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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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 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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Esperanto Goes to War, Almost

Make Esperanto, Not War

One of the great promises of Esperanto is that it is significantly easier to learn than any national language (and, for that matter, many constructed languages). The only problem is that, easy or hard, a language doesn’t have much utility if you’ve no one to speak it to. (Personally, I expend some effort just so I can have a change to speak Esperanto with people.) The problem with this (as my own experience has demonstrated) is that you need someone else to have learned it, or you’re just babbling.

French, on the other hand, is fairly difficult language. There are tougher, but given the disconnect between pronunciation and spelling in French, and a good number of verbs which though not irregular, might be termed “idiosyncratic,” teaching the American troops French probably wasn’t high on the list of things to do in 1917. Writing to the the New-York Tribune, in a letter they published on August 31, 1917, James McKirdy of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had another idea. Why not Esperanto?

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The Esperantist Agricultural Expert

Li revas pri bienoj kaj Esperanto.

The Washington D. C. school board was probably well rehearsed on reasons why not to introduce Esperanto into the curriculum by 1914 when Richard Bartholdt, Representative from Louisiana, suggested that Congressional intervention might be the way to go. Their first encounter with the idea seems to be when Sara Crafts, a noted social reformer (and early Esperantis), attempted this in 1908. Even the students got involved with petitioning the school board to teach Esperanto in 1913.

With the suggestion raised in 1908, 1913, and 1914, the big missing number is 1910. You would think that with the Universala Kongreso in Washington D. C. in 1910 that local Esperantists would have been emboldened to bring up the idea once again. And you would think right. In August 1910 (presumably as part of the preparations for the 1910/11 school year), the Washington D.C. school board made their second evaluation of Esperanto in the public schools.

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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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A Canadian President for Esperanto Group

Bardorf

On July 15, 1921 the Esperanto Association of North America elected a new president. This is not the sort of thing that makes the news any more, but in 1921 it was reported in at least two newspapers, both from the District of Columbia, the Washington Post and the Evening Star. By 1921, the EANA was long out of Washington D.C. (they relocated to West Newton, Massachusetts in 1913), so it wasn’t even local news.

It was something of a first for the organization. The new president, Charles F. Bardorf was the first president of EANA who was not an American citizen. He was citizen of Canada. He was also first European immigrant to head the organization. And, he was the first chemist to lead the group. (Not sure how many, if any, seconds there were of any of these.) Charles F. Bardorf was the seventh president of the Esperanto Association of North America. The group was the Esperanto Association of North America in more than just name: from the beginning it included Canadian members and clubs, although the American side dominated it. There was also a Canadian Esperanto Association. Oddly enough some of the Canadian Esperanto groups were affiliated with the British Esperanto Association.

It hit the papers the following day, although the Post still referred to the events as happening “today.” In the Evening Star, it’s a very brief article, tucked in at the bottom of a page.

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An Esperanto Opera in Chicago

Open wide and say
"Saluton!"

Well they both couldn’t be the fifth United States Esperanto congress, and really this is a question of the Chicago Daily Tribune making a small but important error in their article of July 13, 1914. The fifth United States Esperanto congress had been held in Boston in July 1912. I am slowly building a list of these, as I hit references to specific conferences.

Let’s put this in context: on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated, throwing Europe into crisis, but the war hadn’t started yet. The tenth Universala Kongreso was still being planned for Paris. And the 1914 congress of the Esperanto Association of North America was planned for Chicago. For its prospective attendees, the troubles of Europe were somewhat irrelevant. Finally, the Esperanto Association of North America had held a conference every year since 1908 (the conference at which it was founded). 1914 was the seventh.

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An Esperanto Congress in Boston

Iru ni Bostonen!

I’ve said this before (and doubtless will say it again) that today the annual North American Esperanto Congress probably doesn’t even get media coverage in the town where it’s held. Certainly a check of Google News around the time of the meeting turns up nothing. I don’t know if the blame rests solely on the media, though I know I’ve been involved in large conventions and the local made no reference to the swarms of conventioneers. This was not the case when the Esperantists of North America met on July 9, 1912. There was press coverage.

I’ve found articles from the New York Evening World and the Washington, D.C. Evening Star, so this press coverage actually extended outside of the convention city, since the 1912 convention was in Boston. There was probably coverage in the Boston papers, but unfortunately, I don’t have access to any of them. The two articles are nearly identical to each other, with the only difference within the actual article being something that can be attributed to house style. That said, the ultimate source was probably a press release either from the Esperanto Association of North America or the New England Esperanto Association. At the time of the meeting, EANA was headquartered in the Boston suburb of West Newton, so there was probably some overlap between the two organizations.

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Early Results on Students’ Petition for Esperanto

We want Esperanto now!

