Susan Jacoby, in her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004), wrote about the “Golden Age of Freethought” and specifies the years 1875 to 1914 as freethought’s heyday. Understandably, Robert Green Ingersoll was the era’s standard-bearer for the freethought cause. Ingersoll was probably the most-heard speaker in the United States before the advent of commercial radio (the early 1920s). He crisscrossed the country speaking to large audiences, packing leading theaters to the rafters. And, as we know, Ingersoll died in 1899 at his son-in-law’s summer home in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Yet, according to Jacoby, the Golden Age went on for another fifteen or so years following his death. Who was there to carry on the public discussion and be the “celebrity” of the cause? Who was the lecturer, writer, and popular philosopher who captured the public’s interest and prolonged freethought’s Golden Age?
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your feelings about the man) Elbert Hubbard, a retired soap salesman, captured the public’s interest. Hubbard kept many of Ingersoll’s ideas in the public mind for years afterward. Hubbard is a genuine dichotomy—and as the person carrying the torch for Ingersoll, he is no less a dichotomy.
Elbert Green Hubbard (yes, he too received his middle name after a cleric named Green) was born in 1856 and raised in Illinois. His parents were highly devout Baptists. His father, Doctor Silas Hubbard, was a well-known phrenologist. His wife, Juliana Francis “Frank” Read, became known as, yes, Mother Hubbard. Elbert’s older sister Hannah would marry John Larkin, and this introduced him to the soap business.
At the age of sixteen, Hubbard began his career as a soap salesman for his cousin Justice Weller and Weller’s partner, John Larkin. The J. Weller Soap Company became very successful in the following years. Hubbard’s sales territory took him throughout the Midwest and Illinois. In the 1870s, he very well may have sold soap to the Ingersoll household, then in Peoria.
Weller was married to Larkin’s sister, and their divorce caused a rift between the partners. Weller and Larkin decided to split the company. Weller would keep the Midwest, and a new company called the Larkin Company would take the East. Hubbard’s parents originally came from the Western New York area, and because this was a good opportunity for Hubbard, he left the Weller Company and became a one-third owner of the Larkin Soap Company in 1875.
From a humble factory well-placed in the First Ward of Buffalo, close to the ingredients supplied by the tanneries and slaughterhouses, the Larkin Soap Company became second only to Sears, Roebuck as a catalogue sales company in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. The company became so successful that it retained famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design its administration building (which was demolished in 1950). Wright designed a house for another Larkin executive, Darwin Martin, and this is one of several Wright-designed works still standing in the Buffalo area.
Elbert Hubbard was the reason for all this success. Hubbard had two ideas that worked well at Larkin: “Trial to buy” and premiums. Premiums—miscellaneous free items—were added to customers’ soap orders. It began with towels, spoons, and other sundry items; this eventually led to what became known as the Larkin Idea.
By this time, door-to-door selling had been abandoned in favor of catalogues. The Larkin Idea was for customers to form informal clubs to promote buying of Larkin products among their friends and families. Club members would go in together on the various combination boxes and then raffle off the premiums among themselves. The success of the premiums led to larger and more diverse objects offered as premiums. Coupons saved from smaller purchases could be used, or you could outright buy many different household goods, including desks, cedar chests, chairs, and more.
Hubbard was hugely successful, yet he felt something was missing. In the 1870s, he took up writing and other intellectual pursuits, but these seemed only a hobby. Hubbard was most influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists, but he also began reading Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, and other scientists of the day.
Then he discovered Ingersoll.
On November 3, 1878, Robert Ingersoll spoke in Buffalo at the Academy of Music on Main Street. Ingersoll delivered one of his routine speeches critical of religion from his lecture repertoire, “Some Mistakes of Moses.” Hubbard attended this speech and from that point forward idolized Ingersoll. Hubbard later declared, “The world was ripe for this man’s utterance.”
In 1881, Hubbard married Bertha Crawford of Illinois; during their marriage, they had four children. Hubbard also had a child out of wedlock with Alice Moore; she later became his second wife. (This is one area where Ingersoll and Hubbard differed starkly; Ingersoll was exceptionally virtuous. Hubbard, not so much.) The consensus is that Hubbard found a more intellectually compatible person in Moore. Moore was much more a free spirit, free thinker, and writer. She probably influenced Hubbard greatly in these areas.
