The New Lyceum

A nice invitation has come my way from Northwestern Michigan College to speak May 17th at TEDx Traverse City, a local version of the acclaimed TED conferences that bring people together every year to share inspiring ideas. The national conference, TED2011, was launched yesterday in Long Beach, California, and runs through this week. Speakers, each limited to an 18-minute presentation, include an array of revolutionary thinkers who know how to grab and hold an audience’s attention. They include a musician, surgeon, epidemiologist,  cellist, inventor, CEO of a wearable-robot company, neuroengineer, newspaper columnist, gamestormer, chef, historian, artist, film critic, futurist, health policy expert, dinosaur digger, street artist, poet, physicist, four-star general, polar photographer, architect, “wrongologist,” filmmaker, linguist, and many others.

Naturally this brings to mind the Lyceum of ancient Athens, where philosophers walked back and forth lecturing while acolytes trotted along and scribbled down their words. Those lectures inspired the American Lyceum movement that began in Massachusetts in the 1820s and reached its heyday in the Boston area in the 1840s and 1850s, when hundreds of lectures on a dazzling variety of subjects were presented to an eager public.

The movement reached its peak just as American literature exploded onto the world, with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, and Hawthorne producing their greatest works in a few years of remarkable fecundity. Most of those major authors, as well as hundreds of minor ones, supplemented their incomes by speaking to live audiences in New England and, later, across the rest of America. Their lectures became immensely popular — by 1835 there were 3,000 town lyceums in New England — and helped fire a national passion for self-improvement and education. Emerson relied on his lecture audiences as a flame-test for ideas that often began with scribbled entries in his daily journal  (his “bank account,” he called it). If the lectures went well, he further revised them into essays that were finally collected into his books.

It’s fun to imagine the ideas that burst from the stages in Boston and Concord. Those communities were already crowded with eccentric characters that Hawthorne called a “veritable host of hobgoblins and nightbirds” – and few of them were shy about sharing their opinions. Audiences of up to 3,500  crammed into auditoriums to hear not just  rock stars like Emerson, but such varied speakers as the chemist John Grissom, who punctuated his lectures on the wonders of chemistry by setting off spectacular test-tube explosions; John Gough, who railed against the evils of alcohol, illustrating his remarks with lurid examples of lives destroyed by a single sip of brandy; and the feminist and abolitionist Fanny Wright, whose proclamations against slavery and for easy divorce were so inflammatory that the audience once dismantled the platform upon she lectured

After about 1845, New England lecturers began finding their way to the Midwest, where they were eagerly welcomed. Soon just about every sizable Midwestern community was hosting a winter lecture series. (Farm work made it tough in spring, summer, and fall to attract audiences.) Emerson, after an 1854 tour through Ohio, southern Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, wrote to his wife to say that he was pleased to have “found a population of Yankees out here, and an easy welcome for my Massachusetts narrowness everywhere.”

But Midwesterners could be a little grudging in their enthusiasm. Though hungry for ideas they were defensive about being thought to lack a culture of their own (we haven’t changed much in that regard), and they could be especially prickly about money. New England speakers were accustomed to receiving speaking fees of $40 to $75 per lecture back home, but homegrown lecturers from the Midwest typically charged only $15 to $25. This disparity inspired the Sandusky Commercial Register to complain about Emerson’s price of $50 during his 1854 tour and to warn its readers that “…this winter the threat is that more will be charged! If such really be the case, we emphatically say don’t hire Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

Still, there was no shortage of speakers, and from 1847 to 1857 the Lyceums enjoyed greater growth in the Midwest than anywhere in the nation. Among the noteworthy lectures:

– Herman Melville at the Detroit Young Men’s Society (where the average attendance that winter of 1857-8 exceeded 500 per lecture)  speaking on the subject of “Statuary of Rome.”

– E.L. Youmans on “The Chemistry of the Sunbeam.”

– George Vandenhoff on “Smiles and Tears from Poetic Fountains.”

– John Clevees Symmes on his “Symmes Hole Theory,” which held that the earth had a hollow interior that could be entered at the North and South Poles. Symmes sometimes ended his lectures with a call for “one hundred brave companions” to travel with him to the North Pole, where he was certain they would find “a warm and rich land stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men.”

Have our tastes changed much in a century and a half? Judge for yourself.
Here is a partial list of lecture titles from this week’s TED2011:

“Glowing Life in an Underwater World”
“My Seven Species of Robot”
“Women Reshaping the World”
“Hacking Your Brain With Music”
“Using Nature’s Genius in Architecture”
“Medicine Without Borders”
“Reviving New York’s Rivers — With Oysters!”
“What Makes Us Happy?”
“Might You Live a Great Deal Longer?”

And here are some titles from the American Lyceum of the 1850s:

“The Sun”
“Causes of the American Revolution”
“The Sources of National Wealth”
“The Capacity of the Human Mind for Culture and Improvement”
“The Honey Bee”
“The Legal Rights of Women”
“Instinct”
“The Discovery of America by the Northmen”
And my all-time favorite lecture title:  “…[A] Moral and Satirical Lecture on Human Hearts and a Dissertation on Noses, the Whole to be Concluded with a Hornpipe.”