Chautauqua

“Chautauqua is the most American thing in America.” Theodore Roosevelt

Riis photo

For more than a half century beginning in the 1870s Chautauqua summer programs brought culture, information, and entertainment to millions. Founded on the shore of Lake Chautauqua in southwestern New York, Chautauqua began as a Methodist camp dedicated to training Sunday School teachers, yet almost from the beginning prided itself on being nondenominational. A successor to the Lyceum Movement that stressed adult education as essential to democracy, Chautauqua lectures were not only religious but reformist, motivational, informational, and instructive.  In July of 1891, for example, urban progressive Jacob A. Riis, author of the 1890 expose of New York City tenement house conditions, “How the Other Half Lives,” spoke on “The Children of the Poor.”  Other celebrities at Chautauqua that summer were Social Darwinist philosopher John Fiske, the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, and the feminist Julia Ward Howe.  Riis returned to Chautauqua often, as did other distinguished personages at the turn of the century.  Other communities emulated the Chautauqua example.

brochures from 1906 and 1920

In 1904 the movement expanded with the beginnings of “Tent Chautauqua.”  Enterprising booking agents put together a Chautauqua Circuit, providing local communities with an impressive lineup of speakers.  Within a decade over 10,000 communities hosted programs ranging from a few days to weeks. In addition to Jacob Riis, the financial rewards attracted such popular speakers as Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette, and Frances Willard.  Free thinker Robert Ingersoll could speak knowledgeably about topics as varied as William Shakespeare, Postwar Reconstruction, and Agnosticism. Baptist preacher Russell Conwell was in such demand for his “Acres of Diamonds” oration that the founder of Temple University ultimately gave the speech over 6,000 times, all over the world.

left, Russell Conwell; below, Robert Ingersoll

By the 1920s lecturers began to share equal billing with entertainers, as singers, magicians, yodelers, and theatrical groups joined the traveling caravans.  In 1925, for instance, a cast performing Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” began an extended tour in Abbeville, Louisiana, that concluded in Sidney, Montana. By this time, vaudeville tours were the rage, held in movie emporiums sprouting up all over the country.  The days of the Chautauqua Circuit were numbered; summer programs near Lake Chautauqua, however, still attract tens of thousands of registrants each year.

 

Kevin Nevers found this nugget for Chesterton Tribune’s “Echoes of the Past” column:

    100 Years Ago, the Red Grenadiers Bank band and male chorus, great lectures on timely topics: these are the notable attractions which will appear here on the 1920 Redpath Chautauqua.  The entire program is replete with features of compelling interest and timeliness.  Featured guests will include Dr. George Park, who will lecture on “The Man of the New Age;” Earl H. Hipple, “Wizard of the Xylophone<” and Judge Manford Schoonover, who will give his great lecture, “Unseen Forces.”

 

IU Northwest’s summer adult education series, Senior College, was cancelled due to the pandemic.  I was scheduled to speak on the state of Rock and Roll music in 1960.  I’d given the talk to Munster seniors and was looking forward to interacting with students, including jazz pianist Billy Foster.  I’m on the Munster Center for the Arts schedule for next year that may or may not go forward, given the current uncertainty. Topic: the underrated early 1960s in popular music: from Chubby Checker to the Beatles: surf sounds, soul music, and the girl groups.  And more.

This month Ron Cohen was to have spoken to the Merrillville History Book Club on Glenn Frankel’s “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic.” On the surface a traditional western starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, shot on a shoestring budget in less than five weeks, “High Noon” won four Oscars in 1953 and achieved box office success.  Debuting at the height of the Red Scare, the film celebrated moral courage and loyalty. Screenwriter Carl Foreman had increasingly regarded the script as an allegory for the Hollywood witch hunt taking place as he wrote.  Hauled before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the midst of the production, Foreman, a Communist Party member in the 1930s, refused to name names of fellow members and was blacklisted as a result.  He subsequently co-authored “The Bridge on the River Kwai” screenplay, uncredited.

 

After sending federal troops in marked uniforms to Portland, allegedly to protect federal property in defiance of the Mayor and Oregon’s governor, which escalated the confrontation (moms and the Mayor himself have been tear-gassed, Now Trump is sending others (purportedly from ICE, Homeland Security, AFT, Border Petrol, and other agencies) wants to send other units to Chicago and Albuquerque, again not invited and over threats of legal action, in order to fight combat gun violence.  Ray Smock wrote:

    12,000 Chicago Police Officers do not need help from 3 or 4 hundred members of Trump's Goon Squad, assembled to cause disruptions in major cities with Democratic mayors. This is what fascism looks like. Don't pretend this is normal. State and local officials have not asked for federal help. If Trump wants the pandemic to be run by the states, why does he feel it takes federal officers in battle gear to handle mostly peaceful protests?

    Trump has enablers in some cities that will help him make this seem legitimate. It's ironic that the state's rights Republicans are willing to tolerate federal incursions into state authority. They will only argue it is unconstitutional when Democrats do the same to Republican strongholds.

Chesterton High School was all set to have an outdoor graduation when one of Becca’s classmates who’d been with several others recently tested positive for Covid-19.  School officials cancelled the ceremony and substituted a parade of cars procession for the immediate family only.

