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in that it is typical of America at its best.” Its adult education courses of study could be followed in one’s living room as easily in Iowa as they could in New York, and as graduates of the program went out into the world, spreading the movement’s gospel, independent Chautauquas sprung up all over the country, with an especially large number in the Midwest. Geared toward the lower and middle classes, Chautauqua was an emblem of the new American zeal for self-betterment through education. For women, especially, the program was one of the few ways to gain the skills they needed in order to rise above confined roles as farmers’ wives or domestic help in the years when very few other opportunities were open to them. “Chautauqua functioned for many lower- and middle-class women much as the elite women’s colleges did for upper-class women,” according to the group. “They were training grounds from which women could launch ‘real’ careers.” What came to be called Circuit Chautauqua, in which performers traveled around the company and set up temporary shop in towns and settlements, spread nationwide. By the time the movement crested in the mid-1920s, they were appearing in forty-five states around the country and playing to upward of forty million people a year.
    It was exactly the kind of program suited to an up-and-coming prairie town settled by intelligent men and women in search of a new life. Ladora’s Chautauqua was run and put on by locals, who enlightened their fellow townspeople on everything from politics and psychology to music. On one occasion, at least, Jasper Augustine took advantage of the opportunity to perform and tried his hand at Hamlet’s soliloquy. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, a fact that had not always been appreciated by his wife. Instead of presenting her with a diamond ring when asking for her hand in marriage in the late 1890s, the exuberant young suitor had offered a complete leather-bound set of the bard’s works. She never let him forget it.
    By the time of Mildred’s birth, the Augustines had built themselves a large wooden house on Ladora’s main street. A sign of Jasper’s burgeoning medical practice, it had a huge porch and a bedroom apiece for Mildred and Melville. There was enough money for a bit of help, so there were no chores to be done and Mildred was generally left to amuse herself. Such comfort, however, had to be earned by someone. “There was an awful lot of work in the family,” Mildred once said, looking back on her childhood and pondering the roots of her own tireless work ethic. Her mother assisted her father at his practice and, she remembered, “They worked sometimes until 8 or 9 o’clock at the office and those times I ate whatever I could find for food.” Relentless prairie pioneer energy ran deeply through the Augustine family.
    In 1907, when Mildred was only two years old, Lillian’s beloved Ladora Presbyterian Ladies’ Aid Society published a pamphlet of “Favorite Quotations.” Each church member was asked to choose a motto that had especially inspired him or her, and these various lines were bound together in a pamphlet and handed out to the congregation. The collection testified to the self-sufficient, stoic nature of Ladora Presbyterians, but it also revealed their wide range of reading and their feeling for a philosophical, often lovely, phrase. Like his gift of Shakespeare to his bride, Jasper Augustine’s choice belied the image of the man of science who had no time for the more ephemeral things in life. The line from Ruskin that he contributed exemplified his physician’s nature, but it was also concerned with a man’s soul: “The nobleness of life depends on its consistency, clearness of purpose, quiet and ceaseless energy.” His wife’s choice, from Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts Phillips Brooks, echoed this idea while