Elbert Hubbard

Elbert Green Hubbard was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher, born in Bloomington, Illinois, on June 19, 1856, and raised in Hudson, Illinois. His father, Silas Hubbard, had moved the family from Buffalo, New York, after finding it hard to establish a medical practice in Bloomington. Known to his family as “Bertie,” Hubbard grew up among several siblings, in a household marked early by the death of his older brother Charlie. He attended the local public school, a small two-room building overlooking a graveyard, and later remembered those school days as “splendid.” His sister Mary recalled a boy with a quick sense of humor who sometimes annoyed his teachers.

Hubbard first found success in business, not literature. His earliest venture was selling Larkin soap products, work that eventually brought him to Buffalo. At the Larkin Soap Company, he became a traveling salesman and developed innovations that included premiums and “leave on trial.” That mix of salesmanship, experiment, and direct appeal to ordinary customers stayed with him. It helped shape the practical, plainspoken public voice that later made him a popular lecturer and a busy publisher.

He is best known as the founder of the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, an influential center of the Arts and Crafts movement. Hubbard founded Roycroft in 1895, growing it from a private press begun in collaboration with his first wife, Bertha Crawford Hubbard. The press was inspired by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, but the group called itself “The Roycrofters” and “The Roycroft Shops.” In time, Roycroft became a community of residences and workshops producing handsome books, furniture, pottery, leather goods, rugs, baskets, stained-glass lamps and windows, candy, painting, and music.

Roycroft was also the setting for Hubbard’s best-known work as an editor and publisher. His publications included the fourteen-volume Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great and the short publication A Message to Garcia. He edited and published The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, bound in brown butcher paper and filled largely with satire and whimsy, and The FRA: A Journal of Affirmation. The Roycrofters printed books on handmade paper and operated shops for fine binding, furniture, modeled leather, and hammered copper goods. They became a leading producer of Mission style products.

Hubbard’s thinking moved across several currents of his time. Roycroft drew on William Morris-inspired ideas, and his second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, brought her own background as a graduate of the New Thought-oriented Emerson College of Oratory in Boston and as a noted suffragist. The Roycroft Shops became a meeting place for radicals, freethinkers, reformers, and suffragists. Hubbard’s homespun philosophy shifted from a loose socialism toward a strong defense of free enterprise and American know-how, a change that brought criticism from the Socialist press. He answered that he had not abandoned his ideals, only his faith in Socialism as the way to realize them.

At the beginning of World War I, Hubbard published much commentary in The Philistine and wanted to cross the ocean to report on the war and interview the Kaiser. He and Alice Moore Hubbard died aboard the RMS Lusitania when it was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine SM U-20 off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915. His words still suit readers who like energy over complaint and action over drift. A line associated with him on this site, “Positive anything is better than negative nothing,” catches that brisk, useful spirit.