpath bureau since 
the Redpath-SIayton days, and particularly popular with the farmers be- 
cause he had fought the lumber and harvester trusts, was one of our regular 
lecturers who did not bolt the Taft organization to join the Bull Moose 
organization. 

"The Progressive Party was born from a dozen Chautauqua speeches 
in Iowa and Kansas," Editor William Allen White once remarked. Cer- 
tainly there was not an idea in T.R.'s "New Nationalism" of 1912 (F.D.R. 
was not the first Roosevelt with a "New" slogan) nor in Wilson's "New 
Freedom," nor in Senator Bob LaFollette's "National Progressive" program 
which preceded both the other two that had not been stressed repeatedly 
in some Chautauqua tent. Among them were tariff revision, the initiative, 
referendum and recall, woman suffrage, prohibition of child labor, a cor- 
rupt practice act and dozens of other social ideas. 

The tent circuits were heavily indebted to the old independents for the 
part the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa and their neighbors 
played in supplying speakers in that period. This whole territory had given 
exceptionally strong support to the pioneer assemblies. Local enthusiasm 
for the Chautauqua movement had been such that, in the 1870's, an in- 
spired Kansas legislator, after visiting Bishop Vincent's New York grove, 
had succeeded in giving the name "Chautauqua" not only to a whole Kansas 
county, but also to the principal street in its county seat and to a nearby 
whistle-stop, an example which half a dozen other states followed at one 
time or another. The assemblies were powerful. It was only natural that 
officeholders learned early to use these platforms as sounding boards. 

Nebraska, in addition to Bryan and Norris, furnished our circuits with men 
like Republican Elmer Burkett and silver-haired Democrat Ashton Shallen- 
berger. Burkett talked steadily for fifteen summers against government own- 
ership of railroads. Shallenberger, the second Democratic governor in 
Nebraska's history, was a "T.R." type of orator, with a reputation among 
the talent for "getting the tent" with his first amusing story. The fanners 
liked him because he backed the first rural credits bill that gave the farmer 
a chance to get money on the same basis as a businessman. 

Kansas ex-Congressman Victor Murdock, whom we advertised as "the 
original insurgent," was a Roosevelt follower who kept slapping savagely 
at reactionaries in all parties, long after he left office. In 1912, in a Ken- 
tucky town, he made newspaper headlines by telling an audience that if 
Congress really desired to do something popular, "it should suspend pub- 
lication of the Congressional Record, take the money so saved and print 
daily for general distribution the record of the beef barons' trial in Chicago." 

Murdock, a newspaper man by profession and a positive fellow who 
parted his hair straight down the middle, measured the content of every 



124 Culture Under Canvas 

speech by a yardstick of timely news value. He was convinced, and the 
fees we paid him over a decade bore him out, that the "dominant char- 
acteristic of the public in this period is its desire for current news on public 
questions," 

Another speaker from Kansas, not as fiery as Murdock but just as earnest, 
was self-made Joseph L. Bristow, the officeholder who later appointed 
Dwight D. Eisenhower to West Point. Bristow was already in the Senate 
when he joined Redpath. A talking point in our brochure was that, as a 
young lawyer, he once had to choose between buying an overcoat or a new 
Webster's dictionary and he chose the dictionary. Undoubtedly a more im- 
portant reason why we hired him was the fact that he had come to public 
attention by fighting Mark Hanna. 

The name of Hanna, the Ohio Republican "czar" who coined the word 
"standpat" for his party and elected William McKinley President over 
Bryan by "frying the fat" meaning that he pulled campaign money out of 
Big Business was a household word, hated or respected. The Hearst press 
had contributed to this by almost daily merciless cartoons catering to the 
habitual irreverence of Americans for public personages. 

In the New York Journal, Homer C Davenport had blithely caricatured 
Hanna as a comic fat figure in clothes adorned with dollar signs, reclining 
with his feet on a pile of money bags, the skull of Labor on the ground 
beside him. Frederick Opper, in the same newspaper, had shown the 
Trusts skinning both the Fanner and the Laborer, with Hanna and Mc- 
Kinley happily standing by. Hanna, in the public mind, was Wall Street and 
Big Business and Trusts. You were for him or against him. Bristow, Re- 
publican though he was, had tangled with him. As McKinley's assistant 
postmaster-general, the Kansan had been sent to Cuba to clean up its 
postal service and in so doing had dared get into a public argument with 
Hanna and the sugar interests. On the Chautauqua platform Bristow dis- 
cussed Cuba, the oriental question, taxation, the American navy, army and 
American youth, all under the covering umbrella, Responsibilities of the 
American Citizen. 

Bristow's fellow Kansan, Edward Wallis Hoch, began filling dates for 
Redpath while he was governor. He, too, had fought Standard Oil and the 
railroads, bringing Kansas a two-cent fare for one thing, and he, too, talked 
about the fight in fiery words that packed the Chautauqua tents. 

In Minnesota and Iowa as well as in Kansas, so far as the overflowing 
crowds went, "Hoch Day" sometimes looked like "Bryan Day." Hoch had 
helped dry up Kansas. When his daughter Anna swung a bottle made by 
Tiffany to christen the battleship Kansas, instead of champagne the bottle 
held spring water from the Sunflower State. Platform superintendents found 
Hoch fussy about one thing: he wanted the lights in the tent so arranged 
that a speaker, in his words, "could pierce the audience with his eyes." 



"Let's Face the Issue . . ." 125 

From Missouri came Joseph Folk, the reform governor whom a St. Louis 
boss described as "acting as if he'd written the Ten Commandments." The 
Democratic machine had first elected Folk, thinking him "safe," soon found 
him looking too closely at public utility franchises. Men went to jail, the 
St. Louis race-track syndicate went out of business, and saloons closed on 
Sunday. The people responded. So in the next election, when Teddy Roose- 
velt carried Missouri heavily for the Presidency, Folk, a Democrat, out- 
stripped him by a big margin for governor. He then gave Missouri its first 
taste of reform laws against lobbying and child labor, for compulsory 
education, statewide primary, initiative and referendum. 

On our 1912 and 1913 circuits Folk gave the details of his battle in a 
lecture billed as A Fight for a State. In that second summer he made the 
speech one hundred and ten times, from Florida all the way to Michigan. 
"If the government anywhere neglects the people," he thundered, "it's be- 
cause the people neglect the government. If corruption exists anywhere, the 
people are to blame." Publicity for Folk never was difficult. Governors 
of the states he visited invariably gave big receptions for him. 

Iowa first supplied us with the oratorical talents of that white-haired, 
white-mustached Republican governor and senator, Albert B. Cummins, 
and his fellow senator, Jonathan P. Dolliver. The fanners in our audiences 
never forgot that, singlehanded and green as grass, Cummins as a young 
man had "licked the barbed wire trust," and in overalls and Sunday suits 
they flocked to hear him and then went home and voted for him for twenty 
years. Cummins never could speak without taking a jab at the railroads. 
No railroad official ever sat on a Chautauqua committee bringing Cum- 
mins, the railroad buster, into town. His speeches on tariff revision even- 
tually became known nationally as "the Iowa idea"; in 1909 the two Iowa 
senators, Cummins and Dolliver, had been among the ten lonely Re- 
publicans who voted against the protective Payne-Aldrich tariff. 

Dolliver, re-elected senator five times, was even more of an orator than 
Cummins, sometimes too much so for an audience that could take just so 
many grandiloquent phrases and no more. "He's too eloquent," superin- 
tendents reported, to the home office. "He makes the people get tired." 
This may have been true, but at least he had a better sense of public rela- 
tions than many of our speakers* One summer while I was still working for 
Vawter, we booked Dolliver at Miami Chautauqua, a permanent assembly 
near Franklin, Ohio, with a tabernacle seating 5000 persons. The previous 
Sunday Walter Chandler of the New York Bar Association had delivered 
a lecture on the trial of Christ from a lawyer's viewpoint. The day was hot. 
A baby started to cry. Chandler became irritated and said, "Any mother 
with any sense would remove that baby/* 

He failed to say it with a laugfr, the way good-humored J. Adam Bede 
of Minnesota did once on the stage. Congressman Bede, when a baby's 



126 Culture Under Canvas 

crying became too persistent, said pleasantly, "What that baby needs is 
board, not room,*' and everybody laughed, including the mother, and with 
so much good nature in the air, even the baby stopped crying. 

At Miami Chautauqua, however, after Lawyer Chandler's sharp remark, 
the embarrassed mother left, and with her went many of the sympathetic 
audience. The next Sunday Senator Dolliver arrived to speak before a 
crowd of about the same size. He was just under way when another baby 
cried. The audience stiffened and this mother, having heard of the inci- 
dent the previous Sunday, got up quickly. But Senator Dolliver had heard 
the story, too, and now was ready to make Chautauqua amends. 

"Madame," he said, "please return to your seat. I'd give a good deal 
of money to hear one of my babies cry this minute." 

Dolliver was a great supporter of Gifford Pinchot. Before he became 
governor of Pennsylvania, Pinchot headed the United States Forest Service 
when he publicly accused Richard A. Ballinger, who was Secretary of the 
Interior for Taft, of turning over one hundred thousand acres of rich 
Alaskan forest and coal land to the Guggenheim interests of New York. 
Wall Street attorneys helped prepare Ballinger's defense while a liberal 
Boston lawyer named Louis Brandeis handled Pinchot's interests. 

Siding with Wall Street and Ballinger, Taft fired Pinchot, then went off 
on vacation to play golf. Theodore Roosevelt quickly came to Pinchof s 
defense. A dozen western senators, headed by LaFollette, Borah and In- 
diana's Beveridge, took up the Pinchot cause. Ballinger at length resigned, 
but it was too late. The Bull Moose party was in the making; old standpat 
Republicanism was on the wane. 

Dolliver carried his fight to Chautauqua tents, as did other senators and 
dedicated conservationists. Pinchot at last was vindicated and conserva- 
tion of public lands and public power for forty years remained a govern- 
ment policy. The movement was a noble monument to the Iowa senator 
and Chautauqua speaker whom Senator Beveridge called, "Beyond any 
doubt the greatest orator of the contemporaneous English-speaking world." 

Dolliver was succeeded in the Senate by Iowa's Walter S. Kenyon, who 
also took to the summer platform to discuss his bill forbidding the ship- 
ment of liquor into dry states* 

Many other conspicuous political figures appeared on our lecture lists 
before the First World War. There was big, handsome, fluent Frank Willis, 
college professor, governor and senator from Ohio, who a few years later 
was to make the Presidential nominating speech for Warren Harding. 
There was controversial Caleb Powers of Kentucky, who had come out of 
prison with a pardon in 1908. A Republican, Powers had been convicted 
some years before "railroaded," his friends charged of complicity in 
the murder of Democratic Governor William Goebel. In prison Powers 
wrote My Own Story, discussed it in his lecture, re-established his career 



"Let's Face the Issue . . ." 127 

and served four terms in the House at Washington, meanwhile lecturing 
every summer. 

Intermittently from McKinley through Harding, Assistant Attorney Gen- 
eral James M. Beck, later Solicitor General, talked for the independents and 
in the tents on The Constitution. It was a serious speech. So was the one 
delivered by Senator Robert Owen, who lectured on currency a half dozen 
years before his name took on Owen-Glass Bill fame. Audiences remem- 
bered Owen's sharp black eyes longer than they did his complicated points 
about the Federal Reserve system which he helped to establish. 

In quite another and more humorous class were the lively Hoosiers, 
Charles and Fred Landis, brothers of Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain 
Landis, first commissioner for professional baseball. Charles and Fred both 
had served in the House of Representatives and they lectured on their ex- 
periences there, both satisfied just to "make *em laugh," instead of going 
in heavily for political education. Fred, who originally was a newspaper- 
man, wrote the short story that was the basis for The Copperhead, a movie 
and a play in which Lionel Barrymore had the leading role. 

Charles Landis toured the cornlands once in a joint debate with Champ 
Clark. They were in Clinton, Illinois, guests of a fellow congressman, and 
in the evening in the public argument Clark made a blistering remark that 
offended a Republican in the audience and the man began to heckle. After 
a few minutes, Clark, pointing his finger at the heckler, burst out in a 
fury, "Say, you, when we get through here, you-all come out behind the 
tent and I'll cut yo' damn throat from y'ear to y'ear. I mean you feller with 
the gold teeth." The "feller with the gold teeth" happened to be the post- 
master, appointed by Clark's host. 

Landis, in his speech, often told a story dating back to the Spanish- 
American War when a committee of Indiana congressmen went to the 
White House to urge President McKinley to appoint General Lew Wallace, 
author of Ben Hur, to command a division on active duty. President Mc- 
Kinley listened to their arguments, probably having heard similar ones 
that day from rival committees, then turned politely to Congressman Landis' 
nine-year-old son who was with his father, and asked, "Well, sir, have 
you any suggestions to offer regarding the appointment of General Wal- 
lace?" 

The boy answered, "Well, Mr. President, if it were me Td send General 
Wallace to Cuba as a spy." 

General Wallace himself never appeared on any tent circuit, but cut- 
tings from Ben Hwr by various readers were as popular stand-bys as selec- 
tions from Hamlet and Macbeth. 

Chautauqua took profitable advantage of the great Cook-Peary con- 
troversy. It gave both sides, even though its managers publicly supported 
Cook. Tougji old Commodore Robert E. Peary, after several decades of 



128 Culture Under Canvas 

polar exploration, came out of the Arctic in 1909 to announce that on 
April 6, with a servant, four Eskimos and forty dogs, he had reached the 
North Pole. To his violent annoyance he found that a soft-spoken medical 
man named Frederick A. Cook had just landed in Denmark from Green- 
land with a claim that he, Cook, had found the Pole on April 21 the 
year before. Peary roared "liar." Cook answered more calmly but insistently. 
He had accompanied an expedition northward in 1907, had left his party, 
he said, and gone forward with Eskimos. 

While scientists studied the data, lecture managers put the two explorers 
on the platform, each to tell his own story. Not on the same platform to be 
sure. Chautauqua audiences liked controversy, not mayhem. Cook already 
was a favorite. He had been a summer lecturer as early as 1904; in 1906 
he had acquired fame by a claim that he had ascended Mount McKinley in 
Alaska, highest mountain in North America. 

The affair raged for several years, with the public taking sides. But while 
monuments were being erected to Peary, Cook got involved in a Texas oil- 
field promotion and served time in prison. To the end of his life, however, he 
fought for recognition as conqueror of both the mountain and the North 
Pole, Copenhagen had welcomed him rapturously, but after a study of his 
documents, a committee from the University of Copenhagen declared that 
they contained no proofs. The scientific world found for Peary; now a 
segment leans toward Cook. Who was right? Discussion of the affair still 
would make lively listening. 

In this, as in other controversies, managers aimed for a free platform. If 
in any field the approach to a problem was one-sided, it was national 
prohibition. Chautauqua speakers were definitely in the forefront of the 
fight for the Eighteenth Amendment. Chautauqua, as pointed out earlier, 
was born, lived and died in dry territory. The country and small towns where 
it found its audiences were the strongholds of the bone-dry sentiment. Many 
of the lecturers and practically all the bureau managers sprang from that 
territory. It is on record that in 1918 the International Lyceum and Chau- 
tauqua Association, representing both managers and talent, passed a reso- 
lution supporting prohibition. 

Before the tents folded, managers on one circuit booked Alfred E. Smith 
for a few engagements. But the four-times governor of New York, who in 
1928 in his unsuccessful race for the Presidency demanded repeal of the 
Eighteenth Amendment, though the Democratic platform supported its en- 
forcement, was not the "Chautauqua type/* It is doubtful whether even 
curiosity about this slangy, cigar-smoking man in a tilted brown derby could 
have lured crowds into the tent in certain sections of the west 

Al Smith represented everything that the majority of Chautauqua audi- 
ences abhorred and feared. He drank liquor, he was born in a New York 
slum and his voice, like a dull buzz saw with an East Side twang, was 



"Let's Face the Issue . . ." 129 

enough to damn him in Kansas and Tennessee. What he said in that voice, 
"for the record," was even worse. He fiercely attacked the W.C.T.U., funda- 
mentalism, the Volstead Act, even William Jennings Bryan. No, the flashy 
New York governor, in spite of what he accomplished in his state for social 
welfare, was no man to pull folks into a Chautauqua tent. And except for one 
semirelated incident, to be discussed later, I can think of no other "wet" 
speakers hired before or during the Volstead era. 

