“Commune” In East Aurora (February 1971 | Volume: 22, Issue: 2)

“Commune” In East Aurora

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Authors: Robert L. Beisner

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February 1971 | Volume 22, Issue 2

In the spring of 1915 a handsome fifty-nine-year-old man with a marked resemblance to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan boarded ship in New York, bound for England. Other passengers stared unabashedly at his long black Prince Albert coat, his outsize black tie, his almost shoulder-length tresses topped by a Stetson hat. There was indeed nothing ordinary about Elbert Hubbard. When the Lusitania was torpedoed in the Irish Sea a few days later, his death was reported across the United States in the same paragraph that recorded that of the multimillionaire Alfred Vanderbilt. The Literary Digest described Hubbard’s loss, along with that of several theatrical notables, as a “Blow to Arts and Letters.” And forty thousand Americans wrote their condolences to his son in East Aurora, New York.

Who was Elbert Hubbard, this deeply mourned victim of war? Few today are able to identify him except as the author of an inspirational popular essay entitled “A Message to Garcia.” But Hubbard was more than an uplifter. Eor twenty years this one-time soap salesman mixed handicrafts, village atheism, success worship, and ballyhoo into an improbable amalgam of earnest truth-seeking and charlatanry. Though he equalled few of them in real talent, he reminds one of Ben Franklin, Bob Ingersoll, Norman Vincent Peale, Mark Twain, Emile Coué (“Every day in every way I’m getting better and better”), Horatio Alger, Walt Wrhitman, P. T. Barnum, and Mary Baker Eddy. Part vulgarian and part aesthete, part Owcnite socialist and part robber baron, Elbert Hubbard lived a life of compelling interest.

Hubbard was primarily a huckster, a man with a keen nose for publicity, who first channelled his commercial talents into business and then into a successful writing and publishing career. In addition to “A Message to Garcia” he wrote dozens of biographical sketches called Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great (a veritable five-foot shelf when collected) and published two periodicals, the Philistine and The Fra . The former, launched in 1895, at one time had a monthly circulation of 126,000. Although Hubbard wrote ads willingly, as well as essays preaching the virtues of the American free-enterprise system and the talented social benefactors who ran it, his magazines appeared between arty brown covers, were printed by an organization supposedly dedicated to a communal economy, and were full of Hubbard’s antiestablishment manifestoes. He favored enlightened reforms in penology, supported a tax on inherited income, and claimed that he opposed child labor (though many a prepubescent found employment in his East Aurora works). Three established professions were constantly under attack in the Philistine . First was the clergy, whose privileged status the agnostic Hubbard assaulted by opposing blue laws and Bible-reading in public schools and by favoring the taxation of church properties. Second came physicians, who also felt Hubbard’s public scorn, for Fra Klbertus, as he styled himself, was a kind of slapdash Christian Scientist who believed in drugless healing and Fletchcrism