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Hubbard & Wright - something to investigate

This chapter note is in Freeman Champney’s book, “Art & Glory: The Elbert Hubbard Story”:

“There is some interesting material on Hubbard and Frank Lloyd Wright in “Frank Lloyd Wright: A Study in Architectural Content” by Norris Kelly Smith (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1966). The two met and they had arguments, with Hubbard apparently taking a stand for the freestanding individual as against Wright’s (then) more conservative position.”

 

Hoping I had a lead on facts that would support EH and FLW having met or known each other, I bought this book, but did NOT find any evidence; just more conjecture. Do any of our readers have sources that can prove the two met? I would love to have the names of the sources if you do.

 

- Sue

 

Lovers in Room 79

      January was a significant anniversary month for Elbert & Alice for several reasons. Not only was it the month his divorce from Bertha was finalized and within days he married Alice (1904), but it was also the month in 1893 when they first became lovers in Boston after Elbert journeyed there to attend Harvard.

      January 9, 1893 Elbert left his wife Bertha and his three sons behind in East Aurora, taking the train to Boston. On January 10th he and Alice registered as man and wife at a Boston hotel and settled into room 79 for four days. Thereafter the numbers 1,2,3,4 appeared in their love letters as a coded reference to those blissful days. They even removed the room plate number from the door as a souvenir! Perhaps the Roycroft Inn should offer similar mementos to honeymooners today...

      Source: “As Bees in Honey Drown” by Charles F. Hamilton, pages 59-61; sold at the Roycroft Copper Shop, 31 South Grove St., East Aurora, NY.

 

- Sue

Recognized Individualists: Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp & Elbert Hubbard

Today’s celebrities have many venues for their agents to use in getting their clients' images and their work out to the public. As a result, for example, few people do not know who Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp are or what they look like.

Not so in Elbert Hubbard’s day. Many of those who had read Hubbard’s famous essay, “Message to Garcia”, or his “periodical of protest”, the “Philistine”, had no idea what he looked like until they saw him speak in person. His large format magazine with photographs, The Fra, did not debut until 1908. 

As related in the book, "Art & Glory: The Story of Elbert Hubbard" by Freeman Champney, the first time Hubbard was booked to speak in New York City, he went with Ali Baba to the Waldorf-Astoria to register - it was also the site for his lecture. The desk clerk took one look at them - whiskered and weatherbeaten faces, long hair, flowing neckties, hickory shirts, baggy pants and stetson hats - and told them that the hotel was full. The press made much of it with headlines like “Apostle of Simplicity Refused Admission to Waldorf-Astoria”. The hotel manager had his work cut out for him to fix the situation.

On the other hand, once people had seen Hubbard, they never forgot what he looked like. His eccentric attire and hair cut were an important part of his image as an individualist, just as it is for Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp today.

See more of this “american original” in the WNED documentary, “Elbert Hubbard, An American Original”; available for purchase at the Roycroft Copper Shop.

- Sue

Elbert’s Opinion of Evangelism

An excerpt from Art & Glory: The Story of Elbert Hubbard, by Freeman Champney:

“Mary [Elbert’s sister] joined the church when she was twelve, and “was baptized in the icy waters of Six Mile Creek on a snowy February day, while the congregation sang on the banks, ‘Oh happy day that fixed my choice.’” But Elbert was never converted. Mary gives no indication that he openly rebelled, but he was the only holdout in his Bible class - “a seeming impossibility , considering his training and uprightness.” But there it was, and the “ministers sorrowfully shook their heads.” What he felt about the whole thing turned up frequently in print twenty to forty years later. One good sample is in the Philistine for October 1908. “The entire intent of the evangelist is to kill in the man his sense of self-reliance - to destroy his self-confidence - to make him think less of himself. . . . When you make a man doubt himself you injure him.” 

And yet, "Said he [Elbert Hubbard], 'Every man is a Child of God and the best man who has ever lived was nothing more.'" (from Felix Shay's book Elbert Hubbard of East Aurora). 

Scorning evangelists, but maintaining a personal faith in God, Elbert was a man of contradictions in this and many things. He didn't want to be preached to and yet he was the king of the soap box preachers. In any case, being contradictory suited his purposes - more publicity!

- Sue

February 1894, Elbert Writes to His Sons

While at Harvard, Elbert would write to his sons in East Aurora knowing that Bertha would read the letters. There would be news for her there too, indirectly of course, as their relations had cooled considerably.

"Thursday, Feb. 3

My Dear Boys 3. I wrote you a letter a day or so ago about putting your clothes always in one place at night, so you can find them at once in the morning. Now Mamma will not scold you nor tell you to dress but just once - that is all. 

Each boy, must dress himself 'cept Whutchie and he can take his Klose out tot he barn and let Baba" (the hired man) "dress him if he can't do it himself but then I guess he can. then after each boy is dressd  he must wash his own hands and face good with soap and water and use the towel. Then Mamma will at once comb his hair and part it carefully i the middle for all of the Harvard boys part their hair so. ...When the Snoozer comes here he will join the football team and be the biggest  and strongest boy in the school. "

 excerpted from As Bees in Honey Drown, by Charles F. Hamilton, page 63

- Sue

January - Hubbard's Month of Endings & Beginnings

January was the month Elbert and his first wife Bertha finalized their divorce in 1904. But EH’s newfound “bachelorhood” was very short lived. He and his long-time mistress, school teacher Alice Moore, married January 17, 1904, just days after his previous marriage ended. They took their vows in Philadelphia at the end of one of Elbert’s lecture tours. 

