A Teacher
Elbert Hubbard
Initiative and conscientious diligence
The transmission
Elbert Green Hubbard was born on June 19, 1856, in Bloomington, Illinois. He made an early fortune as a partner and marketing innovator in the Larkin Soap Company before leaving business to reinvent himself as a writer.
After a formative trip to England and contact with the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris, he founded the Roycroft community in East Aurora, New York, in the mid-1890s — a print shop, bindery, and artisan colony that became a commercial and cultural enterprise built around fine craftsmanship and Hubbard’s own prolific writing and salesmanship.
Hubbard’s most famous work is the short 1899 essay A Message to Garcia, an inspirational tribute to the employee who acts on a task without excuses or hand-holding. Written quickly as filler for his magazine The Philistine, it struck a nerve with businessmen, was reprinted and distributed in the tens of millions of copies, and became a staple of corporate and military character-building literature.
Hubbard, a tireless self-promoter and aphorist, embodied the late-Victorian gospel of initiative and self-reliance carried into the American business age. He and his wife Alice died on May 7, 1915, aboard the RMS Lusitania when it was torpedoed off the Irish coast.
His work belongs to the early, pre-metaphysical wing of success literature: a gospel of diligence, character, and initiative.
What they gave
The ethic of initiative: A Message to Garcia canonizes the self-starting, excuse-free worker as an ideal of character, an early and durable template for business inspiration.
- Self-reliance for the business age: Translates the Emersonian and Smiles self-improvement tradition into the vocabulary of commerce and the conscientious employee.
- The inspirational tract as mass medium: Pioneers the cheaply printed, widely distributed motivational pamphlet — a format later central to the success-literature industry.
- Identity through craft and conduct: Through Roycroft and his essays, models the idea that who one becomes is forged in disciplined, conscientious work.
In their words
My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the “boss” is away, as well as when he is at home.
It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing—“Carry a message to Garcia.”
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Samuel Smiles’s self-help ethic; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s self-reliance; William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement.
- Influenced: the corporate and business inspirational genre; the literature of initiative, diligence, and self-reliance that fed into twentieth-century success writing.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- A Message to Garcia1899
- Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great1894-1909