Temple Israel

“Happiness is the only goal, justice the only worship, truth the only torch, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.” Robert Ingersoll

Nicknamed “The Great Agnostic,” nineteenth century lawyer and orator Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899) lectured on everything from political issues of the day to the plays of William Shakespeare.  In “The Great Infidels” Ingersoll poked fun at the Christian concept of Hell, declaring: “All the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable, grew, blossomed and bore fruit in this one word – Hell.”

 Cullen Ben-Daniel harvesting tomatoes

At Temple Israel Cullen Ben-Daniel traced the history of Gary’s Jewish community.  The first Temple, a temporary wooden structure, dates from 1908.  Before that, according to legend, early Jewish settlers held services in a hayloft.  Temple Beth El was built four years later.  Temple Israel is celebrating its 104th year.  Orthodox Jews attended Beth El, while Temple Israel was home to a Reformed congregation.  Evelyn Shaevel wrote:

  My grandfather, Aaron Bornstein, moved to Gary in 1908 and established a wholesale fruit company located at 16th and Broadway. He was one of the men who established Temple Beth El. He was killed January 26, 1929 when his car stalled on railroad tracks.

back row, fifth from right, Rabbi Carl Miller (1906-1984)

Phil and Dave went to pre-school at Temple Israel 40 years ago.  One day Dave told us he met God.  It was actually the Rabbi.  We’ve gone to several Bar and Bat Mitzvahs there, as well as Sunday breakfasts when there’d be speakers.  I heard pacifist David Dellinger, one of the “Chicago Conspiracy 8,” speak there.  When Ron Cohen and my “Gary: A Pictorial History” came out, we were on the program. In January the place will be jumping on Trivia Night.

 Trivia Night hosts with Mayor Freeman-Wilson

Around 1973 I interviewed Rabbi Garry Joel August at Ambassador Arms Apartments on Gary’s near West Side.  A cultured man who was the first president of the Gary Symphony, August served Temple Israel for 25 years, beginning in 1926.  In 1929, after 23 year-old Arthur Shumway poked fun at Gary’s absence of culture except in the immigrant neighborhoods, August replied that Gary might be roughhewn like other young cities but not backward.  In fact, he concluded, “Gary is America.  Every American city is Gary writ large or small.”  At his retirement banquet he stated: “My congregation had a heart that was warm, a loyalty that was always intense, an imagination that was always alive, and love that was always profound.”  In “Gary’s First Hundred Years” I wrote:

  Reverend Thomas S. Pierce described his oratorical ability as like that off a magnificent actor, with perfect elocution and a deep resonant voice.  In 1932, debating the merits of Prohibition with Frederick W. Backemeyer, he delighted the audience and infuriated the abstemious Presbyterian pastor by predicting that when his [Backemeyer’s] boys grew up, they’d be drinking beer.

“Indiana’s 200” contains an essay on Rabbi Morris Feuerlicht of Indianapolis, the first Jew to serve on the State Board of Charities and a vocal opponent of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s when that hate group dominated Indiana politics.  Feuerlicht had a healthy respect for agnostics such as Robert Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow, whom he debated before an audience of several thousand at Cadle Tabernacle, arguing, as he put it, that “without a soul, man would not be a man, but only a species of animal.”

At the Holiday bowling banquet at Hobart Lanes I pigged out on hot beef sandwiches, deviled eggs, corn pudding, veggies, and brownies.  My pickle spears went fast, and a woman inquired where I had bought them (Jewel in Chesterton).  Robbie brought an entire cake.  The Engineers took two games from Frank’s Gang despite a 687 by Mark Garzella, Sr., who had a chance for a 700 series but left an 8-10 split in his final frame.  A few years ago Garzella rolled a 767.  Our anchor Frank Shufran finished with a turkey for a 245, enabling us to win series.  Opponent Tom Iseminger resembled Al Pacino.  Duke Caminsky, resplendent in a Christmas shirt, shouted to Melvin Nelson to “hit the head pin, dummy,” although it seemed like every time Melvie did, he left a split.  Before leaving I polished off two homemade cookies and wrapped a couple brownies in a napkin for Toni.

The Gary Roosevelt and Indianapolis Crispus Attucks basketball teams who in 1955 vied for the state basketball championship were 2015 South Shore Wall of Legends inductees.  Also honored: General Lew Wallace, Civil War general and author of “Ben Hur,” and Civil War soldiers from the Twentieth Indiana infantry 

A writer who calls himself Gary Indiana made the New York magazine “top ten” list with a memoir titled “I Can Give You Anything But Love.”  The author has also written the novels “Depraved Indifference” (2002) and “Do Everything in the Dark” (2003). A gay veteran of the Haight-Ashbury scene who now teaches literature and philosophy (?) at New York’s New School, Indiana admits, “I’m old enough to justify writing about my history, but too old to remember much of it.” Living in 1919 in a commune populated by “emotionally flattened hippies . . . fond of elaborate, cruel psychological games,” Indiana recalled:

  In the long rancid afterglow of the summer of love, the Haight-Ashbury had puddled into a gritty slum of boarded-up head shops and strung-out junkies, thuggish dealers, undercover cops in love beads and fright wigs.  The hippie saturnalia had continued as a sinister parody of itself, featuring overdoses and rip-offs and sudden flashes of violence.

Steve McShane distributed ten copies of “Education the Calumet Region: A History of Indiana University Northwest” (Steel Shavings, volume 35, 2004), co-edited with Paul Kern at a meeting of the Council of University Historians, charged with planning projects for IU’s bicentennial in 2020.