The Buffalo Courier ran a story on January 18th about the nuptials and had this to say about the newly weds eventual return to East Aurora: “It is presumed that Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard will soon come to this village. For the present it is understood they will reside in one of Hubbard’s houses on Oakwood Avenue, but in the spring they will take possession of a log house that is being built in the rear of the Roycroft property on Grove Street...What sort of reception local  society will give the second Mrs. Hubbard is rather of an enigma. However, it seems likely to be of a frigid order...”

I suspect the writer was referring to East Aurora’s typical January weather as well as the public response to this news. . .

- Sue

Elbert Hubbard's Style of Dress

The book Art & Glory: The Story of Elbert Hubbard, by Freeman Champney, describes the possible sources of Hubbard’s bohemian style (pages 60-61). As a soap salesman at Larkin, Elbert was very buttoned-down and followed the dictates of society for his fashionable wardrobe. But once he began his writing career he developed a completely different look. 

“Leaving the soap business ended his “devotion to fashion”. When he visited Chicago in May of 1893, his moustache was gone, he wore a cape overcoat, and he was letting his “curling locks” grow. ...giving him “just a bit of a theatrical air”. ...In his visit to England, he found two special kinds of dress eccentricity...foppishness of the Oscar Wilde group...” and ”...William Morris, whom he described as “big, bold and shaggy” and adopted his casual, loose fitting style "....he added still another item - a western-style Stetson...” thus completing the ensemble for which he is known today.

You can see Elbert in his signature style in photographs both on the RCC web site and at the Copper Shop’s front room museum. 

- Sue

January - a Month of Newborns for the Fra

Miriam C. Hubbard, Elbert Hubbard and Alice Moore’s love child, was born out of wedlock on September 16, 1894. The couple did not register her birth until January 1, 1895 in Hingham, Massachusetts. 

In March of the same year Elbert reconciled with his wife Bertha and they conceived their daughter Katherine. She was born in the following January, 1896. Alice had no idea that Bertha was pregnant and was very surprised by news of the Hubbard daughter. She nearly had a nervous breakdown and went into seclusion for a time.

Oh what a tangled web they wove. . . 

- Sue

Then & Now: Darwin Influencing a Young Boy

Many think that one hundred fifty years ago bears little resemblance to today. I say that with a little examination, you will find much in common with those who have gone before us. My example naturally uses Elbert Hubbard. Excerpts are from Art & Glory: The Elbert Hubbard Story, by Freeman Champney

In Elbert's day, 

“The whole common life of the time...was based on the one Book. The Bible was infallibly and literally God’s Word, and it supplied everyday practical guidance, solace in times of trouble, assurance of the cosmic importance of life, moral absolutes, history, poetry, philosophy,  and prophecy. 

. . . science - as a radically new way of looking at the world - came into American Society during Hubbard’s boyhood, and came as a set of ideas with practically no tangible referents. For most people, it was Lyell, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley and their popularizers who shattered the total authority of the Book and opened the doors of men’s minds for all that was to follow. If the Creation had not taken place literally as set forth in Genesis, what man could henceforth know what was real and what was right? Heresies beyond numbering or imagining would arise; how could they be refuted? These were the sorts of questions that were asked. Those who tried to answer them usually invoked the name of science.” 

When Darwin’s On The Origination of Species first printing sold out in one day Elbert Hubbard was only 3 years old, but the ramifications of that book influenced society from that point onward. Hubbard’s adult writings are evidence of his personal reaction to the impact science had on religion for him. 

Today the controversy Darwin stirred up continues to be very much alive; manifesting itself in the Modern Creationist Movement as a pro-active response to evolution theory and science’s continued pursuit of the smallest particle of matter - Higgs boson - referred to by the media as the “God particle”. 

This debate began during Elbert’s lifetime and will continue long after ours.

- Sue

Elbert Hubbard, the Early Days

A description of Elbert on the road as a soap salesman, from the book Art & Glory: The Story of Elbert Hubbard by Freeman Champney - 

“As a drummer, Elbert was on hearty and joshing terms with his customers, fellow salesmen, and all the draymen, freight agents, hotel clerks and waitresses the day’s work brought into his orbit. But he seems never to have adopted the traveling man’s more customary ways of filling up his spare time. Alcohol, tobacco and cards he never touched. He attended political meetings, explored the countryside, visited state fairs and museums, collected souvenirs and curiosities for the folks back home...He also acquired the reading habit. He broke the Baptist taboo on novels by sending home cheap copies of Dickens and George Eliot. (It was finally decided that the girls* might read them, except on Sundays.)”

The future “Fra” was growing into his charismatic style, devouring the written word and developing an understanding of his customers across the country; all of which helped him later as he marketed Larkin Soap with premiums and when he was in business for himself selling books.  

• Sue

* his sisters