How election deniers, covid skeptics, and a Thomas Jefferson impersonator are disrupting the upstate New York retreat for the elites.
At 1,308 feet above sea level, Chautauqua Lake in upstate New York is one of America’s highest navigable lakes, whose waters drain through a series of rivers before ending up in the Mississippi and flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. On its western shore sits the Chautauqua Institution—the august intellectual colony, and de facto HQ of the Chautauqua intellectual movement, which Teddy Roosevelt once called “the most American thing in America.” In its long history, Chautauquans, as the institute’s participants refer to themselves, have shaped public attitudes on everything from woman’s suffrage to the prosecution of global human rights violators.
Once a roving extravaganza of discussion, debate, and prayer, it has settled into an annual summerlong confab of concerts, conferences, and lectures. It has hosted everyone from Susan B. Anthony to Ulysses S. Grant, John Philip Sousa, Ella Fitzgerald, and, more recently, Gen. David Petraeus, New York Times columnist David Brooks, and comedian/automobile enthusiast Jay Leno. It was at Chautauqua in 1936 that FDR first delivered his “I Hate War” speech, which aimed to sway the “body of public opinion in this country” against the allure of war profiteering. Like the namesake lake abutting the grounds, the Chautauqua Institution’s intellectual headwaters are also meant to trickle down to the rest of the country, feeding the broader currents of U.S. political and social life.
But recently a contingent of longtime conservative-leaning Chautauquans has broken with the institution, alleging that it has given up values of freedom of speech for the bogeyman of the modern elite: “wokeness.” This rival group now hosts counterprogramming of the supposedly “canceled.” Their calendar counts a motley crew of conspiracists, cranks, ivermectin boosters, 2020 election truthers, and even a Thomas Jefferson impersonator, who delivered a speech on the Bill of Rights in full period costume.
[h/t Scott Horton]
