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

Communication Studies, Spring 1999 by Reid, Loren

In a few days came a letter from Layton, with a list of members and a copy of the minutes, and mention of a convention in Columbia in April. No funds were available. James A. Winans once said that he walked down Michigan Boulevard with the entire assets of the national association in his coat pocket. I walked home down Columbia's Broadway with the entire assets of CSSA in mine.

I asked Wesley A. Wiksell, then at Stephens College, to chair a Conference Executive Committee. Wiksell's deep professional interest and capable planning ability dated from state speech association days. The first task was to determine a date that would clear numerous regional tournaments; April 1 and 2, 1938, were available. April Fool's day, for sure.

All in all, the thirty-member committee must have written nearly five hundred letters to get the job done.

We had no funds, but we told everybody to spend what was needed and present the bill in April. The printing bill alone was enormous-nearly $200 for 8-page programs, stationery, postcards carrying the preliminary announcement. The committee was not so much a third set of founders as it was a group to nurse the infant association, wash and perfume it, clothe it handsomely, and hold it up for all the region to admire.

More than 80 people participated in the program. The 300 people present contributed just enough in $1.25 convention fees to meet our bills. Heath Meriwether, for years publisher of national and regional speech and theater journals, must have been relieved when he was paid. We ended the year as we began, with a zero-based budget.

With the Association apparently now in full health, the convention held at Minneapolis in 1939 attracted 390 delegates. The 1940 convention at Terre Haute went to a three-day program. Oklahoma City attracted 220 delegates in 1941, each member receiving a copy of Vol. I, No. 1 of the,journal of the Central States Speech Association; thirty-five pages, edited by Orville A. Hitchcock of the State University of Iowa, then Executive Secretary.

CSSA now had to face a greater hazard-the outbreak of World Was II. It went ahead with its plans for a Des Moines convention, with 186 program participants, but the war was beginning to take students out of school by the thousands, and teachers also. Washington issued an edict requesting professional societies to limit their conventions, since transportation and hotel accommodations were desperate. Meetings that were held should focus on problems of national interest. CSSA postponed future activities, putting its assets of $484 in government bonds and suspending its new journal. Other regional associations, and NATS, carried on.

James H. McBurney of Northwestern University served as President 1942-1946, and, with Wayne Thompson of the University of Missouri as Executive Secretary, succeeding Hitchcock, planned the first postwar convention, on the campus of the University of Missouri, in 1947. Columbia thus became the scene of a second attempt to revive CSSA. Only 150 people attended, although 2500 invitations had been mailed; not very encouraging. But the 1948 Chicago convention drew more than 600, reflecting the explosion in college and university enrollments and the demand for teachers. At the 1949 Omaha convention, the Association felt prosperous enough to establish the present journal, with Lionel Crocker, of Denison University, as editor.