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Elbert Hubbard and Alice Moore: A True Love Story

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"If I had but two loaves of bread I would sell one of them and buy White Hyacinths to feed my soul."

He was already married, the father of three young children, when he saw her the first time. His own wife, "fetching enough to be a Gibson girl," was minding the kids at home that particular evening, while he stood at a podium delivering a lecture crafted to improve the minds of his audience at the neighborhood Chatauqua meeting.

What was it about her that attracted him like a beacon in the night? Hard to say. A successful traveling salesman, he?d certainly had his chances with any number of desirable women before deciding to settle down with Bertha Crawford, a girl from Illinois. As a partner in a growing company, he had flagstones of success and security being laid down before him. Still in his early thirties, he could look forward to a distinguished career as a businessman, his accomplishments capped later in life with philanthropies established in his name.

She wasn?t even very pretty.

Yet he picked her out of the crowd, "rather tall, plain, but with a face that beamed intelligence, insight, and good nature." His life and hers would never be the same.

They didn?t say anything to one another. "Suddenly my eyes looked straight into the eyes of a Personage. . . . she smiled the frankest kind of smile of welcome . . . I smiled back. . . . It was all in an instant, but we had met, . . . in a soul embrace, and there was a perfect understanding between us."

The kicker: "a soul embrace." Before they ever got introduced, before they ever spoke to one another, they?d consummated their relationship. They had mated for life.

It would take years for the soul embrace to flesh itself out completely, and even more years for it to fold back upon its own spiritual origin. Nevertheless the transformation began that night.

And she would inspire him to make such a radical departure from the life he knew that his fame would span continents.

At the time they met he was 32 years old, she, about 29. He?d been married seven years.

He?d started working as a traveling salesman at 16. He?d grown up on the road. But he never quite fit the stereotype. He?d ride into town in the morning, drop off soap samples at as many households as he could, and return later in the day, either to pick up what was left of the samples or get paid for a sale. An affable young man with a ready smile and a quick wit, he might have spent his leisure hours engaged in any number of amorous affairs. Instead he took to the local library during the day, and at night preferred lecture halls to barrooms or pool halls. When he got married the first time, he was as ready to get married as a man his age might be.

The hours he clocked in town libraries probably indicate more about him than the sales he chocked up in those same towns, though he never gave up his love for the road. He needed intellectual stimulation no matter where he was or what he did. Apparently he was not getting it at home.

His new love provided that They met for lunch, for walks, for horseback rides, discussion being the lifeblood of their bond. When it became obvious to his wife that the woman who had come into their house as a boarder had more on her mind than simply a place to stay, she made the lady leave. When it became obvious to the young lady?s relatives that she had fallen in love with a married man, they took her away for the summer.

It didn?t matter. When she got a job teaching a couple of hundred miles away, that town became part of his itinerary. After the school year was over, she returned to the family digs, only this time she didn?t allow the family to pack her off for the summer. She and the man she loved met, talked, threw ideas at one another. They began working on a book.

That fall she moved to Boston for postgraduate work. He would visit her, they would go over what they had written, were writing, would write. When they weren?t together they wrote long letters to one another. Over the years they exchanged thousands of letters, continuing the exchange of ideas that sprang up when they were together.

The following year he submitted the novel to a New York publisher. It was accepted.

That did it. He had to get out. He had to change his life style.

He quit his job. He applied to Harvard.

Not just like that, however. First he ran everything by his wife Bertha. He?d invested wisely enough to enable them to maintain their life style, so money didn?t factor in as an issue. He wanted to get the degree as a steppingstone to other things. She liked the idea. Or if she didn?t totally like the idea, she didn?t lambaste him severely enough to dent his resolve.

That fall he moved to Boston. The woman he loved continued her studies at Emerson College. He prepared for Harvard. Harvard, unfortunately, was prepared not to accept him.

It didn?t matter. He and the woman he loved were working on two novels. He got a job with a publishing company in Kenmore Square. Every so often he would take a train home to see the wife and kids, but his heart remained wrapped around a woman in Boston.

So much so that he spent the Christmas holidays with her, away from his real family. Five years had gone by since the look that bonded them together, but they had never physically consummated their relationship. That was about to end. One memorable night they took a hotel room and, five years after their first meeting, had sex for the first time. It must have been a good night. They stayed at the hotel four nights and when they left they took the room numbers off the door and in their subsequent correspondence used a cryptic "1, 2, 3, 4" when they signed off.

