An American Anthem…In Esperanto

Dr.James McFatrich
Sought to select anthem
Probably not the Esperanto one

The status of the “Star Spangled Banner” as the national anthem, has apparently been of discussion ever since it was chosen (and clearly a bit before that). While it’s been the United States national anthem for forever, it only become so in 1931,[1] despite that the lyrics, “Defense of Fort M’Henry” were written in 1814.[2] People have complained that the song is difficult to sing, and that the music comes from a drinking song (which must have been damn difficult to sing drunk), “To Anacreon in Heaven,”[3] so maybe not the best tune for a sober nation.

There were various attempts to find a national anthem, because all the cool nations had one. England had “God Save the King,”[4] France had “La Marseillaise” and even the Esperanto movement had “La Espero” as anthems before 1911.[5] Unofficially, the United States was using “My Country, ’tis of Thee,” which has the problem of using the tune of “God Save the King.”

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Mr. Privat Goes to Washington

Li iris al Vaŝingtono

One of the early great celebrities of the Esperanto movement was a young man from Switzerland. You cannot fault Edmond Privat for a lack of fervor: he walked to the first Esperanto Congress, from Geneva to Boulogne-sur-Mer.[1] at the age of fifteen (the conference ended shortly before his sixteenth birthday). By 1907, he was actively promoting the Esperanto movement and had become a prominent Esperantist, and had been sent to the United States to promote the language. In late 1907 (check the link), the New York Sun dubbed Mr. Privat “the principal commercial traveller for the original manufacturer of Esperanto.”

Privat began his visit to the United States in New York, but in February 1908, he came to Washington, D.C. At the time that he was there, the national organization was the American Esperanto Association, headquartered in Boston. It was later that year that they would be supplanted by the Esperanto Association of North America.[2] In February 1908, D.C. wasn’t the center of the Esperanto movement in the United States,[3] but it had been national capital for a good long time. And who knew? Maybe Mr. Privat could get President Roosevelt interested in Esperanto.

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Kiam Mi Esperantiĝis

Ne! Oni diris
secretario, ne
sekretario!

Okaze, mi blogas esperante. Hodiaŭ estas la 35a datreveno de la dato kiam mi komencis lerni Esperanton. Do, ŝajnas al mi ke hodiaŭ me devas verki esperante.[1]

Antaŭnelonge, ĉe la reto, mi vidis demandon, pri kiel oni lernis Esperanton antaŭ la interreto. Ho ve! Kompatinda D-ro. Zamenhof, kiu havis nek interreton nek komputilon, kiam li reklamis Esperanton. Ĉu oni vere povas lerni Esperanton sen komputilo? Oni ne povas kredi tion!

Sed tio estas vera. Mi estas la pruvo. Je February 18, 1981, mi prenis malgrandan broŝuron el tablo ĉe scienc-fikcia congreso. Ĝi estis nur paĝo de verda papero, faldita duople. Dum multaj jaroj, la verda estis kaj estas mia plej preferita koloro. Do, mi devis scii kio estis sur la verda papero. Eble reklamo por alia scienc-fikcia congreso, certe. Aŭ eble por klubo. Samtempe, estis la komenco de mia vivo en la mondo de scienc-fikcio.

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A Promising Young Esperantist

William P. Bonbright in 1904

There was more than one William P. Bonbright in 1909. One of them was the founder of a banking firm which bore his name, with offices in New York, London, and Colorado Springs. (The New York Times referred to him as a “New York banker.” Those other places don’t count.) To provide a small amount of clarity, in his case, the P stood for “Prescott.” The other was his first cousin once removed, William Parker Bonbright. That’s the William P. Bonbright who was also an Esperantist.

This is the moment where I need to clear up the genealogy, since the question probably has arisen, “just what is a ‘first cousin once removed.’” If you’re Chico Marx, this would be followed by list of reasons for which the cousin was removed. I could point you to the Wikipedia entry on cousin, and I was tempted to bury this in a footnote,[1] but it seemed to make much more sense to explain it in the main text.

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A World Government in French and Esperanto

This monarch, are we going to have an election, or will it
be done by strange women lying in ponds?

Herbert Stanley Jevons (1875–1955)[1] was a British professor of economics, the author of several books, such as The British Coal Trade, The Theory of Political Economy, and The Economics of Tenancy Law and Estate Management.,[2] but he seems to have been overshadowed by his father, William Stanley Jevons, as the elder Jevons is the one with the Wikipedia entry.

In 1909, the elder Jevons had been dead since 1882 and it was H. Stanley Jevons’s moment of prominence, for he was the prophet of a whole world monarchy, as reported in the Chicago Tribune (where I cannot find it), and then reprinted in the Washington Post on February 7, 1909. The reference to Esperanto in the piece is somewhat slight,[3] amounting to a single reference in the entire piece, but it’s interesting how far off Jevons was in his predictions.

