Chautauqua Publications: An Historical and Bibliographical Guide (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Chautauqua Publications: An Historical and B...)
Excerpt from Chautauqua Publications: An Historical and Bibliographical Guide
A principal obstacle barring the way to fruitful study of Chautauqua by men trained in the general field of American history has been the lack of an adequate guide to the source materials. Files of Chautauqua news papers and periodicals, and collections of Chautauqua programs, catalogs, reports, and other pamphlets are essential, yet the location, availability, and even the existence of such materials have never been made known to scholars generally. The books issued by the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle are scattered through most large libraries, but they are not classified together. And the only check-list of C. L. S. C. Books that has been compiled recently was a four-page leaflet, bristling with inaccuracies, and unobtainable today. The other publications of Chautauqua have not been. Listed in any manner, adequate or inadequate.
The sixtieth anniversary of Chautauqua and the meeting here of the New York State Historical Association - events of the present summer naturally direct attention to Chautauqua's past, and make this a fitting time to present a bibliography of the books, periodicals, and other printed records of the Institution.
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Arthur Eugene Bestor was an American educator. He was President of Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York from 1915 to 1944.
Background
Arthur Bestor was born in Dixon, Illinois, United States, the first of two children and only son of Orson Porter Bestor and Laura Ellen (Moore) Bestor. Both parents came of old New England stock. His father, a native of Connecticut, had fought with an Illinois regiment during the Civil War; he afterward graduated from Brown University and became a Baptist minister, in which capacity he served churches in Illinois and Wisconsin.
Education
Arthur Bestor received his education at the Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, and at the University of Chicago, from which he graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1901. In two years he returned to the university to begin graduate work in history. He did not complete a Ph. D.
Career
Bestor taught history and political science for two years at Franklin College in Indiana. From 1904 to 1912 he was a lecturer on political science in the university's extension division. After 1905 Bestor's consuming interest was the Chautauqua movement, founded in 1874 at Fair Point, New York, by Lewis Miller and John Heyl Vincent. Bestor had first become acquainted with the movement through his father, who had organized several local adult education reading groups as part of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. At the University of Chicago, Bestor was influenced by George E. Vincent, a sociology professor who was also principal of instruction at the Chautauqua Institution of which he later became president and by William Rainey Harper, the university's first president, who had been principal of Chautauqua's college of liberal arts.
Through Vincent, Bestor was appointed assistant director of the Chautauqua Institution in the summer of 1905. Two years later he became director, in which position he had charge of all business matters and assisted in educational activities, and in 1915 he succeeded Vincent as president. As such, Bestor was responsible for the educational and administrative policies of all branches of the Chautauqua Institution, including the summer assembly, summer schools, home reading courses, and the physical plant at Chautauqua Lake. Under Bestor's direction, Chautauqua participated fully in the American effort during World War I. It played host both to the Speakers' Training Camp for Patriotic Service, which trained persons to propagandize the war cause, and to the National Service School, where young women learned how to rehabilitate disabled war veterans.
Bestor himself was secretary of the National Security League's Committee on Patriotism through Education and, later, chairman of the Y. M. C. A. 's War Council of the Platform Guild and its War Board Committee on Lectures and Entertainment in Training Camps. He also served at the invitation of Herbert Hoover as director of the lecturers' and speakers' division of the United States Food Administration, and in September 1917 was appointed by President Wilson as director of the speakers' division of the Committee on Public Information. For the latter he toured the United States, lecturing on "America and the Great War" and "The War and the Making of Public Opinion. "
After the war, faced with competition from motion pictures, radio, and the automobile, as well as from universities and colleges that had adopted Chautauqualike programs of summer schools and extension courses, Bestor moved to expand the facilities and activities of the organization's home base. To ensure Chautauqua's survival as an educational institution, he encouraged specialization in three types of instruction: professional study for teachers, advanced musical training, and general cultural courses. His efforts to maintain academic respectability were further realized when in 1923 New York University agreed to accept courses taken at Chautauqua for degree credit.
In 1919 the New York Symphony made an extended appearance at Chautauqua, and thereafter it played a regular six-week engagement, after 1923 under the direction of Albert Stoessel, who was also Chautauqua's musical director. The Rochester Opera Company brought opera to Chautauqua in 1926, and in 1929 the Chautauqua Opera Company was founded. The following year a repertory theater, at which the Cleveland Playhouse gave a regular season, was established. Such cultural activities were an important adjunct to the Institution's attractions as a center of learning and outdoor recreation. Music, which had been clearly subordinate to other activities before World War I, eventually came to dominate the program at Chautauqua.
Though Bestor's program was largely responsible for Chautauqua's successful adjustment to a new era, it created a sizable debt which brought the Institution perilously close to disaster; unable to pay the interest on the debt, it went into receivership at the end of 1933. A group of loyal Chautauquans, acting independently, immediately formed the Chautauqua Reorganization Corporation, which managed to raise enough money by 1936 to clear away the debt. Thereafter Chautauqua's financial affairs were entrusted to the Chautauqua Foundation, Inc. , an independent corporation established in 1937.
Apart from Chautauqua, Bestor served the cause of adult education in numerous other capacities. He was a trustee of the League for Political Education and chairman of the board of trustees of its successor (1937), Town Hall, Inc. He served on the executive board of the American Association for Adult Education, was the American representative on the council of the World Association for Adult Education, and was a member of the advisory committee on emergency education to the United States Commissioner of Education. Bestor traveled extensively in the Near East and was a director of the American Schools in Sofia, Bulgaria, chairman of the board of trustees of Near East Relief, and a trustee of the Near East Foundation.
Stricken with encephalomyelitis in January 1944, Bestor entered St. Luke's Hospital in New York City but was transferred to the New York City Neurological Institute, where he died at the age of sixty-four. After funeral services at the Riverside Church in New York and at the Smith Memorial Library in Chautauqua, he was buried in the Chautauqua Cemetery.
"He was no soft sentimentalist, no vague utopian. He was a realistic idealist who loved people and worked tirelessly and joyously for their good. " - Harry Overstreet
Connections
On March 24, 1905, Bestor married Jeanette Louise Lemon of Bedford, Indiana. They had four children: Arthur Eugene, Mary Frances, Jeanette Elizabeth (who died in infancy), and Charles Lemon.