Head, Heart, and Hand: Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters

The. Lacrosse King's craft King's craftsmen. The best that can be done for the team. The idea was to be able to bring to the general public a quality item at a reasonable price that had a good style design to it. When you examine the Arts and Crafts movement to look it over hope you started bringing people together. But mind you make a fine book of limited quantities. Adam said they were close to 60 and. Comer never considering the

mission they were playing in the Camino. Had she just. Funding for this program has been provided in part by the foundation. The Cameron Baird Foundation and by the Harriet Ames Charitable Trust. It was a community of artisans. Drawn together by the passion of a charismatic leader. A revolution of ideas. It's part of a nationwide movement rooted in the practices of the old. Philosophy of living. Affirming the strength of the human spirit. It was a social vision. Born from the head. From the Heart. And from the hands of its creator. The last part of the 19th century was a time of change an extraordinary time of change the likes

of which I don't think we have seen in America. But mind you where we were coming from we were coming out of the Civil War we were coming out of reconstruction. Well there were really two things going on One was the industrial effort to recover from the civil war. It was had while capitalism rampant and the saddle rushing to wealth and greatness and power in their way couldn't at the same time you had a nation very self-conscious about the fact that it was an educated draw on familiar with the great cultures of the Western Europe from which it is to come. Some of the major thinkers Ruskin and Carlyle and others Dickens began to write against the industrial revolution and call for a movement that would go back to the Middle Ages. Charles Dickens is one of the people who spoke out against the evils of the factory system and in America we hadn't quite reached that sort of a level in terms of child labor and the need for

labor laws. But the same time people such as Gus stuff Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright and other social observers did realise that we were headed in that direction. And one way to actually attack that system the industrialized mass production was to emphasize the craftsman and to try to work toward supporting craftsmen who are not working in a factory setting and through the Arts and Crafts movement and the Arts and Crafts movement says by heart and by hand and by head we are going to restore values to the home. Shall man go on. Generation after generation gaining fresh command over the powers of nature gaining more and more luxury as appliances for the comfort of the body. Yet generation after generation losing some portion of his natural senses that is all of his life and soul.

When you examine the Arts and Crafts movement you need to look at Elbert Hubbard Elbert Hubbard more than any other individual in the Arts and Crafts movement was in his time. Its spokesperson Elbert Hubbard was the son of a country doctor who had originally been from around here. West New York but who had gone out to central Illinois. John Larkin who had come from Buffalo to Chicago to work in partnership and some company began to court Albert Sr. Francis Albert was introduced to John Mark and was brought into the company as a salesman and apparently he was very glib and he was very attractive. And was an immediate hit as a salesman. In 1875. John Larkin split with his partner and married Albert Sr. and took Albert in the sister back to Buffalo and established a lark and sought company here in Buffalo. He's in 75 and from that point on

John Mark and are in the so part of the works in Albert did the sales and advertising. And they really took off. And I like to attribute them to Hubbard's gimmickry and a willingness to experiment even to at one point fool the public around 1890 we find Elbert Hubbard living in a small country town about the same period of time we start to see that his interest in the lark and company begins to wane as his interest in a writing career begins to develop. He becomes involved at the Chautauqua Institution both as a speaker as well as a very active member of his own Chautauqua literary and scientific circle. And it is at the meetings of the circle that he meets Alice Moore who is a local school teacher and who is also very interested in his work that he is doing and would want to become one of his greatest supporters. Alice was my grandmother. My mother's mother.

And one of the things I've recently done is to go to the farm where Alice was born and brought up out in Wales just to the east of here this is dirt farms there was one and there were eight children raised in her generation on that farm and she was the only one who somehow took all. Since Alice was a single woman and a teacher she was invited by the Hubbards to come and live with them. This proximity permitted a more personal relationship to develop between Albert and Alice and this is something that Bertha had a very hard time tolerating. Consequently Alice was invited to leave the house and not only did she do that but she left the community as well and moved to Boston. My impression of Bertha is that she was a lovely woman more traditional. When Albert wanted to change his life she didn't see that Albert was trying to aspire to something different. Eventually Albert found himself in Boston as well where he unrolled Harvard University with the idea of furthering his literary career.

