The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest

The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest. Vol. 21. ed. Elbert Hubbard (June--Nov. 1905). The Society of Philistines, Aurora, New York. Hand-bound Hardcover 16-mo., 193 pp.

  

The Philistine was an American journal published by the Society of Philistines, a collective working in the Aestheticist-Socialist tradition most famously exemplified in Britain by Oscar Wilde and William Morris. In fact, here is a contemporary description from an earlier issue of The Philistine of its editor, the satirist, activist and bookmaker Elbert Hubbard, calling him the "American William Morris." Inspired by the agrarian socialism of Morris and the British Arts & Crafts movement, Hubbard founded the utopian community at Roycroft in New York, which thrived for twenty years until Hubbard was killed in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, which precipitated US entry into World War I. Toward the end of his life however, Hubbard drifted toward the right in economic matters, becoming an advocate for Free Trade.

Beautifully designed and hand-printed on letterpress, each copy was wrapped in rough butcher-paper. Hubbard used the journal to attack all aspects of establishment culture, soaked in tongue-in-cheek humour rife with gags and neologisms. (Here is an entry on Hubbard and the Philistine in the Encyclopedia of American Humorists.) In doing so, he made a great many enemies among mainstream American  intellectuals, as shown in this hateful obituary by an enemy. His thought and work is preserved and continued today by a group of bibliophiles called The Roycrofters.