Mr. Privat Goes to Washington

Li iris al Vaŝingtono

One of the early great celebrities of the Esperanto movement was a young man from Switzerland. You cannot fault Edmond Privat for a lack of fervor: he walked to the first Esperanto Congress, from Geneva to Boulogne-sur-Mer.[1] at the age of fifteen (the conference ended shortly before his sixteenth birthday). By 1907, he was actively promoting the Esperanto movement and had become a prominent Esperantist, and had been sent to the United States to promote the language. In late 1907 (check the link), the New York Sun dubbed Mr. Privat “the principal commercial traveller for the original manufacturer of Esperanto.”

Privat began his visit to the United States in New York, but in February 1908, he came to Washington, D.C. At the time that he was there, the national organization was the American Esperanto Association, headquartered in Boston. It was later that year that they would be supplanted by the Esperanto Association of North America.[2] In February 1908, D.C. wasn’t the center of the Esperanto movement in the United States,[3] but it had been national capital for a good long time. And who knew? Maybe Mr. Privat could get President Roosevelt interested in Esperanto.

Kiam Mi Esperantiĝis

Ne! Oni diris
secretario, ne
sekretario!

Okaze, mi blogas esperante. Hodiaŭ estas la 35a datreveno de la dato kiam mi komencis lerni Esperanton. Do, ŝajnas al mi ke hodiaŭ me devas verki esperante.[1]

Antaŭnelonge, ĉe la reto, mi vidis demandon, pri kiel oni lernis Esperanton antaŭ la interreto. Ho ve! Kompatinda D-ro. Zamenhof, kiu havis nek interreton nek komputilon, kiam li reklamis Esperanton. Ĉu oni vere povas lerni Esperanton sen komputilo? Oni ne povas kredi tion!

Sed tio estas vera. Mi estas la pruvo. Je February 18, 1981, mi prenis malgrandan broŝuron el tablo ĉe scienc-fikcia congreso. Ĝi estis nur paĝo de verda papero, faldita duople. Dum multaj jaroj, la verda estis kaj estas mia plej preferita koloro. Do, mi devis scii kio estis sur la verda papero. Eble reklamo por alia scienc-fikcia congreso, certe. Aŭ eble por klubo. Samtempe, estis la komenco de mia vivo en la mondo de scienc-fikcio.

A Promising Young Esperantist

William P. Bonbright in 1904

There was more than one William P. Bonbright in 1909. One of them was the founder of a banking firm which bore his name, with offices in New York, London, and Colorado Springs. (The New York Times referred to him as a “New York banker.” Those other places don’t count.) To provide a small amount of clarity, in his case, the P stood for “Prescott.” The other was his first cousin once removed, William Parker Bonbright. That’s the William P. Bonbright who was also an Esperantist.

This is the moment where I need to clear up the genealogy, since the question probably has arisen, “just what is a ‘first cousin once removed.’” If you’re Chico Marx, this would be followed by list of reasons for which the cousin was removed. I could point you to the Wikipedia entry on cousin, and I was tempted to bury this in a footnote,[1] but it seemed to make much more sense to explain it in the main text.

A World Government in French and Esperanto

This monarch, are we going to have an election, or will it
be done by strange women lying in ponds?

Herbert Stanley Jevons (1875–1955)[1] was a British professor of economics, the author of several books, such as The British Coal Trade, The Theory of Political Economy, and The Economics of Tenancy Law and Estate Management.,[2] but he seems to have been overshadowed by his father, William Stanley Jevons, as the elder Jevons is the one with the Wikipedia entry.

In 1909, the elder Jevons had been dead since 1882 and it was H. Stanley Jevons’s moment of prominence, for he was the prophet of a whole world monarchy, as reported in the Chicago Tribune (where I cannot find it), and then reprinted in the Washington Post on February 7, 1909. The reference to Esperanto in the piece is somewhat slight,[3] amounting to a single reference in the entire piece, but it’s interesting how far off Jevons was in his predictions.

A Traveling Professor Talks about Esperanto

Ĉu lil parolas esperante?

It seems fairly likely that “Professor R. B. Maitland of San Francisco” is responding to a 1895 New York World article, “Volapuk Has a Rival,” one of the early articles on Esperanto.[1] What isn’t clear is just who R. B. Maitland was, or even if his name was “Maitland.” Several online sources have indexed the name as “Maltland,” which is a real, though more obscure name. There doesn’t seem to be a Professor Maltland in the Bay Area at the end of the nineteenth century either. He doesn’t show up in the University of California Register for 1894 through 1897. There is a reference in the 1896–1897 volume, but it to Maitland, Nova Scotia.

Perhaps the Los Angeles Herald expected its reader to instantly grasp who Prof. R. B. Maitland (or Maltland) was, but to use the reference has dropped below the obscure all the way to the opaque. If I had to make a bet, I’d say they garbled the name, but my skills at name de-garbling haven’t been of any help here. Or maybe the person identified himself as “Prof. R. B. Maitland” with no further checking from the Herald. The item appeared in a column “Talks with Travelers,” which was presumably a reporter talking with recent arrivals to Los Angeles.

This item is one of the rare references to Esperanto in the nineteenth century. As the years progressed, there would be articles on Esperanto made with the assumption that the reader had never heard of it, and that it was something new. On February 6, 1896, Esperanto still was very new.

Mondays, Mrs. Roe Teaches Esperanto

Ŝi volas paroli esperante kun vi

Esperanto seems to have been at the center of the social world of Omaha, Nebraska in the period before World War I. In 1909, according to the Adresaro published by the Esperanto Association of North America, the Omaha Esperanto Club had forty-two members, with an additional twenty-two in the evening class (what this distinction indicated, it’s not quite clear). Oddly enough, Omaha had fifteen additional members of the EANA who were not members of the Omaha Nebraska Club.[1] Given this, it’s no surprise that the Omaha Daily Bee covered the local Esperantists so thoroughly.

I’ve already written about two of these Omaha early Esperantists, Charles J. Roberts (EANA membership number 923) and Mrs. W. B. (Alice) Howard (1346). Alice Howard’s mother, Mrs. E. A. (Abigail) Russell (1713) was a member of the First Nebraska Esperanto Club, of Ord, Nebraska (her number seems to indicate that she joined the EANA some time after her daughter did). According to Wikipedia, about this time Omaha had a population of 124,000 people. Not bad to have sixty-four people speaking or studying Esperanto.[2]

A New Day for Day One

Day One
I use it daily

I have been keeping a journal (with no great regularity) since March 14, 1978. I only wish I had been more diligent about it. There are vast stretches of time for which I have no journal entries. The first few are in composition notebooks (I’ve lost one of those, unfortunately), followed by a collection of notebooks of varying sort, not all of which are filled in to the last page. It’s more-or-less a portrait (sketchy at times) of my life over the last thirty-eight years.

The Holy Grail of journaling for me has been to write in my journal every day, something I have never done. I’ve already missed a day this year, and we’re only thirty-five days in. But missing a day is nothing considering that I look at my journals and find that six months elapse at times between entries. It became clear to me long ago that scribbling in a paper notebook would never get me to my goal of writing in my journal daily (or at least nearly daily).