Elbert Hubbard

Elbert Green Hubbard (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915) was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. Raised in Hudson, Illinois, he had early success as a traveling salesman for the Larkin Soap Company. Hubbard is known best as the founder of the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, an influential exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement. Among Hubbard's many publications were the fourteen-volume work 'Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great' and the short publication 'A Message to Garcia'. He and his second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, died aboard the RMS Lusitania when it was torpedoed and sunk by German submarine SM U-20 off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915. He was born in Bloomington, Illinois, to Silas Hubbard and Juliana Frances Read. He described his schooling days as "splendid" and "tinged with no trace of blue." His first business venture was selling Larkin soap products, a career which eventually brought him to Buffalo, New York. His innovations for Larkin included premiums and "leave on trial." His best-known work came after he founded Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts community in East Aurora, New York, in 1895. This grew from his private press which he had initiated in collaboration with his first wife Bertha Crawford Hubbard, the Roycroft Press, inspired by William Morris's Kelmscott Press. Although called the "Roycroft Press" by latter-day collectors and print historians, the organization called itself "The Roycrofters" and "The Roycroft Shops". Hubbard edited and published two magazines, 'The Philistine—A Periodical of Protest' and 'The FRA--A Journal of Affirmation'. 'The Philistine' was bound in brown butcher paper and featured largely satire and whimsy. The Roycrofters produced handsome, if sometimes eccentric, books printed on handmade paper, and operated a fine bindery, a furniture shop, and shops producing modeled leather and hammered copper goods. They were a leading producer of Mission style products. Hubbard's second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, was a graduate of the New Thought-oriented Emerson College of Oratory in Boston and a noted suffragist. The Roycroft Shops became a site for meetings and conventions of radicals, freethinkers, reformers, and suffragists. Hubbard became a popular lecturer, and his homespun philosophy evolved from a loose William Morris-inspired socialism to an ardent defense of free enterprise and American know-how. Hubbard was mocked in the Socialist press for "selling out". He replied that he had not given up any ideal of his, but had simply lost faith in Socialism as a means of realizing them. An example of his trenchant critical style may be found in his saying that prison is, "An example of a Socialist's Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied and competition is eliminated." In 1908, Hubbard was the main speaker at the annual meeting of The Society in Dedham for Apprehending Horse Thieves. Before he died, Hubbard planned to write a story about Felix Flying Hawk, the only son of Chief Flying Hawk. Hubbard had learned about Flying Hawk during 1915 from Major Israel McCreight. In 1912, the passenger liner RMS Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg. Hubbard subsequently wrote of the disaster, singling out the story of Ida Straus, who as a woman was supposed to be placed on a lifeboat in precedence to the men, but refused to board the boat, and leave her husband. Hubbard then added his own commentary: "Mr. and Mrs. Straus, I envy you that legacy of love and loyalty left to your children and grandchildren. The calm courage that was yours all your long and useful career was your possession in death. You knew how to do three great things—you knew how to live, how to love and how to die. One thing is sure, there are just two respectable ways to die. One is of old age, and the other is by accident. All disease is indecent. Suicide is atrocious. But to pass out as did Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus is glorious. Few have such a privilege. Happy lovers, both. In life they were never separated and in death they are not divided."