The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chatauqua as Performance

Before radio, television, and the internet, one mass medium provided rural Americans with a mix of education, entertainment, evangelism, and patriotism that constituted a shared national experience. Called "Chatauquas" in reference to the Methodist institution at Lake Chatauqua in western New York that inspired the movement, these traveling performance companies crisscrossed the United States from roughly 1904 to 1930, playing virtually every town large enough to support a train station. Charlotte M. Canning's lively and thorough book narrates the history of circuit Chatauqua (or, simply, "the circuits," referring to the itinerant nature of the companies), which at its peak in the 1910s and early 1920s played to thousands of towns and millions of Americans each year. Canning, a theatre historian, draws on a broad range of archival sources to paint a vivid picture of the once ubiquitous circuits whose trademark brown canvas tents and wood platform stages showcased "talent" of all sorts, from Susan B. Anthony to Swiss bell ringers, from William Jennings Bryan to literature professors, from Mark Twain to bowdlerized productions of Shakespeare's plays. Over one-hundred illustrations, spaced throughout, help bring the period alive for the reader.

By focusing on the interaction between the Chatauquas and the audiences for whom they performed, Canning demonstrates persuasively that the circuits were a site of complex negotiations of citizenship and national identity. Unlike other popular entertainments of the period (vaudeville, burlesque, circus) Chatauqua spoke directly to the desire of many Americans to preserve a rural, agricultural way of life. "In the Chatauqua tent," writes Canning, "small-town America was participating in the performance of small-town America. [. . .] By performing the America they wanted to exist, Chatauqua and its communities helped to make that America exist, even if only for the duration of the performance" (5).

The book takes its organizing structure from its subject matter. After a brief but thorough Introduction ("Remembering the Platform"), each of five chapters brings a different aspect of Canning's argument to the stage. Chapter 1 ("America on the Platform") explores how the Chatauqua circuits self-consciously allied themselves to a national mythology. This national mythos, Canning suggests, was dependent on a specifically pastoral concept of community, the parameters of which are discussed in Chapter 2 ("Community on the Platform"). Just as the physical stage stood for and at the center of the overall Chatauqua experience, the pivotal central chapter ("The Platform in the Tent") explores how the circuits were able to reposition the tent, a sign of transience and questionable virtue, as a symbol of permanence and moral uplift. In Chapter 4 ("Performance on the Platform: Oratory"), Canning turns her attention to the forms of performance form most commonly associated with the Chatauqua: the civic lecture and the elocutionary recital. Chapter 5 ("Performance on the Platform: Theater") explores Chautauqua's curious relationship to theatrical performance. Initially conceived as a morally and aesthetically superior alternative to theater, the Chatauqua movement struggled to maintain its anti-theatrical stance in the face of a growing audience desire for dramatic entertainment. A brief Conclusion ("The Palimpsestic Platform"), looks at surviving traces of Chatauqua in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, from the Chatauqua-themed Elvis Presley movie The Trouble With Girls (1969) to the neo-Chatauqua performances conceived and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, state humanities councils (mostly in the great plains), and public and private historical societies.