Unfortunately Harvard did not live up to Albert's expectations however. This move enabled him to renew his relationship with Alice and it was Alice who encouraged him to go to Europe to gather material for future writing projects. He had convinced GP Putnam who was a publisher in New York to sort of front this trip that he was going to take you know. Yet he was the great salesman so we could sell almost anybody on an idea. And he said well I'm going to write all these what he called little journeys to the homes of the great and he was planning on doing that and going visiting places in England in Scotland and Wales that that great people had lived and visited the home of John Ruskin and William Morris and. And Eliot. And you know any anybody that he could sort of work into this this framework during his trip to Europe our son Albert corresponded regularly and it was through this correspondence that Albert learned that Alice was pregnant with his child. He returned to the United States with mixed emotions knowing that he would have to

make peace with his personal life but excited because of his own intellectual rebirth which would ultimately lead to the birth of the work craft community. He met William Morris supposedly we're not we've never been able to document what went to Maurice's print shop and to come Scott House and the press so what Morris was doing with these wonderful handmade books and decided that he could do something like that in America and in 1905 he along with a local printer started a little magazine called The Philistine a periodical of protest. Hubbard was you know is probably the basis of everything was a humanistic type philosopher and really had his own way of thinking that was based upon his growing up in the Midwest where free thought a new thought was sort of abolishing. He had sort of that Western character. But he also had gone to England had read the classics and sort of was able to sort of blend all that together. And if you put a lot of that into the Philistine it was really other than bits and pieces from other writers of the day it was largely Albert and Albert's writing from day one in 1899.

Elbert Hubbard was very successful with the publication of a message to Garcia which was a story about an incident in the Spanish-American War where Colonel Andrew Rowan was asked to deliver a message to the Cuban general guard. He didn't ask how or where anything like that he just did it. So basically this became an homage to the dedicated worker and devotion to duty which is very popular with big business men everywhere. It was reprinted in millions and millions of copies in several different languages and the success of this publication basically gave Hubbard the capital he needed to expand the other Ryecroft shops. The print shop was the largest building ever built on the campus it was half timbered in St.. Concurrently with that they built the Waycross chapel also made of stone. All these buildings so somewhat English medieval looking directly south and a little bit west about building was the original blacksmith shop. That Abboud into the copper shop. And they started making lighting fixtures. Fine copper dust

that bases the lamps in that building about 900 for evolved furniture shop though it was never a big shop it probably never had more than about 15 or 20 Cross people working there. So as opposed to most of the arts and crafts period where furniture was the most important thing right from day one all the way up until the demise of the word crafters in bankruptcy in 1938 it was books. And there were always at least half of the people working in books the other large building complex of buildings actually that became the original Warcraft in 1983. They saw a need on the campus all these people are coming from all over the world because they read Roadcraft books or or seen a piece or across furniture whatever her ever talk. That they wanted to see Roy Croft and Albert again saw the need to capitalize on that so he built the inn and really made it a state of the art. Arts and crafts style showroom for his furniture and the other items that were made here. One of the things that people said about Rockwell about the man. And Elbert Hubbard was that there were men a man who had so many friends he had a builder named Hellenism.

And who created the first buildings. And presto he was looking at making them work then. So we have him here we will see these movie Evil style buildings. They look much older than the hundred years that they will be in 1985. He got onto the lecture circuit nationally in a big way and he would lecture 30 times a month. And I think the income really began to roll in to supplement the money that he already had so it's important to understand the word craft in terms of that and his wealth and his vanity and his wit and his charisma. But Hubbard's daughter by his second marriage Miriam Rohloff told us that she remembers once traveling being allowed to travel to New York City and one of Albert speaking tours and they went to Carnegie Hall and it was basically a sold sold out performance of the Albert speaking. And she said. I want to sit in the front row is that all right dad.

And Albert said to her you know Miriam I want you up and back I want you up in the second tier all the way at the back I want to see if you can tell me how the people to react and whether I speak all right and people can hear me. When I was about five or maybe maybe a little bit older than that mother took me down to New York. And along this particular trip she took me to Carnegie Hall. She took me all the way up to the upmost gallery. And she said to me Mark that's where he stood and he held them all in the palm of his hand. While Hubbard was on the lecture circuit the management of the Wright craft shops was left to his wife Alice. This was at a time when there were probably 500 people working at the Ryecroft. Many of them were women and Alice was very interested in promoting women and making sure that they found a way to become economically independent. She wrote that she was tired of seeing women classed with children lunatics and convicts. And this is a way to help them out of that that circle.

