Authors: Greg King
But then, twenty-four-year-old Trixie was accustomed to doing things differently. In 1910 she’d eloped with wealthy Mexican Solid Petroleum Fuel Company president Alfred Witherbee; not only was he forty-nine to her twenty, but he also had two divorces behind him, and a daughter nearly as old as his new wife. They’d lived happily in Larchmont, keeping suites at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and the Savoy in London to use on their frequent travels.
Lusitania
was a favorite ship: Trixie determinedly ignored her brother-in-law’s last-minute efforts to persuade her not to travel aboard with her child and her mother, Mary Brown. Perhaps now, she secretly worried about being separated from her precious son. A fellow traveler, businessman Charles Hill, agreed to watch after them on the voyage, but Trixie—as Kessler saw—“was entirely wrapped up in her little boy, devoting herself in amusing him.”
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At the end of these meals, passengers scattered. After dining with Richard Freeman, James Houghton joined him for tea or leisurely strolls around the deck, “talking of our friends and of the days when we were at Cambridge together.”
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Others might retreat to
Lusitania
’s Lounge. There were coffee and tea, relaxed conversation, and gentle games of whist with the ladies. Wealthy Angela Papadopoulos, traveling with her carpet merchant husband, Michael, not only got to dine at the Captain’s Table on May 5 but also spent the evening playing cards with Lady Allan and Sir Hugh Lane. When she learned that he was traveling with a number of paintings, Angela insisted that Lane let her see them. He duly led Angela and her husband back to his cabin and revealed the canvases. “I had the chance,” she recalled, “to see those works of art for the last time before they were lost forever.”
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Melodic strains issuing from the Lounge’s Broadwood grand piano gave way to serenades by the ship’s five musicians.
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The repertoire reflected the popular songs of the day, including such hits as “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” “Curse of an Aching Heart,” and “Moonlight Bay.” Selections from light operettas like
The Merry Widow
alternated with Strauss waltzes and, more ominously, “Songe d’Automne,” the tune many recalled
Titanic
’s band playing just before she slipped beneath the Atlantic. There were also sentimental tunes like Carrie Jacobs Bond’s “The End of a Perfect Day” and “Just a Wearyin’ for You.”
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The latter must have pleased passenger Elbert Hubbard, for Bond was his favorite composer. Bohemian to the core and a professional, unrepentant firebrand, Hubbard was as much a celebrity as Rita Jolivet, Alfred Vanderbilt, or Charles Frohman. He was “an opinion molder and popular philosopher,” a “public tastemaker,” and a thorn in the side of his many critics.
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Hubbard was both perpetually enthusiastic and cynical: life, he once mused, “is just one damn thing after another.”
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A tireless self-promoter, Hubbard had been born in 1856. As a young man he drifted from job to job; although his prospects seemed dubious, he married well, wedding Bertha Crawford, daughter of a prominent Illinois family, in 1881. Working for his brother-in-law’s Larkin Soap Company, Hubbard traveled the country and eventually moved to New York State to establish a branch of the company in Buffalo. In 1892, he sold his substantial stock in the company and set out to enjoy his financial independence.
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He applied to Harvard; although his educational background was lacking, he was provisionally admitted, but, disliking the routine, he soon left.
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What Hubbard wanted to do was write, but he found dealing with “pesky editors” an unwelcome nuisance. To avoid such interference, he decided to publish his own work, and founded a magazine,
The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest,
as a vehicle to accommodate his disparate interests in art, music, philosophy, science, and religion.
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Hubbard greatly admired William Morris, the foremost English proponent of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and deliberately copied his efforts. In 1895, he established the Roycroft Colony in East Aurora, New York. In addition to producing Craftsman-style furniture, pottery, stained glass, woven rugs, leather goods, and household items, the organization also included its own printing arm, publishing expensive new editions of classic works. To
The Philistine,
Hubbard added a second magazine,
The Fra,
and quickly made a name for himself. At one time,
The Philistine
had a quarter million monthly subscribers, while Hubbard’s philosophical, antiwar work,
A Message to Garcia,
sold a stunning 52 million copies.
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Hoping to distinguish himself, Hubbard cultivated a deliberately flamboyant appearance: he habitually wore sweeping, oversized coats, enormous cravats of velvet or silk, and a floppy hat perched atop his long hair.
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In addition to stores, a stone chapel that served as a meeting place, and workshops, Hubbard built an inn to house the many guests who came to East Aurora to hear his views, among them a young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright.
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One person not enamored with the idea of meeting Hubbard was William Morris’s daughter, who dismissed the man known as “the Sage of East Aurora” as “that obnoxious imitator of my dear father.”
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A friend later described Hubbard as “a bundle of contradictions, and he knew it; and his philosophy of life was subject to frequent and radical revisions.… He was not a fossil; he was a living thing that assimilates and grows. He was as variable as the weather-vane, it may be; but, like the weather-vane, he marked the direction of the currents of public opinion.”
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Hubbard variously described himself as a socialist, an anarchist, a spiritualist who denied formalized religion, a proponent of women’s suffrage, a social reformer—anything and everything to go against the grain.