During this time, Hubbard continued to direct the sales of the Larkin Company and was rewarded with a greater share of ownership in the company. Sales continued to grow. Despite his success, Hubbard believed he was destined for more. He decided he must get away from the soap business and became a man of letters. At the beginning of 1893, Hubbard pulled out his share of the Larkin Soap Company—the tidy sum of $75,000—and retired. He planned to go to college.
Hubbard attended Harvard as a special student for a semester but was not able to matriculate; he left shortly afterward. The importance of this will be made clear later.
Because Harvard had not worked out for him, Hubbard decided to go on a tour of Europe. Before sailing, he planned to stop at several book publishers in New York City to sell some manuscripts and pitch some writing ideas. On the way, he stopped in Utica to hear Ingersoll speak again. This incident, which Hubbard witnessed from a table nearby, is found in Ingersoll’s Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Americans: Robert Ingersoll:
In April 1894, Ingersoll lectured at Utica, New York.* The following Sunday a local clergyman denounced the lecturer as a sensualist, a gourmand—one totally indifferent to decency and the feelings and rights of others. Then the preacher said, “At breakfast in this city last Thursday, Ingersoll ordered everything on the bill of fare, and then insulted and roundly abused the waiter-girl because she did not bring things that were not in the hotel.”
I happened to be present at that meal. It was an “early train breakfast,” and the bill of fare for the day had not been printed. The girl came in, and standing at the Colonel’s elbow, in genuine waiter-girl style, mumbled this: “Ham and eggs, mutton chops, beefsteak, breakfast bacon, codfish balls and buckwheat cakes.”
And Bob solemnly said: “Ham and eggs, mutton chops, beefsteak, breakfast bacon, codfish balls and buckwheat cakes.”
In amazement the girl gasped, “What?” And then Bob went over it backward: “Buckwheat cakes, cod fish balls, breakfast bacon, beefsteak, mutton chops, and ham and eggs.” This memory test raised a laugh that sent a shout of mirth all through the room, in which even the girl joined.
“Haven’t you anything else, my dear,” asked the great man in a sort of disappointed way. “I think we have tripe and pig’s feet,” said the girl.
“Bring a bushel,” said Bob, “and say, tell the cook I’d like a dish of peacock tongues on the side.”
The infinite good nature of it all caused another laugh from everybody.
The girl brought everything ordered excepting the peacock tongues, and this order supplied the lecturer and his party of four. The waitress found a dollar bill under Bob’s plate, and the cook who stood in the kitchen door and waved a big spoon, and called, “Good-bye, Bob!” got another dollar for himself…
“Good-bye, Brother, and mind you get those peacock tongues by the time I get back,” answered Bob.
After Utica, Hubbard continued to New York and tried to sell his ideas to publishers, but he became very discouraged when no one wanted to even meet with him to discuss them. He embarked on his European tour. In England, he discovered the Arts and Crafts Movement of William Morris.
The Arts and Crafts Movement was a rebellion against the Machine Age. Morris encouraged artisans to create items by hand and get back to nature through what he called Joyful Labor. The goal was to simplify life and yet create inexpensive but high-quality goods to be sold to everyone. Not only was the final product important but so was the means of creating it. Psychologically, it helped people address their fears of the Machine Age.
Morris had launched a small publishing operation called Kelmscott Press. The press had a distinctive style: its books were all handmade. If you look at both Morris’s works and later works by the Roycrofters—the operation Hubbard would create—you will notice how similar in style they are. Hubbard came back to the United States with many, many new ideas and resolved to keep writing.
One of these ideas was the Little Journeys … series. Each Little Journeys … book was part travelogue, part philosophy, and part biography. But mostly, these were writings where Hubbard interpreted what he thought about his subjects. He envisaged several series of Little Journeys …, coming out once a month. Each year there would be a different theme: American authors, eminent artists, famous women, and so on.
In mid-1894, G. P. Putnam accepted for publication a book manuscript from Hubbard called No Enemy. Hubbard was invited to visit the publisher in New York City. He brought with him a mock-up of a Little Journeys … a book he had printed at home in East Aurora, New York (Putnam had rejected it in manuscript form less than a year earlier). Maybe it was the mock-up, or maybe Hubbard’s redoubtable salesmanship did the trick. In any case, Putnam began publishing Little Journeys … in the fall of 1894. (Putnam and Sons would publish Little Journeys … from 1894 to 1900.)
