Esperantist Professor Leaves University for Literary Life

George B. Viles
Nia dua prezidanto

The American Esperanto Association made a point in response to claims that they were wholly a Boston organization that their president, George B. Viles, was a professor at the Ohio State University. But in all truth, OSU couldn’t claim that their Professor of Germanic Language and Literature was a native son of the Buckeye State. Professor Viles was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, not far from Boston.

It’s not clear if the founders of the American Esperanto Association knew they had elected a fellow Bay Stater as their head. Viles had graduated from Harvard in 1892, receiving an A.M. in 1896, and from there went on to receive his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1902. He then spent two years studying at Leipzig, before beginning at Ohio State University in 1904. He was at Leipzig at the same time that Wilhelm Ostwald was at the greatest point of his enthusiasm for Esperanto, and at a time when Ostwald was preparing for his trip to the United States, where he would lecture at Viles alma mater, Harvard.

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Harvard Professor Prefers Volapük to Esperanto

Leo Wiener.
Guess who he knew

When the New York Sun spoke with Professor Wiener of Harvard in 1907, the Volapük movement had collapsed about eighteen years before. Professor Wiener was truly flogging a dead horse, and the article acknowledges this, noting that “now Volapük is mute, and many of its former devotees are working and playing at Esperanto, the language of hope.” (Kudos to the Sun for remembering the umlaut in Volapük.)

From the perspective of the United States, in 1907, Esperanto was still pretty new, even though it was coming up on the twentieth anniversary of its publication. It had not reached the heights of interest that Volapük had achieved, then again, Volupük was published only seven years before Esperanto and Volapük’s fate already seemed to be sealed.

Still, in the Sun article of March 24, 1907, Professor Wiener made unfavorable comparison between Esperanto and Volapük. It seems likely that Wiener was a Volapükian, but there are indications that he was a disaffected Esperantist. Of course, one can be both, as the early twentieth century has plenty of examples of individuals who first favored Volapük, then Esperanto, then Ido (and then went on to invent their own languages).

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Esperanto at Harvard

The latest fad in Boston

The Congregationalist and Christian World paid scant attention to Esperanto, even though its place of publication, Boston, was something of a hotbed of early Esperanto activity during the time when it was published, during the early days of the twentieth century. However, when Harvard, which had been founded to train Congregationalist minsters, started an Esperanto group, maybe that’s what it took to get the attention of The Congregationalist. And so, on January 20, 1906, The Congregationalist and Christian World reported on Esperanto at Harvard University.

Harvard’s Esperanto group has an impressive forebear. While Wilhelm Ostwald did not found the Harvard Esperanto Society, as Ostwald visited Harvard the year before the group was founded, he did provide prize money for speeches in Esperanto. A March 21, 1906 article in the Harvard Crimson notes that the prizes will be “an Esperanto dictionary and Esperanto literature to the value of $5.” (Which seems strange because in March 1905, it was noted that the Ostwald prizes were worth $50.[1])

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