Mr. Brewster’s Esperanto Party

E. V. Brewster
A real family man.
He had four of them.

When the New York Sun first wrote about the Esperanto party in Brooklyn, the newspaper stated that gathering would take place “at the home of Mrs. Brewster,” on April 29, 1905. But what about Mr. Brewster? And what about that plan to charge a penny for every failure to speak Esperanto after two hours of practice with an Esperanto grammar? How many pennies were expended in the cause? Happily, the Sun did a follow-up article on the Esperanto gathering.

The subsequent article makes it clear that Mr. Brewster was involved as well. It wasn’t just that it was happening “at the home of Mrs. Brewster,” but that it was Mr. Brewster’s home as well[1] and that Mr. Brewster seems to have been the actual instigator of the event, as he was president of the organization presenting the event. The article also makes it clear that this was not a gathering of Brooklyn esperantists, but instead a group that was curious about the new language. Brooklyn would later be home to plenty of Esperanto speakers, and at least one proponent of Ido.

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Mrs. Brewster’s Esperanto Party

Bring your pennies to Brooklyn

Esperanto has a verb, krokodili, literally “to crocodile,” but it means to speak one’s native language among Esperantists. According to some, it is only possible to krokodili in the presence of an Esperantist who does not share the native language of the other speakers, an American and a Brit dropping into English despite the presence of a French Esperantist. It’s not clear when the verb came into use (probably the 1920s), but from the beginning there was certainly the problem of those who supported the idea of Esperanto without bothering to learn the language, including the first two presidents of the Esperanto Association of North America, George Harvey and John Barrett.

But when Mrs. Brewster held her Esperanto gathering in Brooklyn, on [date], the EANA was a few years in the future, and the American Esperanto Association had been founded just a month before in Boston. One of its founders, Charles Matchett, was coming to Brooklyn to give a talk about Esperanto (in English) at the Brewster’s home. Oddly enough, records make it clear that the address, 131 Rutland Road, was their home only briefly. Was the party so dreadful that they felt they needed to move from a home they had only recently occupied?

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An Alsatian Esperantist in New York

Esperanto: Not a jargon

The early Esperanto movement was fond of pointing to merchants who used Esperanto in their businesses as a sign of the success of Esperanto. Some of the early lists of people who had learned Esperanto also include merchants with whom you could correspond in Esperanto in this early phase of global commerce. For the most part, their inclusion on these lists is the sole indication of their involvement in Esperanto. We get no determination of how successful it was (clearly not sufficient, in that it didn’t become a standard business practice).

But we have at least one actual piece of testimony from someone whose business had made use of Esperanto. On April 3, 1920, the New York Times had published a letter from J. G. Fourman on Russian words that had entered English. Perhaps they had entered Mr. Fourman’s English, because although some words (Bolshevik, knout, pogrom, ukase), he also cites “mujik” (which did not appear in my dictionary) and “zemstvo” (which did, but is so specialized in meaning “a system of elected councils in tsarist Russia” that it can’t really be said to have entered English). Despite the claims made by H. E. Lempertz, he didn’t call Esperanto a “jargon.” That was his predicted future international language, derived from the “interchange of words among the chief European languages.”

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Esperanto’s Civil War

Wouldn't have said it in
Esperanto or Ido.

Five score and seven years ago, the Esperanto movement was engaged in its own great civil war. In October 1907, the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language had declared for Esperanto, with such modifications upon which the Delegation had insisted. It split the Esperanto movement, with each side initially laying claim to the word “Esperanto.” (Eventually, the term “reformed Esperanto” gave way to “Ilo” and then “Ido.”) Their battlefields included not only the meetings of Esperanto groups (some of which became Ido groups), but also the pages of various newspapers.

Looking back, it seems somewhat strange that this was played out, in part, in the pages of major daily newspapers. After all, to those who had no intention of learning an international language (or probably any other), whether the proposed language was “primitive” Esperanto (as the supports of the Delegation called it) or “reformed” Esperanto (same) was irrelevant.

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A Chemist Promotes Esperanto

Wilhelm Ostwald

The early Esperanto movement had the support of many prominent figures of the scientific world, including the great German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald. From 1905 to 1906 Professor Ostwald lectured at Harvard and Columbia. Judging from the statements made in the newspapers of the era, this kind of intentional exchange was rare, which isn’t a huge surprise for an era when traveling between Europe and the United States took a week or two.

