[Alumni-chat] Antiochiana/ Elbert Hubbard

[YAZZ ALLEN]

Sept. 9, 07
   
  Hi from Yazz (David Roger) Allen '66 (YazzAllen at Yahoo.Com)!
   
  Antioch College was discussed in 1912 by Elbert Hubbard, the guy who wrote MESSAGE TO GARCIA.  He was a big deal in pre-WW I USA arts and letters and journalism....sort of the Horrace Greeley of his day!.
   
  Short bio article about him below from the Wikipedia, FYI.
   
  Interesting to learn of Antioch's travails in 1912, and the fact the President (Simeon Fess, later US Senator from Ohio and one of the guys who ran America in the  1920's when Ohio Republicans ran everything everywhere back then) got only $1,000 per year.  Probably one could live an OK life on a grand a year in 1912....rents in YSO must have been pretty cheap then, I'd think.  They still were when I lived off campus in YSO in the early 60's.  Yellow Springs, Ohio only recently became super-gentrified and unaffordable for little guys.  Currently, it's the poster yppie community for the Greater Dayton OH area, I hear.
   
  Antioch College has always been the darling of American cultural leaders, and tongue-clucking about Antioch having money trouble in spite of its famous origins and accomplishments went on the 19th century and into the 20th century.
   
  Eleanor Roosevet headed the "New Yorkers For Antioch Committee" in the 1920's even before her husband became NY state governor in 1928.   The Roosevelts actually drove to Antioch College Ohio for a visit in 1931 when FDR was still NY governor to look it over.
   
  MORE Antiochiana about Eleanor Roosevelt and Antioch College (according to the 1975 Antioch calendar I have!):
   
  On July 11, 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt visited and spoke at Antioch College, Ohio.
   
  She stated then, during her Antioch visit, "We've taught history the way we would like it to be, rather than the way it really is!"  
   
  This gal could have been a terrific Antioch undergrad, given the chance (she never atended school or had group education, ever.  All her education came from private tutors!).
   
  Here is the Wikipedia article about the sainted Elbert Hubbard, who spoke about Antioch College in 1912, cited in an early Antiochiana post I made:
   
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  Elbert Green Hubbard (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915) was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. He was an influential exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement and is, perhaps, most famous for his essay A Message to Garcia.
  

               
He was born in Bloomington, Illinois and grew up in Hudson, Illinois, where his first business venture was selling Larkin soap products. His innovations for Larkin included premiums and "leave on trial." His best-known work came after he 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 graduate of the New Thought-oriented Emerson College of Oratory in Boston and 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."
   
  In 1908 he was the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of The Society in Dedham for Apprehending Horse Thieves.[1] In 1912, the famed passenger liner the Titanic was sunk after hitting an iceberg. Hubbard subsequently wrote[2] of the disaster, singling out the story of the wife of Isador Straus, who as a woman was supposed to be placed on a lifeboat in precedence to the men. She refused to board the boat: "Not I—I will not leave my husband. 
   
  All these years we've traveled together, and shall we part now? No, our fate is one."
  Hubbard then added his own stirring commentary: "Mr. and Mrs. Straus, I envy you that legacy of love and loyalty left to your children and grandchildren. The calm courage that was yours all your long and useful career was your possession in death. You knew how to do three great things—you knew how to live, how to love and how to die.
   
  "One thing is sure, there are just two respectable ways to die. One is of old age, and the other is by accident. All disease is indecent. Suicide is atrocious. But to pass out as did Mr. and Mrs. Isador Straus is glorious. Few have such a privilege. Happy lovers, both. In life they were never separated and in death they are not divided." Hubbard and his wife, though he knew it not then, were to have just such a privilege. Little more than three years after the sinking of the Titanic, the Hubbards boarded Lusitania in New York City on May 1, 1915. On May 7, 1915, while at sea, it was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine Unterseeboot 20.
   
   
  

 


 
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  Contact Yazz Allen directly via email at YazzAllen at Yahoo.Com, mail to 644 Shrewsbury Commons Ave., #239, Shrewsbury PA USA 17361...
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  "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead (1901 - 1978)


       
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