Genius is often only the power of making continuous efforts.
~ Elbert Hubbard
I will lay fair odds that you probably have not heard of Elbert Hubbard. That fact is a shame, because he was one of the great progressives of the early 20th century: a philosopher with a romantic streak, a businessman who believed in both free-market enterprise and socialism; a creative, complex man known for his witty bon mots.
He helped popularize (read: successfully marketed) the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 1900s through his writings and his founding of the Roycroft Shops. Because of this, he was both hailed as a prophet of Arts and Crafts ideals, and criticized as a sell out who cashed in on a popular movement. Both are true facts, just as much as it is true that Hubbard valued the ideals of socialism while being a proponent of capitalism (the two are not actually exclusive, a fact most people are unaware of).
The reason I recommend Hubbard is not because he is a lost American treasure (except in select circles), and not because I think he was right about everything or lived a perfect life. What Hubbard represents to me is someone who was willing to approach problems in his own way, no matter the criticism, and who faithfully adhered to a determined positive outlook on life to his dying day.
I first came across Hubbard as a young teenager; I wanted to start collecting books (a hobby I failed at spectacularly, but that’s another post) and I found this very unique and interesting work called Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap Book, a mildly deteriorating book that did not set me back too much in my allowance to buy. I only got it because of the printing style, which to my young and unworldly eyes was very unique and new (it is neither; printed in 1923, it used an Arts and Crafts design style that by then was quite mundane in the face of Art Deco).
The book was posthumous, as Hubbard died along with his wife in the Lusitania disaster of 1915. It says a lot that this book was very popular when it came out, eight years after Hubbard’s death; his presence still loomed large in the minds of most Americans, what with his unique personality and business sense.
Ironically the book is a collection of scraps of writing that Hubbard gathered together, not that he wrote himeself; but that was interesting enough, and got me to at least search him out. I’ve been mildly fascinated by the man ever sense.
What I recommend about Elbert Hubbard is looking at his life as a whole, to take inspiration from his ability to renew his vision and purpose when he needed to and to continuously move forward. It is easy to say, “no one remembers him today” without realized how incredibly influential and important he was in his own time. Likewise, it is sometimes easy to think our goals or dreams don’t matter because no one cares about them, while we may not see the profound impact we truly have on others.
Elbert Hubbard was, in a lot of ways, my first exposure to the belief in the power of positive thinking. The idea that a person is in charge of her own destiny was quite foreign to me, and Hubbard’s life and works cracked open the door to my possibility box. That’s good enough reason for me to say to anyone, “Find Elbert Hubbard.”
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