Ostwald traveled on the SS. Blucher, which left Cuxhaven on September 21, 1905 and arrived in New York on October 2. Oswald made a series of visits to the United States, making less celebrated visits in 1903 and 1904. The shortest of these trips took a week, which made it impossible that any scientist would dash over to give a seminar on another continent and then dash back after.

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No Esperanto Peasant Talk

"Is this what Esperanto looks like?"
"Not really."

Translators sometimes face the problem of what do you do when faced with an original that represents substandard speech: things that are ungrammatical or mispronounced or use slang. This is going to be a particular problem in a planned language; you don’t have a population speaking a lower-class dialect.[1] A clever translator could get around this, but the lack of lower-class dialect isn’t really much of a criticism of a language.

It was a pretty slender thread from which John Hearn’s criticism of Esperanto hung in the January 9, 1909 New York Times. Mr. Hearn had an obvious ulterior motive in criticizing Esperanto: he was an proponent of Ido.[2] Except in January 1909, the language was still being called “Ilo.”[3] Hearn had written the New York Times before, but in 1908, he was still supportive of Esperanto, but he was part of the group in the New York Esperanto Society that had gone over to Ido. That group included Dr. Max Talmey, who became the treasurer on his return to the organization.[4]

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Esperanto and Dr. Talmey's Other Languages

Flaws. Dangerous flaws!
A doctor says so.

The New York front of the Ido schism in the Esperanto movement showed some of the bitterest conflicts. I’ve been somewhat remiss as I haven’t had time to write up some of the articles, but there will be future posts.[1] I’ve seen it estimated that most of the people who left the Esperanto movement for Ido were in the leadership. The rank and file members didn’t feel like learning a new set of rules and new words. The leadership seemed to filled with those who liked the idea of an international language more than they liked the actuality of any specific one, and when the prospect came of offering reforms, they saw their chance.

It’s not a coincidence that many who joined the Esperanto movement, then sought to reform Esperanto, went on to propose their own languages, which they proclaimed were even better than their prior allegiances. Not just Esperanto, but the same story can be found among the Volapük reformers; adherence, reformist zeal, independent project. It should come as no surprise that that’s exactly the story found with Dr. Max Talmey, who was until autumn 1907, the president of the New York Esperanto Society. In happier days, he wrote Practical and Theoretical Esperanto. Dr. Talmey resigned with great publicity, abandoning Esperanto for Ido, which was then being called “ILO.” Dr. Talmey even wrote a book, The Defects of Esperanto, its decline and the growth of ILO (which, alas, does not seem to be available online).[2]

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Actress Wasn’t From Esperanto-Land, Nor from America

That Katherine Mulkins was a Broadway actress is beyond dispute. She appeared on Broadway at least four times, in the plays A Stranger in a Strange Land (1899), On the Quiet (1901), The Luck of MacGregor (1908), and A Lucky Star (1910). She appeared in several other plays, with her appearance in Bohemia in 1896 possibly her first noted role (it seems possible from the contemporary accounts that Ms. Mulkins may have performed his role on Broadway, as she was part of the Empire Theater Company, which produced plays both on Broadway at the Empire Theater and with touring companies outside New York).

She appeared in two plays by William Collier The Man from Mexico (1897) and (aforementioned) On the Quiet (1902). Other plays included The Bonnie Brier Bush (1902), and Checkers (1903). During her time in Checkers two stories were told about her, both of doubtful authenticity: that she was English, and that James MacNeill Whistler had begun a portrait of her before his death. Checkers was a Broadway show, but the entry at the Internet Broadway Database doesn’t list her among the cast, though newspaper accounts state that only the actor in the title role wasn’t in the Broadway production. She went on from there to good reviews for Brown of Harvard (1906). In 1907, she was in The Powers that Be by Avery Hopwood.

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An Early Birthday for Esperanto

Of course it does, but when?

Ask an Esperantist when the birthday of Esperanto is and they’ll tell you: December 15th, the same as Zamenhof, who made the first public demonstration of Esperanto on his 19th birthday in 1878. Edmond Privat in his Vivo de Zamenhof[1] In a way, the language of 1878 wasn’t really Esperanto. Zamenhof called it the lingwe uniwersala; the letter w is absent from Esperanto. The language that was celebrated on Zamenhof’s birthday in 1878 wasn’t the same same language that was published nine years later in 1887.[2]

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A Professional Esperantist

He wasn't actually looking at
Esperanto, but was getting others to.

