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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Tuesday, September 5, 2017
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I AM now 67 but have not forgotten that it was in 1967 at age 17 when I first read the famous quotation “Loyalty”:
“If you work for a man, in heaven’s name work for him. If he pays you wages which supply you bread and butter, work for him; speak well of him; stand by him, and stand by the institution he represents. If you must vilify, condemn, and eternally disparage, resign your position. And when you are outside, damn to your heart’s content. But as long as you are part of the institution, do not condemn it. If you do, you are loosening the tendrils that are holding you to the institution, and at the first high wind that comes along, you will be uprooted and blown away, and will probably never know why.”
At the bottom of the quotation was the author’s name, Elbert Hubbard. The world-famous American writer who lived a “wife-defying” life has since then become my role model.
Elbert Hubbard, born in Bloomington, Illinois on June 19, 1856 (exactly five years ahead of Jose Rizal), belonged to that Victorian generation that exalted hard work but despised immorality.
He led a “double life” as student and door-to-door soap salesman for J. Weller Company. Sensing his natural flair for winning regular customers, a competing soap manufacturer, Larkin Company, pirated him and sunk in his name hefty shares of stock.
Business success compelled him to drop out of college and to marry fiancée Bertha Crawford.
The union kicked off in a big house in East Aurora, New York which accommodated boarders. One of them was a young teacher, Alice Moore, who loved exchanging philosophical views with Elbert.
Suspecting that a love affair had developed between the two, Bertha asked Alice to move to another boarding house. She did, but not after getting pregnant of Elbert’s child.
Fearful of puritanical backlash, Elbert and Alice hid the baby girl under the care of her married sister, who pretended to be the mother.
The financial burden of having two new-born babies (wife Bertha having delivered her fourth child) forced Elbert to cash in his shares of stock worth $75,000. Henceforth he wrote essays and feature stories for monthly magazines.
Realizing that he was spending more money than he was earning, he went back to business without giving up writing.
With Harry Taber as business partner, he put up Roycroft Printing Shop, which printed a monthly magazine, The Philistine.
In his most famous 1899 essay, “A Message to Garcia,” set during the Spanish-American war, the President calls a man in for a mission to carry a message to an insurgent in Cuba. The messenger did as instructed, mindless of risk to life and limb. The essay is accessible today on the Internet.
The unprecedented success of the writer/publisher was not without repercussion. Alice’s sister demanded a princely “refund” for expenses incurred in care-giving his child. Elbert would not be blackmailed into giving in.
As a result, Hubbard’s well-kept secret burst into a public scandal. Wife Bertha had no choice but divorce him. Half of his employees resigned and ostracized him to dramatize condemnation of his “immorality.”
But why be bothered by what others were thinking of them? Even if readers would stop patronizing his magazine, he had stashed away enough dollars to spend for a lifetime.
As public indignation cooled off, Elbert and Alice got marriage.
“Don’t take life too seriously,” he jested in one of his essays. “You’ll never get out of it alive.”
His words were fated to be prophetic. On May 7, 1915, a German torpedo blasted the cruise ship Lusitania to pieces off the coast of Ireland. Elbert and Alice Hubbard were among the ship passengers who never got out alive. He was only 59. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
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