Soap Man

ELBERT HUBBARD: GENIUS OF ROYCROFT --David Arnold Balch--Stokes ($2.50).

U. S. literary histories pass over the career of Elbert Hubbard, Sage of East Aurora. Yet his writings crossed the path of a whole U. S. generation. Between 1895 and his death on the Lusitania, millions read his little magazine, The Philistine, his Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great. He wrote the most famous of all inspirational bromides, A Message to Garcia (total estimated printing to date: 40,000,000 copies, including those issued as regulation equipment to both Russian and Japanese soldiers in the Russo-Japanese War).

Few U. S. mission-oak library tables were without a limp leather volume from Elbert Hubbard's Roycroft Shops in East Aurora, N. Y., which also flooded the land with such objets d'art as hammered copper book ends, goatskin table covers, leather pillows, mattresses, mission furniture, ferneries. As inventor of signed ads for Big Business, Fra Elbertus reached most millions of all. Sometimes he was called a combination of a dozen geniuses including Benjamin Franklin, Victor Hugo, Emerson and William Morris; other times, a combination of P. T. Barnum, Robert G. Ingersoll, Henry Ward Beecher.

Previous Hubbard biographies have been out-&-out "tombstone pieces." Elbert Hubbard: the Genius of Roycroft is also the work of a highly sympathetic biographer. But his more complete facts speak pretty much for themselves.

Robust son of a Bloomington, Ill. country doctor, Hubbard quit school at 15, became door-to-door salesman for his cousin (J. Weller & Co., Practical Soaps). Few years later, a dandy in sideburns and tight pants, he had risen to No. 1 U. S. "soap-slinger," become partner of the soap firm of John D. Larkin in Buffalo, N. Y. His supersalesmanship made a household word of Larkin's Creme Oatmeal Soap. He invented the Club Plan, pioneered the premium method of selling (celluloid collar buttons, buttonhooks, "solid silver" spoons, the Chautauqua Lamp). But at 36 (in 1892) he suddenly sold out for $75,000, enrolled at Harvard as a special student in literature and history. Shortly thereafter he had several bad novels to his credit and had launched his amazing literary career.

Thenceforth there is an almost burlesque aptness in the fact of his phenomenal success with soap. Admiring Emerson, he was inspired on a pilgrimage to Concord to write his highly profitable Little Journeys (one part fact, three parts fancy). Biblical inspiration coined such popular aphorisms as "Blessed is the man who does not bellyache." Emulating William Morris' idealistic experiment in fine books and hand craftsmanship, Hubbard founded the Roycroft Shops. His brand of Guild Socialism consisted of turning out rococo limp-leather-bound reprints selling from $2 to $250 ("not how cheap, but how good"), together with his glorified soap premiums in handicraft.

But hatreds as well as admirations inspired him. The Philistine was started to pay off old scores against publishers who had sent rejection slips. His inconsistencies stimulated many an epigrammatic alibi which passed as sageness. Denounced by Kipling, Shaw, Jack London, most other authors who had dealings with him, he aphorized on the heartaches of friendship: "Let a man come close enough and he'll clutch you like a drowning person, and down you both go." Resenting a Harvard professor's literary criticisms, Hubbard ever after blasted colleges: "A college de gree does not lessen the length of your ears; it only conceals it." When his affair with Schoolmistress Alice Moore created a national scandal, he coined and widely promoted an epigram on gossips: "When in doubt, mind your own business." Biographer Balch takes 320 pages to seek (vainly) for the clue to Elbert Hubbard's contradictory character. The shrewdest characterization is that of the Scottish comedian, Sir Harry Lauder.

Hubbard once toured ten weeks in vaudeville on the same bill with Lauder and Pugilist Jim Corbett. Chatting together one evening over a soft drink, Sir Harry wise cracked: "Mr. Hubbard is the only one of us who wears his make-up on the street."

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