Elbert Hubbard: Larkin Soap Premiums, the Roycroft Utopia and the Lusitania

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Elbert Hubbard was born in 1856 in Bloomington, Illinois, son of Dr. Silas Hubbard, who moved the family to nearby Hudson to find patients. His older brother Charlie died at nine after a fall, and Elbert grew up a prankster in a two-room schoolhouse overlooking a cemetery. As a traveling salesman for the Larkin Soap Company in Buffalo, he pushed try-before-you-buy trials, free premiums such as handkerchiefs and lamps, and buying clubs in which women pooled orders to earn furniture. Rich from soap, he remade himself as Fra Elbertus and, with his first wife, Bertha Crawford Hubbard, started a private press in East Aurora, New York, that grew into the Roycroft arts and crafts community making books, hammered copper, leather, stained glass and mission furniture.

His magazine The Philistine, bound in brown butcher paper, carried politics that moved from William Morris socialism to a defense of free enterprise and later a self-described anarchism. With his second wife, suffragist Alice Moore Hubbard, he made Roycroft a hub for reformers. In 1913 he was convicted of sending objectionable material through the mail, which blocked a passport. The Taft administration denied a pardon, so he went to Woodrow Wilson's White House, cornered secretary Joseph Tumulty during a cabinet meeting, and won a pardon in one day. On 1 May 1915 he and Alice sailed on the Lusitania, which was torpedoed off Ireland days later.

• After the Titanic sank, he called a couple's choice to die together a "glorious privilege."
• He joked that a prison is the socialist's paradise, where equality prevails and competition is eliminated.
• He planned to interview the German Kaiser as a war correspondent.
• Survivor Ernest Cowper saw the Hubbards link arms, then walk into a room on the upper deck and close the door.
• His son ran the Roycroft shops until 1938.