Stephen Leacock, the Canadian humorist and essayist, was not a "wet" 
speaker really, in spite of a report round-and-about that he criticized the 
Volstead Act on the platform and that his Chautauqua manager objected. 
Among clergymen we did book several who espoused temperance, as op- 
posed to prohibition; one of these was the Right Reverend John Ireland, 
archbishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of St. Paul. 

The confusion, particularly in the middle west in the first two decades of 
this century, as to the difference between "temperance" and "prohibition," 
needed to be cleared up if possible. Many people mistakenly used the words 
as meaning the same thing; so Bishop Ireland's loud denunciations of the 
liquor interests and saloons, but at the same time his disdain for prohibition 
and his advocacy of temperance, were difficult for some country audiences 
to understand. 

Bryan and Evangelist Billy Sunday, of course, lead the "drys." Dozens 
of lesser men, not clergymen or evangelists by profession, echoed them 
perhaps less eloquently, but no less emphatically. J. Frank Hanly, a pious 
but not too distinguished governor of Indiana, elected as a Republican, cru- 
saded on all circuits for two decades talking prohibition chiefly, until finally 
in 1916 he was nominated for President on the Prohibition ticket. John G. 
Wooley, a Prohibition-party candidate back in 1900, lectured whenever he 
could get a hearing up until the First World War. It was for one of Wooley's 
circulars that an inspired Redpath copy writer wrote, intemperately one 
must concede, "What Gladstone was to English liberty, what Bismark was 
to German Imperialism, what Phillips was to the cause of human freedom, 
John G. Wooley is to the doctrine of American citizenship." 

Some years later, around 1920 probably, Mayor David Stewart Rose of 
Milwaukee approached the Redpath office in Chicago with the complaint, 
"You claim to represent all points of view but you never give the side of the 
liquor interests. The schools are supported by taxes from liquor. I will debate 
anyone on the wet-dry issue and the brewers will pay my expenses." 

Redpath agreed and offered as adversaries Captain Richmond Pearson 
Hobson of Alabama, Governor Hanly and Canadian-born Samuel Dickie, 
at that time president of Albion College, Michigan. Mayor Rose accepted 
all three, Captain Hobson to be the first. 

The series was announced, first for winter Lyceum courses, to be followed 
in summer Qiautauqua^ with Mayor Rose's services advertised as <fc the com- 



130 Culture Under Canvas 

pliments of the brewers' association." The program sold like hot cakes. 
Three debates between Hobson and Rose took place during the winter. 
Then the brewers, discouraged both by the public's reaction and the de- 
cisions, abandoned the project and paid the local committees for what 
losses they might suffer as a result. 

It was serious-minded Captain Hobson, representing Alabama in Con- 
gress, who first introduced a Prohibition amendment to the Constitution. 
Handsome, young, intrepid, Hobson in the Spanish-American War almost 
succeeded in bottling up Spanish Admiral Cervera's fleet in Santiago Harbor. 
With a crew of seven picked men, Hobson, then a "construction lieutenant," 
had eased the collier Merrimac into the narrow harbor entrance when fire 
from Spanish batteries disabled his steering gear and the collier sank at a 
point that did not completely block the harbor mouth. Hobson and his crew 
were captured by the Spaniards; a few days later they were exchanged. The 
young officer returned home, a hero overnight, to become the center of one 
of those hysterical phenomena that occasionally sweep the country. 

One night in 1912, after a lecture in Chicago's Auditorium Hotel, while 
a crowd waited to shake his famous hand, a young woman came up and he 
kissed her. According to Redpath lecturer Wallace Bruce Amsbary who was 
standing nearby, the girl was Hobson's cousin. But an inventive reporter 
expanded the episode. In the headlines next day it was not one woman who 
kissed handsome Captain Hobson, it was several. Other newspapers copied 
the story. That was enough. Weak-minded females began kissing the hero 
whenever and wherever they could corner him. 

Hobson, who more than anything in the world wanted to be judged seri- 
ously, did not take it like an officer and a gentleman. For a time he even 
refused speaking dates. Then his interest in "problems" got the better of him 
and he went on the road for Redpath with a lecture on The Yellow Peril. 
His next lecture advocated American Naval Supremacy, and he followed 
that with his plea for world-wide prohibition. Later he travelled with two 
other speeches, one urging American leadership in the international peace 
movement, the other discussing the link between narcotics and the white 
slave traffic. Entertainers travelling with Hobson found him a superstitious 
man. Even his best friends admitted that he would only get into a race for 
Congress "when the moon was right," and the story never dies down that 
once, commanding a ship, he made a detail of sailors drop all other duties 
until they found a lost black cat 

As controversial as Hobson, but for entirely different reasons, was the 
Roosevelt Progressive, Judge Ben Lindsey, famous founder of the juvenile 
court, for more than a quarter century its judge in Denver, and more than 
forty years a Redpath lecturer. George Creel in Rebel at Large says, "All 
of the reformers of that early day . . . Folk of Missouri, Tom Johnson and 
Brand Whitlock of Ohio, Francis Heney of California, LaFollette of Wis- 
consin . . . were made to run a gauntlet of abuse and defamation, but no 



Bishop John H. Vincent, 

founder of the Chautauqua 

movement. 





James Redpath, who creat 
the Boston Lyceum Bureau 
better known as the 
Redpath Bureau. 




President Woodrow Wilson 
and William Jennings Bryan 
walking to a Cabinet meeting. 



William Jennings Bryan arrives at a Chautauqua lecture stopover. 
In the summer of 1912, Bryan filled 34 Redpath Chautauqua dates. 





Edgar Bergen in his Chautauqua days, with 

Charlie McCarthy and the later discarded Laura. 



The White Hussars, famous singing band on 
the Chautauqua circuit. 





Typical audience outside the tent. 



Season-ticket holders at Marengo, Illinois. 





A tent Chautauqua audience. 



A tent on the circuit. 





A Chautauqm boosters parade at Tipton, Indiana. 



Ladies Harp Ensemble. 





Dunbars Handbell Ringers. 



Daddy Groebeckers Swiss Modelers. 





Keith Vawter, initiator 
of Tent Chautauqua. 



Opie Read as he appeared 
on Chautauqua. 





Standing: 1. Prof. J. T. Marshmam of Penn. State College; 

2. Wendell MacMahill, advance agent of the Redpath Circuit; 

3. Percy Hunt, husband of Katharine Ridgeway; 4. Cratoford A. Pefer. 

Seated: right, Katharine Ridgeway; center, Judge Ben E. Lindsey; 

left, Mrs. Crawford A. Peffer. 




Princess Watahwaso. 




Phil Clark and his Marching Men of Song. 



The DeLuxe Artist Singers in "Musical Memories! 3 





Ben Greet, whose famous players toured the Chautauqua circuit 




Madame Ernestine Schumann-Hemk, noted Metropolitan Opera 
contralto who was also a Chautauqw trouper. 




Alice Neilsen, opera star, on the steps of the private 
car that took her over a Chautauqua circuit. 



Jessie Ray Taylor, 
noted impersonator 





Julia Claussen, of the Chicago Opera Company, u 
Harry P. Harrison, manager of the Redpath Chautauq 



"Let's Face the Issue ..." 131 

one was ever called on to undergo greater persecution than Ben Lindsey." 

A great humanitarian, with ideas of social justice far ahead of his time, 
Lindsey stirred up the wrath not only of the ordinary politician, but even 
of the ordinary old-fashioned policeman, with a speech dealing with the 
misfortunes of a mythical boy named Mickey. His program for juvenile 
probation and for an "honor system" were called "pampering" in the un- 
enlightened days before penology was recognized as a science. Local editors 
often threw verbal brickbats at Judge Lindsey before his appearance in a 
Chautauqua town; this naturally boosted the ticket sale. So did publication 
of his book, The Beast and the Jungle, in which he exposed Denver's po- 
litical corruption. 

Later more bjickbats were to be hurled. The judge always had been 
interested in the problems of marriage and had been one of the first to 
ascribe juvenile delinquency to an unhappy home life due to ill-matched 
parents. So, striking at what he considered the root of youthful misbehavior, 
he suggested a system of trial marriage which drew immediate loud protests 
from both Catholic and Protestant clergy. 

Persisting, Judge Lindsey wrote a book on the subject in 1927. The Com- 
panionate Marriage, it was called, and the Hearst press had a field day. He 
created another flurry of headlines when he arose in the Cathedral of St. 
John the Divine in New York and replied to Bishop Charles Francis Potter, 
who was officiating, for the latter's attack on him. 

Asked once after a lecture in Youngstown, Ohio, how he could stay an 
optimist when he dealt all the time with bad boys, Judge Lindsey replied, 
"Bad boys? Not at all. No more than you or I were. The ones I deal with 
just got caught." 

Aside from the "wet" point of view as against the "dry," only two other 
subjects that I know of were barred by common consent among Chau- 
tauqua managers. No lecturer dared to advocate violent overthrow of the 
government nor attack the Christian religion. Looking back on it now, the 
persistent and exceedingly popular campaign by ex-Senator Frank J. Can- 
non of Utah against the Mormon church, through half the life of the tent 
circuits, may have come close to sidestepping that second taboo, but 
managers did not recognize it at that time, perhaps because of the raging 
polygamy issue. 

There was talk, too, that Granville Jones, an Arkansas judge who took 
to the tents in the 1920's with a speech called Philosophy of a Hill-billy, 
had an odor of the Ku Klux Elan about him, and that in some towns, 
acting as punch man for the new contract, he relied on Catholic-Protestant 
rivalries. I have also heard the charge that in the movement's last years 
a "free platform" was denied a pro-evolution speaker; that a man named 
C. D. Zerbe asked to lecture and was refused because "there were no 
openings." The incident is a little cloudy. Chautauqua was tottering in 
1925, perhaps there were no openings. Bryan had died. So if intolerance 



132 Culture Under Canvas 

did actually play a part in not accepting Zerbe, it was not for fear of hurting 
Headliner Bryan's feelings. Actually, Bryan's own adversary on the sub- 
ject of fundamentalism, Attorney Clarence Darrow of Chicago, had lum- 
bered out across many Redpath platforms, his thumbs hooked in his 
famous suspenders, had pushed back his forelock and said what he pleased, 
sharply and fluently, on evolution or any other topic. No one censored him 
or Bryan. If Darrow, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, wanted to say, "The earth 
is a speck of mud ... I am aware that neither I nor anyone else has the 
slightest importance in time or space," no one tried to stop him. 

It is difficult to know how to classify the afore-mentioned Frank Can- 
non, Utah's first senator after it became a state. Was he politician, reformer, 
agitator, or just a man out to earn a good living? At least he was another 
ex-senator with a Message; in his case, also an ex-Mormon. His speech, 
lashing out at polygamy, which he made sound like a threat to every Ameri- 
can hearthside, was sensational. Whether the shocked crowds who flocked 
to the tents to hear him drank it in for that reason or because of his im- 
passioned delivery, it is hard to judge now. Cannon took pains to ex- 
plain that he did not advocate actual overthrow of the Mormon church. 
He was working, he said, "only against those phases of Mormonism that 
are crime and treason." The press, the sober as well as the sensational, gave 
him tremendous publicity, chiefly because of the Mormon elders from 
Salt Lake City who followed him in twos and threes into some towns, talk- 
ing on street corners, occasionally entering the tent and mounting the 
platform at the close of Camion's hour-and-a-half speech, asking to be 
heard. 

On Redpath-Chicago's first trek, Cannon covered more than fifty per- 
cent of our towns a short, squat, indefatigable figure with white panama 
hat, white tie, white palm leaf fan, and a proper-for-those-times senatorial 
forest of curly gray hair. The next summer, when he appeared in New 
Wilmington, Pennsylvania, on the same day as Laurant the magician, a 
lightning bolt struck the tent during his speech a javelin from Jehovah 
his Mormon neighbors probably thought. Like Harvey Wiley, Cannon can- 
celled dates in 1912 to campaign for Woodrow Wilson. 

Early in the winter of 1912, six hours after Harvey Washington Wiley 
resigned as chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agri- 
culture in order to say what he pleased about adulterated foods the 
Chicago office of Redpath signed him for a tour. His first speech was called 
Public Health, Our Greatest National Asset, and it lasted seventy-five min- 
utes. He was sixty-eight years old then and for nearly thirty years he had 
been the government's chief chemist. He lectured all the rest of that winter 
for Redpath Lyceum, gave twenty-four days to my first tent circuit and 
sixty the next summer; that was the beginning of a long connection be- 
tween us. 

Back in 1 903 popular interest in Wiley had first been stirred by his "poison 



"Let's Face the Issue . . ." 133 

squad," volunteers that he organized in the Bureau of Chemistry to de- 
termine the effects of preservatives and coloring matter in food. The ex- 
periment led, eventually, to the enactment of the Federal pure food law 
and to better food inspection everywhere. 

Wiley's ideas on social reform are still in the public mind. There was 
nothing lukewarm about him. He pioneered ardently on our platforms 
against patent medicines, for additional pure food laws, free school lunches 
for the poor, milk for babies. 

"Give your child a tooth brush to chew on instead of a rattle," he told 
the mothers. His campaign in behalf of the health of school children never 
let up. "You give money for garbage removal," he thundered at embar- 
rassed taxpayers, "but does your city do anything to furnish pure milV 
for needy children?" 

In 1904 when I listened to James K. Vardaman deliver his one-sided 
speech in Iowa Falls, I had not yet had the privilege of hearing his fellow 
Mississippian, John Sharp Williams, but I was to listen to that honorable 
gentleman often, travel with him occasionally, before and during the Wil- 
son years. Senators Vardaman and Williams had only two things in com- 
mon. They came from the same state and both wore the label of Demo- 
crats. Williams, probably the most consistent Jeffersonian Democrat of his 
day, did not speak with Vardaman's grandiose oratory but with closer 
regard for the issues. When he walked out on a platform, pants bagging, 
black string tie dangling to one side, hair a little uncombed, and started 
off as he always did with a good story, the audience settled back for an 
enjoyable evening. 

Senator Williams was deaf in his right ear and he had a way of holding 
his hand as an ear trumpet to catch the crowd's reaction to what he had 
said. His stories were inexhaustible. A typical one concerned another of 
our speakers, John Allen of Louisiana, Allen, emphasizing that he had 
been "Private John Allen" in the army, was running for Congress against 
a man with the rank of colonel. 

"You get all the colonels to vote for you," he told his rival, "and Til still 
win. All I need is the privates." 

Williams went to Washington first as a congressman back in 1893. He 
supported Wilson passionately and the defeat of Wilson's post-war program 
grieved and angered him. He left the lecture platform about the same time 
that he left the government. 

"I'd rather be a hound dog and bay at the moon from my Mississippi 
plantation," he said in 1923, "than remain in the United States Senate." 
So he took his pipe and went back to his plantation and did no more speak- 
ing for anyone. He had been one of the highest-paid lecturers in the busi- 
ness. As early as 1907, when popular Congressman Bede, for instance, 
was getting $125 a night for debating with Socialist Seidel, lecture man- 
agers were competing for John Sharp Williams at $200. They paid Judge 



134 Culture Under Canvas 

Lindsey the same. By the time Williams retired, his rates had skyrocketed 
to $500 a night 

Probably the most colorful of the political orators of the south were 
the Taylors of Tennessee. Old u Fiddlin' Bob" (Robert Love) Taylor 
died in 1912, just a few weeks before Redpath-Chicago's opening in 
Pulaski. He was a Democrat, three times governor of his state, senior sen- 
ator when he died, and made his original spirited campaign in 1900 against 
his brother Alfred who headed the Republican ticket, and his father, 
Nathaniel Taylor, who was on the Prohibition ticket. 

Tobacco-chewing "Bob" was the favorite in the always-Democratic west 
and middle of Tennessee, "Alf ' in the always-Republican east, and the 
two brothers, both playing violins, made their speeches from platforms 
banked, one with white roses, one with red, Tennessee's version of the 
English War of the Roses. Farmers would drop work for two or three 
days, drive twenty miles over the hills, hitch their teams to the courtyard 
fence while they listened to Bob and Alf speechify. 