The early Esperanto movement had its share of celebrities, people who tended to get mentioned whenever the subject of Esperanto was brought up, or whose connection to Esperanto was mentioned whenever attention was being turned to them specifically. Chief among these was Dr. Zamenhof himself, but in the United States, the same was true of the Stoner family, and every time Mrs. Stoner’s educational theories were discussed in print, readers would be reminded of her connection to the Esperanto movement.

But Zamenhof didn’t make money from the Esperanto movement (it actually was a drain on his resources) and Mrs. Stoner’s interest in Esperanto seemed to be largely based on self promotion.[1] One celebrity’s fame came from his promotion of Esperanto, and in traveling around promoting Esperanto, Edmond Privat was one of the early professional Esperantists, and preeminent among them.

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An Esperantist in Motion Pictures

Esperanto: They ought to
make a movie!

There was little find about Creston C. Coigne, who as a young man in New York wrote a letter to the Sun which appeared in their November 25, 1916 edition, in part because Mr. Coigne died young. When he died, he was probably about twenty-six years old. The 1915 New York State Census says that Mr. Coigne was eighteen years old and worked as a motion picture actor.

It was a family business. The same census lists his father as a motion picture director and his mother as a motion picture actress. Coigne’s brother Armand, was at sixteen and a stenographer. His grandmother, Ella Brous, kept house for the family. The family business was named after him, Creston Feature Pictures. Like many short-lived silent movie studios, it’s a struggle to even find out what they produced. The Catalog of Copyright Entries does list both Ireland a Nation and St. Joan of Arc among their pictures. The firm did advertise that another film, The Scapular, was nearing completion.[1]

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A Home for Esperantists in New York City

If Esperanto can make it in NYC…

I saw on Facebook recently that the cafe where the Esperanto group in New York City meets is closing, leaving them without a meeting space. Of course, many small groups have similar problems; finding a place to meet can be tough. Either places are too noisy or too difficult to get to or too expensive (and that’s just talking about my own experiences).

This problem is nothing new, and in 1907 the Esperantists in New York had solved the problem, at least for a while. It certainly didn’t become the permanent home of Esperanto in New York, or the current group wouldn’t be looking for somewhere to meet. What is interesting is that this is all happening in the shadow of the Ido schism, only a few days after this article, the New York Times would carry an article on a split in the Esperanto movement in New York.

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Girls’ Trip to Evil Haunts Blamed on Novels

Remember children, the policeman is your friend
Especially when your trip to New York lands you in a brothel

Those damn novels, leading young women astray for generations. Now, of course, when people are looking for something to blame, they never think of novels. But in 1889, novels were still on the suspect list, though it had become limited to “trashy novels.” Got that? There are good novels, then there are trashy novels. And if you read the trashy kind, there’s no telling what could happen to you.

The Evening World did manage to quietly give their readers the addresses of two New York brothels, though the implication of the article was that the police had closed these “establishments.” When I was last in New York, I took the Tenement Museum tour (tours only because it’s a preserved tenement house, that was boarded up for decades and used as a storehouse, so its interiors were largely preserved), the tour guide said nothing about tenements being used as houses of prostitution,[1] but that is the implication of this article. Yes, that “trashy novels” will land you in a brothel.

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Esperanto and the Italian Subversives

Similar, but not Esperanto.

I don’t know what surprises me more: that there was an Esperanto group just for Italian speakers in New York, or that there was an Italian-Language newspaper in Vermont. It just doesn’t strike me as a place with a large Italian population. But they had the Cronaca sovversiva. Clearly with a name like “Subversive Chronicle,” this was a newspaper of the Italian anarchists of the early twentieth century. Sort of the thing you’d expect to see Sacco and Vanzetti reading.[1] The Library of Congress notes that the place of publication varied in its run from 1903 to 1920. No doubt when Lynn, Massachusetts became too hot for an anarchist publication, the editor packed off to Vermont.

We’ve have several threads here, weaving through the (unlikely) location of Barre, Vermont. Early on, Esperanto was picked up by the labor movement and to a degree it’s still there. The major Esperanto dictionary, Plena Ilustrita Vortaro (Complete Illustrated Dictionary) is published by SAT, the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, the World Non-National Association. They’re not just a dictionary publisher; their real goal is just what their name implies. Then there was the thought that in the near future Esperanto would indeed be the common tongue. So if you were an immigrant, why not learn Esperanto? And, of course, with the large immigrant Italian population of New York, why not give Esperanto classes in Italian?

