The ‘Loyalty’ author was a disloyal husband

By Herbert Vego

 

WAY back when I was working as a mail sorter (my first job) at the post office at the old Manila International Airport, a framed quotation on the wall would often catch my attention. Since then, I have read “Loyalty” scores of times:

“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.”

At the bottom of the quotation is the author’s name, Elbert Hubbard.

Like me, you must have wondered who the late Elbert Hubbard was. I find it ironic that I only got to know him better by chance while reading his “wife-defying” story in an old, dusty American almanac. It would be a “sin of omission” if I don’t summarize what I have read about this world-famous American writer and entrepreneur who lived in 1856–1915.

Hubbard saw the light of day in Bloomington, Illinois on June 19, 1856 (five years before the birthday of Dr. Jose Rizal on the exact date in 1861). It was the generation when Victorian society exalted hard work but despised immorality. He was destined to become famous in hard work but notorious in immorality.

While still a teenager, he led a “double life” as a student and 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 sunk in his name hefty shares of stock.

Business success drew him away from school. He dropped out of college. Why study for a living when he was already earning a living? It was time to marry 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. Their closeness did not escape the attention of Mrs. Hubbard.

Suspecting that a love affair had developed between her husband and Alice, Bertha eventually asked her to move to another boarding house. She moved to Massachusetts. 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. In time, the child grew up to recognize his parents as “uncle” and “aunt.”

The added 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 become a worry-free writer. He wrote essays and feature stories for monthly magazines.

The more he wrote, however, the more he realized that he was spending more than he was earning. He had to go back to business without retiring from writing. He had to be his own publisher.

With Harry Taber as a business partner, he put up Roycroft Printing Shop and printed a monthly magazine, The Philistine, containing mostly his articles. It sold like hotcakes.

In his most famous essay, “A Message to Garcia,” set during the Spanish-American war, the President calls a man in for a mission to carry a message to an insurgent in Cuba. The messenger did as instructed, mindless of risk to life and limb. The appeal of “individual responsibility” was of such magnitude that the magazine issue that printed it had to repeatedly reprint until it sold 40 million copies worldwide. That essay is accessible to today’s Internet readers.

The unprecedented success of the writer/publisher was not without repercussion. Alice’s sister demanded a princely “refund” for expenses incurred in caregiving 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 to divorce him. Half of his employees resigned and ostracized him to dramatize condemnation of his “disloyalty” to his wife.

Elbert and Alice saw the scandal philosophically as a blessing in disguise. Why be bothered by what other people thought of them? Even if readers would stop patronizing his magazine, he had stashed away enough dollars to spend for a lifetime.

“Life is short,” he philosophized. “No use piling more than enough.”

But no such reversal of fortune came to pass. On the contrary, the personnel of Roycroft Press expanded to 500 full-time workers.

As public indignation cooled off, Elbert and Alice exchanged “I dos.”

“Don’t take life too seriously,” he jested in one of his essays. “You’ll never get out of it alive.”

They booked for an overseas journey on the most luxurious cruise ship at that time, the Lusitania. But his words were fated to be prophetic. On the seventh day of the cruise on May 7, 1915, a German torpedo blasted the ship to pieces off the coast of Ireland.

Elbert and Alice Hubbard, like all other ship passengers, never got out of it alive. Indeed he had lived a short life of 59 years.

 

-oOo-

 

CITY DADS MORE IMPRESSED

VICE-MAYOR Jeffrey Ganzon and the rest of the Sangguniang Panglunsod of Iloilo City were among the most recent visitors of MORE Power President Roel Castro, who willingly toured them around the corporate offices of the nine-month-old company.

Castro briefed them on what MORE had been doing to upgrade the facilities “inherited” from the previous power franchisee. They were unanimous in predicting a modernized distribution of power in the next 25 years. Let us echo what some of them told company spokesman Jonathan Cabrera.

From Vice-Mayor Jeffrey Ganzon: “MORE’s facilities are well-programmed, They are really prepared. They only need just a little time for adjustment to achieve their plans.”

Councilor Lady Julie Grace Baronda: “We are happy to see for ourselves the new facilities of MORE Power. They have done well in a short period of time despite the pandemic.”

Councilor Jay Treñas: “Having come here, we are now in the position to answer whatever issues might crop up on electrification in the next three to five years, including the problem on how to further minimize power rates.”

Councilor Leila Luntao: “We have seen what they have done so far and what they are prepared to do to improve services. Now we know why there are still power outages.”

Councilor Lyndon Acap: “Now we know the capability and capacity of MORE Power to handle the high-end distribution system. We hope for that day to come when there would be no more brownouts.”

The city dads also agreed with Castro’s explanation that power outages could not be fully prevented while in the process of upgrading power lines and other facilities. Some of these brownouts are scheduled in advance and announced via Facebook to enable affected residents to cope.

Tomorrow (Nov. 19), for instance, a maintenance job would necessitate a two-hour power interruption in Landheights Village Phase 2 in Arevalo, Iloilo City. The linemen would replace the leaning and dilapidated poles, and erect additional secondary poles to straighten sagging wires.

As regards the spaghetti wires, pababa na sila nang pababa. Mawawala lahat in a few more weeks. Right, Sir Randy Pastolero?