To Educate and Entertain: Circuit Chautauqua in Early Interwar New Zealand, 1919-1924.

Abstract

Between 1919 and 1924 a travelling tent show called ‘Circuit Chautauqua’ trekked the length and breadth of New Zealand offering high-quality live performances to thousands. Circuit Chautauqua was an American cultural phenomenon, and in line with historian Peter Gibbons’s suggestion that historians adopt a ‘world history’ approach, this thesis contributes to the investigation of the place of ‘the world in New Zealand’. In doing so it also responds to the work of historians such as Caroline Daley and Miles Fairburn, who argued that America had an important influence on New Zealand’s culture. Scholarship on life in interwar New Zealand has revealed that the more glamorous, modern forms of entertainment such as department store shopping, dining out and going to the movies were popular, but Circuit Chautauqua provides evidence that New Zealanders enjoyed yet another form of entertainment: the Circuits offered a different type of performance, one which cleverly combined entertainment with education. Chapter one commences the exploration of this ‘rational recreation’ ethos by exploring the entertainment on offer at Chautauqua, while the second explores Chautauqua’s educational agenda. Lecturers on the Circuits were highly skilled rhetoricians, who promised to bring ‘higher education’ and progressive ideas to ‘the masses’. In doing so they reinforced the notion of Anglo-Saxon citizenship on the New Zealand Circuits. Like New Zealanders, Circuit Chautauqua’s audiences in small towns throughout America enjoyed the fact that the movement linked them the rest of the country, and to the wider world. The third chapter of this thesis tells the story of two New Zealanders – Charles H. Poole and Wherahiko Rawei – who represented New Zealand on the US Circuits. American’s wanted to know about New Zealand, and Poole and Rawei satisfied their curiosity with performances that reinforced the cultural belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority and the success of the Christian civilisation ethos. Although Circuit Chautauqua’s influence in New Zealand was limited by its failure to continue to provide the intellectual content that New Zealand audiences expected, the movement reveals that exchange between New Zealand and America went both ways. While many historians have previously explored New Zealand’s ‘place in the world’ in the context of the British Empire and the Commonwealth, this thesis reveals that a shared notion of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority provided the framework for two-way traffic between New Zealand and the United States. In the heyday of the Circuits, thousands of New Zealanders and Americans enjoyed themselves under the big, brown tent at Chautauqua.