Elbert Hubbard was born on June 19, 1856, in Bloomington, Illinois, United States. Elbert was descended from George Hubbard who was living in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1639. His parents were Silas Hubbard, a physician, and Juliana Frances Read. Named by his parents Elbert Green Hubbard, he dropped the middle name when he became an author.
The eccentric Hubbard lacked a formal college education. Although he briefly attended Harvard University, he was not a remarkable student. He left Harvard and traveled to Europe in 1894 to gather material for a series of biographical studies that were later published as his highly successful series of "Little Journeys" pamphlets.
At the age of sixteen, Hubbard went to Chicago and for four years was in a freelance connection with the newspapers of the city. In 1880, he took a position with a manufacturing company at Buffalo, New York, and for the next fifteen years was connected with its sales and advertising activities. He introduced here methods which have been widely used in stimulating sales by extension of credit and awarding of premiums, methods which he successfully employed later in the circulation of his own magazines. In 1883, he moved to East Aurora, a Buffalo suburb. In 1892, he retired from business with modest resources.
A vital educational experience was his trip abroad in this year when he visited and fell under the influence of William Morris. On his return he entered the office of the Arena Publishing Company in Boston, through which his first two novels, One Day: A Tale of the Prairies (1893) and Forbes of Harvard (1894), were published, together with two essays in the magazine, The Arena, in 1894. In the latter year, a New York house published for him his third and last novel, No Enemy (But Himself), and in January of 1895 the first of his Little Journeys, the pamphlet on George Eliot.
In 1895, stimulated by the example of William Morris, he founded at East Aurora the Roycroft Press, named after the seventeenth-century English printers, Thomas and Samuel Roycroft. Roycroft became the name not only of the press but of the entire enterprise which would grow slowly, a growth which came with time rather than from a plan. In June of 1895, he published, in a form which was later to become very familiar, the first number of The Philistine, issued in a spirit of experiment and challenge without thought of any permanent future policy. The 2, 500 copies which he distributed among authors and publishing houses brought responses which stimulated the issue of a second number in July. For a while, he worked with the assistance of contributors, but with the forty-fifth issue, January 1899, he announced that thereafter he himself would write everything in the periodical including advertisements and testimonials of Roycroft books. Circulation increased steadily, and according to the announcement on the last issue before his death in 1915, the number that went to press was 225, 000.
The Philistine had become so completely his own utterance that it was discontinued with the issue of July 1915. It had been only the beginning of his editorial activities; in April 1908 he started the publication of The Fra, a less personal periodical which, however, was also discontinued after his death (August 1917). His Little Journeys, issued monthly, aggregated 170, and are published in fourteen volumes. He was the controlling spirit in the Roycroft Shops, with ultimately a working force of over 500. To the Roycroft Inn picturesque visitors came singly, and in numbers to the annual conventions which were gay interchanges of miscellaneous opinion.
For the last fifteen years of his life, Hubbard was on the road lecturing much of the time from May to September annually; and in one of these years, he even invaded the vaudeville stage, more to his monetary than to his artistic satisfaction. His Message to Garcia of 1899 was written in the mood of an impatient employer wearied at the inefficiency of his hirelings. It was eagerly snapped up by industrial magnates and was printed under various auspices and in various languages, giving currency for the probably unverifiable statement that its aggregate circulation reached 40, 000, 000. A characteristic collection of his efficiency utterances is the posthumous booklet called Loyalty in Business (copyrighted 1921) of which an edition of 5, 000 was circulated by the officials of one of the well-known schools of commerce.
Hubbard and his second wife, Alice Moore, drowned in the Irish Sea when the Germans sunk the Lusitania. His son, Elbert Hubbard, Jr., continued to publish both the Philistine and Fra for a time in addition to managing the business affairs of the Roycroft Shop. The Roycroft Shop was sold in 1938 and continued to manufacture various products under several owners until 1987.
Hubbard is remembered for his contributions as an author and lecturer, and especially for his roles as publisher and editor of The Philistine and The Fra, two controversial publications in the early twentieth century. By the time of his death, his oeuvre numbered more than forty works, most published by his own Roycroft Press.
Hubbard was early in the modern succession of American authors who broke away from the conventions of traditional polite literature and wrote informally for his own contemporary public. His Philistine was the longest-lived and most substantial of a large number of little periodicals of literary revolt which sprang into existence in the nineties.
(A Message to Garcia has carried its simple message of har...)
1899Hubbard considered himself as an anarchist and a socialist. He believed in social, economic, domestic, political, mental and spiritual freedom.
Quotations:
"A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success."
"To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing."
"Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out of it alive."
"It is the weak man who urges compromise - never the strong man."
"Life is just one damn thing after another."
"The supreme prayer of my heart is not to be learned, rich, famous, powerful, or ‘good,’ but simply to be radiant."
"I desire to radiate health, cheerfulness, calm courage, and good will. I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural, clean in mind and clean in body, unaffected - as ready to say ‘I do not know,’ if it be so, and to meet all men on an absolute equality - to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid."
Hubbard was fond of horseback riding, swimming, rowing and gardening. His gifts as an administrator and as a writer were in no small degree indebted to his engaging and magnetic personality, an asset which he did not hesitate to exploit. He abjured the conventional stiffness of men's dress and with his wide-brimmed soft hat, luxuriant hair, and flowing tie, he challenged attention wherever he went. From his lectures his auditors carried away rather more a sense of contact with an individual than the memory of his formal discourse; and similarly the readers of The Philistine gathered from the substance of what he wrote, the breezy and sometimes recklessly informal style, and the format of the magazine with its rough paper cover and its characteristic typefont, a feeling of having received a personal message in the continuance of a periodic correspondence.
On June 30, 1881, Hubbard married Bertha C. Crawford. In 1903, the couple broke up and the following year, Elbert married Alice Moore, a writer.
Hubbard had four children: Elbert, Sanford and Katherine from his first marriage, and Miriam from the second.
9 May 1821 - 18 May 1917
16 November 1829 - 28 December 1924
1861–1946
Bertha Crawford Hubbard was one of the founders of the Roycroft movement, an American branch of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
June 7, 1861 – May 7, 1915
Alice Moore Hubbard was a noted American feminist, writer, and, with her husband, Elbert Hubbard was a leading figure in the Roycroft movement – a branch of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England with which it was contemporary.
16 September 1894 - September 1985
1882–1970
1887 - 21 May 1955
22 June 1885 - 14 November 1980
10 June 1853 - 15 April 1922
10 December 1861 - 27 November 1899
1923 - 17 August 2008
H. Mark Roelofs, professor emeritus of New York University, and scholar of the American political mind.