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A Traveling Professor Talks about Esperanto

Ĉu lil parolas esperante?

It seems fairly likely that “Professor R. B. Maitland of San Francisco” is responding to a 1895 New York World article, “Volapuk Has a Rival,” one of the early articles on Esperanto.[1] What isn’t clear is just who R. B. Maitland was, or even if his name was “Maitland.” Several online sources have indexed the name as “Maltland,” which is a real, though more obscure name. There doesn’t seem to be a Professor Maltland in the Bay Area at the end of the nineteenth century either. He doesn’t show up in the University of California Register for 1894 through 1897. There is a reference in the 1896–1897 volume, but it to Maitland, Nova Scotia.

Perhaps the Los Angeles Herald expected its reader to instantly grasp who Prof. R. B. Maitland (or Maltland) was, but to use the reference has dropped below the obscure all the way to the opaque. If I had to make a bet, I’d say they garbled the name, but my skills at name de-garbling haven’t been of any help here. Or maybe the person identified himself as “Prof. R. B. Maitland” with no further checking from the Herald. The item appeared in a column “Talks with Travelers,” which was presumably a reporter talking with recent arrivals to Los Angeles.

This item is one of the rare references to Esperanto in the nineteenth century. As the years progressed, there would be articles on Esperanto made with the assumption that the reader had never heard of it, and that it was something new. On February 6, 1896, Esperanto still was very new.

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Mondays, Mrs. Roe Teaches Esperanto

Ŝi volas paroli esperante kun vi

Esperanto seems to have been at the center of the social world of Omaha, Nebraska in the period before World War I. In 1909, according to the Adresaro published by the Esperanto Association of North America, the Omaha Esperanto Club had forty-two members, with an additional twenty-two in the evening class (what this distinction indicated, it’s not quite clear). Oddly enough, Omaha had fifteen additional members of the EANA who were not members of the Omaha Nebraska Club.[1] Given this, it’s no surprise that the Omaha Daily Bee covered the local Esperantists so thoroughly.

I’ve already written about two of these Omaha early Esperantists, Charles J. Roberts (EANA membership number 923) and Mrs. W. B. (Alice) Howard (1346). Alice Howard’s mother, Mrs. E. A. (Abigail) Russell (1713) was a member of the First Nebraska Esperanto Club, of Ord, Nebraska (her number seems to indicate that she joined the EANA some time after her daughter did). According to Wikipedia, about this time Omaha had a population of 124,000 people. Not bad to have sixty-four people speaking or studying Esperanto.[2]

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The Mysterious A. E. Handley

There might not have
been any takers.

What you can accomplish through research can only go so far and every once in a while, instead of tracking down an early Esperanto speaker, I come up with nothing. Such is the case, unfortunately in the case of A. E. Handley, who lived in Ocala, Florida in 1908.

In 1908, starting on January 28, (Mr.? Mrs.? Ms.?) Handley ran a series of advertisements in the Ocala Evening Star, offering his services in the teaching of French, elementary German and Spanish, and Esperanto. The advertisement ran in the 17 subsequent non-Sunday issues of the paper, from January 28 to February 24, exclusive of the 2nd, 9th, 16th, and 23rd, additionally missing the 19th (a Wednesday). That last one was probably the fault of the newspaper, since the advertisement appears on both pages 5 and 6 of the February 18, 1908 newspaper.

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Never Too Late to Learn Esperanto!

Ŝi esperantiĝis kiam ŝi havis 70 jarojn!

We can all learn from the example of Agnes Corliss, who passed her preliminary examination in Esperanto in mid–1912, as was reported in the June 1912 Amerika Esperantisto. What the magazine didn’t report was that Mrs. Corliss was a seventy-four year old woman. She began her study of Esperanto, according to her obituary,[1] when she was seventy, which would have been either late 1907, or during just about any part of 1908.

That makes her a fairly early Esperantist, learning it just about at the beginning of the Esperanto Association of North America. Her earliest connection to the movement seems to be in 1910, when she gave 50¢ to EANA.[2] As the annual membership in the organization was also 50¢, I suspect she sent in a dollar and made a contribution of the other part, although I do not see her in the subsequent membership lists. The 1911 EANA Adresaro lists twelve Esperantists in Vermont, eleven of them the membership of the Brattleboro Esperanto Society.