The Weatherwax Brothers Quartet travelled with Bob Taylor for many 
years to "pre-Iude" his lectures. He was a poet at heart, with a happy knack 
of dialect, a wealth of flowery words, a belief that a "hearty laugh is a 
hallelujah." A reporter on the old New York World, after hearing Taylor 
deliver his famous Fiddle and the Bow, called him "the Paganini among 
politicians and the Patrick Henry among fiddlers." Like Opie Read, Fid- 
dlin' Bob was a masterly storyteller and if their paths crossed on the road, 
they often sat up all night swapping yarns. Governor Taylor's memory for 
names was poor, in spite of his being a good politician, and for that rea- 
son his daughter often travelled with him. When someone came up to 
greet him after a lecture, he would ask her hurriedly, "Who is this coming?" 
and she might answer, "That is Jim Webster. The last time you met him he 
had a sick horse." 

"Jim, you old scoundrel," the governor would cry heartily, "how are 
you? Did that sick horse ever get well?" 

One winter before making summer schedules for Vawter, I was pressing 
Taylor to know how to bill him and on what date he could start. 

"Give me two more months to think," he said. "My old speech needs 
a new title." His titles were catchy, so that people could remember them. 
One he called Birds and Bees, another Life and Love. He fiddled, sang 
plantation songs, jumped from the broadest humor to the highest elo- 
quence, soothed his listeners with beautiful words "scattered like fireflies 
over a clover field," charmed them with his courtly manner. 

His eloquence and diction in Life and Love became a pattern for other 
aspiring orators. After his death entertainers on all circuits read passages 
from this speech again and again as part of their programs, but none could 
deliver it as Fiddlin' Bob had delivered it. It ran: 

"I saw the Morning with purple quiver and burnished bow, stand tip-toe 



"Let's Face the Issue . . ." 135 

on the horizon and shoot sunbeams at the vanishing darkness of night and 
then reach up and gather the stars and hide them in her bosom and then 
bend down and tickle the slumbering World with straws of light till it awoke 
with laughter and song. A thousand bugle-calls from the rosy fires of the 
East heralded her coming. A thousand smiling meadows kissed her gar- 
ments as she passed. Ten thousand gardens unfurled their flower-flags to 
greet her. The heart of the deep forest throbbed a tribute of bird-song 
and the bright waters rippled a melody of 'welcome.' Young life and love, 
love radiant, radiant with hope and sparkling with the dew-drops of 
exultant joy came hand in hand tripping and dancing in her shining train 
and I wished that the Heaven of the Morning might last, forever. 

"I saw the Evening hang her silver crescent in the sky and rival the 
splendor of the dawn with the glory of the twilight. I saw her drape the 
shadows around her, with a lullaby on her lips rock the weary World to 
rest. Then I saw her with her dipper full of dew-drops and her basket full 
of dreams slip back to the horizon of the morning and steal the stars again. 
The gardens furled their flower-flags and the meadows fell asleep. The 
songs of the deep forest melted into sighs and the melancholy waters whis- 
pered a pensive 'good night' to the drowsy birds and sleepy hollows. 

"Life and love with a halo of parting days upon their brows and the 
star-light tangled in their hair, walked arm in arm among the gathering 
shadows and wove all the sweet memories of the morning into their happy 
evening song and I wished the Heaven of the evening might never end. 

"So the mornings come, the evenings go, till raven locks turn white as 
snow. The mornings go, the evenings come, till hearts are still and lips 
are dumb. The morning steals the stars in vain, for evening steals them 
back again. Thus, life steals us from the dust; we wake to think and sleep 
to dream. We love and laugh and weep and sing and sigh; till death steals 
us back to dust again." 

This was oratory, in the year Redpath-Chicago rolled down the long 
summer road with its first caravan. 



Mother, Home and Heaven 



13 



To be sure, not all speakers fought dragons or windmills, socialism or civic 
apathy. Some were what managers called "mother, home and heaven" 
orators, the Chautauqua version of "God, home and mother." Speakers 
of this type rarely descended to the muddy level of crass partisanship. They 
left the earthy struggles of political forces to other men and from their 
cloudy eminences dispensed good cheer. 

In this best of all possible worlds, even if it rained and the tent leaked, 
these merchants of perpetual sunshine stressed the satisfactions to be at- 
tained from lives of rugged honesty, frugality, chastity, forbearance, neigb- 
borliness, and mutual helpfulness. They wove verbal tapestries that de- 
picted Pollyanna, Horatio Alger, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and the 
little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, all with beatific smiles and rain- 
bows 'round their shoulders. In other words they "inspired," and culture- 
hungry rural America devoured their cheerful words. Wheat growers in 
the Dakotas, western cattle men, corn and hog farmers in Iowa, dairymen 
in Wisconsin, cotton planters in Tennessee, one or all might disagree vio- 
lently with a political lecturer, or dispute business facts, but none was 
crass enough to object to "mother, home and heaven." None sold virtue 
and honesty short. 

The political orator of the Bull Moose days reached his peak before 
America entered the First World War; by the time the last brown tent 
dropped, his name had almost disappeared from our programs. The in- 
spirational lecturer and the educational speaker lasted longer. America 
was buying Gene Stratton Porter's books by the hundred thousands in 
1904. Ten years later this Hoosier author was still a best-seller, as were 
Novelists Harold Bell Wright, John Fox, Jr., and Zane Grey. Their phi- 

136 



Mother, Home and Heaven 137 

losophy of sweetness and light and their heroes, unsullied by a single evil 
thought, found their counterparts on the lecture platform. 

Russell Conwell, of course, was an inspirational lecturer. So was William 
Jennings Bryan with his Prince oj Peace, and like these two box-office 
giants, lesser men used the same labor-saving device one good lecture 
might suffice forever. If it had the right touch, the right emotional lift, if 
it started a tear down the face of the nice old lady in the third row, if a 
few brash young men stumbled out of the tent vowing to take a hand next 
day in making this a better world, its creator could stay in Chautauqua 
for years. Some of them did for life. For an hour, often two hours, hun- 
dreds of men and women listened, laughed, wiped their eyes, applauded. 
An advertisement for this type of speaker might read, truthfully or not, 
"He makes you laugh, he laughs with you, when he stops you are thinking 
hard." 

"Wasn't it wonderful?" women murmured to each other the day after 
the speech. "So inspiring!" Possibly by the third day they had forgotten 
most of what they had heard, but next season, if chance offered, they hur- 
ried again to the gate, with cousins, uncles and aunts, to hear the same 
man give the same speech. It was Vawter's opinion, after many years as 
a booking agent, that an inspirational speech was so full of generalities 
that little of it, including even Bryan's masterpiece, actually stayed in the 
listener's mind. Perhaps that is why folks flocked through the entrance gates 
a second and even a third time. The real reason probably is that America 
in those years simply liked speeches. 

"Uplift" became a business for the mother, home and heaven orator 
and a hard and weary business it was. Its practitioners naturally liked to 
preach, or at least to talk, and those who repeated themselves, year after 
year, were skilled in tricks calculated to hold an audience which a one- 
season orator did not know. The one-season man on the circuits might 
be an author merely out to advertise his new book, or a dreamer with a 
bright idea to revolutionize a naughty world, for whom Chautauqua offered 
a brief sounding board. The real mother, home and heaveners had Messages. 
Their souls burned with them and they delivered them year after year in 
spite of heat, little sleep, poor food, a neglected home life. They dispensed 
cheer. They made people happy. They fortified ambition. 

The true inspirationalist could deliver his speech with as much en- 
thusiasm the hundredth time as he did the first. Or sometimes Ms bow 
had several strings and he played one, now another* Or, as today, a smart 
lecturer might have half a dozen different titles, but actually just one 
speech. In later years there was a well-known poet, best left unnamed, 
who offered the eager ladies on a certain Kentucky committee three titles: 
Listen to America, Words and Music, and Songs and Singers. 

"Let *em take their choice, whichever they think sounds best," he ex- 
plained to his manager. "It's afl the same speech." 



138 Culture Under Canvas 

The uplift theme naturally made its first appearance in the title and 
went on joyfully from there. Many of these titles sound hackneyed or sen- 
sational now. Undoubtedly some of them did at the time. But in 1908 and 
'10 and '12, spread lavishly in big red or black letters across the advertis- 
ing posters, they challenged, they looked exciting. Catchy words did not 
make a speaker's reputation, but they helped, and a man with a well- 
established title made sure no one took off with it. It was his trademark. 
Take the Sunny Side belonged to Lou Beauchamp and no one else, The 
Powder and the Match to Judge George Alden. Tallow Dips, symbolic of 
the idea, "Let your light shine," was delivered 7000 times for millions of ab- 
sorbed listeners by Robert Parker Miles, English-born newspaper col- 
umnist-preacher, who discovered when he was almost middle-aged that 
he could coin phrases people remembered. It was Miles who remarked of 
Henry Ward Beecher, "When he entered the room, his shoulders brushed 
the sides of the walls." 

Lou Beaucbamp's perennial Sunny Side was a grievous temptation to 
other ambitious lecturers. Its popularity arose so early in the Chautauqua 
era, and the words themselves were so happy a choice for an uplift theme, 
that solemn speakers could not resist reaching out for a share. There had 
been "Sunshine" Willits, Paul "Sunshine" Dietrick; happy "Sunshine" Bates 
with his Silver Lining, who, like Col. L. F. Copeland, former lawyer, died 
of fatigue on a Chautauqua trip. 

Dozens of imitators carried similar hopeful messages. Their titles ex- 
alted the Sunny Side of Life, a Sun-Crowned this or that, Sunshine and 
Tears, or Sunshine and Shadows. Even sardonic humorist Strickland Gillilan 
cashed in on the sunlit glow when, tongue in cheek, he went out with 
Sunshine and Awkwardness. 

These golden-voiced purveyors of uplift, in aligning themselves with 
"sunshine," were merely taking advantage of a people's longing for a 
happier world. They believed in their mission, which was to spread good 
cheer; their simple optimism was the nub of honest philosophy. It was 
not this type of title that eventually began to tire the more intelligent seg- 
ment of the ticket-buying public. The ones that did, and caused acute pain 
to the more iconoclastic critics, were those that strained for variety by 
weird concoctions of words. Dietrich, for instance, advertised one speech 
called Grasshoppers and Measuring Worms and kept the meaning of this 
title a deep secret. H. W. "Taffy" Sears managed to contrive his nickname 
from his revolting phrase, More Taffy and Less Epitaphy. 

C. C. Mitchell, a Baptist clergyman from Rhode Island, was built to be 
a humorist, but chose to be an uplifter instead. A genial fellow with so 
many double chins that one Chautauqua entertainer wrote back to Chicago, 
"If the railroads carried him by freight, they would lose money," he con- 
jured up a name for himself that harked back to McNutt, the "Dinner Pail 



Mother, Home and Heaven 139 

Man." Mitchell jovially called himself "The Bombshell in a Nutshell Man," 
offering a speech called The World's Ash Heap, 

Kansas newspaperman Ira David Mullinax, entering the scene a few 
years later, christened himself the "Pie Man," and for a title used what he 
thought was a catchy phrase, Pie, People and Politics. Sjlvester Long, a 
perennial midwestern speaker, advertised that he had a tfc vital message deal- 
ing with first principles," which he mysteriously named Lightning and 
Toothpicks. It was built around the idea, " "Tis not where you are stand- 
ing, but which way are you going, up or down?" It epitomized "mother, 
home and heaven." 

One public performer from Ohio modestly billed himself one summer 
as The Peptomist . . . an Optimist in Action, and on the White and 
Meyers circuit the same year Francis J, Gable spoke on Laughilosophy, 
explaining grandiloquently that it concerned "the doctrine of right living 
on the principle that it pays." Other examples of exaggerated titles are 
legion. 

Alton Packard, the Redpath cartoonist, suggested one winter, not too 
seriously, that Redpath talent get up a debate among themselves "on the 
ethics of stealing literary material from fellow-lecturers." Thomas Brooks 
Fletcher, listening to the idea, didn't debate it, but just to prevent any mis- 
understanding he copyrighted his title for the coming season, Tragedies of 
the Unprepared. 

Both in box-office appeal and speaking ability, Fletcher was one of the 
best "mother, home and heaven" headliners booked by Redpath-Chicago 
before the First World War. In his well-paid class, giving almost full time 
to the exhausting road, were William Rainey Bennett, Lee Francis Lybarger, 
Edward Amherst Ott, Ernest Wray Oneal, and Judge Alden. 

Alden's title of judge had been earned on the Massachusetts bench over 
a period of ten years. He first appeared as a lecturer in 1906 for Peffer's 
Redpath in the east. In his Chautauqua lifetime he spoke in every state, 
hundreds of times in the more populous ones, and he was still filling plat- 
form dates in 1930, his close-cropped mustache just as trim but consider- 
ably whiter. 

It was Alden's optimistic slant that the world was not going to the bow- 
wows, regardless of all rumors to the contrary that the political speakers 
might spread on the same platform. Trusts and wicked money barons were 
among us, Alden admitted, just as the pessimistic officeholder speaking in 
the tent yesterday had warned. But they were merely weeds in a system 
of which every one listening today was a responsible member. If a man 
would "know himself," "be a better man," the judge promised, he could 
knock the trusts into a cocked hat. Alden called this particular lecture 
The Needs of the How and its talk of trusts furnished copy for dozens of 
country editorial writers. 



140 



Culture Under Canvas 



222 



The Lyceumita 



Snap Shots from the Chautauqxias, 







Other Chautauquas Headliners: Col Copeland; Mrs. Sooth appealing for 

the prisoners; Beauchamp; Fred Emerson Brooks; Robert M. LaFoUette; 

Dr. Green in two poses. 



Mother, Home and Heaven 141 

Alden was a descendant of Poet Longfellow, as well as of John Alden 
and his wife Priscilla, and in his Powder and the Match he dared look out 
over his fancy rimless eye-glasses and capitalize on his ancestry by reciting 
his own verse. In Ye Modern Maid he took the "up-to-date girl" apart be- 
cause she did "no darning, no cooking, no washing of dishes," ending on 
the refrain "the old-fashioned girl puts it over the new . . . Satan's still 
friendly with 'nothing-to-do,' " a sentiment with which most mothers in 
his audience were in pious accord. 

In opening this speech Judge Alden used as a text a poem John Boyle 
O'Riley had written for the dedication of the Pilgrim monument. It began 
"Give praise to others, early come and late," and proceeded with the idea 
that as the Pilgrim Fathers laid stout ribs and keel, so also must their sons 
live and work. Like the sometimes irritable Strickland Gillilan, Judge 
Alden became easily annoyed at noise. So when people straggled down 
the aisles late, he showed this annoyance by backing up in his speech and 
repeating, "Give praise to others, early come or late." It did not take 
embarrassed late-comers long to get settled on the benches after that. 

Alden was more sentimental than his contemporary, Thomas Brooks 
Fletcher. Fletcher could wring out the sad little tsar, but his speeches, 
though classed as inspirational, usually had the overtones of the new social 
consciousness of the Theodore Roosevelt era, and there never was any- 
thing sensational about them. We advertised Fletcher's Tragedies of the 
Unprepared as "an effort to save the might-have-beens before it is too 
late"; his Modem Judas as a "protest against social, political and economic 
treason"; his Martyrdom of Fools as a "defense of the persecuted thinker," 
all extravagant words if used in this day and age. 

Fletcher usually began his Martyrdom of Fools by announcing the 
title, and then adding quickly, "Glad to see so many of you here," which 
always brought a laugh. The day the Lusitania sank he was giving this 
speech in Brunswick, Georgia. He used his usual opener but that evening 
no one laughed. 

Most small towns were drearily alike; the same Main Street with the 
same millinery shop, the same real estate signs, the same loafers in the 
barbershop, same fat cat sleeping in the same grocery store window. So 
talent, after covering the same circuit year after year, were always happy 
to find something, anything, that was new and different to break the 
monotony. With particular delight one summer the men in a musical com- 
pany discovered in an audience in southwestern fflinois a woman they 
thought looked like a horse. 

"Same long face, same mouth, same expression," a tenor reported. 
"Nice horse. But a horse, all right" 

The word got around: "Look for 'Horse Face' in Blank-viUe." The next 
company to arrive, coming out on the stage, looked quickly. There she 



142 Culture Under Canvas 

was, third row center, just as the others had said. A nice, very homely 
horse, with a season ticket. 

