The North American Review Abandons Esperanto

All the way to the wilds of Hoboken

The timing should have raised some alarm, but if it did, that alarm was not raised to any great volume. On May 27, 1908, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser of Honolulu, Hawaii, had noticed that Esperanto had come to an end in the North American Review. With the first United States Esperanto congress coming later that year, wasn’t this a cause for concern?

Let’s consider the timeline here.
1. March 16, 1905 The American Esperanto Association is founded in Boston.
2. November 1906 The North American Review starts promoting Esperanto.
3. May 1908 The North American Review stopped its support of Esperanto (according, at least to the Pacific Commercial Advertiser).
4. July 19, 1908 The first North American Congress begins.
3. July 22, 1908 George Harvey is asked to be president of the new Esperanto Association of North America.

Why did they do that? Admittedly, although volume 187 of the North American Review (January to June, 1908) has no reference to Esperanto, there are plenty of references to Esperanto in the succeeding volumes (188–191, and others), and in part, the set of lessons that the magazine published had come to an end. Imagine your position if you’re a subscriber who wasn’t particularly interested in the Esperanto lessons (say an ardent Volapükian). How are you going to feel if they started the whole thing up again? Or if you got to the end of the lessons (and had joined the Esperanto Society). Did you need them again?

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Esperanto Vanishes from the North American Review

George Harvey
Probably not an Esperantist

Over at his blog, Robert Nielson has a post on the rise and fall of Esperanto in the North American Review between 1906 and 1909. The magazine was an early supporter of Esperanto in the United States, and then, just as the Esperanto Association of North America got underway, George Harvey, who owned the magazine, dropped his support.

Harvey wasn’t only promoting Esperanto in his magazine, as a sort of thank you to him, the North American Esperanto movement made him its very prominent head. As a thank you to the Esperanto movement, George Harvey turned his back on it. What gives?

I suspect that George Harvey’s views toward Esperanto mirrored those later expressed by JFK. “Ask not what you can do for Esperanto, ask what Esperanto can do for you.” Robert questions the very decision of the EANA to have George Harvey as its first president:

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Uncle Joe and Esperanto

Nia amiko, Onklo Joĉjo?

Joseph G. Cannon[1] entered Congress in 1873 and finally left it in 1923. While his congressional serve was not consecutive, he did mange to serve as Speaker of the House from 1903 to 1911, during his uninterrupted span in Congress from 1893 to 1913.[2] Nothing in his biography suggests that he was even the type to go for Esperanto when it was popular in Washington. A autobiography, Uncle Joe Cannon; the story of a pioneer American, compiled by his secretary (i.e.: chief aide) L. White Busbey, makes no reference to Esperanto or even any of the major figures of the Esperanto movement in their roles outside the movement, with one exception.

That one exception was George Harvey, who is mentioned in passing in a chapter on Mark Twain. Twain had written Cannon in 1906 seeking to lobby Congress on a copyright bill on the floor of Congress.[3] During all this, Twain invited Cannon to lunch along with George Harvey. This was before the North American Review took up the cause of Esperanto.

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Diplomat Predicts Things Will Be Great for Esperanto in America!

1908 will be a great year for
Esperanto speakers!

George Harvey said that the French Esperanto speakers had “a strong movement, destined to apparently to be crowned with success at no distant date, to add Esperanto to the curriculum of the public schools.” What the Deseret Evening News of Great Salt Lake City, Utah did not mention in their June 29, 1907 paper was that Mr. Harvey had something of a vested interest in Esperanto.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, he was an ardent backer of Esperanto in his magazine, The North American Review, and he would go on to be president of the Esperanto Association of North America. In other parts of his life, he was an ambassador and influential political figure.

In the article “Popularity of Esperanto,” Mr. Harvey did acknowledged that not all was rosy in France:

Despite the efforts of such eminent scholars as M. Beafront, official France has been slow to extend recognition to the new language, presumably because of a desire to maintain the position of their own as that of the world’s diplomacy; but we know from personal inquiry in the smaller towns that the French people are really enthusiastic over Esperanto, nearly every village containing a small group of students, and even the more intelligent innkeepers giving it earnest attention.

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Ten Commandments not for women, said 1920s politician

The man's a prominent American political figure.
He must be right.

I've been burrowing into newspaper archives researching a topic I hope to write about soon. On one page, I was surprised to see the headline,

Col. Harvey Says Decalogue Does Not Apply to Women

But it's okay, he's got you covered. The subhead is:

New Ten Commandments Should be Devised to Save Their Souls, He Tells Author's Club in London

He gave this talk in October, 1922, since which I am not aware of a second set of commandments created for women. Any women reading this might take that in mind while planning out their weekend.

Mr. Harvey was in London because it was part of his job to be there. He was the Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the formal title of ambassadors to Great Britain. The Ambassador was worried that women might just discover that they are not actually forbidden from doing certain things.

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