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 Virginia Esperantist on Ido

Defended the honor of
Esperanto

The Esperanto Association of North America started at something of an inopportune time. Less than a year before the EANA was launched, the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Language had thrown their weight behind Esperanto-with-modifications (that is, Ido).[1] One of the first things the EANA had to deal with was a somewhat fractured movement in which some of the early luminaries were jumping ship.[2]

In Virginia, the honor of the Esperanto movement was defended by George H. Appleton of Lynchburg, Virginia, who wrote to the Times Dispatch defending Esperanto as it was set down by Zamenhof, and putting some of the news about the fracturing of the movement into context, basically arguing that the whole Ido movement was getting more intention than its actual numbers warranted.

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Those Lying Esperantists

Dire predictions for Esperanto!

One of the recurrent features in the Ido schism were claims—from the Ido side—that the Esperanto movement was making false claims. In all fairness, yes, there were statements from Esperantists rebutting statements made by supporters of Ido, what was absent on the Esperantist side were out-and-out attacks against Ido. I have seen claims by Idists that these existed; I just haven’t found any yet (or they were mischaracterizing the responses and no such exist).

Given this, I don’t want to demonize current Ido speakers; I’m merely pointing out that their predecessors at the beginning of the Ido movement seem to have been a pugnacious crowd. The ire of two Ido proponents was directed at a March 10, 1909 letter to the editor in the Chicago Daily Tribune. The Tribune ran two letters in response on March 12, 1909, one from a pseudonymous writer who used the name “Progress” (undoubtably in homage to the Ido magazine Progreso), and the other by O. H. Mayer, of Chicago, who was quite active in the Ido movement, but has proved somewhat elusive on biographical details. There were about 13,000 people in Chicago with that last name in 1910, and the street where he lived is spread out over about twenty enumeration districts in the 1910 Census, which is about 400 pages.

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After Esperanto and Ido…Esperanto?

Auguste Forel
Ant expert and temperance
advocate

The Butte Daily Bulletin got that one little detail wrong when they reported on March 9, 1920 that a solution had been found to the Ido schism. At this point, Ido had been introduced just over twelve years before, and there was probably no chance for reconciliation of the two movements.

The Daily Bulletin names one of the people involved in this, but it turns out that he wasn’t the main person. The article makes it clear that Auguste Forel is the “honorary president” of the new organization. He wasn’t running things, but they figured that his name would look really good on the letterhead. He was, however, one of those figures with something of a mixed legacy. On the one hand, he argued for world peace, female suffrage, disarmament, on the other hand, he argued for the sterilizing or euthanizing those with mental handicaps[1] or of certain races.[2] He was also a leader in the temperance movement and an important member of the International Good Templars. His reputation is clearly sufficiently redeemed (at least for the Swiss) that he appears on the Swiss 100-franc note.

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Esperanto as Religion

Keep it simple?

William J. Phoebus was an early advocate of Ido, and in support of that language, he sent several letters to the New York Sun (as well as other newspapers). During early 1909, there appeared in the Sun sort of a correspondence between Phoebus and an an advocate for Esperanto, William Parker Bonbright. I will have to cover his side of the conversation at some point, but for now, realize that the two were holding a back-and-forth in the pages of the Sun. At this point, I don’t think I’ve uncovered the extent of their correspondence.

Briefly, Phoebus was a forty-nine-year-old man living in Brooklyn. He had been active in the Esperanto movement only a few months earlier, but when he switched over to Ido, he did so with a vengeance. With the zealotry of a convert, he proceeded to attack the Esperanto movement. In 1909, Phoebus is describing the Esperantists as holding a religion, a (erroneous) view that still crops up, as I’ve seen it recently.

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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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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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Mr. Baker’s Brochure and An Esperantist Responds

Why would Arthur Baker ask
for stamps and then just
mail them back?

On December 5, 1910, the Los Angeles Herald ran a letter from O. H. Mayer, a prominent Idoist, promoting a brochure about Ido, must as Arthur Baker had been promoting a brochure on Esperanto. This brought two responses from readers of the Herald, one telling us what happened when he wrote to Arthur Baker for the free Esperanto brochure, and the other attempting to rebut the claims made by O. H. Mayer.

Baker was in Esperanto for the cash, and seemed resentful of competition from other Esperantist concerns.[1] For him, the whole point of the brochure Elements of Esperanto was to get people to buy his book, The American Esperanto Book, subscribe to his magazine, Amerika Esperantisto, or both. The proffered free brochure (available for stamps for reply) was a sixteen-pages long, and largely drawn from Zamenhof’s Unua Libro. Today it can be read without having to send stamps to anyone, since Google Books has made a copy of Elements of Esperanto readily available. Elements of Esperanto concludes with an advertisement for The American Esperanto Book.

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An Idist Counteroffers

Free offer:
What's wrong with Esperanto?
Yeah, that sounds tempting.

Arthur Baker made a regular practice of offering a free introductory brochure in Esperanto in order to induce people to learn Esperanto. Since he published books and a magazine in Esperanto, he was just trying to increase his customer base. Eventually, Baker decided to drop any attempts to become the major publisher of Esperanto items in the United States, and in 1911 left the editorship of Amerika Esperantisto, selling it to the Esperanto Association for North America. While he was in it, according to Esperanto Wikipedia, he distributed approximately 100,000 copies of the brochure Elements of Esperanto.[1]

He distributed these by writing to papers across the country, asking them to include the notice that people could write him for a free copy of the brochure. A fellow Chicagoan, O. H. Mayer, decided to offer the same for those who might be interested in Ido. He was published in the December 5, 1910 Los Angeles Herald. There’s no way of knowing how much response Mr. (my assumption) Mayer got with his offer. (The only O. H. Mayer I can find in Chicago in 1910 was an eleven-year old, Otto Mayer. Our O. H. Mayer was a representative for Chicago of the “Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language” and clearly active in promoting Ido from 1909 through 1912 (at least), which seems an unlikely activity for a small child.

