Esperanto, the Uniter of Nations

Louis F. Post
Journalist, social reformer,
Esperantist

Expecting Esperanto to “unite nations” was probably somewhat beyond wishful thinking in October 1915. This was, after all, the year in which the Universala Kongreso had to be relocated since Germany had put all of waters around Great Britain into an exclusion zone, though which ships could only pass at their peril (ships like the Lusitania). The world, in 1915, seemed to be united only in so far that groups of nations were united in their efforts to conquer other groups of nations.

This did not stop Louis F. Post from extolling the virtues of Esperanto at a meeting of the Kolumbia Esperanta Klubo on October 14, 1915. It reached the pages of the Washington Post on October 17. There was certainly an aspect of preaching to the choir; you didn’t need to convince the Esperanto speakers of Washington D. C. that Esperanto was, on the whole, a good thing. Post was not the only speaker at the event, nor was the item in the Post the only article.

The Washington Times ran a long article on one of the other speakers, Hyman Levine, on October 14 (in advance of the evening lecture). Mr. Levine spoke on “Esperanto at Work.” The Times did a brief follow-up article on the meeting, but gave no detail of anyone’s statements. The Post quoted Mr. Post, probably not because of the similarity of names, but because he was the Assistant Secretary of Labor, a position he assumed in 1913, held until 1921, and for Wikipedia, is the start of his life story, merely omitting the first sixty-four years of his life.

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More Anarchists and Esperanto

La anarkiistoj estas ĉie!

If there were any doubt remaining that there was a broad use of Esperanto by the anarchist movements of the early twentieth century, here’s a third article on Esperanto and anarchists. I’m actually a little behind on this one, as it’s a rehash of an article that appeared in the Washington Times on September 6, 1908.[1] As I’ve been going through these articles, I’ve been stepping back in time, since the notice in the anarchist newspaper for Italian speakers in the US was in 1914, the Spanish anarchists in 1909, and now we’ve taken this all the way back to 1908.[2]

This could be the earliest association between Esperanto and anarchism, and though I passed on it when I first read it, the Perrysburgh Journal (of Perrysburg, Ohio) is giving me a second chance by running this abridgment of the article in its October 23, 1908 edition. The article had some legs, since I found it reprinted in three other newspapers with later dates.[3] As I noted, it seems to have been an abridgment of the Washington Times article, which was itself taken from an item in the Pall Mall Gazette.[4]

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