| |
Hubbard, Elbert (1856–1915)
 Elbert
Green Hubbard (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915) was an American
philosopher and writer. He is perhaps most famous for his essay
A Message to Garcia.
He was born in Bloomington, Illinois and founded Roycroft, an
Arts and Crafts movement community in East Aurora, New York in
1895. This grew from his private press, the Roycroft Press,
which was 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" and
"The Fra." "The Philistine" was bound in brown butcher paper and
full of satire and whimsy. (Hubbard himself quipped that the
cover was butcher paper because "There is meat inside.") 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 noted
suffragist, and 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 much mocked in the press for "selling
out." The American science fiction writer and founder of
Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, was a nephew of Elbert by the
adoption of his father into the Hubbard family.
He and his wife were killed in the sinking of the Lusitania by
the German submarine, Unterseeboot 20 in May of 1915. The
Roycroft Shops, run by Hubbard's son Elbert Hubbard II, operated
until 1938.
|