Wife Bertha by now could not help but suspect there was more to Boston than baked beans and chowder. Her husband had an office in their house, an office he kept locked when he was away. He and his love had devised a system whereby he could send and receive letters at the post office in a neighboring town, but he kept her opened letters in his office at home. While he was away on one of his many trips to Boston, his wife picked the lock. If ever a woman needed evidence of flagrant infidelity, alienation of affection, even adultery, it was all there.

But she did not file for divorce. Possibly she still loved him. Possibly she did what she thought was best for the three boys, the oldest of whom was only 12.

By this time two more novels had been accepted for publication. He?d been thinking about another project, a series of pamphlets about the lives of famous writers and artists. Europe beckoned. He booked passage on a ship. He would spend the summer in England and France, collecting information.

As soon as he arrived at his London hotel in early June he tore through the letters from Alice that were waiting for him. It was then he learned that their Christmas gamboling had resulted in a serious jackpot: she was pregnant.

He wrote back immediately, ". . . I feel I must write and tell you how much I love you, Dear Lady. You have no cause to fear in any way. . . . You are mine and I intend to take the best possible care of you and God will care for us both."

He booked passage back as quickly as he could after docking in England, but transportation being what it was back then, he had time to tour parts of England and France. With a mind that recognized opportunity when it ran into him, he took copious notes, notes that would enable him to write a series of short books about the historical sites he visited and some of the people associated with them. These notes became the basis for his Little Journeys, a series he published for 20 years.

Upon returning to the States at the beginning of July he rented a cottage in Hingham, Massachusetts for Alice and the baby, and on September 16 their daughter Miriam was born. The son of a country doctor, Bert himself assisted in the home delivery.

The lovers and their infant daughter spent the holidays together that year. It would be the last time they did so for many years.

Alice?s brother-in-law, Wayland Woodworth, just happened to be a lawyer. Through whatever means he persuaded Bert to remove Alice from his will, agree to child support, and promise to stay away from her and the child. Alice and the baby would live in the Woodworth household. Alice did the best she could under the circumstances; she traveled, wrote long letters to her lover, hoped things would change.

He did not even reply to her letters, as far as we know.

And for some unaccountable reason Bert and wife Bertha made love about this time, with the expected result: she became pregnant.

So there he was, with a wife, three actual children and another on the way, another woman who called herself "Wife" and their love child, all of them depending on him for support, and not much additional income on the horizon.

He started a new business right there in his old home town.

He began publishing his own books. The first ones, based on his recent travels, were short, hardly more than pamphlets. He also started a magazine?brash, irreverent, different from anything else being printed at the time. A joke, he called it. The magazine caught on. The books sold, but it was the magazine that kept the business going, "the only magazine ever started," as he put it, "that has been self-supporting from its first appearance."

In January daughter Katherine was born to Bert and wife Bertha. Alice did not take the news too well. Shortly afterwards she had a nervous breakdown.

It took her nearly a year to recover. When she finally did recover enough to collect the fragments of her broken life about her, she decided to leave the area. After some deliberation she took a teaching job at a high school in Denver.

Meanwhile the publishing business was booming. Bert had his own printing press by now, was using locals to illuminate the pages of the short-run books he was selling by subscription. He had a list of satisfied customers who kept buying books. But the backbone of the business was the magazine. After a first printing of 2500 copies, most of which sold, within five years The Philistine brought in revenue from over 50,000 paid subscribers; ten years later that number had swelled to 200,000.

A community of artists and artisans formed around the publishing enterprise, first to illuminate, later to hand bind the books, subsequently to make furniture, design pottery and housewares. In its heyday it had its own school system, its own apprentice programs, its own entertainment, its own teams.
The community became a village. Thousands of people visited it every year.

As itinerant as ever, Bert spent much of his time on the lecture circuit, selling his community and its philosophy. He was famous by now, having made his mark by publishing a short essay that was snatched up for distribution to all its employees by the New York Central. The same piece was translated into Japanese, then Russian. It became internationally famous, with millions of copies in circulation.

At some time during his travels it appears likely he visited Alice in Denver.

Brother-in-law and lawyer Woodworth at this time decided to stir the domestic pot, as it were. Noticing that Elbert Hubbard had become quite prosperous, he sued for lack of child support. Upon hearing of the suit an enraged Alice hightailed it home from Denver, collected her five year old daughter Miriam, and settled the two of them in Concord, Massachusetts, in a house that Bert rented for them. She established herself in the community as Miriam?s nurse.

Bert?s schedule provided countless opportunities to visit Concord and spend time with his daughter and her mother. He spent so much time in Concord in fact that his name frequently appeared in the local weekly newspaper. And when he happened to be out of town, he and Alice exchanged letters.

