Profile of Elbert Hubbard on Famous Like Me

Elbert Green Hubbard (June 19, 1856 - May 7, 1915) was an American philosopher and writer. He is perhaps most famous for his essay A Message to Garcia.

He was born in Bloomington, Illinois and founded an artist colony in East Aurora, New York. in 1895. There he established 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 a pioneering little magazine, bound in brown butcher paper and full of satire and whimsy. 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 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." Hubbard can now be viewed as a proto-Libertarian.

He and his wife were killed in the sinking of the Lusitania by the German submarine, Unterseeboot 20 in May of 1915. The Roycroft Shops, run by Hubbard's son Elbert Hubbard II, operated until 1938.

Further reading

• Upton Sinclair The Brass Check (1919), chapter "The Elbert Hubbard Worm"

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