After that everyone appearing in Blank-ville looked for "Horse Face." 
Finally Brooks Fletcher arrived. He started his speech, The Tragedies of 
the Unprepared. Give the same speech a hundred times, and a man can 
safely let his mind wander. In the middle of a sentence, Fletcher's glance 
reached "Horse Face," and, completely unprepared for such a startling 
sight, he faltered and forgot his lines. After frantic ad-libbing, he was able 
to put a few sentences together and did not look again in the woman's 
direction. 

Like the Military Girls, Fletcher was jealous of his reputation for "al- 
ways getting there" he was one of the redoubtable ham-sandwich clan 
who rode freight, handcar or bicycle to arrive where he should be on time 
and who slept soundly on the baggage truck at a flag station if no other 
bed was available. Once in southern Illinois, when he was trying to reach 
a program before curtain, the only automobile available had no brakes. 
He hired it anyway and the driver was half way down a steep hill when 
he saw a bridge out ahead. Both men had to jump. Fletcher brushed him- 
self off and appeared as usual that night. Unlike a lecturer whom we 
shall call Mr. X, he did not mention the mishap. 

Mr. X, in 1915, with a superintendent from the Redpath-Columbus 
office, also was involved in an automobile accident. The superintendent 
had minor injuries, Mr. X, none. But when he stepped on to the platform 
for his afternoon engagement, he had an impressive limp and a bandage 
on his head. With trembling voice and hands, he told of the "terrible acci- 
dent," adding, "and as I leaned over our poor superintendent, who was 
hurt so badly, he looked up at me and said in a weak voice, 'Mr, X, you 
will have to carry on for both of us.* So, ladies and gentlemen, here I 
am." The bandage and limp went over so well that he clung to them for 
several days in succeeding towns. 

Among Fletcher's many other lectures were Community Deadheads and 
The Infamy of Intolerance. All his speeches were popular, all spotted with 
humor, and we booked him season after season in the same towns. He went 
to Congress later, at one time owned newspapers in Marion, Ohio, com- 
peting with Editor Warren G. Harding. For all one knows the future 
President got the idea for his Chautauqua treks from his fellow towns- 
man* Certain men, after getting the Chautauqua habit, became impas- 
sioned apostles of the idea. Fletcher would argue to the point of anger if 
anyone legitimately pointed out a Chautauqua fault. In fact, some say that 
Fletcher was responsible for the surprising remark, "Jesus Christ was the 
first Chautauquan." 

There was one great group of inspirational topics called, not the prac- 
tical "How-to-Do's," which eventually became an important type of edu- 
cational program, but the ambitious "How-to-Be's," The late Dale Car- 



Mother, Home and Heaven 143 

negie became the most famous exponent of this type of speech with his 
never-equalled homily, How to Win Friends and Influence People. An 
obituary in the New York Times at Mr. Carnegie's death made the point 
that, as a youth, "he became so impressed with the style of a speaker at a 
Chautauqua lecture that he decided to emulate him," practising ''recita- 
tions on the horse he rode to and from college.*' Certainly there is a hint 
of the early Chautauqua Lake "Reading Courses'" in the "Carnegie Courses" 
which are still being given. Over forty years nearly half a million persons 
have enrolled in them, to learn not only How to Win Friends, but How to 
Stop Worrying or How to Start Living how, in short, to be the happy 
man or woman of whom the starry-eyed Chautauqua orator preached in 
Mr. Carnegie's youth. 

The "How-to-Be" programs became rampant in Chautauqua. Earnest 
lecturers in frock coats told longing individuals How to be Successful, or 
merely Content, How to Master One's Self, How to Make a Happy Home. 
Even sober-sided Lee Lybarger travelled one season with a How to Be 
Happy title, which he delivered most seriously. 

Another phrase, like the word "Sunshine," in which would-be Conwells 
saw profitable possibilities was The Man. Dozens of speakers dissected him. 
He might be The Man Worth While, or Behind the Throne, Man of the 
Hour or of Tomorrow one determined lecturer probed relentlessly for 
The Man Within the Man. Philadelphia Baptist preacher Charles Sea- 
sholes, without so much as a nod to Edwin Markham's Man With a Hoe r 
crisscrossed the country, declaiming about Man With a Pick. For half a 
dozen years he gave the speech seventy times a summer. Many of the 
country people he was talking to lived "just to work" and it did not matter 
to them whether they used a pick or a hoe, if they could "be somebody" 
in the end, and they got Mr. Seasholes' point with no effort. 

In all this onslaught, The Man Who Can, by William Rainey Bennett, 
was the most famous title and it belonged as conspicuously to hhn as 
Tragedies of the Unprepared did to Fletcher. 

Long before the First World War we initiated a business practice of 
contracting lecturers to appear only for Redpath on a guaranteed annual 
wage, to cover both summer Chautauqua and winter Lyceum. Bennett, 
a Congregational clergyman who had ventured out independently with a 
few dates at $10 a night while preaching in Wisconsin, by 1911 was draw- 
ing $4000 a year from us. Later he changed his contract to $50 a day for 
independent Chautauqua dates and $225 a week on the circuits. 

Black-haired Bennett and his Windsor tie made a tremendous impact 
on the average crowd. He "inspired" with a good hard push in the right 
direction, no gentle pat on the back. People a bit down at the mouth 
listened to his Man Who Can and decided that perhaps he was right; they, 
too, could do splendid things. One distressed individual in a Minnesota 
audience went home to write a letter to Redpath, admitting that he had 



144 Culture Under Canvas 

decided life was no longer worth the effort, but he wandered into Bennett's 
lecture just to hear "one more rehash." It changed his mind. 

Bennett, too, gradually began to emphasize social problems on the 
Chautauqua platform. In 1913 he went out with a speech called, far from 
tersely, The Reign of the Common People or The World-Wide Foment 
Towards Democracy. The phrase "One World" had not yet come into our 
vocabulary. So it is worth noting that even before the First War, Bennett, 
with his tendency toward big words, was talking to plain, ordinary people 
in small-town tents about "tie self-assertion of the common man, a plane- 
tary, political movement which makes this age the most dramatic since 
the French Revolution/' In its advance publicity Redpath-Chicago also 
took a bold fling at prophecy by saying, "This lecture shows the part 
America shall play in this world-drama. In fact, it might be called The U.S. 
of the World." 

Lee Francis Lybarger, whom we modestly billed as "a new Patrick Henry," 
was a lawyer and teacher who talked fervently for the cause of labor, 
against socialism, frequently on the tariff, always with a philosophy of free 
trade from a Democratic viewpoint. "How many millionaires are there?" 
his voice thundered down the aisles. "How large are their fortunes? How 
were they acquired? Astors collect $500,000 a week. What equivalent 
service do they render?" 

This outburst was entitled Land, Labor, Wealth, or How They Got 
Rich, an Oration on the Dangers and Injustices of Our "Swollen" Fortunes, 
The title of his chief tariff speech was just as verbose and the speech 
just as effective. He insisted on calling it, The Get and Give of the Tariff, 
What Do You Give, What Do You Get? 

Lybarger experimented once with "serial lectures," in which one day's 
subject led into the next. Booked by Redpath to Miami Valley, Ohio, 
permanent Chautauqua for a morning hour lecture, usually only a mod- 
erate drawing card, he built up his curious audience from forty the first day 
to three thousand at the close of the third series, and for one morning ses- 
sion drew an unprecedented five thousand. He was tireless. When Emil 
Seidel and Adam Bede finally ended their long and friendly years of 
spirited debate on socialism, Bede took on Carl D, Thompson, an ex- 
ponent of public ownership, a speaker whom the Missouri Public Utilities 
Commission tried, unsuccessfully, in the 1920's to force off Vawter's cir- 
cuit. When the Bede-Tbompson team also broke up, after a fairly short 
life, Lybarger took the negative against Thompson, in an hour-and-thirty- 
five-minute tussle. 

Soon after joining Redpath, Lybarger wrote a creed for fellow lec- 
turers that many of them respected, at least. He asked a mythical small- 
town committeeman, about to sign a Chautauqua contract: "What do you 
want from this lecturer? What you already know or what you do not 
know? What you believe or what you do not believe? Should he make you 



Mother, Home and Heaven 145 

feel good by flattery, or feel bad by advocating things you oppose? The 
lecturer should take none of these things into consideration. It is not Ms 
mission to flatter or irritate, denounce the old or praise the new. He simply 
should proclaim the truth." 

Vawter listed seven lecturers, including one woman, on his 1904 experi- 
mental tour. By 1912 the available supply had mushroomed into hundreds 
of good speakers, with hundreds of topics. Men like lame Frank Dixon, 
former North Carolina preacher and brother of Novelist Thomas Dixon, 
who appeared on my Pulaski "pre-meer," later filled one hundred and 
fifty engagements a year with his Man Against the Mass; in this, as with 
Lybarger, socialism lost again to individualism. 

There were others like Byron Piatt of Indianapolis, who one season 
startled parents out of their wits with charges of immorality in high schools; 
or bald-as-an-egg Adrian Newens, an lowan; or E, T. Hagerman from 
Milwaukee, who called himself "a man's preacher" and talked with no 
inhibition on "life, love, laughter; health, honor, humor." Occasionally, also, 
there were men with the erudition of William A. Colledge. 

Colledge, born in Edinburgh, was a serious scholar and looked like 
one, in spite of the fact that he had fought in three wars against the Arabs 
and spent three rugged years with Stanley in Africa. Because he enjoyed 
coining maxims in language not above the heads of the people, the press 
began to call him Chautauqua's Ben Franklin. "Do not put the heaviest 
load on the weakest horse" . . . "When a man has no argument he usu- 
ally wagers" . . . "The best of men often give the worst advice." These 
were typical morsels he offered as food for thought. Over a considerable 
period he directed Redpath-Chicago's educational department, lecturing 
in the tents in the summers on Scots Barrie, Stevenson and Burns. 

Newens, a play reader originally, who later coached both our lecturers 
and entertainers, had one popular offering called A Message from Mars, 
a play in three acts built around the reform of a selfish man. One afternoon 
on Homer's circuit in Fredonia, in southeast Kansas, Newens was following 
the Killarney Girls with his Message from Mars, when there began a series 
of disturbances of the kind that made the life of a tent orator interesting 
and taught him patience. The tent stood near a barn with a mule. The 
mule began to bray just as Newens began to speak and was still braying 
when the fire alarm sounded. A hose cart rattled past and naturally a num- 
ber of ticket holders, thinking it might be their own houses burning, got 
up and hurried out. Those who stayed had just resettled themselves and all 
the wakened babies had stopped crying, when a woman rushed back ex- 
citedly into the tent, and after searching up and down several aisles, found 
the friend she wanted and cried loudly, "My God, Mrs. B., it's your house 
has burned down!" 

Mrs* B. ran out and patient Newens emptied his water pitcher and 
found the thread again in his Message from Mars. A noisy dray arrived 



146 Culture Under Canvas 

next. It rattled all the way around the big tent to the "pup" shelter at the 
rear, to pick up the Killarney Girls' trunks for the railroad station. The 
babies cried again but Newens finished his show. 

Back in the days of Bishop John Vincent, Chautauqua had rid itself of 
pure denominationalism. The influence never returned, even among the most 
fervent home-and-heaveners. Religious intolerance in every field except 
possibly, as has already been noted, in Senator Cannon's attack on the 
Mormons had its head knocked down as soon as it showed itself. Any 
representative of any faith had a welcome place on the platform, providing 
he possessed stage presence and had something to say. 

I never heard of a preacher on Redpath or any other circuit who urged 
anyone to walk down the sawdust trail in a tent. Even the ebullient Sam 
Jones had not used this direct method, nor did fire-breathing, shirt-sleeved 
Billy Sunday. 

Sunday's long evangelistic tours were made independently of any cir- 
cuit, but if he had open dates he spoke willingly for us for sixty percent 
of the gate receipts. He battled sin with vigor, eloquence and dramatic 
skill, and sinners and churchgoers both flocked to hear him. It has been 
estimated that at times in his skyrocket career Billy Sunday made one to five 
thousand converts a month, some of them undoubtedly from our platform, 
if only indirectly. 

The Reverend Billy's public-relations sense never slept. One summer 
when his large frame house at Winona Lake, Indiana, burned to the ground, 
a reporter found him with his wife, "Ma" Sunday, surveying the still- 
smoking ruins. The reporter approached them from behind, unseen by 
either of them. 

"What happened?" he asked. 

Without hesitating, Billy Sunday propelled himself into a headline. 

"The Lord gave," he said, "and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be 
the name of the Lord." 

The routine fire story became a story of Billy Sunday's Christian reac- 
tion and was carried by newspapers from coast to coast. 

Everyone in Chautauqua got along with Billy more easily than with Ma, 
whom one beaten-down superintendent, after an encounter over a pay 
check, described as "tougher than whang leather." In this respect manage- 
ment found her a littie like Mrs. Warren G. Harding. 

There were many home-and-heaveners who were evangelists on Sunday 
and lecturers on temperance, honesty and frugality the remainder of the 
week. Few of them ever reached the stature of smiling Revivalist Benjamin 
Fay Mills, with his white temperance button on his black coat lapel and 
his philosophy, "All is well! Be of good cheer!" The platfonn career of 
Mills, who for a period abandoned orthodox church relationship because 
of his liberal ideas, was cut short before he was sixty, but for a quarter cen- 
tury many men imitated him. 



Mother, Home and Heaven 147 

One of these was the Kansas judge, Manford Schoonover, who like 
Beauchamp, advertised himself as a "reformed drunkard." Schoonover, 
without once slowing down, could spend a long, full summer talking about 
"the good time I have had loving my fellow man. 5 * 

Another highly vocal member of the Redpath family whose message on 
drunkenness came from his own experience was Lincoln McConnelL He 
had been lawyer, cowboy, police detective, eventually an evangelist in 
Atlanta. He provided our program-makers with a dozen pleasant-sounding 
topics Blue Coat and Red Flag was typical. But mostly he breathed fire 
and brimstone. He was another lecturer who offered special subjects for 
the Lord's Day. Shocked boys and girls in their best Sunday clothes did not 
squirm or make eyes in the back rows the evening McConnell declaimed 
on Down Hill, The Psychology of Sin. 

Redpath talent scouts were not infallible. Occasional misfits and frauds 
were bound to creep into the lists. Discovered, they departed, sometimes 
before the connection had done the bureau any harm. The well-known 
clergyman who walked unsteadily into the Chicago office to ask for a 
little advance on pay (the day before he was to start out on the circuit 
with a speech expected to reform whole platoons of drunkards in a single 
night) left precipitately that same day for a home for alcoholics. There 
were other close calls, other individuals with feet of clay. We even had a 
sad experience once with a lady kleptomaniac who lectured her way up 
and down a circuit staying in the "best" homes until the owners con- 
cerned began to report the loss of silver candlesticks. 

Luck in catching all mistakes could not be expected. Oklahoma his- 
torians still dispute whether Joseph W. Griffis, a Presbyterian minister 
from Buffalo who appeared for many seasons as Tahan, a white boy 
brought up by the Kiowa Indians, actually was Tahan. At the time, his 
Up from Savagery was a lively horror story that fascinated its listeners. 
Not until years later did anyone challenge its authenticity. 

Horror stories were usually resounding hits. One of the most startling, 
Mantraps of the City, was offered by the same Reverend Mr. Green whose 
unprophetic Key to Peace I first heard in 1904. Mantraps, an expert piece 
of its kind, was packed with examples of poor, honest country boys get- 
ting done in, either physically or morally, when they took up with evil 
companions. 

One character whose name appeared at about this time might be classed 
as a shouting-evangelist, home-and-heavener, or as just plain headline 
hunter. This was Clinton N. Howard, who modestly described his lectures 
as "inspirational and radical," aimed "to get the world back to Eden." The 
"radical" undoubtedly referred to his titles, Adam and Eve and the Baby, 
Why God Made a Woman, or if anyone preferred, Why God Made a Man. 
Howard was a distinguished looking man. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 
after he had talked in Texas, remarked that he wore Stephen A. Douglas* 



148 Culture Under Canvas 

collar and tie, Elbert Hubbard's hair and a Quaker hat and coat. I heard 
free-speaking Sam Jones introduce him once with the words: "You people 
don't know what I'm snickering at, but you'll pretty soon see when I in- 
troduce the next speaker. It's that little runt over there. He weighs 111 
pounds in that frock coat, big hat and accessories. Ten pounds of that is 
hair, the rest is clothes, hide and backbone." 

