ON MY first working day at the old Manila International Airport a long time ago, a framed quotation on the wall caught my attention. It was the famous short prose “Loyalty” by Elbert Hubbard:
“If you work for a man, in heaven’s name work for him. If he pays you wages which supply you bread and butter, work for him; speak well of him; stand by him, and stand by the institution he represents. If you must vilify, condemn, and eternally disparage, resign your position. And when you are outside, damn to your heart’s content. But as long as you are part of the institution, do not condemn it. If you do, you are loosening the tendrils that are holding you to the institution, and at the first high wind that comes along, you will be uprooted and blown away, and will probably never know why.”
Hubbard was the world-famous American writer and entrepreneur who lived in 1856 – 1915. I got to know him better by reading an old American almanac telling his “wife-defying” story,
Hubbard saw the light of day in Bloomington, Illinois on June 19, 1856 when Victorian society exalted hard work but despised immorality. He was destined to become famous in hard work, notorious in immorality.
While still a student, Hubbard worked as door-to-door soap salesman for J. Weller Company. Sensing his natural flair for winning regular customers, a competing soap manufacturer, Larkin Company, pirated him and rewarded him with hefty shares of stock.
Business success made him drop out of college. Why study for a living when he was already earning a living? He married his fiancée, Bertha Crawford.
The union kicked off with an enviable start – the spouses having bought a big house in East Aurora, New York where they accommodated school teachers as boarders. One of them was a young lady, Alice Moore, who loved exchanging philosophical thoughts with Elbert at the veranda at night.
Certain that a love affair was unfolding between her husband and Alice, Bertha eventually asked her to move out. By then, however, she had become pregnant of Elbert’s child.
Fearful of puritanical backlash, Elbert and Alice hid the baby girl under the care of her married sister, who pretended to be the mother.
The financial burden of having two new-born babies (wife Bertha having delivered her fourth child) forced Elbert to cash in his shares of stock worth $75,000 and to write essays and features for monthly magazines.
With Harry Taber as business partner, he put up Roycroft Printing Shop and printed a monthly magazine, The Philistine, containing mostly his articles. It sold like hotcakes.
His most famous essay, “A Message to Garcia,” is still accessible today on the internet.
The unprecedented success of the writer/publisher was not without repercussion. Alice’s sister demanded a princely “refund” for expenses incurred in care-giving his child. But Elbert would not be blackmailed into giving in.
As a result, Hubbard’s well-kept secret pried open and burst into a public scandal. Wife Bertha had no choice but divorce him. Half of his employees resigned and ostracized him to dramatize condemnation of his “immorality.”
Elbert and Alice saw the scandal philosophically as opportunity to marry each other.
“Don’t take life too seriously,” he jested in one of his essays which would turn prophetic. “You’ll never get out of it alive.”
They booked for a luxury cruise on the Lusitania. On the seventh day of the cruise on May 7, 1915, a German torpedo blasted the ship to pieces off the coast of Ireland. There were no survivors. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