By mid-1895, back in East Aurora, Hubbard partnered with a local printer to begin a new publication. He titled it The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest.
The Philistine began as a vehicle for criticizing those he called “the gatekeepers”: publishers and the literary establishment, the major magazines, and the universities and colleges (here we see an echo of his animus against Harvard). Hubbard took New York publishers to task for rejecting him; he ridiculed magazine editors who would not allow him to get published. He fought against “the Old Boys’ Club” of the literary establishment and fought for those who wanted to become published and could not. Hubbard said: “We called it The Philistine because we are going after the Chosen People in Literature.” This publication later criticized high society, the government, and basically, anything Hubbard decided to write about—all in a humorous homespun style.
The Philistine met with great success, and Hubbard began publishing books in the style of Morris; Roycroft books were handprinted and handbound—books that not only held ideas, but were also works of art.
The success of the printing venture became a problem in several ways. First, Hubbard’s printing partner decided to get out of the business (there was too much work) and sold Hubbard sole control of the business. Second, Hubbard needed people to stitch the books, create the bindings, and so on. He began by hiring local residents. Men, women, and children from the area were able to work for the Roycrofters, as its artisanal work style allowed for the employment of, especially, women in a close approximation of a home setting.
Ever the salesman, Hubbard launched a print shop, a copper shop, a leather shop, and furniture shops—all striving to follow the Arts and Crafts ideals that had been formulated by Carlyle and Ruskin and put into practice by Morris. There was a medieval guild-like quality to this arrangement, and sometimes critics thought Hubbard’s workers were treated more like serfs than artisans. These jobs did not pay much; many Roycrofters worked for room and board plus a little bit of cash. However, self-proclaimed “Philistines”—admirers of the magazine—began to visit East Aurora from other parts of the country. Some of them stayed on, eventually replacing local workers with people who embraced the Roycroft ideology.
Roycroft began attracting artisans from other parts of the country to create these items; at the same time, Hubbard sent his own people to be trained in other centers of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The Roycrofters became one of the first creators of household goods to have its trademark or symbol prominently featured on items for sale. Hubbard had begun selling not only goods but an idea.
The American version of the Arts and Crafts Movement differed from its British inspiration. Where Morris insisted on artisanal handwork throughout its production processes, Hubbard and other Americans in the movement were willing to see some of the work done by machines to keep costs down and make the goods inexpensive to buy. Machines could turn wood, but artisans would still be using their hands to finish the items. A pretty fine distinction, perhaps, but it made American Arts and Crafts purveyors more solvent than their British counterparts. The Roycroft venture was the longest-lasting of all the Arts and Crafts colonies, enduring until 1938. (Beneath it all lay a great irony: though the Arts and Crafts movement and its principle of handcrafting was ideologically the opposite of commercialism, Hubbard succeeded precisely by commercializing the U. S. Arts and Crafts movement.)
In 1899, in the pages The Philistine, Hubbard published what would become his most famous work: A Message to Garcia. It was an essay very loosely based on an actual event. Andrew S. Rowan was a U. S. Army lieutenant sent by President William McKinley to take a message to Garcia, a Cuban rebel general, just before the Spanish-American War. Garcia’s location was unknown; Rowan reportedly displayed exceptional ingenuity and initiative to find Garcia and deliver McKinley’s message. Hubbard’s essay became extremely popular with business owners and was printed for workers, soldiers, the Marines, and even the Boy Scouts. The essay is a decree to follow the rules yet apply oneself; it praises conscientiousness in work as well as individual initiative. The success of this essay led to more workers, more visitors, and more people becoming aware of Hubbard.
By 1900, the Roycrofters’ print shop in East Aurora had grown capable enough that it took over publication of the successful Little Journeys … series from Putnam.
Hubbard went on the lecture circuit, ostensibly to speak about Garcia but also to talk about Roycroft. Then he hit the vaudeville circuit, reaching even more people. The lectures were financially lucrative and helped to keep Roycroft afloat financially. Hubbard enjoyed a distinction Ingersoll had held before him: Hubbard became the most sought-after public speaker in America between 1895 and 1915.
Hubbard spoke at the Thomas Paine Memorial Dedication in New Rochelle, New York, in 1909. He continued to lecture and publish. Along the way he grew more tolerant of Big Business and trusts, attacked muckrakers, and became more distrustful of the government. He also became a pacifist.