Howard claimed in his advertisements to have delivered his Execution 
of John Barleycorn to "acres of men." Perhaps he did, for in Canada his 
efforts were credited for Alberta's dry vote in 1915. Howard's sensational 
appeals were somewhat similar to those of James Keeley, who came out 
of Washington, D.C. one summer with an all-inclusive lecture on "re- 
form, temperance, politics and economy" that he unveiled under the title, 
Is It Family Life or Free Love?" Men of this type classed themselves as 
realists. They aimed to "shock" the public. How much lasting good they 
actually accomplished will always be a question. 

Edward Amherst Ott also shocked his audiences thoroughly, but with 
no aim to achieve front-page notoriety. A speech that packed the grounds, 
from Crawford Peffer's eastern territory to the western Ellison-White cir- 
cuit, was Ott's loud and challenging discussion of heredity. He corrupted 
the word into "Hittery-dittery," thereby coining a catch-word that helped 
people remember his speech. 

Many learned voices those years were already arguing heredity versus 
environment. As a speech professor at Drake University in Iowa, Ott not 
only knew how to argue, but he had definite opinions on this particular 
subject. He was convinced that heredity alone controlled man's moral 
character. So he developed the idea in a frank piece of writing called 
Sour Grapes. 

Ott's first intention was merely to deliver the speech on the Drake 
campus* But conservative university authorities said "No." So Ott took to 
the tents. A middle-sized man in white pants and blue serge coat, he marched 
out belligerently the first night, arched his bushy eyebrows, squared his 
jaw, and let go with the facts as he saw them, first about heredity and then 
on to marriage and divorce laws. 

"I bring you tonight, good friends," he began, "no new fad of the hour." 
This was a fine and reasonable start, folks out in front thought. Most of 
them were weary of fads and both self-conscious and averse to any dis- 
cussion of sex "I deal in heredity," Ott went on. "If you don't like your 
environment, you can change it. But it's pretty hard to pick out your 
own father and mother.*' 

The "Ott plan" provided for medical examinations and a ninety-day 
announcement previous to a marriage, and a proper education in the mar- 
riage relation. By 1912 the ex-college professor had repeated the speech a 
dizzy two thousand times in thirty-five states, Lyceum and Chautauqua 
together. His average audience numbered only seven hundred. But it counted 



Mother, Home and Heaven 149 

up to a million and a half persons, who sat so amaze J and impressed by 
his blunt words that half a dozen state legislatures rushed to amend their 
marriage laws. 

Ott was a sell-out in every Chautauqua town. Hospitable women rose 
at dawn to prepare special breakfasts for him, or served big community 
banquets the night he tossed his bags down from the local train. He left the 
platform in 1917 after twenty-five years of hard, earnest crusading for 
what he believed to be the most necessary reform in the American scene. 
He commented once that in a single summer "men like Fletcher and Hob- 
son address more people than Demosthenes and Cicero addressed in all 
their lives." The remark certainly was true of Ott himself. Unlike many 
of his fellows, he never had been a clergyman. He started his career on 
the New York stage. 

The gems Ott dropped on hot afternoons in FIorida~to-Michigan-to- 
California tents were strange talk to the intent farmers and schoolteachers, 
the merchants who had closed their stores for the session, the country 
bankers, the small employers not too familiar with the word "labor union." 
He warned them, forty years ago: "We need a labor reservoir for surplus 
men. Organize your industries on a year 'round basis. Stability in the 
labor market is the need of trade. Is it good social economy to lay off men 
with families to support, without cutting the pay of a corporation presi- 
dent?" And then, getting closer home with his hatred of "waste," he would 
demand: "How many churches is this town supporting? Are they all 
necessary?" 

Reform in marriage laws was also a theme for serious Chautauqua lec- 
tures by Walter Taylor Sumner, dean of Chicago's Episcopal Cathedral of 
SS Peter and Paul, who later became Bishop of Oregon. Dean Sumner's 
name in the midwest stood for the fight against vice. Our superintendents 
often complained that he lacked brevity. The title of his address the second 
summer I had my own circuit was somewhat less than lucid. He called it, 
Dawning Consciousness of Woman's Sex Loyalty. 

A broad line separated the run-of-the-mill reformer from a "name" 
clergyman who had achieved particular fame in a particular pulpit, who 
drew great crowds with great sermons and who took a spiritual message 
into the tents. The native interest of the Chautauqua audience in oratory 
supported men like Samuel Parkes Cadman of Brooklyn's Central Con- 
gregational Church, or Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus and Rabbi Emfl Hirsch 
of Chicago. And so Redpath continued to book Newell Dwigiht Hillis, 
whom I had first encountered as a young agpnt in Actor Joe Jefferson's 
dressing-room in Boston. Venerable Plymouth Church still drew crowds, 
as it had in the days of Beecher and Lyman Abbott, and Hillis, its incum- 
bent orator, always reached the people on the benches, no matter where 
the benches were. 

Hillis was high-priced. In spite of that, the reputation of his pulpit was 



150 Culture Under Canvas 

such that managers competed for him. In addition to his church duties, by 
some miracle of transportation or endurance he filled at least one hundred 
and twenty-five Chautauqua and Lyceum dates a year. 

Cadman, Hillis' fellow Brooklynite, was one of the first preachers in the 
nation to speak regularly on the air. He was English-born, of a race of 
Scotch preachers, English-educated, married to an Englishwoman; an im- 
migrant, one might say, with an affinity for the New England tradition of 
eloquence which he carried into the pulpit. Cadman had two hobbies. He 
collected English china and antique furniture and he liked to chat about 
both to any or all who would listen, including an audience. He reached into 
his British background for his lectures on Gladstone and Lord Macaulay. 

The south, which could supply fluent political orators of the Fiddlin' 
Bob Taylor quality, and garrulous evangelists by the dozen, still sent forth 
dmost no lecturing clergymen. Midwest pulpits made up for it. Iowa's cap- 
ital, Des Moines, a strong seat of the Disciples of Christ, had dispatched 
gallant soldiers and the Reverend Charles Medbury to the Spanish-American 
War. Like so many clergymen of his period, shocked by what they saw as 
chaplains in that ugly conflict, Medbury left his congregation frequently to 
talk about his war experiences. 

Methodist bishops, in particular, were plentiful and long-lived. William 
Fraser McDowell, who had gone east from Ohio for a period as Lyman 
Beecher lecturer at Yale, seldom could desert the subject of foreign mis- 
sions; but this was a time when that subject absorbed a good many 
fervent souls, so in the main it was all right. Bishop William A. Quayle was 
livelier. He preached sermons. He conformed to that extent. But he was 
more likely to drop his prepared speech and recite a play by Shakespeare 
or Victor Hugo, or, if the spirit moved him, talk dramatically about "God's 
Out of Doors." People smiled at his long, tousled red hair, his inelegant 
but never shabby dress, and loved him. 

Bishop Quayle practically never had an open date. This was true, too, 
of solid, handsome, middle-aged George Bradford, chancellor of Okla- 
homa's Methodist University. People thought Bradford "looked like Bryan" 
and therefore must be a good speaker, and, moreover, they liked his plain 
talk. One day in Ohio Bradford angrily cried that if only he had his way, 
he would "adjourn Congress and all the state legislatures right this min- 
ute and not let them meet again for ten years. We don't need more laws, 
just more men willing to obey the laws we do have." 

Like Lew Wallace's Ben Hur, Victor Hugo's character, Jean Valjean, 
over the years, was top source material. The Reverend Preston Bradley was 
one of dozens of lecturers, readers and actors who utilized the dramatic 
qualities of the immortal Valjean. Night with a Conscience was a good 
selling title. Bradley had started out in life to be a lawyer; he withdrew first 
from the law, then from the Presbyterian ministry, to establish in Chicago 
the independent Peoples* Church > meeting in theatres until the congrega- 
tion finally could afford its own building. 



Mother, Home and Heaven 151 

Like Rabbi Harrison of St. Louis in Vawter"s pioneering days, the fame 
of Rabbi Emil Hirsch of Chicago spread quickly across the country. Bril- 
liant, independent, born in Luxemburg where his father had been chief 
rabbi of the Grand Duchy, Rabbi Hirsch was a liberal who brushed aside 
any religious forms that he thought no longer useful. He vigorously op- 
posed Zionism, which was just beginning to be a lecture subject. Orphan- 
ages also stirred his righteous indignation; he wanted "orphans in homes/' 
not "orphan homes." 

Chiefly Rabbi Hirsch liked to consider himself "the Jew's ambassador 
to the Gentiles." The overwhelming majority of listeners in his occasional 
summer audiences were non-Jewish. His aim was to give them an ap- 
preciation of Judaism, just as in his pulpit he tried to teach his own con- 
gregation to understand Christianity. There were many others of his faith 
on the circuits. 1 

Rabbi Hirsch taught at the University of Chicago, as did another early 
Redpather, the Reverend Herbert L. Willett. When the Redpath organiza- 
tion bought the Slayton Bureau, back hi the early 1900's, a few bold souls 
who had already ventured into the lecture field transferred with it. One was 
the Reverend Ernest Wray Oneal; another was Herbert Willett. There had 
been another Redpath personality with a similar name which sometimes 
caused confusion. This was doughty old "Sunshine" (Dr. A. A.) Willits of 
New Jersey. I say "doughty" and "old" justly, for "Sunshine" Willits in 
1911, in his eighty-ninth summer, filled one hundred and twenty-seven 
Chautauqua dates in twenty states. It was his last safari; he died two years 
later. 

Herbert Willett, the rather sedate pastor of Chicago's Memorial Church 
of Christ, confined himself to straight Biblical interpretations. For two 
decades, while the world swirled around him., he offered portraits of Moses, 
David, Job and Isaiah. Curiously enough, since the days of the old inde- 
pendents, when redoubtable George Wendling went up and down the land 
reciting Man of Galilee and Saul of Tarsus, there actually were very few 
speeches on Chautauqua platforms confined purely to Biblical characters, 
even on the restricted Sunday programs. Possibly this was because a lesser 
man dared not follow too closely in Wendling's steps. 

Wendling's debates with godless Robert Ingersoll, whom James Redpath 
had dared to sponsor, put Wendling in a class by himself. I was with him 
one night in the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago at a lecture on atheism 
by bushy-haired Elbert Hubbard. "That's the best speech I ever heard," 
Wendling told Hubbard afterward, "only there's not a word of truth in 
it." Wendling lived until war-torn 1915. He had taken to the platform in 
1880, the year James A. Garfield was the "dark horse" candidate for the 
Presidency. 

1 Among other Chautauqua lecturers of Emil Hirsch' faith were Rabbi Louis Wilsey 
of Cleveland's Euclid Avenue Temple, Rabbi Joseph Korn of Columbus, and Rabbi 
A. J. Messing of Chicago's west-side Reformed Temple Judea, to name only a few. 



152 Culture Under Canvas 

Hubbard, who began his career as a radical iconoclast but before it 
ended was defending the meat packers against Upton Sinclair's exposures 
in The Jungle, spoke chiefly in Lyceum. His topics there did not concern 
horrid agnosticism. Sweet titles, like Beauty in the Home, grew out of his 
work at Roycroft, his arts and crafts workshop outside East Aurora, New 
York. Some of our program headliners would occasionally hide away for a 
day or two of rest at Hubbard's Roycroft Inn. It was both quiet and di- 
verting. Instead of prosaic numbers, guest-room doors bore the names 
of artists or authors. You slept not in plain "room ten," but in the "Robert 
and Elizabeth Browning Suite." 

Any picture of clergymen plodding over territory where old camp-meet- 
ing sites were hallowed ground, leads naturally to the subject of "temper- 
ance." Some responsible churchmen were as smart as any politician: they 
made a distinction between "prohibition" and the more flexible conception 
of "temperance." The Catholic church furnished us a goodly share of 
temperance crusaders. Father P. J. McCorry, of St. Mary's Cathedral, 
Wichita, Kansas, who started for Redpath-Horner with an illustrated story 
on the life of Christ, switched to Intemperance, a National Calamity. Like- 
wise, in the dry Kansas-Nebraska area, D. J. Cronin, a twinkly-eyed priest 
from Harvard, Nebraska, offered one title, As a Man Thinks, So Is He, 
that he described as being "by no means a *dry' lecture" a statement 
which might have been Irish humor, or not. 

The real fighter, of course, who barred no holds, was Bishop Ireland 
of Minnesota. No one had more talent for making headlines or probably 
enjoyed them more himself. Already seventy-four years old when Redpath- 
Chicago sent out its first tents, Ireland was a hearty campaigner who 
could out-argue and out-shout many an orator a third his age. A Kilkenny 
Irishman by birth, he had grown up on hard work on an Illinois farm, 
and in the Civil War had earned the title of "Fighting Chaplain" with Illi- 
nois volunteers. He carried all his life an edge of brogue on his tongue; 
therefore, in order to leave no one in doubt as to his nationality, he opened 
each speech with the blunt statement, "I am an American citizen." 

From his earliest priesthood Ireland had been a thorn in the side of the 
liquor trade in the northwest. From Lake Superior to the then far Dafcotas, 
he organized abstinence societies among both Catholics and Protestants. 
He believed that the liquor problem could best be solved by each indi- 
vidual for himself, that the law should not supplant individual conscience; 
but when liquor dealers disobeyed the statutes, he went out into the streets 
and alleys collecting evidence and then fought in the courts for its admission. 
Newspapers called his speeches "startiingly frank." Around 1900, because 
of his distaste for legislated prohibition, he had attacked that other head- 
liner, William Jennings Bryan, and he continued to slug away at Bryan 
for years. Later, when certain members of his church attempted to halt 
his militancy in his fight for temperance, he appealed to Rome, and was 



Mother, Home and Heaven 153 

rewarded by a Papal brief indirectly giving him approbation. All of this 
helped enormously with advance publicity on a summer circuit. 1 

A hard-pressed clergyman, whose frugal church board failed to pay 
him enough salary to live on, found fees from lectures very helpful Others 
labored for the extra money, just to give it away. Rugged, independent 
Frank Wakely Gunsaulus, like Russell Conwell with his profits from 
Acres of Diamonds, is an example of the orator who took to the platform, 
month after weary month, to support a particular charity. With financial 
help from Philip D. Armour of Chicago, Gunsaulus, before the turn of the 
century, founded the Armour Institute of Technology, became its presi- 
dent and all his life thereafter worked doggedly to help support it. Any 
night that this shaggy man walked with his slight limp out across the stage, 
there were sure to be hundreds of paid single admissions. 

Gunsaulus had started lecturing for the independent Chautauqua as- 
semblies. He switched to the tent circuits, at first unhappily, in order to 
reach a larger audience. Aside from his pulpit in Chicago's Central Church, 
his interest centered always in his Institute, where he claimed that ten per- 
cent of the students owed their presence in classes to the "Chautauqua in- 
fluence." His lectures, of which Gates of the Soul was among the best, were 
actually sermons. 

Gunsaulus possessed a rare sense of humor. He also was kindly enough 
to show neither boredom nor offense when an inept platform chairman 
tried to be funny at his expense. Unfortunately this happened often in 
Chautauqua. The head of a local committee was chosen, not because he 
had inherited "Josh" Billings' or Mark Twain's platform skill, but because 
he could be counted on to sell two thousand season tickets. Frequently 
he insisted that he be allowed to introduce the evening's headlines 

Once, at a Gunsaulus program in his native Ohio, a chairman who fancied 
himself a comedian, began his introduction with this: 

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a great Gun aimed at us tonight. A man 
built like Saul Who will now fire at Us. Dr. Gun-Saul-Us!" The distin- 
guished preacher, as he arose to speak, smiled wanly. 

An example of Gunsaulus* humor at his own expense is furnished by 
a story he used to tell, of his first pastorate in Columbus, Ohio. He was 
very young and success apparently had made him brash. To teach him how 
to be humble, a presiding elder sent him out to ride a circuit. Gunsaulus 
went reluctantly. His route took him to Circleville, Ohio, and there at a 
prayer meeting, he asked a stem-faced deacon to pray. 

