Chautauqua

Luke

     Chautauqua was founded in 1874 by businessman Lewis Miller and Methodist minister John Heyl Vincent, who later became a Bishop. It was originally held on Lake Chautauqua in western New York to educate Sunday school teachers but quickly expanded its offering to more individuals. They catered to families for “education and uplift”(http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu./traveling-culture/essay.htm) and Chautauqua assemblies began to grow across the country. The goal of the circuit Chautauquas was to offer stimulation to rural and small-town America.
     Lecturers were the bases of Chautauqua, which had topics ranging from current events to human interest. One of the most notable lecturers was William Jennings Bryant who delivered populist, temperance, evangelical and crusading messages on the circuits. Opie Read was also notable for his homespun philosophy and stories which were very humorous and made him really likeable as part of the lecture circuit in Chautauqua.
     Theater Acts became part of the circuit with many people doing one-person shows. Gay Maclaren was a notable performer who did one-person versions of popular shows. Lecturer Glenn Frank viewed her act as “ a recreation. The original cast lived and acted again” (http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/traveling-culture/essay.htm), marveling at how compelling and convincing her act was.  William Sterling Butts portrayed Charles Dickens’s characters, doing impersonations of Little Nell and Fagin right in front of the audience with minimal props and costumes. The theater acts were creative and compelling, helping to play a prominent role as part of the Chautauqua circuit.    

Election of 1872

Emily

In September 1870, Missouri liberals were the first to establish a separate Liberal Republican party. Foreshadowing the national strategy in 1872, they formed an alliance with the state’s Democrats to overthrow the regular Republicans. On January 24, 1872, U.S. Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri, judging the Grant administration to be irredeemable, issued a call for a national convention of liberals to nominate a candidate for president. Over the next few months, Liberal Republican editors, delegates, and other supporters warned repeatedly that caution should be taken in choosing the best nominee.

The odd became surreal in Baltimore on July 9-10 when the Democratic party also nominated the Greeley-Brown ticket and adopted the Liberal Republican platform whole-cloth. It is the only time in American history when a major party endorsed the candidate of a third party. Greeley had been an outspoken abolitionist, one of the founders of the Republican party, and the needle in the side of many a Democrat. Now he was to be their champion. During the Civil War, Greeley had first advised letting the South secede, then urged an aggressive Union military policy, followed by attempts to arrange a cease-fire and negotiated settlement. Early in the Reconstruction process, he was one of the first to call for both universal manhood suffrage and universal amnesty. By 1872 the Democrats rhetorically accepted the former and desperately desired the latter. They were also a party in disarray with no other viable candidate to offer the nation. Like in Missouri in 1870, national Democratic leaders saw the Liberal Republican movement as a Trojan Horse which could carry them back into the White House. (The Liberals, conversely, thought they were taking over the Democrat party.)

One wag remarked that the Grant-Greeley contest was a battle pitting a "man of no ideas" against a "man of too many." The campaign degenerated into a mudslinging melee, epitomized in the anti-Greeley cartoons of Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly and the anti-Grant cartoons of Matt Morgan in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (many of which are featured on this site). Greeley partisans called Grant a dictator and a drunk, while the president’s forces depicted the editor as a traitor and a flake. At the end of the campaign, Greeley complained, "I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly knew whether I was running for the presidency or the penitentiary." Grant could have said much the same.
 
Grant opted for the traditional silence of a sitting president, but his challenger took to the hustings. On September 19-29, Greeley embarked on a grueling campaign tour through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, delivering up to 22 speeches per day for a total of nearly 200. Although some detractors were impressed, others judged the effort to be counterproductive, with Greeley saying the wrong things to the wrong audiences. His vice-presidential running-mate, Gratz Brown, made matters worse by delivering a speech at Yale while drunk, fainting before a gathering in New York City, and generally making misstatements.