Fanfare for fifty: A brief history of the Central States Speech Association to 1981

Communication Studies, Spring 1999 by Reid, Loren

II

Finally, CSSA got under way, despite those years of the Great Depression . . . Read on

The person most active in the move to start a Central States group was Alan H. Monroe of Purdue University. Recently ( 1929) he had been involved in the formation of the Indiana Association of Teachers of Speech and knew the issues faced by the profession. He saw that a regional, by bringing state groups together, could make it possible for them to profit by each other's experiences.

At the outset the new regional association was thought of as a servant of state associations. At NATS's 1930 convention in Chicago, Monroe chaired a committee to organize a new Federation of Central States Speech Associations. It called a meeting of delegates from the several state associations for NATS's, 1931 Detroit convention. This meeting created an Executive Council with Monroe as Chairman and Charles R. Layton of Muskingum College as Executive Secretary. The group also named chairpersons of four committees: O. C. Miller, Northwest Missouri State Teachers College, curriculum problems; W. P. Sandford, University of Illinois, college entrance requirements; F. L. D. Holmes, University of Minnesota, state associations; Giles W. Gray, State University of Iowa, planning of the first regional convention. These six persons are the only ones we can now name as founders; the names of others may come to light later. Certainly the group was small, as the meeting was held on the day before the convention proper began. December 27, 1931, is, therefore, the birthday of the Federation.

As the spring of 1932 seemed too near at hand to have a convention, the committee decided to wait until the spring of 1933. Nobody was in a rush to get started. Moreover, these years were the trough of the Great Depression.

No one was surprised that Gray scheduled that first convention on his home campus; this decision might have been made, in fact, at Detroit. As a graduate student and part-time instructor at Iowa, I heard a lot of talk about the new group, partly from him, but mainly from two fellow teachers of the fundamentals course: Harry G. Barnes and H. Clay Harshbarger, who were strongly interested. Each later served the CSSA as president.

At the Iowa City convention, 175 persons registered, but that figure was attained partly because the annual Iowa University Conference of Teachers of Speech was meeting concurrently, along with a Delta Sigma Rho debate tournament. (Franklin H. Knower, of the University of Minnesota, later a CSSA president, was one of those there with a team.) Resolutions adopted and forwarded to NATS urged it to establish a secondary school periodical. NATS finally decided against the idea; The Speech Teacher was not destined to be born for another twenty years.

The second convention was held at Northwestern on April 27 and 28, 1934. We know little about that meeting, except that Barnes was elected President and Layton continued as Executive Secretary. The Inter-State Oratorical Association met conjointly; the coaches sweetened the attendance figure, whatever it was; it was probably small and discouraging.