On June 8, 1913, two of the Washington D.C. newspapers, the Washington Herald and the Evening Star reported on plans by D.C. students to create a petition to have Esperanto taught in the public schools. This was neither the first nor last attempt to get Esperanto into the D.C. schools, though none of them were successful. We can cheer for the students in their attempts at convincing the board of eduction to have Esperanto as a subject, while at the remove of more than a century, we know that their efforts were not successful.

But they tried. What it does show is just how energetic and large the Esperanto movement was in just one American city a century ago, and that they were doing the work to try to perpetuate the movement. They had big plans in era when the hope was still alive that Americans traveling abroad would speak Esperanto. The Esperanto Association of North America was still headquartered there, although they would soon move their offices to West Newton, Massachusetts (Amerika Esperantisto had already moved there). Sadly, in a way this move showed that the Esperanto movement was diminishing in the United States; the EANA presidents would be Esperantists, not those who held power in diplomatic circles. The organization would no longer be headquartered in a major city, but was in a suburb. The Esperanto movement in the United States was somewhat running out of steam. A petition drive for Esperanto in the public schools was a bold move that, if successful, might have been imitated.

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A Rosebush in Esperanto

La virino kaj
la rozujo

Mabel Wagnalls is one of those writers who are famous in their own era, but are later forgotten. Literary history is filled with these, and her story The Rose-Bush of a Thousand Years is a cute enough (though sentimental) tale of the miraculous redemption of a “fallen” woman, but Wagnalls didn’t create any significant body of work. A little searching for biographical details shows that she was pianist who occasionally wrote stories. It is probably because Ms. Wagnalls was a pianist that her stories attracted the attention of Edward S. Payson.

Payson, the president of the Esperanto Association of North American (not the “American Esperanto Society,” as named in the Richmond Times-Dispatch) was also a piano manufacturer. In his spare time, he raised horses and wrote in Esperanto, producing both original works and translations. He produced two original works (although one was not published until 1988, more than fifty years after his death), and ten translations, three of which are translations of Wagnall’s work.

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Esperanto at USC

As opposed to teaching
the old Esperanto?

In the early twentieth century, several American universities—formally or informally— started Esperanto classes. At Harvard, these were promoted by visiting celebrity professor Wilhelm Ostwald, but in many places, language professors became interested in the new language and after learning it started teaching it. Sadly (from the point of view of the Esperanto movement) the rising tide of Esperanto classes soon receded, and if I had to make a guess at the number of colleges and universities in the United States where you could study Esperanto in a classroom, I’d put the number at one.[1]

There is a good reason for schools to teach Esperanto: it’s a good starter language. One of the justifications for studying a foreign language is that it will help you understand language better. It will even help you in your native language. Esperanto, since it’s stripped of all the irregularities of natural language, helps you get to the concepts faster, since you’re not dealing with the intricacies of seven strong verb forms, or multiple ways to make a plural, or things like that. If you want to learn French, you might actually be better off with a year of Esperanto (assuming you know no other language but your own), and then jumping into French after that.

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Esperantist Couple Studied Law Together

That second period after "Mrs." isn't the only mistake

To anyone who has sweated their way to a law degree, it might be galling, that Edwin C. Reed and Ivy Kellerman-Reed took up law school as a recreation, obtaining their law degrees simultaneously on May 28, 1913. It would seem that after the end of the 1910 Universala Kongreso, and many months to come before their only child was conceived, they needed something to fill up the time. So they studied at the Washington College of Law.

In a way, the Reeds were the American Esperanto movement’s power couple. She was a noted linguist, and the author of one of the first American textbooks on Esperanto, A Complete Grammar of Esperanto (despite the title, it’s a textbook, not an analysis of the usage patterns of Esperanto), and an editor of Amerika Esperantisto. He was the secretary of the Esperanto Association for North America, but as the presidency was pretty much an ceremonial position during the first four years of the organization (during the presidencies of George Harvey and John Barrett), the secretary was responsible for the day-to-day operation of the EANA.

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The North American Review Abandons Esperanto

All the way to the wilds of Hoboken

The timing should have raised some alarm, but if it did, that alarm was not raised to any great volume. On May 27, 1908, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser of Honolulu, Hawaii, had noticed that Esperanto had come to an end in the North American Review. With the first United States Esperanto congress coming later that year, wasn’t this a cause for concern?

Let’s consider the timeline here.
1. March 16, 1905 The American Esperanto Association is founded in Boston.
2. November 1906 The North American Review starts promoting Esperanto.
3. May 1908 The North American Review stopped its support of Esperanto (according, at least to the Pacific Commercial Advertiser).
4. July 19, 1908 The first North American Congress begins.
3. July 22, 1908 George Harvey is asked to be president of the new Esperanto Association of North America.

