The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Story of Tent Chautauqua Harry P. Harrison's book, Culture under Canvas (Hastings House, $6.50), is both more and less than it pretends to be. The jacket...
...These people furnished the most attentive, the most thoughtful and the most rewarding audiences I have ever addressed...
...My complaint is that our author does not do as well by our geography as he does by our history...
...What remains most clearly in my memory is my experience with the people of the prairie provinces of Canada...
...They must have kept voluminous records of schedules, expenses, personalities, anecdotes—every sort of thing that would make a juicy book...
...My experience was not nearly as wide as that of Harry Harrison...
...I am not complaining—either about what is included or omitted...
...It was an enormous business and no one thought during those days that it would soon come to an end...
...Many of them had been members of the Labor party and were bent on building up a good society in their new land...
...And he talks about all of his people as if they had the same manners and tastes...
...There was little demand for "mother-home-and-heaven" or for the cruder forms of humor at which Harry pokes such good-natured fun...
...The popular Harrison boys inherited the name of James Redpath, which went back to early New England Lyceum days...
...Harry gives us a good deal of history—history of society, history of politics, history of art, history of manners and morals...
...All but two years of this stretch were spent in the service of Paul Pearson's Swarthmore organization...
...There is nothing about the great Ellison-White enterprises which covered the West or about Erickson's wonderful Canadian circuits...
...And then Harry turned the whole delectable mess over to Karl Detzer, who is a first-class book shaper-upper...
...Our circuits stretched from Quebec to South Carolina...
...Our audiences, in general, wanted first-class music and lectures on serious subjects by respectable authorities...
...They had a gift for making and holding friends...
...For more than twenty years, this man traveled up and down his vast domain and carried on business with the people...
...The people in each one of these towns had signed a contract which involved from $500 to a couple of thousand...
...For two happy years I lectured for the Canadian Chautauqua in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba...
...But it is Harry Harrison who is the subject of this piece...
...When I crossed the line from Canada and addressed my first United States audience, the people before me seemed like big, happy, prosperous, overgrown children...
...Our peak was reached in 1923...
...In those days, recent immigrants from England formed a substantial proportion of the population of those sparsely settled areas...
...If Harry Harrison ever writes another book, I hope he will give some account of these regional differences...
...The Swarth more organization started business among the Quakers in towns not far from Philadelphia...
...The Swarthmore Chautauqua, with which I spent many happy years, is respectfully referred to now and then, but I suspect that it is accorded this attention because it was built and inspired by Paul Pearson...
...As a source book for social historians, the volume is priceless...
...During the following seasons, I covered a couple of lyceum circuits in our Middle West...
...I lectured on the Chautauqua trail for twelve happy years, from 1917 to 1929...
...From there, it worked its way up through New Jersey and New York into New England and the Maritime Provinces...
...The jacket advertises it as "The Story of Tent Chautauqua," but it starts with a Mark Twain incident dated 1866 and covers no end of entertaining matters from then on down...
...On the other hand, great slabs of tent Chautauqua business are hardly touched upon...
...But by 1930 it was finished...
...In telling how this great business got started, why it took this course rather than that, and finally how it weakened and wavered and flickered out, he sketches in broad lines a good deal that went on in the American mind...
...They day before my lecture, I saw some Indians help with a roundup of cattle for shipment to the East...
...Toward the west, we seldom went beyond the borders of Pennsylvania...
...At that time we had more than 2,300 towns on our various winter and summer circuits...
...They and their partners and employees ran circuits all up and down and across the Middle West...
...His circuits covered the country from the Dakotas, Minnesota and Michigan on the north to Georgia and Alabama on the south...
...I still have among my things somewhere a snapshot of a beautiful Indian girl who rode her pony and swung her lariat with the best of them...
...As a lecturer rather than a manager, I can testify to the fact that the citizens in different sections were as different as people could well be...
...The very first town on my schedule was in the Peace River country and had received its first settler only two years before the Chautauqua canvas was stretched and the first musicians and lecturers presented their programs...
...But nowhere does he refer to the differences between—let us say—the customers in Georgia and those who filed through the gate in Minnesota...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 23
