THE NATIONAL CENTENNIAL YEAR
The founders of Chautauqua looked forward to its third session with mingled interest and anxiety. It was the centennial year of American Independence, and an exposition was opening in Philadelphia, far more noteworthy in its buildings and exhibits than any previous effort in the annals of the nation. The World's Fair in the Crystal Palace of New York, in 1855, the first attempt in America to hold an universal exposition, was a pigmy compared with the immense display in the park of Philadelphia on the centennial year. Could the multitudes from every State and from foreign lands be attracted from Philadelphia five hundred miles to Chautauqua Lake? Had the quest of the American people for new interests been satisfied by two years at the Assembly? Would it be the wiser course in view of the competition to hold merely a modest little gathering at Fair Point, or to venture boldly upon greater endeavors than ever before; to enlarge the program, to advertise more widely, and to compel attention to the new movement? Anyone who knew the adventurous, aspiring nature of both Miller and Vincent would unhesitatingly answer these questions.
The Assembly of 1876 was planned upon a larger scale than ever before. The formal opening took place on Tuesday evening, August 1st, in the forest-sheltered Auditorium, but two gatherings were held in advance and a third after its conclusion, so that the entire program embraced twenty-four days instead of seventeen.
The first meeting was the Scientific Conference, July 26th to 28th, aiming both to present science from the Christian point of view, and Christianity from the scientific point of view, showing the essential harmony between them, without either subjecting conclusions of science to church-authority or cutting up the Bible at the behest of the scientists. There had been frequent battles between the theologians and the students of nature and the "conflict of science and religion" had been strongly in evidence, ever since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Most pulpits had uttered their thunders against "Darwinism," even though some of the pulpiteers had never read Darwin's book, nor could have understood it if they had tried. And many professors who had never listened to a gospel sermon, and rarely opened their Bibles, had launched lightnings at the camp of the theologians. But here was something new; a company of scholars including Dr. R. Ogden Doremus of New York, Professor A. S. Lattimore of Rochester, Dr. Alexander Winchell of Michigan, and others of equal standing, on the same platform with eminent preachers, and no restraint on either side, each free to utter his convictions, and all certain that the outcome would be peace and not war.
The writer of these pages was present at most of those lectures, and remembers one instance showing that the province of science is in the past and the present and not in the future. Dr. Doremus was giving some brilliant experiments in the newer developments of electricity. Be it remembered that it was the year 1876, and in the Centennial Exposition of that year there was neither an automobile, a trolley-car, nor an electric light. He said, "I will now show you that remarkable phenomenon—the electric light. Be careful not to gaze at it too steadily, for it is apt to dazzle the beholder and may injure the eyesight." Then as an arc-light of a crude sort flashed and sputtered, and fell and rose again only to sputter and fall, the lecturer said, "Of course, the electric light is only an interesting experiment, a sort of toy to amuse spectators. Every effort to utilize it has failed, and always will fail. The electric light in all probability will never be of any practical value."
Yet at that very time, Thomas A. Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey, was perfecting his incandescent light, and only three years later, 1879, Chautauqua was illuminated throughout by electricity. When the scientist turns prophet he becomes as fallible as the preacher who assumes to prescribe limitations to scientific discovery. We live in an age of harmony and mutual helpfulness between science and religion; and Chautauqua has wrought mightily in bringing to pass the new day.
It is worthy of mention that Chautauqua holds a connecting link with "the wizard of Llewellyn Park" and his electric light; for some years later Mr. Edison married Miss Mina Miller, daughter of the Founder Lewis Miller. The Miller family, Founder, sons, daughters, and grandchildren, have maintained a deep interest in Chautauqua; and the Swiss Cottage at the head of Miller Park has every year been occupied. Representatives of the Miller family are always members of the Board of Trustees.
Rustic Bridge over Ravine
After the Scientific Conference came a Temperance Congress, on July 29th and 30th. A new star had arisen in the firmament. Out of a little meeting at Chautauqua in 1874, had grown the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, already in 1876 organized in every State and in pretty nearly every town. Its founders had chosen for President of the Union a young woman who combined in one personality the consummate orator and the wise executive, Miss Frances Elizabeth Willard of Evanston, Illinois, who resigned her post as Dean of the Woman's Department of the Northwestern University to enter upon an arduous, a lifelong and world-wide warfare to prohibit intoxicants, and as a means to that end, to obtain the suffrage for women. Frances Willard died in 1898, but if she could have lived until 1920 she would have seen both her aims accomplished in the eighteenth and nineteenth amendments to the Constitution of the United States; one forbidding the manufacture and sale of all alcoholic liquors, the other opening the door of the voting-booth to every woman in the land. In Statuary Hall, Washington, the only woman standing in marble is Frances E. Willard (there will be others later), and her figure is there among the statesmen and warriors of the nation's history, by vote of the Legislature of the State of Illinois.