The Sage of East Aurora

By Julie Jaskol | September 20, 2025

Elbert Hubbard could sell the heck out of soap. As a 16-year-old in 1872, he began selling it door-to-door for the Larkin Soap Company, based in Buffalo, New York. Within 10 years he helped run the place, implementing innovative marketing and advertising strategies that enabled it to rival Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward as one of the largest mail order retailers in the country.

He loved selling, succeeding, and the heady buzz of free enterprise. But soap, not so much. In 1892, at age 36, he cashed out his profits from Larkin and, inspired by his heroes Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, decided to pursue his passion for writing. After a brief and discouraging stint at Harvard, he headed to England to research some short stories he wanted to write.

There he discovered the Kelmscott Press, founded by British poet, artist, writer, and socialist activist William Morris, whose passionate commitment to beautiful, hand-made objects inspired the Arts & Crafts Movement.

Hubbard found his purpose. He returned to his wife, Bertha, and children in East Aurora, New York, about 18 miles south of Buffalo, and purchased the Roycroft Press, hiring locals to print, illustrate, and bind books in the spirit of William Morris. In 1895 he launched “The Philistine – A Periodical of Protest,” a magazine that proclaimed his brash, contrarian, populist views, challenging religion, industrialists, and high society.

Hubbard considered himself a philosopher and a cultural critic, like his heroes Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman, and frequently repackaged their thoughts in his own words, once again proving his skill as a marketer.

He achieved worldwide fame in 1899 with an untitled 1,500-word essay that he used to fill up space in “The Philistine.” A largely fictionalized account of an American soldier’s mission just before the Spanish-American War, it served as a parable about blind, unquestioning loyalty to orders. Later titled “A Message to Garcia,” it became enormously popular with the very industrialists that Hubbard had criticized. Used in business, the military, and reprinted in many languages, “A Message to Garcia” became a figure of speech, and a Hollywood movie (twice), and launched Hubbard into a career of writing and speaking and selling the Roycroft ideal.

“A Message to Garcia” also helped finance the growth of the printing press into Roycroft Shops, a campus creating books, furniture, and leather and copper goods in the Arts & Crafts ethos, at its peak employing 500 people, and becoming a mecca for artists and bohemians.

In 1904, his first marriage ended bitterly, as Hubbard acknowledged his daughter by his longtime lover Alice Moore. Alice and Elbert married, and Alice brought her suffragism and free-thinking to Roycroft, which became a meeting place for radicals and reformers, while Hubbard continued to espouse his idiosyncratic blend of free enterprise and William Morris-inspired socialism.

In 1915, Hubbard and Alice set off for Europe to report firsthand on the war. Their ship was the RMS Lusitania. On May 7, they perished at sea when the ship was sunk by a German U-boat.