The prayer, which Gunsaulus often quoted, was: 

"Almighty God, who does from Thy 
throne behold all dwellers of earth, 

1 Among other Roman Catholic clergymen in Redpath tents were Bishop John 
Henry Tihen of Nebraska, later the Bishop of Denver, and Canadian-born Bishop 
Francis Clement Keliey, founder of Extension Magazine. 



154 Culture Under Canvas 

make us to feel our littlenesses, 
and do, we pray, take away from us 
all pride and vanity. Inspire this 
young man of God, Thy delegate, with 
all the graces of Thy Kingdom. And 
if the Divine spark with which You 
have him endowed should grow dim, O 
Gracious God, water Thou that spark!'* 

Gunsaulus' heavily lined face was an actor's face. He seemed to gesticu- 
late not only with arms, eyes, eyebrows, but even with his heavy mustache. 
His enthusiasm bounced off the canvas walls. If he saw many young persons 
in the tent, he usually ended with Edmund Vance Cooke's lines: 

'The harder you're thrown, the higher you bounce, 
"Be proud of your blackened eye. 
"It isn't the fact that you're licked that counts, 
"But how did you fight, and why?" 

It was the chronic bad dream of every Chautauqua circuit superintendent 
out on the road that some day his talent would fail to arrive. The ex- 
pectant audience would assemble, wait, get restless, impatient, shuffle its 
feet. And no speaker. No one to take the lecturer's place. So finally no pro- 
gram. 

In 1912 this happened to a Lyceum manager who had scheduled Dr. 
Gunsaulus to speak. He was to be in the little town of Jeffersonville, Ohio, 
on April 24th, but as the date approached, he was ill. So he asked Ernest 
Wray Oneal to take his place. Oneal, pastor at the time of Chicago's First 
Methodfct Church, accepted, then absent-mindedly mislaid his note as to the 
date. It was the 25th, he thought. 

On the night of the 24th, lecture-loving Ohioans gathered in Jefferson- 
ville's hall, waited impatiently till 8:30, then went home, a little hot under 
their collars at both Dr. Gunsaulus and his substitute. The next day on the 
midafternoon train the genial Mr. Oneal arrived and to his chagrin learned 
that he was twenty-four hours late. What could he do, except apologize 
and go back to Chicago? 

The committee was gracious. They voted next day to invite Mr. Oneal 
to return in a week. He managed it this time and his own and Dr. Gun- 
saulus' reputation were saved. I never learned whether the substitute gave 
his fee to the Institute of Technology. Perhaps he had some pet charity 
of his own or his church needed a new carpet. 

There were many instances of generosity of fhe Gunsaulus and Conwell 
type. The lusty Jubilee Singers helped support Fisfc University at Nash- 
ville. Reformer Maude Balltngton Booth spent almost every penny she 
earned for over a quarter century to aid ex-convicts. Judge Lindsey shared 
his income with hapless boys. Sir Wilfred Grenfell, surgeon and great so- 
cial worker, lectured in the United States for the sole purpose of raising 
money for his schools and hospitals in Labrador and Newfoundland. 



Mother, Home and Heaven 



155 



Vilhjalmur Stefansson, booked chiefly in the west, and one of the highest- 
paid lecturers in the business, plowed back a heavy share of his profits 
into Arctic exploration. In 1921, the year his Friendly Arctic was pub- 
lished, he offered to work for Redpath-Chicago for one thousand dollars 
a week and expenses. 

Booker T. Washington, the story goes, once contributed a lone dime. 
This great Negro educator spoke on a program at Fairfield, Iowa, one 
summer afternoon in the early days, and in the evening he was sitting in 
the lobby of the town's little hotel with other talent, when a travelling 
man "drummer" was the word then bustled in with his baggage. See- 
ing Washington, he ordered, "You, George, go get me a pitcher of ice 
water! Quick!" 

"Yes, sir," Washington said without any other comment. 

Washington fetched a pitcher with ice and water from the wash room 
and picking up the newcomer's grips, followed him up the stairs. When he 
returned to the lobby, he said to the others, sitting aghast, waiting for 
him, "The gentleman gave me a tip. I took it, so as not to embarrass him." 
He held up a dune. "It's fine. Ten cents will help one of my boys toward 
an education." 




The Voice of the People 



14 



The career of William Jennings Bryan in Chautauqua probably never will 
be explained to the satisfaction of everyone. His popularity, which 
amounted to adoration in some quarters, is a phenomenon to be con- 
sidered thoughtfully by historians seeking to throw light on the social 
forces which moved the nation in the first two decades of this century. 

Theories by the dozen have been advanced, none in itself adequate, as 
to why, summer after summer, in heat, rain, wind or dust, immense crowds 
clogged the roads and nearly tore down the tents to listen to Bryan. 

During the whole life of circuit Chautauqua, Bryan was its greatest 
name, but curiously enough, not as a political orator. He chose to be an 
inspirationalist He set the mold for this type of speech and other speakers 
tried to fit their own words and personalities into it From that day, in 
Chicago in 1896, when as "the boy orator of the Platte" he stampeded the 
Democratic national convention, until shortly before his death in 1925, his 
golden voice earned his bread and butter and bewitched America's citizens. 

Bryan was a lawyer who rarely practised law, an editor who wrote only 
occasional editorials, a politician three times defeated for the Presidency, 
but an orator without peer so far in this century. He favored broad social 
legislation, low tariffs, woman suffrage, a federal income tax, popular 
election of United States Senators and free silver and he battled vigor- 
ously for them in political campaigns, but he practically never alluded to 
these earthy matters from a Chautauqua stage. He had bitter political ene- 
mies but he never mentioned them in Chautauqua. He never lashed out at 
them nor used his great summer audiences to pay back a politician in kind. 
He never changed the style of his clothes nor his outlook on life from young 
manhood to old age. He was not a deep thinker and he espoused causes 

156 



The Voice of the People 157 

many of which time has proved of doubtful value. But oh, how he could 
talk! An Iowa editor, after listening to him one summer afternoon, fled back 
to his desk and wrote: "Words flow from Bryan's lips like water over 
Niagara!" 

The speech with which Bryan bounced to fame and the Presidential 
nomination at the Democratic convention in 1896 was one of the most 
skillfully constructed oratorical springboards in political history. The sub- 
ject of bimetalism certainly was not in itself a cause to make men's hearts 
rise up. But he wove into his address both religious imagery and a revolu- 
tionary plea to the masses to cast off the shackles of party bossism and 
Wall Street domination and to join his crusade. With deft words and in- 
genious phrases, he aligned himself with the plain people and the plain 
people with God, armed them with justice and made himself their pro- 
tector. 

When Bryan declaimed, on that hot Chicago day, that his opponents 
should "not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns," should 
"not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold," he not only was indulging 
in superb oratory, he was calling God-fearing, hard-working masses to 
the fray. They recognized the challenge when he cried, "The humblest citi- 
zen of all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause is stronger 
than all the hosts of Error." He was a fairly young man and he was to 
speak day after day the remainder of his life. But no later oration was to 
equal The Cross of Gold, not even his Chautauqua masterpiece, The Prince 
of Peace. 

Bryan talked religion in politics; he talked it in Chautauqua. The only 
other subjects that he presented in both forums were prohibition and peace, 
and occasionally woman suffrage. He clearly was more interested in re- 
ligion than he was in government. In The Prince of Peace he declared 
bluntly, "The most important things in life lie outside the realm of gov- 
ernment." Later he added, "I commenced speaking on the stump when I 
was only twenty, but I commenced speaking in the church six years earlier 
and I shall be in the church even after I am out of politics." The remark 
was prophetic. His last public words were in a church. 

His detractors have claimed that even being Secretary of State was a 
side issue in his mind to his public lecturing. This is an exaggeration, un- 
doubtedly. But in 1912, while the newspapers were taking Presidential 
polls that listed Bryan again as a possible contender for the White House, 
he was elected president of the board of trustees of the little Winona Lake, 
Indiana, Chautauqua assembly. I happened to meet him that day. Un- 
doubtedly his political future interested him deeply, but he failed to mention 
it. His pleasure was over the Winona Lake appointment. 

Such a post was trivial for a man soon to be one of the nation's highest 
officials, but trivial things touching everyday life were important to him. 
Once at a railroad station in a small Michigan town, getting out of a horse- 



158 Culture Under Canvas 

drawn hack, he discovered that he had no money in his pocket. Turning to 
me, he asked to borrow a quarter. He paid off the hackie. We did not 
meet again until the next Chautauqua season. The minute he saw me ap- 
proach, his hand went to his pocket and his first words were, "Here's the 
quarter. Many thanks/' 

Even before the Cross of Gold speech, Bryan was appearing at the 
permanent Chautauqua assemblies. He had already represented Nebraska 
twice in Congress and, joining the silver bloc there, he had demonstrated 
his ability as an orator. A speech on tariff in that period is particularly well 
remembered. But back in Nebraska he had failed for the Senate, in the 
days when the legislature chose senators. So in 1894, while editing the 
Omaha World Herald, he began speaking here and there, often for no 
fee. The Slayton lecture bureau was handling him at the time Redpath 
bought it. 

When Vawter booked this Nebraska orator for the experimental 1904 
tour, Bryan was already the undisputed leader of the Democratic party, 
twice by then had been its candidate for President. The first time, in 1896, 
if he had gathered only 50,000 more votes, out of a total of more than 
thirteen and a half million ballots cast, and if these votes had been scat- 
tered in the right states, Bryan, not William McKinley, would have been 
President. 

Bryan travelled around the world in 1906. Crowds in Manila, Tokyo, 
Bombay, Cairo, Jerusalem, everywhere he appeared, demanded to hear 
The Prince of Peace. He returned home, probably weary with giving it, 
and in the course of time prepared a sheaf of other lectures: The Price of 
a Soul Brute or Brother, The Ideal Republic, The Making of a Man, A 
Conquering Nation. In content they might have belonged to any mother, 
home and heaven orator. The people listened to them, then asked again 
for The Prince of Peace. He delivered it in three thousand Chautauqua tents 
after 1904. ConwelTs Acres of Diamonds was heard by more audiences, 
twice as many by some estimates. But ConwelTs speaking career covered 
forty years and perhaps half of his appearances were in churches and 
schools, not on travelling tent circuits. 

All over the nation solid citizens put everything aside to hear The Prince 
of Peace on Chautauqua week's "Bryan Day." Did its content hypnotize 
them or was it the voice, big and easy and golden? They sat dead still in 
their seats as long as it sounded. If Bryan smiled, they smiled. If he frowned, 
they frowned. Babies could cry, trains roar by, thunder and rain shake 
the tent, but absorbed men and women still just sat and listened. The sooth- 
ing voice comforted them. This simple, kindly man spoke to their hearts, 
never over their heads. Like themselves, they knew he had experienced 
bitter disappointment; never poverty or hard labor as many of them had, 
but if Providence had so ordered, he would have endured these, too, they 
were convinced. If he had never shared their muddy struggles, he could 



The Voice of the People 159 

imagine them, and he did share with them their old-fashioned belief in 
God. Like these plain people of the broad, flat midlands, the far-west cattle 
ranges, the poor southern cotton fields, he had been scorned by the sophis- 
ticated east. Like these farmers and villagers who after years of weary 
effort were beginning to make their mass aspirations felt, he, too, had used 
his own sheer will power to become a driving force in America. 

If this great man spoke in choice words and golden accent, so much 
the better. The truths he proclaimed were only those the people themselves 
would have proclaimed, if they only had known how. He belonged to them; 
he knew it and they knew it. He was "the Great Commoner," a man with 
a mission. They thought of him not as a politician, not as a Democrat 
or Republican, not as a paid attraction they had just spent thirty-five or 
fifty cents to hear, but as the echo of their own inner voices refined to purest 
gold. So they sat, in sweating ecstasy. When the golden voice ceased, they 
swarmed down the aisles toward him. He shook their hands willingly. The 
fame he most wanted, it has often been said, was their adoration. 

There probably still are many million Americans who remember Bryan, 
a tall, bald man with bulging bay window, wearing an oversized alpaca 
coat, baggy black trousers, a soft white shirt with spreading collar and nar- 
row black bow tie, slowly waving his five-cent palm-leaf fan as he marched 
out with majesty across the Chautauqua stage. They remember the slow 
way he smiled, with crinkles in the corners of his kindly eyes, or if he 
mentioned injustice the way he angrily snapped shut his thin lips. 

There was nothing profound about The Prince of Peace. Most of its 
words were glorious, but its allusions were plain, about things close at 
hand, simple things that every man, woman and child could understand. 
Bryan started almost in a conversational tone but in a clear voice readily 
understood, not only in the far corners of the tent, but out in the fields 
beyond the rolled-up side walls. 

"I offer no apology for speaking on a religious theme," he usually be- 
gan, **for it is the most universal of all themes. I am interested in gov- 
ernment, as you know. While to me, the science of government is intensely 
absorbing, I realize that the most important things in life lie outside its 
realm, and that more depends on what the individual does for himself than 
on what government does, or can do, for him. Men can be miserable under 
the best government and happy under the worst government" 

So far, no eloquence. That would come later. In the beginning, he made 
himself one with the audience, as he addressed simple words, stating a 
simple faith, to simple people. His opening was a declaration of religious 
conviction. He was praising faith, not free enterprise, pointing out that 
religion can help, where government fails. 

"Can God perform miracles?" he asked, and then he provided a homely 
anecdote to prove that He could. 

He talked about a watermelon. He didn't need to translate the allusion 



160 Culture Under Canvai 

in order to make everyone understand. The people out in front knew 
about watermelons, firsthand. But this was a very special watermelon, one 
weighing forty pounds, and that was big, even for Indiana and Illinois. He 
had been eating this melon one day "several months ago" when he hap- 
pened to realize its exquisite beauty. 

, On the outside it was brilliant green. Under the green was a layer of pure 
white. And within that layer was the meat, a glorious red. And scattered 
through the red meat were hundreds of black seeds. The audience, listen- 
ing to this description of a familiar object, found themselves sharing with 
the great man his sense of beauty, his feeling of awe. He paused, thumb 
and forefinger lifted, to indicate the size of the watermelon seed. "So big,'' 
he said. "Plant it, and another great watermelon full of beauty and lus- 
cious flavor, will grow." 

One little seed, he repeated, would produce another great and gorgeous 
watermelon! How did that happen? Where did the seed get its reproductive 
power? Had the scientists in their laboratories, who were positive of sc 
many things, ever been able to explain the miracle of growth? Could they, 
who so often scorned God, create a watermelon, or even a single seed, 
without God's help? Who drew the plan for this magnificent example oi 
things outside the human range of accomplishment? Who was the Artist, 
the Master Craftsman, who could contrive anything as beautiful as thai 
forty-pound watermelon? 

"The scientists" were his whipping boys. He turned his scorn on doubters 
who insisted on a physical explanation for everything and challenged them 
to answer not only the Biblical stories of miracles, but of miracles en- 
countered at that very moment, in everyday life. The men of science 
had no answers, he told them. 

It was God who, touching "with divine power the cold and pulseless 
acorn," caused it to grow into a mighty oak. Could the scientists, so sure 
of themselves, accomplish that? Could they create an egg? What righl 
had they to doubt the miracle of Jesus Christ, sent from Heaven to re- 
deem mankind? 

So there he was, talking reverently about God and the mysteries of life, 
in language that everyone in every audience could understand. He wenl 
on to discuss self-sacrifice and thus approached the title of his speech 
The Prince of Peace. Christ had sacrificed, and only Christ could bring 
peace to troubled men. 

And if the watermelon seed typified the miracle of reproduction, another 
seed familiar to all, a grain of wheat, could illustrate mortality. 

The people listened and believed. There the mighty man stood, sweating 
even as the humblest of them sweat in Georgia or Illinois heat, common 
as the commonest laborer in the far back rows. He suffered from the 
weather just as they all suffered; unlike them, he always had a pitcher oi 
ice water at his hand and drank great draughts as his speech rolled on, 



The Voice of the People 161 

Sometimes, in August, there also was a tin basin with a chunk of ice. He 
would cool his hand against the chunk and then mop his sweating brow. 
And always he held on to his five-cent palm-leaf fan. 