Conveniently enough he happened to leave some of these letters from Alice lying around where wife Bertha might come across them. She did, and shortly thereafter she filed for divorce. The grounds: adultery. The papers were filed in December of that year. A little over a year later, following a lecture in Washington, Bert received a telegram from his oldest son that the divorce papers had come through. He immediately asked Alice to meet him in Philadelphia.

The wedding between Bert and Alice took place a week after the divorce became final. For years she?d called him "Husband" and he?d called her "Wife." They?d been locked in a "soul-embrace" from the first time they saw one another. After 15 years their relationship became legalized.

They moved back to East Aurora and before long Alice became the business manager, no mean feat for an ex-schoolteacher. At that time Roycroft had about 300 employees on the payroll, and more than 25,000 visitors?"pilgrims" Bert called them?passing through every year. People came from all over the world to witness and experience the wonder that was Roycroft.

Alice herself became an author with a book entitled "Woman?s Work," in which she expressed some of her most heartfelt thoughts: "Incompatibility of interests is the cause of domestic troubles . . . .We meet on the plane of common interest. 'I love you because you love the things I love.? That is all there is to the theory of love. The more mutuality there is, the more love is there. . . . To grow together by working and living together is the only possible path to love, life, and happiness. . . . Companionship, comradeship and friendship are the absolutely necessary foundation for love."

The grew together. Elbert established himself as a solid thinker and a person who could write on serious subjects as well as trivial. He became a fixture on the lecture circuit, wrote a syndicated column, and for ten years, with Alice by his side, hobnobbed with the rich, the famous, and the talented. Like anyone in their position the couple had their detractors, but they also had themselves, which is what seems to have been most important to them.

Hubbard penned an appreciation of Alice five years after their marriage: "Alice Hubbard is a mother. She is a successful mother. Besides being a mother, Alice Hubbard is a woman of varied occupation. She supervises the work in a manufacturing establishment employing five hundred people. She has charge of two unique hotels run as home, where visitors come from all parts of the globe. She is a writer on various subjects and assistant editor of two monthly magazines. She is the author of several books. She pays almost daily visits to her farm of three hundred acres, which produces all the food that is consumed in her extensive household."

He wrote that in 1910.

After the Titanic disaster in 1912, the Hearst syndicate asked Elbert to write a piece about some of the notables on board, Mr. and Mrs. Isador Strauss among them. He might have been writing his own obituary. "These dead have not lived and died in vain. They have brought us all a little nearer together?we think better of our kind.
"One thing sure, there are just two respectable ways to die. One is of old age, and the other is by accident.
"All disease is indecent.
"Suicide is atrocious.
"But to pass out as did Mr. and Mrs. Isador Strauss is glorious. Few have such a privilege. Happy lovers, both. In life they were never separated, and in death they are not divided."

Such would be the case for him and Alice. Although they had been separated for a time in life, they would not be divided in death

England and Germany were already at war when the happy couple boarded the S.S. Lusitania in New York. The ship steamed off to Europe even though the Atlantic was teeming with U-boats and the Germans had placed ads in the New York papers warning that any ships flying the British flag could be attacked once they entered the war zone.

Fair warning. As the ship approached the Irish coast after an uneventful crossing, a U-boat discharged its deadly torpedoes. Within minutes the target began listing. A fellow passenger who was on deck with the Hubbards at the time suggested they return to their stateroom for life jackets. Instead, he said, "Mr. Hubbard stayed by the rail affectionately holding his arm around his wife?s waist and both seemed unable to act."

Another passenger reported he had seen them, hand in hand, head back to their cabin.

No matter. Both of them perished in the sinking of the Lusitania, May 7, 1915.

It was the end of an era. The American Arts and Crafts Movement effectively ended that year.

It was also the end of a timeless love story.

In a book entitled White Hyacinths, Bert wrote of Alice,

"In my wife?s mind I see my thoughts enlarged and reflected, just as in a telescope we hold to the stars. She is the magic mirror in which I see the Divine. Her mind acts on mine and mine on hers. Most certainly I am aware that no one else can see the same in her which I behold, because no one else can call forth her qualities any more than any other woman can call forth mine. Our minds, separate and apart, act together as one, forming a complete binocular, making plain that which to one alone is invisible."

And White Hyacinths?

"If I had but two loaves of bread I would sell one of them and buy White Hyacinths to feed my soul."

This was the mantra of their lives. White Hyacinths was also the name they gave their home in East Aurora.



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