Column by John Warren
In 1926, in The New York Times, Frank Bohn wrote a line about Chautauqua Institution that would be quoted in the next 100 years in many places, many of them related to marketing the Institution.
“He who does not know Chautauqua does not know America,” Bohn wrote. You’ve likely read it many times. But in the past 100 years, important context has been lost. Namely, he didn’t mean it as a compliment.
Frank Bohn also didn’t mean it as a slight. But, again, he wasn’t praising Chautauqua. It should also be noted that he wasn’t even referring to the Institution, per se, but rather to the nationwide Chautauqua Movement. He mentions “little c” chautauquas in Kentucky, Idaho and Pennsylvania, but not the “Big C” mother ship on Chautauqua Lake.
Frank Bohn (1878–1975) was a one-time leading socialist and labor movement leader who would later publicly — in The New York Times — abandon both movements in favor of nationalism. He became an important contributor to The New York Times, criticizing the German government and writing about how technology might liberate the working class. Writing of Bohn’s first appearance on the grounds, in 1938, The Chautauquan Daily wrote he was “considered one of the ablest interpreters of the news of current affairs addressing audiences today.”
The article in which his famous quote appeared was “America Revealed in Its Chautauqua,” published Oct. 10, 1926. Times subscribers can look up the full text on “TimesMachine,” the newspaper’s online archive.
By 1926, the Chautauqua Movement — a traveling roadshow of lectures, performances and classes — that started in Chautauqua, New York, had reached its apex. There were thousands of communities and millions of Chautauquans. With competition from radio and movies, it would soon decline, but it hadn’t yet.
Bohn’s column asserts that the chautauquas’ programming was not aspirational, but rather reflected the sentiments of the audience: what people wanted to hear.
“These audiences indicate the tides, currents and waves of American opinion,” Bohn wrote.
Bohn wrote that Chautauquans didn’t want to talk about Europe in 1926 — they were tired of Europe — and so the chautauquas didn’t program talks about Europe. “The further off, the better-liked,” Bohn wrote. And so it was that chautauquas dealt with issues related to East Indians and the Chinese, Turks and Egyptians.
“Sociobiology” was a hit, and if lecturers could produce “scientific” evidence of Western civilization’s decay and imminent doom, Bohn wrote, “a thousand Fords will rattle into town.”
“Their opinions are derived from sentimental, not from factual causes,” Bohn wrote.
The college student plays of yore had given way to professional, Broadway-caliber productions.
The author took care to laud a very Chautauqua principle: abiding differing viewpoints. He wrote of farmers on the eastern shore of Maryland perking up to hear a Jewish scholar. A Russian emigrant defended the Bolshevik regime up and down the East Coast.
But if the audiences were open-minded, they were also fickle. “A more eloquent man than you might come here in half an hour and win them all back again to the views they had this morning,” Bohn quoted a publicist as telling him.
“The heart of rural America is so much larger than its fund of knowledge that a clear sense of direction is not maintained,” Bohn wrote.
His now-legendary quote reads, in context:
“A total of 10,000,000 people have attended the lectures and concerts in the tents and open auditoriums in woods and fields and town parks. He who does not know Chautauqua does not know America. Professor Charles Beard recently made a statement that the best way to develop an informing contact with the American national mind is by meeting Chautauqua audiences in different sections for a few seasons. The Chautauquas are, indeed, a vast social laboratory.”
“He who does not know Chautauqua does not know America.”
Today, Bohn might write that he who does not follow TikTok trends or watch Fox News and MSNBC does not know America.
But relative to Chautauqua, Bohn’s quote doesn’t work anymore. Chautauqua is no longer a reflection of America as it is.
100 years later, a modern-day adaptation of Bohn’s quote might well be: “He who does not know Chautauqua does not know what America may aspire to be again.”
John Warren’s family landed in Chautauqua in 1956. Reach him at chqhistoriographical@gmail.com.
