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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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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Chess, Esperanto, and Evolution

Chess and Esperanto master

I am, at best, an indifferent chess player. Actually, I’m a pretty lousy chess player. There are small children out there who can doubtless beat me as chess, and I’m not talking chess prodigies. A newspaper chess column is not actually going to be my choice of reading material.[1] The word is, however, one of the words that Zamenhof included in his initial list of words, while a word for “poker” (in the sense of the card game) didn’t make the list.

So, if someone wanted to play chess in Esperanto, the vocabulary was there from the beginning, and an article in the Omaha Daily Bee of January 18, 1914 shows that there were some early takers. One of these chess players was Martin Sitera, of Omaha, Nebraska.

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Monoglott — A Language of One?

"More" but not "much"

I have previously written about some early Nebraska Esperanto speakers, as I stumbled on articles about a mother and daughter who were both Esperantists, and there was an active community of Esperanto speakers in Nebraska in the early twentieth century. But that doesn’t mean that everybody in Nebraska was a fan of Esperanto.

D. C. John seems to have written quite a few letters to the editor of the Omaha Daily Bee in the mid 1910s. He wrote on a number of subjects, but in a pair of letters published on August 17 and 27, 1915, proposed a competitor to Esperanto. I’m not exactly sure about the identity of D. C. John. One letter does refer to D. C. John as a male, and describes him as “the learned doctor,” so the letter writer might have known more than we do. Further, D. C. John’s wife later became the head of the Douglas County Woman’s Christian Temperance Union chapter.[1] D. C. John seems to have stopped writing letters to the editor about the same time that his wife became busier with the WCTU. D. C. John seems to have been involved in the Anti-Saloon League. Most of the articles I’ve found on the Johns are about the temperance movement.

D. C. John’s interest in this matter seems to have been sparked by an August 2, 1915 letter by Charles P. Lang promoting Esperanto. Mr. Lang had done this before. On April 22, 1915, he cited the war bulletins that were being in Esperanto. Mr. Lang’s August 2nd letter brought forth an amplification from D. C. Corios, a native of Yucatan, living in Omaha on the 6th. And then, finally, D. C. John weighed in on August 11, 1915.

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Another Early Nebraska Esperantist

Alice Howard

In my previous post, I wrote about Abigail Russell, an early Esperanto speaker, living in Nebraska. As I noted, her daughter was also an Esperanto speaker, and apparently as active as her mother in Esperanto and other areas. Alice Howard, née Alice Russell, was very active in Omaha society in the early twentieth century. The Nebraska papers wrote about her and her family ninety-one times, between 1887 and 1915. Her husband was a druggist. The lived in Dundee, Nebraska.

Many of the pieces are short items dealing with the Howard’s social life, such as Alice going to visit her parents or her parents coming to visit her. When they spent the summer of 1901 with relatives in Ord, did Alice and her mother, Abigail, teach the little Howards any Esperanto? Or had Alice done that herself already?

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An Early Nebraska Esperantist

Abigal Russell

It’s not clear when Abigail Russell learned Esperanto. On August 6, 1911 the Omaha Daily Bee said that she had learned Esperanto “even before text books and readers in the language arrived in this country,” which if accurate would mean she had she had learned Esperanto within a year of so of its inception, as Henry Phillips, Jr. had translated and adapted Zamenhof’s pamphlet in 1889, under the name An Attempt at an International Language.[1] The implication seems to be that she learned the language not long after it was introduced.

Mrs. Russell is not listed in The North American Review's first list of American esperantists in July 1907 (nor are any other Nebraska esperantists). By May, 1908, she is listed as the head of the First Nebraska Esperanto Club, as noted in Amerika Esperantisto. (She is not the first Nebraskan to be listed in Amerika Esperantisto. That honor goes to John Springer, of Red Cloud, who had himself listed in the “Fako de Korespondado”[2] section in January 1908.) In the July 1908 issue, she actually has a short piece, “La Ĉielo Lin Benu!”[3]

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