The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America

1. How Cosmopolitan was the Lyceum, Anyway?

Part I Cultivating Cosmopolitanism “This page intentionally left blank” 23 1 How Cosmopolitan Was the Lyceum, Anyway? Angela G. Ray In 1980, historian Donald M. Scott wrote in the Journal of American History that the lyceum lecture system in the mid-nineteenth-century United States “not only expressed a national culture; it was one of the central institutions within and by which the public had its existence.”1 Drawing on the scholarship of Scott and others, as well as my own investigation of primary materials, in 2005 I described the lyceum as a “culture-making rhetorical practice.”2 By that I meant that through the regular performance of communal ritual—such as participating in or watching debates, delivering or listening to public lectures—Americans in cities on the Eastern seaboard and in hamlets on the frontiers of European settlement acquired habits of mind that created cultures. It is unmistakable that the cultures I thought they were creating were local manifestations of an ideal called “an American public.” I found especially compelling the metaphor of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who in 1868 wrote of the role of the lyceum lecturer as a “living shuttle” on a weaver’s loom, “moving to and fro . . . to weave together this new web of national civilization.”3 The characteristics of that imagined and performed nation were affected by region, politics, religion, race, gender, and class, for what was called “America” in public discourse about the lyceum bore the hallmarks of the rising middle class of white Protestant New England and often invoked the sensibilities of the Whigs and their descendants. In 2005 I saw the lyceum as an institutional structure that helped to create, promote, and sustain what would count as e f Angela G. Ray 24 American values and American popular knowledge. Ample empirical evidence supported such a claim, from the model citizen that emerged in the pages of Josiah Holbrook’s Boston-based journal The Family Lyceum to the tenets of American exceptionalism heralded by even an incisive social critic like Frederick Douglass. The lyceum, I said, was about nation building. Yet the contributors to this book propose to discuss something called the “cosmopolitan lyceum.” English usage sets the word cosmopolitan in opposition to the nationalistic, denoting the former as “free from national limitations or attachments.”4 So the title of this book seems prima facie to challenge the emphasis on American national identity that characterizes much earlier scholarship on the lyceum, including my own. How are we to interpret the title? Is cosmopolitan meant as a descriptor of the whole (the lyceum was a cosmopolitan phenomenon), or does it signal a subset of practice, those lyceum activities that were somehow cosmopolitan? Are we interested in lyceum events designed to develop participants into people who were polished and urbane or those who had a sense of global responsibility ? Or do we want to trace the resonance of international topics in popular nineteenth-century venues? In our scholarly investigations, how would we recognize a cosmopolitan lyceum if we saw one? Of course, consensus is not required for this book to contribute to new understandings of nineteenth-century culture. Indeed, the power of the title may rest in its ability to balance centripetal and centrifugal forces: openness to pluralism in artifact selection and interpretive approach combined with collaborative attention to common problems. I read the title as an invitation to revisit my conclusions about national identity and to inquire into the ways in which lyceum events might be interpreted as social practices that encouraged Americans to turn their gaze outward. To explore these subjects, I begin with the title’s constituent elements, cosmopolitan and lyceum, and then describe four distinctive ways in which I believe that nineteenth-century lyceums represented the world: as a resource for knowledge of nature, as an arena for political decision making, as a source of comparative ethnographic data, and as inspiration for embodied performance. Although this list does not exhaust the possibilities, the range of lyceum practice creates the basis for a provisional argument: the nineteenth-century U.S. lyceum was characterized by a dynamic interplay of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. In other words, through repeated cultural performances, people had the potential to perform their own identities as citizens of the nation and denizens of the cosmos, and even to imagine worldliness as a fundamental characteristic of American national identity. At different times and places, this interplay of national and...