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Gathering Esperantists in Iowa

State? I'll settle for local

Oh, for the days when there were both state and local Esperanto organizations. By the time I had joined the Esperanto movement, most states had but a single Esperanto organization, and if a state (like California) was large enough, it had regional groups, but nothing more. In the mid–1980s, I was a member of the Esperanto Society of New England,[1] shows from what a (theoretically) large area we were drawing our potential members; it might have more truthfully been called the Esperanto Society of Greater Boston. I lived in Cambridge, and the furthest I ever remember going for a meeting was Concord, some 15 miles away.

The same was true, about the same time, when I was one of the founders of the Gaylaxian Science Fiction Society.[2] As the first, we didn’t attach any geographic designation to our name (subsequent groups did, usually on the form [Place] Gaylaxians), but we really were a group for LGBT (and LGBT-friendly) science fiction fans in the greater Boston area. A meeting has to be pretty compelling to spend an hour getting there.

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Those Bloodthirsty Esperantists!

Bloodthirsty?

At least such was the contention of Ellis O. Jones, writing in the January 1908 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine of January 1908.[1] Really, Mr. Jones? Are Esperantists “surely a bloodthirsty lot”? It sounds unjust.

Mr. Jones seems to have been predominantly a writer of sketches for the stage; most of the contributions to which his name is attached are one-act plays, such as Husband Wanted or Faint Heart, although those are both 1929, and it’s twenty-one years earlier that he’s writing about Esperanto (assuming it’s the same Ellis O. Jones, which seems likely). A little web research turns up more about him.

He had somewhat of a varied career, doing everything from working at Life magazine, to activities in the Socialist movement. Not long after that, he contributed a few “Little Essays” to the New York Times, but came back to their attention more than a decade after writing for Lippincott’s as the Chairman (or, as in the subhead, “chairamn”) of the People’s Day Committee, which gathered in Central Park on December 13, 1918 to mourn the death of Liberty. At the time that he wrote for Lippincott’s, he was thirty-four years old. According to Metapedia, where I stumbled on an article, but with which I am not familiar, in 1908, Mr. Jones was the Socialist candidate for Congress from Ohio.

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Max Nordau and the Breakdown of Esperanto

Max Nordau
(about 1895)
No fan of Esperanto

Detractors of Esperanto have claimed almost from the beginning that were the language adopted across the world, it would splinter into countless mutually unintelligible dialects, the way that English really hasn’t. Yes, the vulgar[1] Latin of the Roman Empire did split into a variety of languages, but there were some special circumstances and a whole lot of time applied there.

Time alone probably isn’t enough. Some years ago, when I was getting my bachelors degree, one class had a single lecture (out of a survey course) on glottochronology, the idea that not only languages change over time, but there’s a a specific speed for such changes. To quote Wikipedia, “any replacements happen in a way analogical to that in radioactive decay in constant percentages per time elapsed.” Then I went to my advanced Old English seminar, where we had a jolly laugh over the idea. (Wikipedia does describe glottochronology as “controversial,” notes attempts to disprove its mathematics, and says that it “has been rejected by many linguists.”)

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Esperanto Lives! A digression into video blogging #EsperantoLives

I am in no way a video blogger. This blog has been quiet lately, because I've been very, very busy lately, and I haven't had the chance to put together a blog post. But, for Zamenhof Day, I decided to get in on the #EsperantoLives project and create a snippet of video.

It took me several tries to do it, and perhaps I should have decided that I wasn't going to do it in one three-minute take. There was the time the cat walked in the room and meowed loudly just as I was finishing up. There was the flubbed line. There was the "perfect" take, except I forgot to pitch Duolingo (I don't have to pitch Duolingo, but it's a good place to learn Esperanto.

If I had to do it again (and I suppose I could), I would be pointing out that the books at right shoulder include some books in or about Esperanto.

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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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An Esperanto Marriage, But Not the First

S-ino kaj S-ro Parrish

Despite the belief expressed by the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, the September 12, 1912 marriage of Donald Evans Parrish of Los Angeles, California to Paula Louise Elisabeth Alexandra Christiana Grawe (or Paula Graves, as the articles had it) was not the first marriage of two Esperanto speakers. Even earlier accounts make it clear that other congress participants realized that—through Esperanto—they had found their soul mates. In 1908, the Esperantists Herman Sexauer and Frida Niedermuller married (in San Francisco). He was a German, she was an American.

Still, it is certainly an early such marriage, and marriages between Esperantists whose only common language is Esperanto are fairly rare, given the general rarity of Esperanto speakers in the world population (there are certainly Esperantist couples in which both individuals share a native tongue and speak Esperanto).

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Esperanto — The Most Neutral Thing

Tobias Sigel
Not a funny man.
Except the hair

An Esperantist walked into a bar… Okay, that’s a setup for a joke, but I’m not certain what the punchline should be. Maybe it’s better that way.