One thing that was very interesting I think in hiring all these women. First of all the time period women were not hired. OK. Secondly these were farm girls that came in dressed very nicely for their first job. They were the fancy dress in the fancy shoes. They found out one thing that Hubbard being the naturalist that he was he had a we now call it a coffee break no longer that this was. Get outside get fresh air. This is a break from their work. He'd get the medicine ball out and toss it to each one of these people they would get their energy back go back to work again. The work of community was sort of the ultimate in the arts and crafts utopian society because here was a situation where people came they lived together they ate together they worked together in the Ryecroft had its own baseball team its own bank employees could own company's stock. There was a couple of vans. An orchestra. And hover drive and. People from all over the world performers musicians and lecturers of note and in general created a very stimulating intellectual

environment for his workers. In 1912 the rate crafters would have gotten a telephone call from Fred Seeley whose father in law Grove would had this idea of building a hotel on the north side of Asheville North Carolina. And he went to the right person and said we're building this hotel we're building it in the arts and crafts style entirely out of granite and we want the right crafters to furnish it. Albert couldn't meet the demand. They wanted this all done within a year. And the copper shop was large enough having 30 40 employees but the furniture shop at that time only had about 15 or 20 so they couldn't do it. They made 700 pieces of furniture for the lobbies in the restaurants but they had to give the designs over to a company in North Carolina to manufacture the bedroom furniture. It's the one place today where somebody can walk in and see you know what Crofter really all over you know in every room that you walk into whether it's ceiling fixtures or clocks. The completion of the Grove Park Commission signaled real economic success for the right crowd. By that time Ryecroft objects had worked their way into

thousands and thousands of American homes. And that economic success continued and grew right up to World War 1. When World War 1 came. Hubbard took it as a personal affront. He had done so much to bring the culture of Europe to the United States and then Europe dissolved into war. He was horrified by this. He was going to go over a report on the war try to help keep America out of the war. He was a pacifist along with Henry Ford who was a good friend Robert. We believed you know had a premonition that going to Europe might be his last trip. And that's one of the reasons he did what else to go but she convinced him otherwise. They left the store on May 1st after they gathered all the right crafters together in the salon and had a he had sort of a heart to heart talk and said that Bert. While he was gone Brit would be in charge. It was a bit over the second his oldest son. And you know if something should happen that you know to respect him and you know follow his leadership as they had his. And.

Obviously that's what happened on May 7th the. Torpedo U-boat. Torpedoed the Lusitania off the old had a can sail in the Irish Sea. Elbert was never. In Alice were never found again. In a sense the word crafters had a martyr. But they also had a very very wise and astute businessman in running the business. They from what we know from payroll records and sales records those little that exist the right crafters were never more financially stable well than they were from 1968 until 18 easily into 1931 or 32 when they really started to have to really lay off people because of the. You know the depression you know the effect was slow to have to hit the rock crafters one of my favorites of Hubbard's many models says conformists die. But heretics live forever. And he was right. He created a persona that continued to capture people's imaginations for many many years after his

own death. And in fact has excited people to rediscover their Ryecroft and the relevance that it holds for them today. Right crafts King's craft or King's craftsman. The best that can be done for the king. Back to the guild system and the evolution of the beginnings of the arts across periods. What you see is the right off the mark that marks the guild Mark. What it says is that this is a collaborative effort. This is something created by a community and something associated with the community. The philosophies of the Arts and Crafts movement were best exemplified with the marketing of these whimsical yet thought provoking epigraph can be found in books or hung as decorative objects and it was a quest to inspire families to achieve higher goals in work and life. Models were very popular during the Arts and Crafts movement. Elbert Hubbard probably did more than anyone else to popularize the idea of having slogans and sort of

summarized some of the philosophies of the Arts and Crafts movement. They would actually print them up in their print shop and sell them in their gift shop. Through the publication of magazines and finally banned books. Elbert Hubbard in the rye crackers began one of the most successful arts and craft communities in America. Their ideals were printed and bound with the same workmanship thought to be used by the medieval guilds of the past. This piece of equipment is an original work cross. That was used by them at the turn of the century and into nineteen twenty probably its quarterly press and a plough which is the. Probably the only form of counting books they use a lot of paper which is extremely good. They tended to produce batches of a thousand of which eight or fifty would be of say good quality and the balance would be a very good quality and had the best sewing. It had the best paper the best leather it's got an extra pointing. When we talk about the books and the publications which are associated with the Red