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The Place where Ido Began

This gives a hint

It’s pretty commonly known that the committee that proposed Ido as “the” international language met in Paris in October 1907.[1] The committee, as Esperantists note, was pretty much self-selected, and no one had made any sort of promise to abide by their decisions. If the major academic journals of the world and the diplomatic corps had said that within a year of the decision, they would switch over to whatever language the committee chose, we’d all know that language right now.[2]

None of the histories of the incident that I’ve seen (both from the Idoist and Esperantist sides) seem to mention just where the conference happened, other than Paris, and Paris is a big place.[3] But an article that appeared in the Daily Arizona Silver Belt on November 8, 1907 may give a hint. At the same time, the article makes a claim that probably wasn’t true. And other portions of it are somewhat mistaken.

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Ido and the Socialists

A must-read!

After yesterday’s post about the early Socialist and promoter of Esperanto, I don’t want to leave you with the idea that all Socialists were Esperantists.[1] Some left-wing people favored Ido instead. The Ido Schism cut across political lines. Some ardent Idists were politically conservative.[2]

Though the Ido Schism is now forgotten by everyone except Esperantists and Idists, when it happened, it was in the news. Newspapers actually ran articles about the conflicts between the two. In the early twentieth century, many simply assumed that Esperanto would keep growing as it had. Sure, there were naysayers, but even in 1910 when the Esperanto movement was wondering about their failure to make a stronger showing in the United States after five years, scientists and diplomats were seeing a universal auxiliary language as both necessary and inevitable.

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Professors Battle over Esperanto and Ido

Me? Create Ido? Be serious!

In 1910, George Macloskie, a professor of biology, made some remarks about Ido to the Washington Herald. More than a month later, Louis Couturat, a professor of mathematics and one of the leading proponents of Ido, responded.

We have the sequel. The earlier part is lost, alas. Louis Couturat wrote a letter to the Washington Herald, which they published on September 26, 1910. In it, he refers to an article that appeared in the August 15th edition. Unfortunately, the scanned copy at the Chronicling America web site is missing three pages. Undoubtably, the interview to which Couturat and Macloskie refer was on one of those pages. (The interview has been found! See the bottom of the post for more details.) The remaining pages have plenty about Esperanto; at the time, the sixth Universala Kongreso was taking place in Washington, D.C. and the D.C. papers gave it a lot of coverage. It would be nice to know what Macloskie said about Ido (beyond attributing its creation to Couturat), but that’s not likely to happen.

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The Unhappy Birth of Ido

If this writer only knew
how many there were.

Ido was introduced in late 1907, but it seems it wasn’t until August 1908 that it came to the attention of the New-York Tribune, which wrote about the new language on August 26, 1908. The general tone of the article seems to be against the whole idea of a international language. I know from my reading that there were still many contemporaneous voices calling for a international language, though the skeptics had been there from the beginning.

Near the end of the article, there’s a suggestion that Ido will itself have a schism, bringing yet another proposed international language to the fore. Point of fact, that actually happened. I’ve previously noted that the language Adjuvilo[1] was created as a further reform of Ido, and there were others. I find myself wondering about the “family trees” of various planned languages, since I know that Volapük also spawned a number of reform projects.

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Ido and Esperanto Congress

Not an Ido speaker to be found.

On August 14, 1910, the Washington Herald had several articles on Esperanto, and perhaps to balance all that off, also included one on Ido. Their placement of the article couldn’t have been worse. It occupies almost the entire remainder of the three columns beneath a set photos of prominent members of Esperanto congress, Gabriel Chavet, Dr. H. W. Yemors, Edwin C. Reed, Dr. Ivy Kellerman Reed, and Captain Josefo Perogordo. Not an Idoist in the bunch.

Oddly enough, though the article makes the claim that Ido is makes improvements to Esperanto, the article starts by talking about what a success Esperanto was at fostering communication between people of differing native languages. But despite the “wonderful progress” of Esperanto, the writer of the article, Lindsay S.Perkins, decided to devote a chunk of the article to Ido.

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Trouble in Esperanto-Land

Get your tickets early!

1910 seemed to have both good and bad for the Esperanto movement. On the one hand, preparations were being made for the 1910 Universala Kongreso, the first outside of Europe. On June 21, 1910, the Washington Times reported that noted Brazilian musician would be giving a concert in D.C. as part of the Esperanto congress.

That was the good news.

Washington lovers of music are looking forward to a visit to the Capital in August of C. Quiririo de Oliveira, of the National Institute of Music, Rio de Janeiro. Senor Oliveira, accompanied by Joas Baptista Mello Souza, an officer in the Brazilian ministry of interior, will come to Washington for the Esperanto congress, and probably remain in the city for a week. 

At the Esperanto headquarters today it was announced that a special concert would be given during Oliveira’s stay and that the famous master of music had consented to take part in it. Both Oliveira and Souza are said to be ardent Esperantists.

Señor Oliveira might have been famous in his day, but I haven’t been able to find anything else about him.

Now the bad news.

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