Periodical: The Philistine

Overview

Elbert Hubbard launched The Philistine in 1895 as a small, combative monthly subtitled "A Periodical of Protest". Printed in East Aurora, New York, it announced itself as an antidote to the swollen rhetoric and institutional pretensions of the Gilded Age. Hubbard, writing as Fra Elbertus, mixed moral exhortation with satire, business counsel with literary talk, and Arts and Crafts ideals with a distinctly American vernacular. The first year established the magazine’s central posture: a running argument for individuality, competence, and craftsmanship, and against sham, cant, and secondhand thinking in art, religion, education, and commerce.

Form and Style

The Philistine’s identity was as tactile as it was rhetorical. Small in trim size and rough in finish, it echoed the hand-press aesthetic that Hubbard admired in William Morris while avoiding museum-like preciousness. Pages carried hand-set type, ornamental initials, and occasional vignettes; the overall effect was crafted, portable, and unmistakable on a newsstand. Inside, long essays shared space with squibs, aphorisms, mock editorials, parables, and open letters. Sentences were short, paragraphs brisk, the tone alternately needling and neighborly. Hubbard printed reader brickbats alongside his rejoinders, folded in wry self-advertising for Roycroft books and wares, and cultivated a conversational intimacy that made the paper feel like a letter passed hand to hand.

Themes and Targets

Hubbard’s first-year program celebrated the dignity of work, the moral obligation to make useful things beautifully, and the right of the individual to form independent judgments. He praised plain dealing and practical efficiency, arguing that business done well is a social art and a form of service. He distrusted academic pedantry, salon fashions in literature, corporate excess, and sectarian narrowness. The magazine favored Emersonian self-reliance and Whitmanesque breadth, yet kept one boot in the shop: read widely, yes, but master your tools; think freshly, but deliver on time. The jabs were lively, at critics who write for critics, at preachers who mistake dogma for charity, at editors who confuse platform with insight, but the current under the wit was constructive. The Philistine urged readers to educate themselves, keep accounts, keep promises, and keep making.

1895: Voice, Subjects, and Setting

Across its inaugural numbers, The Philistine introduced Roycroft as both workshop and idea: a place where bookmaking, leatherwork, and metalwork could model integrity in materials and method. Hubbard’s essays drew lessons from shop floors and sales calls as readily as from libraries, presenting the bench as a school and the ledger as a moral text. He offered quick appreciations of Emerson, Lincoln, and William Morris, casting them as guides for a nation teetering between mass production and meaningful production. Parables about honest trade, vignettes of small-town life, and sly send-ups of literary solemnity kept the blend lively. The design and editorial habit, plain speech wrapped in handmade pages, embodied the argument as much as any maxim on the inside.

Audience and Reception

The Philistine found readers among clerks and teachers, shop foremen and small-town librarians, reformers and skeptics. Some called it vulgar for its colloquial snap and boosterish commerce; others called it bracing for the same reasons. Even detractors conceded its energy. Because Hubbard printed dissent, the magazine became a forum as well as a pulpit, its back-and-forth giving the project oxygen and a touch of vaudeville.

Legacy

What began in 1895 as a pocketable protest quickly became the voice of the Roycroft community and an incubator for essays that would spread far beyond East Aurora. The combination set that first year, handmade look, democratic tone, entrepreneurial candor, and irreverent moralism, defined The Philistine for its run, and offered an American version of Arts and Crafts idealism that could argue, joke, and sell, all in the same breath.