Mrs. Bryan, describing the scene, once wrote: "When Mr. Bryan stood 
in the Chautauqua tent at night under the electric lights and the starlight, 
with practically every adult and most of the children from miles around 
within sound of his voice, he could forget the hardships and weariness of 
travel. His voice would grow deep and solemn, for he knew he was speak- 
ing to the heart of America." On one clear, still night, she added, when 
the sides of the tent were up, she understood him distinctly while she sat 
in a room three blocks away. 

In Value of an Ideal, antedating The Prince of Peace by several years, 
Bryan had used a radish instead of a watermelon as an example, and 
thereafter when he came to town women began bringing him gifts of 
bunches of radishes. He accepted them with pleasure. He liked radishes, 
particularly white ones. They were good for diabetes, he thought. He put 
them in his hip pocket and munched on them when he chose. Supplying a 
forty-pound watermelon the women would have found more difficult. 

Bryan was a middle-aged man when he gave his first lecture for Redpath- 
Chicago on the route north from Pulaski, Tennessee. From that day on, 
whenever he was scheduled, our superintendents knew that they had better 
get a little rest ahead of time in order to keep up with him. No one ever 
heard Bryan say that he was tired. Travel schedules might be long, hard, 
close; if there was a chance for an extra speech somewhere, he inserted 
it. He was unhappy, either in political campaigns or on lecture tours, unless 
he could expend to the full his enormous energy. 

Bryan's son, Attorney William Jennings Bryan, Jr., of Los Angeles, 
recently discovered in one of his father's notebooks a schedule showing 
eleven speeches in six days, in the heat of a summer from July 29 through 
August 3. Nine were in Ohio, two in Indiana. "I can do one at Peebles 
August 4," he wrote, "if I do not go to Baton Rouge"; then continued: 
"After September 18 I expect to go from Missouri west to Wyoming and 
Nevada, then to Miami. From October 4 to 18 I am attending WCTU con- 
ventions in Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, 
Connecticut, Maine and West Virginia, with other meetings in the east 
Will then give some more time to Ohio." 

In Chautauqua one season, not a campaign year, Bryan gave two lectures 
a day for a week and repeated it the next week, skipped two days and did 
another full week. If he spoke in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Monday night 
and his car next morning took him through the town of Brazil, on the way 
to Indianapolis, why not, he reasoned and no one ever argued with him 
pause in Brazil and look in for a minute on the morning lecture hour? 

There was no airplane to take a lecturer swiftly and comfortably from 
place to place and Bryan might not have used it if there had been. He 



162 Culture Under Canvas 

made the hops by day coach, by Model-T Ford or horse and buggy, and 
at least half a dozen times on my own circuits in a freight caboose. Only 
when the engagements were a full night apart would he use a Pullman car. 
Repeatedly, when trains were late or weather ripped a schedule to pieces, I 
have known him to combine train, car and buggy and arrive calm, still 
full of energy, in time for the opening. 

If, in spite of all his efforts Bryan did arrive late, his faithful audience 
knew that the fault was not his. They waited patiently till he got there. Hours 
sometimes. On his way to the program at Hampton, Iowa, one night, the 
engine on his train broke down at Mason City. 'Til be there pretty soon," 
he sent word to the waiting crowd. No one left. At 12.20 A.M. he arrived 
and started The Prince of Peace. Old hands liked to say that if he did miss 
a train and had to hire a buggy, he always asked the livery man which 
horse was fast enough to catch up with the train, and he wasn't being 
humorous. He intended to board it at its next stop. 

And no matter what happened on the road, Bryan never took offense. 
He was courteous, uncomplaining; his temper never short. If things went 
wrong, he pretended not to see or hear. At Attica, Indiana, one evening, 
I was standing in the lobby of the hotel talking to Prohibitionist Bryan 
and an admiring delegation from the W.C.T.U., when hilarity from the 
adjoining bar drowned out our words. 

The door was open. I saw Author Opie Read, the star attraction of 
our afternoon program, lounging with glass in hand, nonchalantly "telling 
the boys a story." Bryan saw him, too. Without question it was distasteful 
to him. Read was breaking a rule. Talent were not supposed to drink liquor 
on tour; in Bryan's opinion they should drink none anywhere. But he said 
nothing; instead, he moved just enough to cut off the view, so the ladies 
would not be shocked at the sight of their other lecture-hero, and the next 
morning, affable as ever, Bryan joined Read and me at breakfast. 

Entertainer Jess Pugh tells of a night in 1917 in Santa Fe, when he was 
working briefly for Homer as a platform manager, and because of a storm 
it was arranged for Bryan to speak in the Masonic Temple instead of the 
tent The makeshift stage was so high that to reach their places of honor on 
the platform the local committee, including an overweight state senator, had 
to step first on a tool chest. Pugh lowered the curtain on the stage and 
Bryan mounted first. The fat senator started up next, but his toe caught 
and he fell. Bryan grabbed him by a pants' leg. Surprisingly the man be- 
came angry and kicked, yelling, "Let go my leg." 

"I'm only trying to help," Bryan retorted. There was a scuffle, to the 
astonishment of the listening audience. When the curtain went up, Bryan's 
tie was untied but he was still smiling. 

The crew boys, in particular, admired Bryan, possibly because like 
themselves he nearly always was ready for food, in spite of the bologna 
he sometimes carried in his pocket. Possibly it was for this mundane rea- 



The Voice of the People 163 

son; more probably they liked him because he went back to their "pup tent" 
if he had a free minute, and talked to them. He knew every boy's life 
history after the first ten minutes and he remembered it the next time he 
saw the boy. When the big man needed sleep, he stretched out, just as the 
crew did, on a roll of extra canvas, though the boys knew well enough that 
if the next day's hop proved hard, "Old Dependable" to all appearances 
would stand it better than anybody else. Crews were critical. They might 
think some other lecturer too standoffish, pompous or demanding. To a 
man they cheered Bryan. 

We used the phrase "The Great Commoner" in our advertising but it 
did not arise in Chautauqua. The story is that after Bryan made Ms Cross 
of Gold speech in 1896, a railroad president was offering him the use of 
a private car for campaigning when a friend objected. "No, you can't use 
a private car, you're the Great Commoner." lie same philosophy influ- 
enced William Howard Taft in later years when, as a train stopped for him 
to alight, he walked forward from a rear Pullman car to a more plebeian 
coach. Two Bryan titles that actually did arise in Chautauqua, both of them 
affectionately, were the "Big Number" and the crew boys' <4 Old Depend- 
able." 

It is hard to imagine that the great Bryan, he of the silver tongue, ever 
suffered from stage fright, but members of his family and talent close to 
Trim confirm this. Like Madame Schumann-Heink, they say, he never 
stepped out on a platform without "butterflies in his stomach." He could 
not eat before speaking, a partial explanation for his prodigious appe- 
tite at other times. 

Talent, made self-conscious by Mr. Bryan's extreme temperance as to 
liquor and tobacco, found it hard to explain what they considered his in- 
temperance in food. Hilton Ira Jones, who traveled with the great man for 
three seasons, used to tell of arriving with him in Aberdeen, South Dakota. 
Relates Mr. Jones, "He walked up and down behind the tent before time 
for his speech, literally wringing his hands, so afraid he wouldn't 'get 
going.* Then as soon as it was over, he said, 'Let's go eat a bite now.' " 
The bite, in Mr. Bryan's case, was a planked steak, an inch and a half thick, 
covering the Sherman Hotel's largest platter, "enough for six men," which 
the shocked Mr. Jones sat and watched him consume without help. 

Bryan wanted the children to hear him free, if only outside the tent with 
the sides rolled up. He insisted that adult admissions be kept low, from 
twenty-five to fifty cents, and any reserved seats not more than one dollar. 
Although many managers, vieing for the war horse's dates, offered him a 
guaranteed minimum of $500 an appearance, he refused that kind of 
arrangement. He was paid on a sliding scale, dependent first on advance 
season tickets, and second on single admissions to his particular program 
which at times exceeded $1000. 

On Redpath circuits, Bryan's share of each season ticket, no matter 



164 Culture Under Canvas 

what its price, was ten cents. The average sale of such tickets was one thou- 
sand, so his average income from this source was $100 a day. In addition 
to this, he took the first $250 in single admissions for the program on 
which he appeared, and Redpath took the second $250. Beyond that, we 
split with him, hrJf and half. 

Thus Bryan was assured of approximately $100. If we sold anywhere 
from $250 to $500 worth of extra tickets at the gate, he made $250 more. 
But if a rainstorm threatened to wash out the tent and kept crowds away, 
he smilingly accepted whatever did come in. For instance, at Independ- 
ence, Iowa, on July 4, 1911, the weather was so foul that, even with 
Bryan on the platform, the gate receipts were only $116. He pocketed the 
sum, plus his original $100, and Redpath-Vawter took a thumping loss. 

At Chautauqua's height, "Bryan Day 9 * would bring five thousand per- 
sons into town, a sizeable audience before the era of loud-speakers, before 
automobiles were common, when crowds collected by slow train, horse 
and buggy or afoot. Amusement vendors of every kind naturally tried to 
profit by it. Souvenir sellers set up stands as close to the tent as they 
could. It was the little daughter of Lecturer Wallace Bruce Amsbary who, 
seeing Mr. Bryan climb off the morning Pullman car, clapped her hands 
and cried, "Oh, goody, goody, it's Bryan's Day," and when asked what was 
so good, she answered, "On Bryan Day the merry-go-round runs." 

Like all Chautauqua lecturers, Bryan shared his programs with other 
acts. In 1913, ^hen he was Secretary of State, he followed The Seven Swiss 
Girls, a team of yodelers and singers who practised their lively and some- 
what raucous art for thirty minutes before he began to talk. Republican 
congressmen complained bitterly that summer about his brief absence from 
Washington. They accused him of neglecting State Department business, 
when international relations were growing more complex. They charged 
that in order to catch a train for his Chautauqua opening date, he had cut 
an ambassador off short in an important discussion. 

A House committee heard Republican Jim Watson, himself a rafter- 
ringing orator who never turned down a chance to speak, demand that 
"There ought to be a law to stop him." "For one reason," the Hoosier added, 
"because he goes about abusing people who make money." 

In Great Britain the press took an unhappy view of the whole business 
and one journal, the Saturday Review, after eyeing the American scene 
and particularly the Secretary of State through its critical lorgnette, called 
attention to the fact that several British soldiers had been disciplined that 
week for working as extras in a motion picture for pay, whereas in America 
a "cabinet minister" appeared with The Seven Swiss Girls "unchided and 
unabashed." It concluded: "In England a private in our forces is expected 
to be more discreet." 

Bryan was forced finally to answer the criticisms, remarking first, "I re- 



The Voice of the People 165 

gard lecturing as an entirely legitimate field,'* and later, "I need the money. 
I cannot live on my salary of $12,000 a year." As lat^ as 1924 he felt 
compelled to refer to the Swiss Girls episode, saying, "President Wilson 
approved of my Chautauqua work, which, by the way, occupied fifteen days 
in the two years. I lectured at Chautauqua before I was nominated for 
President and after. President Taft lectured at Chautauqua after he was 
elected; Vice-President Marshall and Speaker Clark while they were in 
office. Nobody criticized them." 

Bryan resigned from Woodrow Wilson's cabinet on June 7, 1915, ex- 
actly one month after German U-boats had sunk the British liner Lusitania 
with the loss of 1108 lives, 124 of them American. Wilson had been writing 
notes to the belligerents notes which Bryan signed warning them not to 
interfere with American ships or passengers. 

Pacifist Bryan objected to the notes. He called them too bellicose, in- 
sisted that they might lead to war. When the German ambassador, Count 
von Bernsdorff, warned Americans to stay off vessels in the war zone or 
suffer the consequences, Bryan believed that they should stay off. 

The Lusitania sinking shocked America. Germany charged that the ship 
was armed, which it was not, that it carried ammunition, which it did. 
Headlines and flaming editorials denied both charges. The nation bristled 
with patriotic indignation. Wilson wrote and Bryan, under protest, signed, 
another note. Dissatisfied with the reply, Wilson wrote again, in firmer lan- 
guage, to the Imperial German Government This time Bryan refused to 
sign. He would not be a party to anything that might involve America in 
the war. Wilson argued with him and he resigned. 

"I have to take the course I have chosen," he told fellow cabinet mem- 
bers at a final meeting. "The President has one view, I have a different 
one. I can do more on the outside to prevent war ... I go out into the 
dark. . . ." 

He went not to the "dark," but to the bright footlights of the lecture plat- 
form with a speech entitled The Causeless War. Ridiculed by leaders of 
both parties, lampooned by cartoonists, villified by the press, he stood 
firmly on his own feet and faced hostile, patriotic crowds day after day, 
nig;ht after night. His private feud with doubting scientists and liberal in- 
terpreters of the Bible forgotten, he turned his back on the screaming 
American Eagle and embraced the Dove of Peace. Not only pacifists flocked 
to hear him, but "hyphenates," as Americans of German extraction and 
sympathy were called* 

Bryan's immediate target was increased military and naval appropria- 
tions. Crowds still bulged the tents and auditoriums, but many listeners 
were troubled. A cartoon by Rollin Kirby in the New York World had 
been reprinted all over the nation. It showed Bryan oa a platform, with 
the audience fleeing, except for Kaiser Wilhelm in battle helmet, applaud- 



166 Culture Under Canvas 

ing from a front seat. Even in Iowa, the stout heart of Chautauqua, the 
Des Moines Register and Leader called the Lusitania sinking "deliberate 
murder" and demanded that the United States take "immediate action." 
Bryan and the nation knew that "action" should read "war." 

On July Fourth in San Francisco, Bryan faced a crowd of 100,000 with 
his plea for peace. In August he spent three weeks on various Chautauqua 
circuits; sixteen of the speeches were for Horner in Nebraska. Then, as the 
imminence of war temporarily declined, he halted his peace campaign long 
enough to make sixty speeches in forty Ohio counties in a single week, 
plugging for prohibition. 

In 1916, Bryan heard delegates at the St. Louis Democratic convention 
chant his name, demanding that he lead them. He remained silent; he was 
a good party man and that summer, too, his Chautauqua receipts were 
thin while he stumped for Wilson's re-election. In fact, at no time did a 
Presidential convention fail to take precedence over any lecture date. He 
liked to tell that in 1876, when he was twelve years old, he sold enough of 
his father's corn to get railroad fare and expenses to attend the Democratic 
convention in St. Louis, ". . . my initiation into national politics." The 
next one, because he was in school, was the only other convention he ever 
missed. 

So again in 1920 Bryan cancelled his dates with Redpath. In early June, 
at the Republican convention in Chicago, he sat at the press table, a big, 
bulky, aging figure among younger men, reporting for a press syndicate 
the nomination of another Chautauquan, Warren Harding. Later in (he 
month at the "wet" convention in San Francisco, after his planks for (he 
Democratic platform were defeated decisively, he was disturbed; but, not 
showing it, he took to the road at once on a stiff three-weeks schedule for 
the Ellison-White circuit in the west. 

Curiously enough, in the light of his later battle over fundamentalism, 
he never made a speech in Chautauqua dealing exclusively with the sub- 
ject. References to Darwinism, to scientists with no faith, appeared time 
and again, but only lightly, usually with more scorn than positive argu- 
ment. In The Prince of Peace he had said, "I do not accept the Darwinian 
theory but I shall not quarrel with you about it," adding in explanation, "All 
I mean to say is, that while you may trace your ancestry back to the monkey, 
if you find pleasure in doing so, you shall not connect me with your family 
tree without more evidence than has yet been produced." He had drafted 
state legislation forbidding the teaching of evolution in the public schools, 
but only toward the end of his career was he stabbing at the subject on the 
platform, in passages (hat he included in 1921 in a full length book, The 
Menace of Darwinism. 

Bryan delivered his last Chautauqua lecture in 1924. The next year 
came his fateful joust with Clarence Darrow. 

Bryan was an old man when he went north from Florida, where he had 



The Voice of the People 167 

taken up residence, to defend religious fundamentalism in the little court- 
house at Dayton, Tennessee. 

Tennessee's wool-hat legislature, in March, 1925, had passed a law 
making it a crime for any instructor in a university or public school to 
teach "that man has descended from the lower order of animals/* John 
Thomas Scopes taught biology in the Dayton high school. Urged on by 
half a dozen "free-thinking" friends, he decided to test the law. He did, and 
was promptly arrested. 

