The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism. By Andrew C. Rieser. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. xvi, 399 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-231-12642-5.)

Abstract

The term Chautauqua has long served an effective but contradictory cultural role: a symbol of democratic engagement for the National Endowment for the Humanities, yet a stand-in for the ignorant yahooism of H. L. Mencken's booboisie. Few scholars, however, have attempted to go beyond the label to explore this complex movement, so powerful during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Andrew C. Rieser breaks new ground in his sophisticated and exhaustive treatment of Chautauqua. Rieser's breadth of topics is impressive: he is as conversant with railroads and real estate as he is with religion and reform. Readers can easily come to understand from this respectful account why hundreds of thousands of middle-class Americans sought education and uplift, along with civic engagement and summertime fun, at both local assemblies and the main Chautauqua center in western New York. Under the author's broad canopy, several themes stand out. Chautauquans were crucial to the forging of a political and religious liberalism that deeply informed middle-class culture: indeed, they paved the way for Pro gressivism. They were pluralistic in their Protestantism, a quality that helped nurture religious sentiment in a supposedly secularizing age. They were democratic in their engagement with dissenting ideas and their sympathy for those below them in the social order. And within Chautauqua white women were able to forge an authoritative social and intellectual world, even if males held almost all of the institution's formal positions of power.