Elbert Green Hubbard

Elbert Green Hubbard (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915) was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. Raised in Hudson, Illinois, he had early success as a traveling salesman for the Larkin Soap Company. Hubbard is known best as the founder of the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, an influential exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Among Hubbard's many publications were the fourteen-volume work Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great and the short publication A Message to Garcia. He and his second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, died aboard the RMS Lusitania when it was torpedoed and sunk by German submarine SM U-20 off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915.

Early life Hubbard was born in Bloomington, Illinois, to Silas Hubbard and Juliana Frances Read on June 19, 1856. In the autumn of 1855, his parents had relocated to Bloomington from Buffalo, New York, where his father had a medical practice. Finding it difficult to settle in Bloomington—mainly due to the presence of several already established doctors—Silas moved his family to Hudson, Illinois, the next year.

His best-known work came after he founded Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts community in East Aurora, New York, in 1895. This grew from his private press which he had initiated in collaboration with his first wife Bertha Crawford Hubbard, the Roycroft Press, inspired by William Morris' Kelmscott Press.

Hubbard edited and published two magazines, The Philistine—A Periodical of Protest and The FRA--A Journal of Affirmation. The Philistine was bound in brown butcher paper and featured largely 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. 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 mocked in the Socialist press for "selling out". He replied that he had not given up any ideal of his, but had simply lost faith in Socialism as a means of realizing them.

An example of his trenchant critical style may be found in his saying that prison is, "An example of a Socialist's Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied and competition is eliminated."

In 1908, Hubbard was the main speaker at the annual meeting of The Society in Dedham for Apprehending Horse Thieves. His end seems to have followed the pattern he had admired in Mrs. Straus. In a letter to Elbert Hubbard II dated March 12, 1916, Ernest C. Cowper, a survivor of this event, wrote:

Hubbard's Message to Garcia essay was adapted into two movies: the 1916 silent movie A Message to Garcia and the 1936 movie A Message to Garcia.

Mack Bolan, the main character of Don Pendleton's fiction series The Executioner, frequently cites as inspiration a Hubbard quote, "God will not look you over for medals, diplomas, or degrees – but for scars."

Other quotes include Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive. In order to have friends, you must first be one. Never explain - your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

The Elbert Hubbard Roycroft Museum is at the George and Gladys Scheidemantel House in East Aurora, New York. The museum features furniture and decorative items produced by the Roycroft community.

Selected works Forbes of Harvard (1894) No Enemy But Himself (1894) Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great (1895–1910) The Legacy (1896) A Message to Garcia (1899) A Message to Garcia and Thirteen Other Things (1901) Love, Life and Work (1906) A Dozen & Two Pastelles in Prose: Being impressions of the Wanamaker Stores, written in as many moods (1907) White Hyacinths (1907) Health and Wealth (1908) The Doctors (1909) The Mintage (1910) Jesus Was An Anarchist (1910), also published as The Better Part An American Bible (1911) Alice Hubbard, Editor The Silver Arrow (1923) Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book (1923) The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927) The Philosophy of Elbert Hubbard (1930)

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