The principles of beauty and artistic taste and its appreciation in nature and art are very personal, yet aesthetics can often be shared. During the nineteenth century the industrial revolution, first in Europe and later North America, left a dearth of creative aesthetics among inhabitants. Many felt the impersonal civilization, where industrialization forced movement from agrarian societies to urban social life, stripped creativity and aesthetic expression.
Like the industrial revolution itself, what would become an international trend originated in England and would be spread to British colonies and former colonies of the Empire, with origins in the 1850s. This was an arts and crafts movement, spurred on by those with both a grasp of mechanical design and a gift for expressing themselves in writing and lecture, such as John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and William Morris. Art of pre-industrial times, produced by the skills of craftsmen, were championed and embraced by the movement.
When the Arts & Crafts Movement reached the United States in the 1880s, it was expressed in art and architecture, literature, music, philosophy, and publishing, being first embraced in New England with Boston as the epicenter.
The Gilded Age phenomena of the Arts & Crafts Movement was fostered by societies who desired to see decorative ornamentation created by craftsman exhibited along with fine arts and gave the movement its name in 1887.
At Harvard College, H. Langford Warren, their first professor of architecture, espoused the Arts & Crafts Movement and created guilds to foster the creation and distribution of goods created by craftspeople.
Architect Warren was a disciple of his mentor H.H. Richardson, and structures he designed are famous in their own right, one being the most iconic and recognizable sporting venue in the nation at Saratoga Race Course.
New York State had its own advocate for the Arts & Crafts Movement in Elbert Hubbard, who was born in the American Midwest in 1856. As a teenager, Hubbard began selling household products door-to-door, refining his salesmanship skills. His older sister Frances married Hubbard’s co-worker, John D. Larkin, in 1874. The Larkins relocated to Buffalo the following year, and established the Larkin Soap Company, with Elbert Hubbard in charge of sales.
Hubbard drove sales by the then-novel method of mail order to merchants with special bulk pricing, later adding small gifts inside Larkin packaging. He next developed a method of directly selling to customers, who were encouraged to sell Larkin products to their friends and family, rewarded by premiums offered as commissions.
Hubbard’s innovation converted patrons into independent marketing representatives decades ahead of the Avon, Amway and Mary Kay Cosmetics business models, making millions for his brother-in-law’s Gilded Age firm.
In 1881 Elbert Hubbard married Bertha Crawford, and they would begin a family that produced four children and lived in the Buffalo “southtown” suburb of East Aurora. Before the age of forty, Hubbard grew weary of the pitchman routine and the daily rail commute into Buffalo, and by 1893 had accumulated the wherewithal to steer his life in another direction.
This self-educated man fancied himself as a writer, and not simple prose, yet instead of philosophical reasoning, conceptual analysis, and speculative thought. His literary idols were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman and Thomas Paine. Elbert Hubbard used the pseudonym “Fra Elbertus” and began wearing his hair in flowing locks in the manner of the great composers he admired, Chopin, Brahms, and Beethoven.
While shopping around his manuscripts, which mostly found disfavor, he enrolled at Harvard, the epicenter of the American Craftsman style. It might be difficult in any epoch for educators to convince a middle-aged, self-made millionaire of the error of his ways, and Hubbard quickly left behind the ivy-clad campus in Cambridge, scorning higher education afterwards.
Fra Elbertus was not totally focused on his literary pursuits, however; he embarked on an extramarital affair with local schoolteacher Alice Moore which resulted in the birth of a daughter in 1894, starting another family while still legally responsible for his first.
Hubbard traveled to England in 1894 and was introduced to the Arts & Crafts Movement at its origin, with new principles on economic, domestic, political, and social ideals. He was very impressed by William Morris’ Kelmscott Press, which published hand-crafted books with elaborate embellishments, presented with quality covers and binding.
Returning from Europe to East Aurora, Elbert Hubbard embarked on his own Craftsmen adventure in 1895, with partners on East Main Street, eventually succeeding into full ownership. In 1897 he constructed an adjunct structure next to his home on South Grove Street that would house the Roycroft Print Shop. In a historic sense, the word “chapel” was used for a printing house, and that term would be used by Hubbard for his new building.
Roycroft bookmaking allowed Fra Elbertus to bypass the rejections of other publishers, and place his writings into print. From East Aurora emanated a most eccentric and interesting little monthly known as The Philistine magazine, subtitled A Periodical of Protest. This publication found a readership, and subscriptions increased, and an invitation to visit Roycroft was issued:
“All good Philistines journeying thitherward will be greeted, and are welcome to seats at the table and a place to sleep of course without charge. All men and women however, who remain over one night are expected to work for the public good at least two hours a day. There is type-setting, proof-reading, copying and addressing wrappers, besides taking care of the Roycroft baby, cooking, washing, and there is a good big woodpile to fall back on if other work should fail.”