An enterprising Knoxville correspondent put the story on the press wire 
and the nation came to fascinated attention. The American Civil Liberties 
Union took up the challenge and brilliant, agnostic, liberal lawyer Clarence 
Diirrow of Chicago was employed to defend the country schoolteacher. 

"A man with an old face, always old," Poet Edgar Lee Masters had said 
of Darrow. "I make it a rule to expect the worst," Darrow once had said 
of himself. 

Bryan, thrice candidate for President, the greatest orator of his era, 
went into the Tennessee hills, not to defend fundamentalism in itself, but 
the right of a state to be fundamentalist, if it so wished. The legal battle 
was unequal. Bryan was sixty-five and had not practised law for yeaxs. 
Darrow, three years older, came from a series of courtroom victories. Re- 
cently he had kept the two young Chicago "thrill-killers," Leopold and 
Loeb, from the electric chair* Champion of lost causes and lost souls, he 
had been the defender in the courtroom of Radical Big Bill Haywood. As 
attorney for the McNamara brothers, indicted for the dynamiting of the 
Los Angeles Times building, he, together with Lincoln Steffens, persuaded 
the brothers to change their plea from "not guilty" to "guilty" on the 
understanding that they would escape a capital sentence. One brother got 
a life sentence, the other fifteen years. 

The paths of Bryan and Darrow often had crossed. They had differed 
but sometimes they had agreed. On many a moral issue they could see 
eye to eye. Darrow it was who said, "The truth is, no man is white and no 
man is black. We all are freckled." Bryan might have said that. 

The Scopes trial rose to a crescendo. Darrow, witty, sharp, merciless, 
mocked Bryan's fundamentalism. Reporters wrote millions of words and 
those Americans who were too young to have heard The Cross of Gold, 
read what Bryan was maneuvered into saying and thought him out of his 
mind. But Evangelist Amie Semple McPherson at her Four Square Gospel 
Shrine in Los Angeles, without Bryan's knowledge, offered public prayers 
for his success. So did the Reverend Billy Sunday, Bryan's fellow worker 
at Winona Lake Assembly. 

The judge, taking the matter out of the jury's hands, found Scopes guilty 
and fined him one hundred dollars; the defendant* s case was being pre- 
pared for an appeal to the state supreme court 

HI and bewildered, Bryan was not satisfied. He had won the verdict. 



168 Culture Under Canvas 

But it was not a victory. Before the trial ended, he had prepared a new 
speech, which concluded with the line, "Faith of our Fathers, Living Still." 
A court ruling prevented him from delivering it, and he had said: 

"I will take it to the people on the road." Of course, he meant the Chau- 
tauqua road. But he did not. His last public utterance was a prayer, next 
day, at church services in Dayton and his last trip on the road was in a 
funeral coach back to Washington, D.C., in a dramatic journey reminiscent 
of Lincoln's last journey back to Springfield. 

It has been said that Bryan was a mere shell of his old self by the time 
he reached Tennessee, that Chautauqua had drained him, that adulation 
from a noncritical audience had sapped his intellect, that he was happier in 
Chautauqua tents than in Washington because he wanted to escape reality. 
Who knows? 

"Eloquence," he said once in a speech, "is heart speaking to heart." If 
that is its definition, he had demonstrated it on the Chautauqua circuits. 
The ingredients of his success there had been simplicity, the devout re- 
ligious turn of his thinking, a oneness with his audience, his championship 
of the toilers, the sweating masses, the little people, the poor, the exploited 
these plus the Voice, the clear, flowing, golden quality of his voice that 
Mrs. Bryan, after his death, said she missed more than anything else. 

Bryan was aware of the strength of that voice. He knew that he pos- 
sessed the power, whenever he chose, to stampede an audience. I heard 
once on the circuits a story that Mrs. Bryan related later in their joint 
Memoirs, a book which he began and she completed. It was to the effect 
that in 1887, when he was twenty-seven years old, he had spoken at a 
political meeting in western Nebraska and, arriving home at daybreak, he 
came into her room and wakened her and told her uneasily: 

"I have had a strange experience. Last night I found I had power over 
an audience. I could move them as I chose. I have more than usual power. 
God grant that I may use it wisely." 



It Takes All Kinds 



15 



As I look back across the long list of lecturers and entertainers, brilliant 
preachers, dedicated reformers, intrepid travellers, lame ducks, cranks, 
self-seekers, artists and first-class actors who hopped onto the Chau- 
tauqua band wagon, I can think of no one who gave the people more for 
their money than big, stogie-smoking, six-feet-four-inches-tall Opie Read. 

The audience loved Read for his casual, lazy air, his humor, Ms homey 
philosophy, the charm of his manner, his shabby, baggy-pants simplicity. 
To begin with, he was a "personality ," the famous author of several books, 
out of the public mind now, but in demand when Chautauqua flourished. 
His novel, The Juckhns, had led the bestseller list back in 1895, ranking 
even Stephen Crane's The Red Badge oi Courage. Old Lim Lucklin fol- 
lowed ten years later, and on the platform Read told his own stories about 
that fictional philosopher. In 1902 his novel Starbucks had appeared. When 
I ventured out in 1912 with the gay Anita Company "pre4udiBg" Read, 
a pioneer Hollywood film company had just made a movie out of Star- 
bucks, with Read himself playing the part of Jasper. 

The Hollywood publicity added mightily to Read's prestige* Here was 
an honest-to-goodness movie actor on a lecture platform and he drew heavy 
single admissions. He had been born in Nashville, Tennessee, of Scotch- 
English descent his father's aunt was Mrs. Benjamin Franklin so in 
the south we billed him as "a true southern type," in the north as "Ameri- 
ca's favorite author/' The name Opfe intrigued many copy writers. It ac- 
tually came from a distant ancestor, John Opie, the painter at the Court 
of George n, who when the King asked him, "With what do you mix 
your paints?" answered, "Sire, with brains," For that John Opie was 
knighted. 

169 



170 Culture Under Canvas 

One reason the plain people liked Opie Read was that no one ever was 
plainer than Opie himself. He was home folks personified. When he walked 
down a half-empty street in run-over shoes, stogie in hand, wrinkled coat 
over an arm, an old cap on his head, he reminded town after town of 
its own country editor, who as a rule was a shabby iconoclast with a heart 
of gold, able to speak with authority on everything from Elizabethan prose 
to the condition of the local jail, everything from the Darwinian theory to 
what that gang of highbinders was doing at the moment in Washington. 

Fresh from college, Read went to work for Dana of the New York Sun 
for the fabulous, for those days, wage of fifty dollars a week. He started 
with Redpath at the same fee; at the end he was drawing five hundred a 
week. He was on the lists of Central Lyceum Bureau in 1892 when I 
entered high school in Anita, Iowa. He still was climbing off local trains 
when the last Redpath Chautauqua tent went to the warehouse to stay. His 
forty years on the platform gave him a supreme nonchalance and the fact 
that he attacked important problems obliquely, lending humor even to 
serious subjects, endeared him to people who liked to laugh. 

Small boys, admiring the baseball bats in a store window, might sud- 
denly discover, the day after the Chautauqua folks left town, that a big, 
easy-going stranger, they never were sure of his name, had bought them a 
whole bunch of wonderful new bats. Naturally some performers picked 
him for an easy mark. "I never forget when / borrow," he would tell his 
friends, "but I never can remember who borrows from me." 

In spite of hidden generosities, there was one field, however, where Read 
never tossed dollars or dimes over his shoulder, and that was clothes. His 
home was in Chicago in later years and between Chautauqua and Lyceum 
seasons one could find him taking solid ease at the Press Club, glass in 
hand, in the same shabby attire, often the same suit, that he had worn all 
the previous season in the day coaches and on the platform, and probably 
would wear all next season again. He thought luggage a bother and year 
after year he managed to get along with very little or none at all. His 
pockets were large enough to carry his razor and shaving soap, and a man 
of frugal bent could wash out his underwear and socks in the basin of 
his hotel room, There remained the matter of his shirt. 

Stories of Read's shirts took the same earmarks of folklore as those 
about the crowds on "Bryan Day." In that era a good nifty white shirt could 
be bought for fifty cents and celluloid collar and cuffs lasted almost for- 
ever. So when Read had worn one shirt to the point of exhaustion, he simply 
bought a new one. The story goes that in one South Dakota town, arriving 
at noon for an afternoon performance, he looked at himself in a window 
on his walk from the station, and as a result he bought a new shirt, sought 
out a hotel and asked the clerk for a room, for five minutes, in which to 
change. Five minutes later he had dropped the soiled garment in a waste 
basket and, wearing the new, he went back to the desk with the room key. 



// Takes All Kinds . . . 171 

Jingling a handful of coins, he asked how much he owed, half expecting 
to be told he owed nothing. 

"One dollar/* the clerk said without batting an eye. Opie batted his. 
He demanded to know the price again. "One dollar," the clerk repeated. 

Opie slowly counted out the amount in nickels and dimes. "Thank God 
I didn't change my underwear, too," he said. 

Science lecturer Hilton Ira Jones, who travelled frequently with Read, 
reported that the author carried a little black book with his Chautauqua 
dates in it, and one day Jones, looking over his shoulder, read the letters 
"CS" opposite certain dates. 

"What does 'CS' mean?" Jones asked. 

Read answered, "Oh, my wife's fussy. 'CS' means 'clean shirt.* She's re- 
minding me those are the days to put one on." 

Even so, Read often forgot, and now and again an embarrassed super- 
intendent, conscious of the niceties of life, might feel the need of men- 
tioning it to him. Sam Blackwood, managing the Redpath show once at 
Battle Creek, Michigan, felt so compelled one day and began, reluctantly, 
"Mr. Read, your ... ah ... shirt . . ." 

"What's the matter with it?" Read demanded, unabashed. 

"Well, it's just plain dirty," Blackwood said. 

Read looked down his expansive front. "It's all right," he said. "I come 
clean from Chicago." 

If laundry was never a serious problem to Read, it was to most talent. 
Once a bundle got behind, it never caught up. William Weatherwax, of the 
Weatherwax Quartet, tells how his brothers and he, finding them- 
selves with spare time once in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, rushed their 
stiff-bosomed dress shirts to a laundry, after a promise of one^day de- 
livery. But the shirts were not ready at departure time. Next season the 
quartet registered at the same hotel in Wilkes-Barre. Looking at the 
famous Weatherwax name, the clerk turned to the rack and pulled out a 
dusty bundle. It was the shirts, waiting a year. 

In the Chautauqua tents Read's most popular lecture probably was his 
Human Nature and Politics. We could book him anywhere in the United 
States and be sure of a warm welcome except in Arkansas* He had edited 
a newspaper in that state as a younger man, later a humorous weekly called 
the Arkansas Traveler. Arkansas did not object to the Traveler, but it 
believed that Read also was the wicked author of A Slow Train Through 
Arkansas, a "comic" book with a wide sale in cigar stores, full of earthy 
humor not at all complimentary toward the "Wonder State." The book 
was signed by Sam T. Jackson but that made no difference to the people 
of Arkansas. They blamed it on Opie Read. Read lived to be eighty-six. 
When he died, his old travelling companion, the Reverend Preston Bradley 
of Chicago, respecting Opie's jocular attitude when dealing with serious 
subjects, preached a humorous funeral sermon. 



72 Culture Under Canvas 

We billed Read as a "lecturer." If one left the mother, home and heaven- 
rs in a class by themselves, only a narrow, sometimes imperceptible, line 
sparated the "lecturer" from the "entertainer." 

John T. McCutcheon, brother of Novelist George Barr McCutcheon and 
iend of George Ade and Booth Tarkington, had been sharing his genial 
umor with Chautauqua audiences since the days of the Slayton Bureau. 
lis amusing cartoons on the foibles of bespectacled, loquacious "Congress- 
man Pumphrey, the People's Friend," laying down the law in ankle-length 
oat and jack boots, had come out in book form, and in 1912 he used it as 
rogram material. He chose, as usual, to be a "lecturer," although George 
!. Colby, then of Victor Lawson's Chicago Dally News, was booked as 

cartoonist* I always had a suspicion that the humorist thought the word 
lecturer" was more dignified. After all, the humorous clan once had been 
elegated to the razzle-dazzle "opera house," while the lecturer was hon- 
ied in the formal auditorium. 

Cartoonist Colby for a long period was our staff artist in Chicago. It 
/as he who drew the "inspiring" cartoons that the alert publicity department 
[ooded out to country editors in Chautauqua towns as the season ap- 
proached. His stalwart "Redpath sower" dropped precious seeds across the 
and, to sprout miraculously into haystacks of "charity," "high ideals," 
morality," "patriotism," "civic consciousness," "honesty." 

On the platform Colby was a lively entertainer. In one program, entitled 
Curiosity Shop, he would ask "the prettiest girl in town" to come up to 
he stage and have her picture drawn. When none was so bold, he invited 
the handsomest man." A man did pose always, undoubtedly by pre- 
irrangement, and Colby drew him carefully, but when he whisked the 
ketch upside down, it was a picture of a beautiful young lady. This stunt 
>f drawing upside down was old but always popular; back in 1904 in Iowa 
7 alls, Ash Davis had brought down the house with his similar portrayal 
>f The Statue of Liberty. Even the great Richard F. Outcault, unsuspecting 
>arent of the modern comic strip, who appeared with Buster Brown and 
fige and the Yellow Kid in the early 1900's for $200 a night, now and 
igain had used the same device. 

Tall, lanky Alton Packard was our top cartoonist The less elegant 
rord "chalk-talker" had long since gone into the dust pan. Packard had 
oined the parent Redpath bureau in 1895, and he, too, stayed with it the 
est of his busy life, a good cartoonist because he was primarily a humorist, 
t was Packard who spotted the brewery near Jamestown, on Lake Chan- 
auqua, New York, with its sign, "Drink Chautauqua Beer." Alert for simi- 
ar travesties, he discovered the "Redpath Saloon" in Chicago. He was so 
K>pular that some seasons, in 1915 for instance, on Redpath-Ohio, ninety 
>ercent of his towns were "repeats," a few of them for the fifth or sixth 
ime. 

For sketching, Packard used a board eight feet square that the most 



It Takes All Kind* > . . 173 

nearsighted fellow in the farthest corner of the tent could see. On it he 
swiftly created Funny People, one of whom might turn out to be the red- 
headed village drayman who had hauled his trunk that morning or the 
pompous local banker, so lifelike that everyone in the crowd could recog- 
nize him and laugh Or, with the world approaching the First War, he 
might close with a discomfited little Mars, impaled on the point of an over- 
sized pen, with the words hopefully chalked, "The pen is really mightier 
than the sword." Or if it were Sunday, he might give his conception of Jonah 
in the whale, Noah on the ark. He had many imitators. One ambidextrous 
fellow from Illinois went out for a small company one summer claiming 
in his advertisement that he could "draw with both hands." 

Lorado Taft, sculptor on the staff of the Chicago Art Institute, presented 
a lecture on art over all Redpath circuits intermittently for twenty-five 
years. Not a "popular" performer in any sense, he attracted consistently 
good crowds. By 1925, at the peak of his career, when his statue of Black- 
hawk was standing at Oregon, Illinois, and his Columbus Memorial Foun- 
tain in Washington, D.C, we were paying him $250 an engagement, which 
was above average for that type of program. Taft carried half a ton of 
paraphernalia and with the help of one assistant, demonstrated the "how" 
of sculpturing, first on paper on his easel, then with a chunk of damp 
clay. Asked once why he abandoned the comfort of his studio for the 
exertion of the hot tents, Taft is quoted as saying, "Ah, but in the hinter- 
lands I might discover a great sculptor." Musicians on the circuits had simi- 
lar hopes, and sometimes realized them. 

Another craftsman laden with heavy luggage, not of the Taft calibre 
but a strong box-office attraction, was L Smith Damron. In a muddy apron, 
Damron brought his potter's wheel and clay to the stage in a "demonstrated 
lecture" of moralistic tone, called The Potter and the Clay. Ross (short 
for Charles Edgar Rosecrans) Crane, who later travelled with a successful 
lecture on house decoration, also started out as a humorist and cartoonist 
We supplied for Crane's act a piano, a kitchen table, an easel, crayons, 
day and strong lights on the stage, and wi