Cross movement we're really talking at the roots and the heart of the movement. The higher end where the finely bound leather volumes. However there were also magazines such as the frog and the Philistine. These magazines were accessible and tied into a subscription. They also tied into the furniture. You could buy a set of little journeys or acquire the one of the time and of course you would need the little journey stand to keep the books in. So they really were in a nutshell very important to the movement the right crafters were early into furniture making and but they didn't develop as quickly as someone such as gust of Stickley or even Frank Lloyd Wright one way to compare the furniture of that of the Roy crofters with that of gusto Stickley the gusto Stickley furniture did have more of a sophisticated look. His early side board has a great deal of drama to it but it's very well balanced. Where is the ROI crofters. It lacks that same balance although it certainly has a great

deal of drama. It's lacking a little bit of refinement that came through in the gusto Stickley sideboard and I think that's typical of their furniture all together and then you throw in someone like Frank Lloyd Wright who was a designer and not a manufacturer. If you look closely at the right pieces the vertical Piers with the arc glass on either side establish a kind of vertical axis and the proportions as well. A much more refined in the right piece. The pyramid all shapes are very. Particular. And the other designers will focus on that so you get a taller magazine story takes up space. It's a piece of sculpture. Or it has there's an awful lot of stuff. This is what we call call a straddle chair and you sit on it backwards as most teenagers do you know it's wider in the back and now or in the front. This one is made of my Guinea. They were made of oak or Mahogany are our Elbert Hubbard used to use a status chair for energy and he

thought you got energy from it. Hallmarks of the Ryecroft products. Simplicity truth in materials honesty something if we look at for example a chair. It is simple straightforward design rectilinear honest use of wood functionality is also very important very usable functional objects and that goes the same for all the rest of the products for example the copper work you can see the hand of the artist its hammered copper surface such as the vase here. To Hubbard's credit the success of the Ryecroft community thrived on his ability to recognize talent. Eagerly employed skilled artisans to guide and inspire a creative work for. Artisans like Dart Hunter a master designer whose influence can be seen in many books and leaded glass works. And. A guiding hand for the Ryecroft Opera shop. Under the direction of Karl kept many other local artisans or. Employed

and trained in the copper making industry. One of the most famous was Walter Jennings who became the master silversmith. He was very well noted for his detail work in his Jory as well as in this copper. This vase here was one of Walter Jennings as you can see this is very finely detailed and the oval lily pad that Walter Jennings did on this work in the fire lines are good. The length of the vase the the heft of this face is. Unbelievable. The workmanship is without a doubt some of the finest of the requesters ever produced. The Ryecroft Mark historically on one piece is the mark of quality is the mark of excellence and wonderfully. Today there is an active rock crofters at large artists living and working in that same tradition. El sleeper is the New Artisan that has taken upon himself to continue the trait of working with the copper he has a stein which is owned by the

museum here. The part of the work that I do is his repair work and reconstruction work this happens to be a piece that we are working on presently. It's a mug's it was done at the Ryecroft. You can see by the mark and there are back to back K's on the bottom which indicate that Carl Kip was probably the designer and possibly even the creator of this piece. Well I'm going to do is I'm going to create as exactly as possible a replica of the top of this mug which was a copper base and a silver band also around the top with a jade in the very center. When the red rafters at large started it was Riviere idea of supporting. New Crescent to come here again and they were attracted to the place as if there is something special and they want to be a part of it. They want to be able to use that word lurk I would said that I crossed as a state of mind that I really as you know there's a real draw for creative people especially artists and Prost

and literary type people. One of the most gratifying aspects of organizing a Ryecroft exhibition has been the chance to meet artisans like Alice leaper and Glenn Robinson who are renewing our interest in the old ways of working and the people who are collecting Ryecroft I think are also interested in the philosophies that spurred the original movement. The interest in women's rights educational reform House. The cocooning movement and we want to make our homes comfortable and in general reaction against the depersonalization of society that many of us today feel. Funding for this program has been provided in part by the Margaret L. wimped foundation the Cameron berried Foundation and by the Harry dames Charitable Trust. I am. I am I

am. If you would like a video tape copy of head heart and hand send your request to WXXI table for. 280 State Street. Rochester New York 1 4 6 0 1. Or call 2 1 2 6 8 8. 8 2 8 0. Each tape cost one thousand ninety five plus 350 for shipping and handling Visa MasterCard and Discover Card are also accepted.