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Cultural Activities
Oratory is a lost art. It has gone the way of stone fences and buggies. Hollywood and television thrillers have destroyed it forever, but at one time it was as common as the daily newspaper and as American as the Fourth of July. In the early nineteenth century, oratory had wider appeal than the theater. Speeches could be expected at any public gathering, large or small, whether Fourth of July celebrations, camp meetings, political meetings, lyceums, or farewells. Sunday sermons and speeches at court trials were analyzed for weeks afterward. During the time the Latter-day Saints were in Nauvoo, Americans in general looked on the week that court was in session as "a general holiday. . . . all who can spare the time, brush up their coats, and brush down their horses and go to court. A stranger is struck with the silence, the eagerness and deep attention. . . . Everything is done in this country in popular assemblies, all questions are debated in popular speeches and decided by popular vote. . . . the taste for popular assemblies . . . , which forms so striking a trait in the western character, is, in itself, a conclusive proof of a high degree of intelligence. Ignorant people would not relish nor understand the oratory."
The Mormons, as interested in oratory as any other Americans, had an additional reason for improving their skills in speech making and debate. Most Latter-day Saint men expected not only to serve missions for the Church, making public speaking and debate a part of their daily routine for a few years but also to be called on at any time to explain their unique doctrine to non-Mormon neighbors and relatives. The lyceum was an extremely popular forum for honing skills in oratory.
By 1840 practically every town in the old Northwest Territory "had a lyceum. Piqua, Ohio, 1837 was claiming that almost every village half its size had a lyceum to beguile the winter evenings and disseminate knowledge." Through such organizations ordinary citizens learned rules of debate, law, and political science and heard about the best or latest books and periodicals.
In towns much smaller than New York City, the lyceum emphasized local involvement, probably because of the shortage of well-known guest lecturers. Participants compared their own speeches and papers (written speeches were submitted) with such great orators of the time as Robert D. Owen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alexander Campbell, John C. Calhoun, and Henry Clay and even the ancient orators of Greece and Rome.