Professor Proposes Esperanto for League of Nations

Professor Murray
Not sure if he's reading
something in Esperanto.

Attempts to get the League of Nations to use Esperanto or another international language (in this case, Ido) kept coming. Although the French diplomat Gabriel Hanotaux tried to put this matter to rest in December 1920, that did not end the matter. In October 1921 (possibly), there was a resolution made by thirteen delegates to consider Esperanto. That resolution doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere (since we know that the League of Nations never adopted Esperanto), but that didn’t stop further attempts.[1]

That brings us to 1922. The Watchman and Southron of Sumpter, South Carolina clearly wasn’t worried about news not being sufficiently new, since their February 8, 1922 article is datelined January 9. I mean, it’s less than a month old. That’s still current right?[2] Though less than a century would elapse before the 24-hour news cycle, its spirit was still a long, long way away. Would a media outlet today cover a month-old story with no new development?

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A Dark Day for Esperanto

Gabriel Hanotaux
No fan of Esperanto

It was one of those “could have been different moments,” one of those times in Esperanto history when the “fina venko,” the final victory when Esperanto became the international auxiliary language, was at hand. As in all these other situations, the victory didn’t happen (but you knew that already, since if any of them had happened, there would have been at least a moment when Esperanto was the world-wide standard for communication).

On December 18, 1920, the League of Nations voted on whether Esperanto would be the official language of the League. Even now, international organizations have to deal with the cost of translating documents and speeches into a variety of languages. I’ve seen it estimated that the European Union spends about €300 million a year on text translation. The Germans keep suggesting that adopting English as the official language of Europe would help bring the costs down.

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Esperanto at the League of Nations

We know how this ended.

The Taiban Valley News of Taiban, New Mexico had in its October 7, 1921 edition two columns of content that were almost identical to two columns which appeared later in the St. Johns Herald of St. Johns, Arizona on October 20, 1921. Certainly, by the end of October 1921, this news was a bit stale, and news items were probably provided as part of a packing with the surrounding (identical) advertisements.

The article mentioning Esperanto at the League of Nations is tucked in between articles on the attempts of a woman, “Mrs. Emma C. Bergdoll, mother of the notorious draft evader, Grover C. Bergdoll,”[1] to recover some property valued at $1 million, and the story of two young Nebraskans who determined that the best way to raise funds for a wireless set was death threats and extortion.

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