Most of the article that appeared in the October 13, 1914 Washington Post was concerned with the then-current antipathy the Canadians had for the Germans. Canada had been in the war since August 4, 1914 and the Canadians were ready to cast off all things German, just as Americans did after their entry in the war.

Groucho Marx, in his 1972 album An Evening with Groucho attributed anti-Germany sentiments in Canada to the Lusitania, noting, “I was supposed to sing a song, a German song, and I was afraid they were going to kill me if I did, that audience.” Groucho’s fears might have been appropriate even before the sinking of the Lusitania, which (after all) wasn’t a Canadian ship (it was British), wasn’t sailing from or to Canada (New York to Liverpool), and Canada was already at war with Germany when the Lusitania was torpedoed (May 7, 1915). It is entirely possible that Groucho decided it would be prudent not to sing “Oh, How That Woman Could Cook” (and here’s a 1915 rendition, so it stayed popular for a while).

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An Esperantist President in Washington

Big man in the Esperanto movement

Despite Edwin C. Reed’s fairly central role in the U.S. Esperanto movement of the early twentieth century, there is no entry for him in the Esperanto-language Wikipedia, even though there is one for his wife, Ivy Kellerman-Reed. In a way, they seem to be Esperanto’s first power couple, she being a writer, editor, translator, and teacher, and he being guy who organized things. Organizing things can be less enduring; even if you put your stamp on an organization, organizations can quickly go from vibrant to nonexistent. While Dr. Kellerman-Reed’s books can still be found on bookshelves, her husband’s organizations are all now defunct.

Reed (and throughout, I’m going to distinguish them by referring to him as Reed and her as Kellerman-Reed) was the first secretary of the Esperanto Association of North America, but as the role of president seemed to be largely ceremonial, the actual administrative duties fell to the secretary. This probably hampered the organization’s ability to capitalize on its early growth, since it the actual presidents weren’t the slightest bit interested in being strong leaders, and the first two (while Reed was secretary) weren’t even Esperanto speakers. From about 1909 through 1913, Edwin C. Reed was pretty much the central figure in the U.S. Esperanto movement.

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Menus in Esperanto!

All we are saying
Is give Esperanto a chance!

Okay, that’s a bit of a tease, since the article in the Chicago Daily Tribune of September 24, 1910 didn’t uncover menus in Esperanto, instead it was a suggestion that restaurants adopt Esperanto for menus, instead of writing them in French. While it makes perfect sense for a menu of a Paris restaurant to be in French, it doesn’t make that sense in New York, even if the food offered dead-on traditional French food. There is an element of shtick to this.

Several years ago, I was in a not terribly restaurant in Washington, D.C., and on the menu were the words, “Ask about the *soup de jour.” Soup sounded like a good idea, so I saked.

“What’s the soup de jour?”

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An Early Chicago Esperanto Society?

William E. Curtis
What did he know about
Esperanto?

The column, “Matters of Interest to Women and About the Household” that appeared under the name Marion Harland was edited by the American writer Mary Virginia Terhune (she wrote a number of books under the name, including some novels and an autobiography). The column in the (Richmond, Virginia) Times of September 23, 1902, includes four photos of women’s hair styles (the fashion seems to be “adorned with artificial leaves and flowers”), a couple of recipes (the first done by weight, the second by volume measures), and in between, questions and answers.

I should note that though these were noted to be “For the Housewife,” they did not deal with domestic matters, for the most part. The first is on croquet rules, the second a series of disconnection questions (“Was any Pope of Rome a Mason?” “What is the square area of New York and of Philadelphia?”), and the third is how to contact the Ethical Culture Society. Not all questions get answered, and the final question (of nine) is one.

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Doctors Take Early Look at Esperanto

And a good attempt, at that

In Esperanto’s early period, there was much interest in the language in scientific circles, particularly medicine. This makes sense, since science is more firmly international than many of the other subjects of study. Poetry may be, as Robert Frost famously put it, “the stuff that gets lost in translation,” a carbon atom is a carbon atom, whether you’re in Germany, France, the United States, or Brazil (and everywhere else too—far off planets have carbon, but they don’t have the works of Shakespeare).

It was early lamented that at international scientific (and medical) conferences, people just couldn’t understand each other. You were just guaranteed that someone wouldn’t be able to to comprehend the language of at part of the sessions. (This actually still persists. I know of a conference that happened in Germany only a few years ago, at which some of the talks were in German, which not everyone there spoke. The main language of the conference was English, but talks could be given in German.) One of the early reviews of the first Esperanto Congress noted that it was an amazing thing that someone put together an international congress where everybody understood everything.

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