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LINCOLN NeCdNNLLL "WINNING THL WEST"
Former Georgia-Tennessean Doing Work as Evangelist, Lecturer and Guilder of Chautauquas in That Teeming
Land of Progress—Holv His Home People Lobe Him at Liberty, Missouri
Sy WILLIAM D. UPSHAW.
HAVE been to Missouri, but the "show
ing” was done on the other side. It was
to be supposed that a man who was
called all the way from Georgia to speak
on two occasions at a big Chautauqua at
Liberty, Mo., was expected to "show”
something to Missourians, but, be it said
in all humility of confession, that while
two thousand people listened with
I
generous applause, and “made out’’ they enjoyed
the messages of the “Georgia Goobergrabbier,’’
the tables were turned and this wander
ing editor brought back to his native
Southland a lesson and an inspiration,
which would transform this whole sec
tion, and lift our citizenship to a higher
plane of wide-spread intelligence, if this
lesson would only take root and come to
flower and fruitage among our noble
people.
And because of the grip which this
new idea has upon me, I can not begin
in this story to speak of the other fea
tures of my visit to Liberty —the home
of famous William Jewell College with
her six hundred students, and her more
than two hundred young preachers of
the Gospel of Christ.
But what is that idea which I found
in the West, and which I would bring,
“bag and baggage” to a working basis
in this section of my beloved South?
It is: Chautauqua as an educational force
for the masses.
A bit disappointed are you, at the
climax of my enthusiasm? Were you
looking for something startling? There’s
where you lose out. It IS something
startling! And if we Southerners could
only be picked up and put down bodily
in the midst of a sure enough, full
fledged Missouri Chautauqua, we would
stand up on the benches and yell with
a spell of the spinal ecstatics and every
mother’s son and daughter of us would
cry in the old-time, school-day parlance:
“0 Mamma, buy me one!”
A Saturday Night Surprise.
Think of it, people! My first engage
ment was on Saturday night, and as I
drove through the public square in Lib
erty (a town of about four thousand
population) I saw such typical Saturday
night activity that I thought surely nearly
everybody was buying and selling and
seeing the sights, and naturally
concluded that there would be little doing in the
way of a crowd at the Chautauqua on that busy Sat
urday night. But wonders! Long before I reached
Gov. Jos. W. Folk and Lincoln McConnell Will Write For The Golden Age.
A' ,ANTA, GA., SEPTEMBER 30, 1909.
the Chautauqua grounds, I began to pass a regular
caravan of horses, mules, wagons, buggies and car
riages from the country, and then tents spread on
the “good green sward,” and loj I found that of the
two thousand people gathered there half of them
doubtless had come in from the rural districts. Rain
rain, rain, had filled the first half of the week, but
nothing daunted the determined people had come by
the hundreds through rain and Missouri mud. Such
weather would have ruined any Georgia Chautauqua
that was ever hatched in a town of a few thousand
- ■ HJk X I'wk
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Lincoln McConnell.
Preacher, Lecturer and Leading Chautauqua Evangel of the Great Northwest.
people, and really, we doubt if Atlanta herself would
have weathered the storm.
I tell you, people of the Southeastern South, we
have not learned our alphabet, concerning the mean
ing of the Chautauqua as an educational opportunity
for the masses. Here in Georgia, for instance, about
the only people who think of going to a town to stay
during Chautauqua week are some boys and girls—
mostly girls, who go for a social pastime. The bus
iness men invest largely “for the sake of trade and
building up the town,” but if it fails to pay out for
a year or two the most of them will drop it like a
hot brick, and you will hear them say: “Lost money
on that thing last year—don’t catch me fooling with
it again.”
But up in the teeming, marvelous
Northwest the Chautauqua is a sort of
second edition of “Christmas time.” All
the family get ready for it. It is bread
to the mind, recreation to the body and
nectar to the soul. Leading business
men invest in the Chautauqua as a com
munity blessing—a cheap means of bring
ing high-class knowledge and inspiration
close to the people. If they win or lose,
financially, never mind —they buckle on
their harness like men, square off the ac
count to profit and loss, and announce a
bigger Chautauqua than ever next year.
Lincoln McConnell, The Man of the Hour.
Presiding over the great Liberty Chau
tauqua —master of the situation indeed,
I found a born leader of men. He is
Lincoln McConnell, a Westernized-Geor
gianized-Tennesseean, who did wonderful
things in Atlanta after his conversion,
and who left for the bounding, billowing,
beckoning West just when we were
throwing log chains about him to keep
him in the city that loved him so well.
It was a fascinating study to me to see
how McConnell played on the minds and
hearts of that delighted audience, like
an Italian master on his harp of many
strings. While the Terpsichorean art
was not actually practiced while I was
there, and I saw no one dip into that
article that made P. Lorillard famous, it
may be said that when Lincoln McConnell
piped the people danced, and when he
“took snuff,” two thousand people
sneezed. I have seen many masters of
the platform in my brief day, but I
thought I never before saw a man more
grandly and masterfully the man of the
hour.
And not only in Liberty (a suburb of
Kansas City), where he holds his citizen
ship, but I found that Lincoln McConnell
is regarded as the greatest evangelist and the
most sought-after Chautauqua builder and man
(Continued on Page 5.)
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