Why did they do that? Admittedly, although volume 187 of the North American Review (January to June, 1908) has no reference to Esperanto, there are plenty of references to Esperanto in the succeeding volumes (188–191, and others), and in part, the set of lessons that the magazine published had come to an end. Imagine your position if you’re a subscriber who wasn’t particularly interested in the Esperanto lessons (say an ardent Volapükian). How are you going to feel if they started the whole thing up again? Or if you got to the end of the lessons (and had joined the Esperanto Society). Did you need them again?

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Mr. Barrett Believes

Believed in Esperanto.
Didn't speak it.
But he believed!

It seems clear to me why George Harvey took command of the Esperanto movement in 1908 (it also seems clear to that his leadership might not have been the best thing for the movement). To put it simply: Harvey had spent a year promoting Esperanto in his magazine, The North American Review. I suspect that his editor, Henry James Forman, had convinced him that wealth and power came with Esperanto. It’s not clear to me why John Barrett of the Bureau of American Republics agreed to become the second president of the Esperanto Association of North America.

Did John Barrett believe that there would be some benefit to him as a diplomat once everyone else switched to using Esperanto in an international context? It would have to be everyone else, since Barrett didn’t learn Esperanto, nor did he use his position as director of the Bureau of American Republics to push Esperanto in a diplomatic context. “We’re having an international conference. All delegates are asked to provide their statements in Esperanto.”

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Esperanto on the Air

Our man
on the air

In the early twentieth century, radio—transmitting voice over the air—seemed like something out of science fiction. It was the technology that was going to transform the world, bringing the world closer together. With that great advance, there needed to be a way that all those distant broadcasts could be understood. What a better match for radio than Esperanto?

And who better to promote this than Professor Arnold Christen (misnamed in this article as Arnold Christian). At the time the Washington Herald wrote about his plans for a series of lectures and addresses in Esperanto, he was still using his (former) affiliation with the University of Glascow, although he had been in the United States since 1909, without holding any formal university affiliation. At the time that he was proclaiming that Esperanto and radio were a perfect match, he had been a naturalized citizen since 1914.

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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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Omaha’s Esperanto Delegate

A booster for his own state

On April 22, 1911, the Omaha Daily Bee had an article about a wealthy traveler who volunteered to be the official representative of Los Angeles to Esperanto speakers. The Bee estimated that there were about two million Esperanto speakers throughout the world, which is the same number that is estimated today, a century later (and that’s on the high end).

On April 29, 1911, the Bee published a letter, signed “An Omaha Esperantist,” expanding on that article, and also talking about his own promotion of Omaha. Although the Bee does not identify the writer by name, a little sleuthing does, because he identifies himself as the delegate for Omaha. As often happens in these articles, the compositors for the Bee made some errors in the Esperanto, which I have quietly corrected.

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What Did Professor Oswald Do?

Felix L. Oswald
Probably not an Esperantist.
Certainly not a professor.

Given the way that the Sun casually tosses in a reference to “Professor Felix Oswald of Vienna,” you would think he was some sort of well-known personage. Perhaps one of the early winners of the Nobel Prize or a similar sort of luminary. Or, perhaps, given his inclusion in an article on Esperanto, one of the leaders of the early Esperanto movement. If that is the case, then the correct Professor Oswald has not come to light.

There was an American writer of Belgium origin named Felix Leopold Oswald, who did on occasion style himself “Professor Oswald” (and at other times, the more accurate “Dr. Felix Oswald,” or “Felix L. Oswald, M.D.”). In the 1900 Census, his profession is listed as “author.” This is probably our man, but it still leaves vague just what the Sun was crediting to Oswald on April 4, 1906.

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Three Esperantist Lawyers in the Bay Area

Speak Esperanto and hang
with the fashionable crowd

On Sunday, March 20, 1910, the San Francisco Call devoted an entire page to San Francisco Esperantists, with a particular focus on three men: Frank C. Drew, R. B. Tappan, and the late W. B. Treadwell (who gets the posthumous indignity that they get his name wrong). The article doesn’t mention the other connection among the three men, in that they were all three of them lawyers (which I’ve thrown up there in the title), although Mr. Drew is identified as an attorney and Mr. Tappan as a judge. We get no real information for Mr. Treadwell, other than that he is deceased. A little sleuthing showed that he was the third lawyer in the group.

The article is too long for me to type, but it can be read online. It’s an interesting glimpse of the early Esperanto movement in the United States. The Call was mostly interested in the far-flung correspondence in which two of the men were engaged. While R. B. Tappan is described as “an enthusiastic Esperantist,” the focus of the article is on the correspondence of Messieurs Drew and Treadwell.

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