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“I believe in the Motherhood of God,” Hubbard once wrote, denouncing the Bible as “an atrocious book, false, obscene, and misleading.” He added “social, economic, domestic, political, mental, and spiritual” freedoms to the list of his beliefs. Divorce, he insisted, “should be as free as marriage.”
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With Bertha, Hubbard had four children, three sons and one daughter, but the marriage collapsed when Mrs. Hubbard, who served as a trustee for the East Aurora Academy, invited a young, independently minded teacher named Alice Moore to live with them. In 1894 Alice gave birth to Hubbard’s daughter, Miriam.
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By 1901, Bertha had had enough, and, citing his adultery, sued her husband for divorce. Hubbard, for his part, painted himself as the victim of an intellectually vapid, bourgeois spouse, saying, “Great men often marry commonplace wives.”
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Hubbard did his best to ignore the ensuing public scandal, but newspapers loudly denounced him as an unrepentant adulterer and seducer of young women. The
New York Sun,
calling him an “all around rogue,” openly wondered if he had “sold his soul to the Devil.”
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Hubbard refused to make excuses or apologize. “Never explain,” he advised. “Your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you anyway.”
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As soon as his divorce was final, he married Alice in 1904. Defiantly, he had a new motto, “They Will Talk Anyway,” carved over the door of the Roycroft Inn.
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Hubbard and his second wife dedicated themselves to the causes of women’s rights and social improvement. Alice eagerly took on daily management of the Roycroft community, and many credited her organizational gifts for its improved business practices and fortunes, though her brisk efficiency also alienated some of the members.
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By 1915, their personal fortune amounted to roughly $419,000.
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The
Titanic
tragedy in 1912 deeply affected Hubbard, who wrote of the disaster at length—words that, under the circumstances, would echo eerily over his own fate. He spoke of the “ominous” silence that fell over the doomed
Titanic
; of panic boarding lifeboats, “for there has never been a boat drill on this ship”; the “perceptible list to starboard” as the ship began to sink; the swirl of “angry, jealous, savage, relentless” water as the liner disappeared; and the “mass of wreckage, the dead, the struggles of the dying” when the ship had vanished. He was particularly taken with the story of Ida Straus refusing to leave her husband, Isidor, and choosing to die together with “calm courage.”
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Hubbard was unapologetic about the stir he caused: in 1913 he was fined $100 for sending “pornographic material” through the postal system (the “pornographic material” turned out to be a racy joke about birth control) and temporarily lost his American citizenship.
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He greeted the Great War with undisguised scorn, comparing the conflict to the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, as “all the crowned heads of Europe are related.” He foresaw “no romance or heroism” in the war, warning that it “will progress from horror to horror, and with it the protest, disgust, and anger of the people will deepen.”
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Hubbard freely indulged in anti-German propaganda in his magazines, including a hyperbolic attack called
Who Lifted the Lid off Hell?
Hubbard angrily denounced Kaiser Wilhelm II, insisting that he had “a shrunken soul and a mind that reeks of egomania,” and was a “megalomaniac” suffering from “paranoia,” and a man who compared unfavorably with Caligula.
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Charles Lauriat, to whom Hubbard lent a copy of the article when the men were aboard
Lusitania,
found it a stunning “piece of vitriolic English.”
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Despite these inflammatory words, Hubbard and his wife sailed on
Lusitania
believing that the Kaiser would be amenable to an interview. “I used to be on friendly terms with the Kaiser,” Hubbard insisted, “but I don’t know how I stand with him, for you know I have written some things he may not have liked.”
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Hubbard blithely ignored warnings that
Lusitania
might be in danger; indeed, he seemed to relish the idea of death. “Speaking from a strictly personal point of view, I would not mind if they did sink the ship,” he told a reporter. “It might be a good thing for me. I would drown with her, and that’s about the only way I could succeed in my ambition to get into the Hall of Fame. I’d be a regular hero and go right to the bottom.”
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Aboard
Lusitania,
Hubbard befriended a young journalist from Toronto traveling in Second Class named Ernest Cowper, welcoming him to his cabin on B Deck and chatting with him in the ship’s public rooms.
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When Cowper quizzed Hubbard about the possibility of a German submarine sinking the vessel, “the Sage of East Aurora” dismissed the idea. “No,” Hubbard insisted, “they will never torpedo the
Lusitania
. The Germans have done some bad things since the War started, but I don’t think they are that bad. Moreover, if a man was going to slug you as you came around a corner, he would not advertise the fact in a newspaper.”
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After an hour or two of conversation in the Lounge or Smoking Room, most of
Lusitania
’s First Class passengers slowly made their way to their staterooms. Ladies might stop at the impressive mahogany and brass Purser’s Bureau on Promenade Deck, handing over to purser James McCubbin diamond necklaces, brooches, aigrettes, and bandeaus they deemed too valuable to leave in their rooms.
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Stewards had already prepared the cabins, closing windows to prevent unwelcome drafts, and turning back eiderdowns to reveal the crisp linen sheets. Ladies’ maids and valets laid out negligees, pajamas, and dressing robes for their illustrious masters, taking their evening clothing away for any needed cleaning or pressing. One by one, lights dimmed until the vast corridors were still, their solitude interrupted only by young men retrieving shoes and boots left outside cabin doors to be shined before magically reappearing in the morning.