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The Amazing Future of 2008

Amazing predictions of the future! Guaranteed to come true!

Yeah, I admit it, this article would have been a lot better to address six years ago on September 22, 2008, but I wasn’t keeping a blog then. On the other hand, we can just retroject this thing. Pretend that the blog is at this point more than six years old and you’ve stumbled on something I wrote back then. Would it really make it any better. I think a couple of my footnotes aren’t what I would have written six years ago.

The piece I’ve stumbled upon is from the New York Evening World of September 22, 1908. The writer, Helen Vail Wallace, seems to have been a writer of light entertainment pieces; the World has several which are advice to women under the title “Just 1 Minute, Sisters!” each on a different topic (she advises the “fussy and nervous” to take a cool sponge bath daily, and the hasty eater to chew each mouthful thirty times, describing twenty times as “the lowest safe limit”). In her September 22 piece, Ms. Williams is predicting New York of 2008.

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Waving the Green Flag

It’s not clear why the Sun expected Colonel John Pollen to speak anything but English to reporters when he arrived in New York City on August 7, 1909. They reported on this the next day, making him a more prominent New York arrival than a Russian prince.

The Sun was clearly watching Colonel Pollen for any indication that he might slip in some Esperanto on the sly, as they noted that he “was not observed to prattle in the new tongue with acquaintances.” Of course, Pollen didn’t exactly travel anonymously, since the point of the article was that he was waving the green flag.

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A Desperate Plunge Into Esperanto?

That's a charge of felonious
leg pulling

The article in the the August 3, 1907 New York Sun reads like a piece of fiction, though the names are real. So, did this really happen? Was there a “renaissance of culture” among the police in 1907?

I wouldn’t believe it for a minute, but the Sun did publish this. Here’s their tale of the New York police making a desperate plunge into Esperanto. You can decide whether or not to believe it. My mind's made up.

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American Esperantists Plan 1921 Convention for Boston

Was it a close vote?

I'd make a bet that it's been a long time since the U.S. Esperanto congress attracted any press attention outside of the city where it was held (and the most recent one seems to have received none at all). The conventions in the first few decades of the Esperanto moment got a lot of press attention.

The Sun and New York Herald persisted in referring to Edward S. Payson as "Dr. Payson." Payton was neither Ph.D. nor M.D., but the president of Emerson Piano of Boston. Oddly enough, the trade press of the piano industry called him "Colonel Payson." Odd thing to call a Yankee.

As noted before, this was a meeting of about fifty people. I'm going to guess that the New York Times would probably ignore events with 500 people taking place over a weekend in Manhattan, although the Times did cover the convention in one small article, which adds that the president of the New York Esperanto Association was Miss Cora L. Butler, and that she gave the welcoming address.

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The Language They're Studying in New York

This piece by "R.L.H." that appeared in the New-York Tribune on July 4, 1913, starts off poking fun at universal languages (and seems to add a few whose names are the writer’s own creation to some real ones), but the real subject matter seems to be what a polyglot place New York had become in 1913. In other words, it is a cry of “why are all these foreigners speaking their foreign tongues in our fair city?”

In this, the writer gets to not only mock the latest contestant in the universal language rally, but also get to express contemporary anxieties about immigrant populations. Ro, the language mentioned in this piece seems to have never been a serious contender as an international language. There does not seem to have been any Ro clubs, magazines, or conventions.

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A Scout Is ... Mindful of Civl Rights

Is there a merit badge for equality?

I never thought I'd see this.

I opened up the New York Times this morning over breakfast and was surprised to see that a group of Boy Scouts had marched in New York's Pride parade (now I'm ever more bummed out that I missed it). I know that I would have been cheering loudly had I been there, since I was a Boy Scout when I was in my teens.

In the late 70s, gay scouts were simply unthinkable. I don't think there were any fifteen-year olds in America who were willing to be out to their peers. Of course, this was the era of Aaron Fricke, who gained some fame by attempting to bring a male date to his prom in 1980. I'm the same age as Fricke, and was fascinated by the news stories at the time. But Fricke was a rarity in those days. (And his home town was three times the size of mine.)

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