The Long Plan for 1915

Personally, I want to know how
many members they had.

In 1912, the committee working on the Pan-American Esperanto Congress had no idea that their efforts would also incorporate the eleventh Universala Kongreso, since their hopes for another Esperanto congress in the United States weren’t receiving an enthusiastic response. Really no surprise, given that 1910 Universala Kongreso in Washington, D.C. was the second smallest ever (with only 357 participants), with the last time the a congress held in Europe had fewer than 1,000 participants was right before World War II (preceding an eight-year gap). The United States probably isn’t ruled out of hosting a congress, but it’s my guess that the UEA would want to see that 1,000 American participants were likely first.

In 1912, the Esperantists who met in Oakland were just planning the eighth national congress of the Esperanto Association of North America. The hopes of the Universala Kongreso returning to the United States had already been dashed with Edinburgh, Scotland chosen as the site of the 1915 Universala Kongreso. And that all changed in March 1915, with little time to turn this from a national congress to an international one.

In a way, as the smallest Universala Kongreso ever (and I doubt there will ever be a smaller one), the 1915 Kongreso really was a national congress with a bit of international tacked on. But they didn’t know that in 1912. They were just planning the EANA congress. The San Francisco Call ran an article announcing their meeting on August 27, 1912.

ESPERANTO ADVOCATES WILL MEET THURSDAY

OAKLAND, Aug. 26.—The monthly meeting of the Oakland branch of the Universal Esperanto association will be held in the Oakland high school Thursday evening. Papers will be read by Miss Emma Rathgeb, William T. Drake, Miss E. Stevens and Miss Alice Lercher. Edward Irving will read a paper on the value of Esperanto to science. A short talk will be given by L. H. Gorham, who will tell of the plans of the society, including the pan-American congress of Esperantists in San Francisco in 1915.

The date in question for the meeting was September 30, as the 27th was a Monday in 1915. That’s an awfully long lead-up to a convention that was only going to be a couple hundred people at best. It’s clear that in that era that was the size of the national congresses in the United States. So why three years in the planning? Couldn’t this have been handled in about a year or less?

Sadly, there’s not much value in reading a paper on the importance of Esperanto to science to a bunch of Esperanto supporters. Really, it’s the scientists that you need to convince. In any case, this seemed to be pretty standard for a meeting of the Oakland Esperanto Society, and the San Francisco Call was pretty good about letting the public know of their events.

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An Esperanto Congress at a Time of War

How international
was it really?

August 23, 1915 was the opening day of the eleventh World Esperanto Congress, the Universala Kongreso. It’s not wholly the fault of the San Francisco committee that it was the smallest on record (a mere 163 participants). After all, until the outbreak of WWI in August 1914, the plan had been to hold the 1915 Universala Kongreso in Edinburgh, Scotland. But there was a war on. Plans for the Kongreso don’t seem to have started until March 1915, although the committee actually had been working on this since 1915.

In 1915, the United States was still maintaining its neutrality in WWI, which at that point wasn’t per se a “world war” (the term only came into use after the end of WWII, renaming the earlier war; personally, I lean to the view that there was a cease-fire of about twenty years within a single conflict). Although, one of the papers that covered the opening of the 1915 Kongreso, the Bemidji Daily Pioneer has a comic strip, Scoop, The Cub Reporter, on the same page as one of the articles about the Kongreso. In the strip, the characters are on a ship worrying about the potential for being struck by a torpedo. While the war in Europe was far from the waters Bemidji, Minnesota, it was clearly still on their minds.

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Veltlang at the Esperanto Meeting

The Veltlang Alphabet
Not sure if you can use it to write Esperanto

Veltlang clearly got more press than it deserved. Chronicling America has thirteen articles on it, ranging from its introduction in May 1910 through 1913 (when journalists seemed to tire of it). Its creator, Frederick Braendle, was a translator for the Pension Office (and so his designation of “Professor” was undoubtably self-conferred), who spoke sixteen languages. For the world, he gave English, slightly respelled with a new alphabet.

