The Chautauqua Institute began as an adult summer-education program located at a campsite on Lake Chautauqua in western New York State. It was started in 1869 by Methodist Episcopal bishop John H. Vincent (1832-1920) and Lewis Miller, a businessman from Akron, Ohio. The Institute’s founders initially designed it for Sunday-school superintendents and teachers who wanted to improve their programs, but they soon broadened its goals.
The Chautauqua Institute reflected the American faith in popular education and the belief that a democratic republic needed citizens who could join in private organizations for mutual improvement. The origins of the Chautauqua Institute can be found in the early 19th-century lyceums, which sponsored lectures, debates, and concerts and which bridged the gap between a community’s tiny number of college graduates and the vast majority of literate adults with a common-school education.
As the lyceum movement waned after the Civil War, the Chautauqua leaders adopted its approach and began to offer secular programs in art, music, literature, science, and social issues to summer vacationers who wanted to combine physical relaxation with mental stimulation. Speakers at Protestant churches encouraged attendance by families as well as single persons at the institute, where the joys of healthy, clean, rural living would be combined with the virtues of listening to great speakers address the issues of the day. Between lectures concerning such topics as the tariff, women’s voting rights, or the implications of Darwinian thought on American society, participants enjoyed bountiful meals, boating, swimming, and church services. Easily accessible by rail, Chautauqua was visited by comfortably wealthy, intellectually active Americans.
In 1878, under the leadership of William R. Harper, a Yale University Hebrew scholar who later became president of the University of Chicago, Chautauqua developed a year-round home-reading program that also promoted its summer program. Between 1880 and 1900 Chautauqua participants (both home study and summer) increased as the number of well-to-do educated Americans with leisure time increased. During the first quarter of the 20th century, traveling Chautauqua programs (including drama
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And popular music) appeared throughout the country and appealed to educated Americans of all ethnic and religious backgrounds. By 1930, however, with the coming of radio and the movies and the spread of high schools throughout the country, summer attendance and homereading enrollment in Chautauqua programs drastically declined.
Further reading: Ann Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Lawrence Cremin, A History of Education in American Culture (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1953); Joseph Edward Sould, The Chautaugua Movement: An Episode in the Contemp-ing American Location (New York: State University of New York, 1961).
—Harry Stein
Chicago Fire (1871) See cities and urban life.
Chicago World's Fair (1893) See World’s Columbian Exposition.
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