His pacifism—and his ego—led him to believe that he could talk Kaiser Wilhelm II out of war. He decided to go to Europe to meet with the Kaiser. He and Alice (Moore) Hubbard boarded a ship on May 1, 1915, to see the Kaiser but also to witness what was happening in the war and report back to Hubbard’s readers.
On May 7, off the coast of Ireland, the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. The bodies of the two Hubbards—for Lusitania was the ship they had boarded—were never recovered.
During his life, Hubbard struggled to find a good blend of his religious upbringing and his “rampant individualism.” Looking back, it seems his individualism won out. As to his views on religion, some observers thought Hubbard was an agnostic, but we would call him more of a deist than an agnostic. He continued to believe in a deity but was very much against organized religion. He remarked often that his best advertising came from clergy denouncing him (an observation also made by Ingersoll):
Up to the time of Thomas Jefferson, religion and government were one, and even now, although (sic) they are not legally wedded, they continue to have ‘relations.’ No candidate for the presidency dares expresses his honest belief. (The Philistine, Vol 25, no 3 [August 1907] page 87)
Over the course of several issues, the culmination of the following story appeared in the October 1908 issue of The Philistine. It illustrates both Hubbard’s rampant individualism and his irreligiousness. A local woman wanted to donate a Dresden edition of Ingersoll’s works to the public library in East Aurora and was turned down by the library board because the writings were “atheistical.” Hubbard heard of this and wrote a letter to the board offering his own writings. Hubbard pointed out that he was a taxpayer and the largest employer in the town, that he received three-quarters of all mail handled by the local post office, and that many of the people in town came to work for him precisely because of his views. Hubbard also stated that his writings were not on par with Ingersoll’s, but they were just as “atheistical.” The Board that had refused Ingersoll’s writings accepted Hubbard’s writings—though they would be placed in a special “Objectionable Literature” section. After some interesting back-and-forth correspondence, Hubbard withdrew his offer, announcing that instead he would invite the townsfolk to come to the Roycroft Library to read these “objectionable works” instead of patronizing the public library.
In 1909, Alice Hubbard edited a book called An American Bible, an anthology of brief writings by prominent Americans. Of course her husband was included. She wrote this in the book’s introduction:
So this, then, is the book we offer—a book written by Americans, for Americans. It is a book without myth, miracle, mystery or metaphysics—a commonsense book for people who prize commonsense as a divine heritage. The book that will benefit most is not the one that imparts the most facts, but the one that inspires men to think and to act for themselves. The world can only be redeemed through action—movement—motion. Un-coerced, unbribed and unbought, humanity will move toward the light.
There are many dichotomies regarding Hubbard. Hubbard was tolerant of individualism but only his individualism. At Roycroft he was an autocrat. All things were supervised either by his wife, or by himself. We also know that he had no problem embellishing the truth. In later biographical writings and lectures, he claimed he had worked on the docks, worked as a teacher, and pursued other professions when we know that he absolutely did not do those things.
Critics of the time decided that Hubbard was a combination of the following: P. T. Barnum because of his “ballyhoo”; Buffalo Bill due to his affection for horses and his haircut; Mark Twain for his homespun humor; Victor Hugo for his sympathy for the oppressed; and Robert Ingersoll because of his war on tyranny and religious orthodoxy.
Being a businessman, Hubbard supported the ideas of Big Business, yet it was difficult for him to reconcile this with his empathy for the people. He was often accused of “leaving quotation marks” off many writings—in other words, plagiarizing and taking the words as his own—or at least “not pointing out that they were not his.” There are times Hubbard called himself an anarchist, a socialist, a businessman, and other things at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Hubbard was a salesman and marketer extraordinaire; he sold soap, manufactured goods, and an idea. We know he was not as virtuous as Ingersoll. He may have been contrived. Was Hubbard the best spokesman for these ideas after Ingersoll? Probably not, but then again, who could live up to the reputation that Ingersoll created?
* The Ingersoll Chronology (https://chronology.secularhumanism.org/) does not show an Ingersoll lecture in Utica in April 1894. It does show that on Wednesday, May 2, 1894, Ingersoll delivered his lecture “Lincoln” at the Utica Opera House. Ingersoll toured through New York State from April 22 to May 6, speaking in a different city each night with the exception of April 25. It is likely, then, that Hubbard is recalling the May 2 lecture.