Those thirteen article are a bit too much coverage because Braendle’s only publication on Veltlang is a twelve-page pamphlet which gives little detail about the language itself (which, once again, is really English), and goes into greater detail of the somewhat mystical implications that Braendle felt his language had.

There does seem to have been a language, since he told the press the he used it in correspondence with friends. However, his book World-English, A New World Language, Veltlang, with English Words and English Grammar, Subject to the limitations of the phonetic writing of Veltlang, together with a simple phonetic world-alphabet, Seuastikon is his only book. (This title brings to mind the long titles of eighteenth-century novels, which are typically chopped down in modern editions.)

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Yes to Esperanto, No to Photos at World’s Fair

Please don't photograph
the Esperanto speakers.

Whenever I find that a tourism venue forbids photography, my immediate thought is that they’re tying to push you to buy the souvenir photo book instead. They don’t want to compete with their vendors. They want to squeeze more tourist cash out of you. Ironically, in some of these places, they have people running about taking flash photos, and I can understand a ban on flash photography. A museum might claim that flash photos can harm artworks (I’ve heard that this is utter bullshit), but more believably, the claim can be made that flash is distracting to other patrons (which is true). But a world’s fair?

But that’s what the organizers of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition did. They announced their ban on cameras on May 10, 1913, while the Expo was still under construction. However, contemporary reports made it clear that the ban continued when the fair was actually opened. And article in the San Francisco Call made it clear that permission to take photographs lay with the Department of Concessions. See, you don’t need to take photos; we have this wonderful souvenir book with professional photography.

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Esperanto Comes to San Francisco

Esperanto was spoken here.

San Francisco started their campaign to host the 1915 Universala Kongreso in 1910, when they sent Sinclair Lewis to the 1910 Kongreso to make the case for the City by the Bay. Despite having a future Nobel laureate plead their case, the decision at Washington, D.C. was that it was too early to be planning the 1915 convention. They were eventually rebuffed, and Edinburgh, Scotland was chosen as the site of the 1915 Universala Kongreso.

Then World War I broke out, just on the eve of the 1914 Paris congress, which had to be cancelled. Edinburgh had the problem of being in enemy territory for some of the potential participants. There was the further problem for some that the war made any sort of travel impossible. With the Russian Empire at war with the German Empire, the Zamenhofs weren’t going to be going anywhere. The Esperantists decided that a congress in a neutral nation would be a better choice, and so the location was swapped to San Francisco. Although the initial thought probably was that it was better to have a small convention than no convention, there would not be another Universala Kongreso until 1920.

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Spirits, Telepathy, and Esperanto

A little late for Zamenhof-Festo

Grant Wallace was, according to Wikipedia, “an American journalist, artist, screenwriter, and occultist.” They left out Esperantist. That piece of information comes from an article in the December 23, 1912 San Francisco Call. The main context was simply an announcement of an upcoming meeting, planned for December 26, 1912.

The article gives the name of people who will be speaking at the meeting, one of whom is Grant Wallace, who is identified as “editor of the San Francisco Esperantist.” I’ve encountered a few small literary magazines from the early days of the Esperanto movement, but my supposition is that the San Francisco Esperantist was the club newsletter of the San Francisco Esperanto club.

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The Bookseller, the Library, and Volapük

The late news from Paris

Among the many volumes in the Bancroft Library, the special collections library of the University of California, Berkeley, are two books on Volapük, the Hand-Book of Volapük, by Charles E. Sprague, and the Abridged Grammar of Volapük; Adapted to the Use of English Speaking People, by Auguste Kerckhoffs, and the only question I have is: “did they end up in the library because of Bancroft’s younger brother?” The Bancroft Library is named Hubert Howe Bancroft, a California bookseller and amateur historian who amassed a substantial library which he later sold to the State of California.[1]

Why not the older Bancroft? Well, they might have been his, but he doesn’t seem to have thought much of Volapük. In an essay on “Early California Literature,” he noted that while “a universal tongue must in time prevail,” he felt that English “need fear no competition from such artificial substitutes as Volapuk, of uncouth aspect.” No Volapükian he. But his brother is another matter altogether.

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