An Esperantist President in Washington

Big man in the Esperanto movement

Despite Edwin C. Reed’s fairly central role in the U.S. Esperanto movement of the early twentieth century, there is no entry for him in the Esperanto-language Wikipedia, even though there is one for his wife, Ivy Kellerman-Reed. In a way, they seem to be Esperanto’s first power couple, she being a writer, editor, translator, and teacher, and he being guy who organized things. Organizing things can be less enduring; even if you put your stamp on an organization, organizations can quickly go from vibrant to nonexistent. While Dr. Kellerman-Reed’s books can still be found on bookshelves, her husband’s organizations are all now defunct.

Reed (and throughout, I’m going to distinguish them by referring to him as Reed and her as Kellerman-Reed) was the first secretary of the Esperanto Association of North America, but as the role of president seemed to be largely ceremonial, the actual administrative duties fell to the secretary. This probably hampered the organization’s ability to capitalize on its early growth, since it the actual presidents weren’t the slightest bit interested in being strong leaders, and the first two (while Reed was secretary) weren’t even Esperanto speakers. From about 1909 through 1913, Edwin C. Reed was pretty much the central figure in the U.S. Esperanto movement.

Menus in Esperanto!

All we are saying
Is give Esperanto a chance!

Okay, that’s a bit of a tease, since the article in the Chicago Daily Tribune of September 24, 1910 didn’t uncover menus in Esperanto, instead it was a suggestion that restaurants adopt Esperanto for menus, instead of writing them in French. While it makes perfect sense for a menu of a Paris restaurant to be in French, it doesn’t make that sense in New York, even if the food offered dead-on traditional French food. There is an element of shtick to this.

Several years ago, I was in a not terribly restaurant in Washington, D.C., and on the menu were the words, “Ask about the *soup de jour.” Soup sounded like a good idea, so I saked.

“What’s the soup de jour?”

An Early Chicago Esperanto Society?

William E. Curtis
What did he know about
Esperanto?

The column, “Matters of Interest to Women and About the Household” that appeared under the name Marion Harland was edited by the American writer Mary Virginia Terhune (she wrote a number of books under the name, including some novels and an autobiography). The column in the (Richmond, Virginia) Times of September 23, 1902, includes four photos of women’s hair styles (the fashion seems to be “adorned with artificial leaves and flowers”), a couple of recipes (the first done by weight, the second by volume measures), and in between, questions and answers.

I should note that though these were noted to be “For the Housewife,” they did not deal with domestic matters, for the most part. The first is on croquet rules, the second a series of disconnection questions (“Was any Pope of Rome a Mason?” “What is the square area of New York and of Philadelphia?”), and the third is how to contact the Ethical Culture Society. Not all questions get answered, and the final question (of nine) is one.

Doctors Take Early Look at Esperanto

And a good attempt, at that

In Esperanto’s early period, there was much interest in the language in scientific circles, particularly medicine. This makes sense, since science is more firmly international than many of the other subjects of study. Poetry may be, as Robert Frost famously put it, “the stuff that gets lost in translation,” a carbon atom is a carbon atom, whether you’re in Germany, France, the United States, or Brazil (and everywhere else too—far off planets have carbon, but they don’t have the works of Shakespeare).

It was early lamented that at international scientific (and medical) conferences, people just couldn’t understand each other. You were just guaranteed that someone wouldn’t be able to to comprehend the language of at part of the sessions. (This actually still persists. I know of a conference that happened in Germany only a few years ago, at which some of the talks were in German, which not everyone there spoke. The main language of the conference was English, but talks could be given in German.) One of the early reviews of the first Esperanto Congress noted that it was an amazing thing that someone put together an international congress where everybody understood everything.

Esperanto Becomes Popular

Popular is good.

I would think when a newspaper describes and article as “special” to that newspaper, that they’ve got some sort of exclusive on it, and not that it was written by a stringer and not a staff reporter. But for an article that appeared on September 10, 1905 in both Washington, D.C. Evening Star and the Omaha Daily Bee, the second meaning was clearly the correct one. Someone in London cabled off to the two newspapers (and doubtless others) news Esperanto activity in London following the excitement generated by the first World Esperanto Congress, the 1905 Universala Kongreso.

The tale told by the cablegram correspondent seems a little fanciful, but on the other hand, it was clear that there was a real surge of interest in Esperanto after the first congress. Certainly, not long after the New York Esperanto Society had to take measures to exclude those who wanted the prestige of being a member of an Esperanto society without the actual bother of learning the language.

Esperanto and the Friends

Ĉu ni devas esti Amikoj?

Given the interest paid to Esperanto by various religious groups, it’s not surprising to find the Religious Society of Friends (that is, the Quakers) among their numbers. The event that caught the attention of the Quakers was the first Universala Kongreso in 1905. Just a few weeks after the close of the Congress, a brief item appeared in The Friend, a Religious and Literary Journal in their September 9, 1905 issue.

Certainly the Friends (and a whole lot of other people) could get behind the idea of reducing “ misunderstandings, quarrels, and stupid hatreds.” (Ah, if only a language could do that; you don’t actually become more saintly when speaking Esperanto.) The bulk of the article is a quotation from somewhere. The words aren’t familiar to me, but the bulk of the article is quoted, although no source is given.

Zamenhof in the Independent

Did he really write
the article?

Zamenhof’s article “Esperanto: A New International Language” in the August 11, 1904 Independent is two long to include in full. Despite the attribution to Lazaro Ludiviko Zamenhof, it was probably translated from the Esperanto, although no such credit is given. If you’re interested in Esperanto, it’s well worth reading, since it’s one of the early statements about the language in English. My guess is that, despite the attribution, it was not written by Dr. Zamenhof, since it has a sort of third-party quality to it.

At some point, the Kansas City Journal (which is not available online) abridged this. This abridgment was then reprinted by the Los Angeles Times on September 8, 1904. Newspapers don’t seem to do this as much anymore, thought it’s become pretty standard for bloggers; rephrase and quote an article in an existing source.

The Independent View of the First Congress

Just one big paragraph

The Independent, as Wikipedia points out, was a supporter of various progressive movements of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For abolition, for women’s suffrage, and so, it should come as no surprise that their initial view of Esperanto was, on the whole, positive.

The 1905 Esperanto Congress, the first Universala Kongreso, was a big thing. It wasn’t the first international language congress, but the first two Volapük congresses were in a mix of German and Volapük, and the third was the one that brought that movement to its end. And now the Esperantists were trying it.

A Linguistic Hodgepodge — Either Esperanto or English

Or, as we now say, "hodgepodge."

Reading the newspapers of a century ago is a great way to prepare yourself to rebut the current detractors of Esperanto, because, yes, their arguments are that old. Unfortunately, even though their arguments were rebutted a century ago (yes, even the “English is destined to become the world’s language”), the same arguments still manage to convince people. When you’re an American in a foreign hotel dealing with the clerk’s substandard English, you blame the poor clerk and not the situation that made the clerk expend time in learning a fairly difficult language.

But one of the oddest criticism is that it’s made up out of a bunch of languages, as if some other languages were some sort of seamless whole, sprung from the hearts of its speakers. There’s a graphic going about Facebook that states that English knocks down other languages in dark alleys and rifles their pockets for loose grammar. Vocabulary. English pillages vocabulary, not grammar. But we’re not alone.