The pilgrimage to anti-urban East Aurora began and a confederation of like-minded people developed. Roycrofters expanded their product line beyond book binding with ironwork from the blacksmith shop, furniture and cabinets, tooled leather, and hammer formed copper and brass.
They also wove rugs, threw pottery, made jewelry, stained glass windows, and raised flowers, poultry and vegetables on a farm, and cared for the equine stock. The Roycrofters were organized as a corporation, but worked together as a community of Medieval craftsmen.
Elbert Hubbard’s “A Message To Garcia” first appeared in the March 1899 issue of The Philistine, and it dramatized an event during the War with Spain where a US Army officer courageously carried a message from President William McKinley across dangerous conditions to a Cuban insurgent leader.
The text also contained Fra’s preachments about inept and disinterested workers and lauded the values of thoroughness, efficiency, individual resourcefulness and dedication in the workplace.
The employee diligence Hubbard expressed resonated with the mavens of Wall Street, and the New York Central Railroad’s management, with the consent of the Fra, published hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed them across the country on their trains, making the operations at Roycroft nationally known.
The campus expanded with additional buildings of farm field stone, and the addition of a dedicated powerhouse with the Roycroft Print Shop relocated across South Grove Street in 1901.
The original structure became the Roycroft Inn reception room, with a three-story dormitory built around it to house those who shared the doctrine of the Fra. These operations held characteristics of both a hostelry and a monastery.
The affair with Alice Moore continued through the mails, as she had relocated to Concord, Massachusetts, and Bertha sued for divorce in 1902. Elbert Hubbard married Alice in Bridgeport, Connecticut in January of 1904.
The Roycroft Inn catered to those coming to East Aurora to witness Hubbard’s methods, and the rooms, rather than being numbered, carried the names of those the Fra admired. Most rooms had an attached outdoor sleeping accommodation, and Alice Hubbard oversaw the day-to-day aspects of the operation.
The popularity of the Roycroft Inn required additions to be built, and the structure was augmented to what we see today, connected with a delightful peristyle (a covered open-air space). The Roycroft Inn, described by its operators as “The Phalansterie,” describing a self-contained structure housing a cooperative community.
Mottos espoused by the Fra decorate the doors and rafter trusses; “self reliance,” “your eyes and ears inform you, not your tongue,” and “no one but an aviator has a right to look down on others.”
Always the salesman of his youth, Hubbard’s sartorial appearance was part of his message. Rather than looking like a Philadelphia lawyer, he dressed in flannel shirt with Windsor tie, a baggy black suit and boots with side-buckles, and a broad-brimmed hat above his Ben Franklin hairstyle.
One scribe wrote “Hubbard’s daily garb is not the least of his idiosyncrasies.” Some saw him as a philosopher and humanitarian; others saw him as a greedy fake. In either case, he presented himself as a Philistine.
As a self-described anarchist, Hubbard was pleased to disrupt society, and in January of 1913 pled guilty to sending objectionable matter through the mails and was fined $100. This “slap-on-the-wrist’ by Uncle Sam prevented Elbert Hubbard from being issued a passport, and a pardon granted by President Woodrow Wilson was needed in 1915 for the East Aurora couple to leave the country.
Alice and Elbert Hubbard boarded Cunard’s RMS Lusitania on May 2, 1915, at the foot of West 14th Street, North River en route to Liverpool. Like all other American passengers, they had read the warning issued by the German government, that the big liner would be attacked if encountered by their U-Boats.
Fra Elbertus, when told of the German warning, said that “he had no fears, but that the Kaiser probably would like to make him look like a piece of Swiss cheese.”
Following their drowning, management of Roycroft enterprises transferred to the Fra’s son Bert. As tastes and styles evolved there was less demand for Roycroft products, with the Great Depression making the situation worse, with Bert holding out until 1938 before declaring bankruptcy.
The Roycroft Inn was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1986 and with financial support from the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation, the celebrated guesthouse underwent an $8 million restoration, reopening to guests in 1995 as a fully restored boutique historic inn, welcoming visitors today with an operational restaurant and tavern with direct access to the Roycroft Shops.
Read more about the Arts & Crafts Movement in New York State.
Illustrations, from above: The “Arts And Crafts font,” also sometimes called “Roycroft” was created by Roycroft artist Dard Hunter and used in many of their publications; Herbert Langford Warren from Warren’s The Foundations of Classic Architecture, 1919; Fra Elbertus (Roycroft’s Elbert Hubbard) quoted in the Saratogian in 1908; The Roycroft Campus with their logo in front of the Print Shop constructed in the craftsman style from local field stone; The original print shop is the present Reception Room of the Roycroft Inn, with stained glass features created by Roycroft artist Dard Hunter; and Elbert Hubbard on the deck of RMS Lusitania on May 2, 1915 embarking on his and the vessel’s final fateful voyage (Library of Congress).
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