Elbert Hubbard, Transcendentalism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in America

Abstract

This article examines the impact of Transcendentalism on the Arts and Crafts movement in America by exploring the manner in which Elbert Hubbard used this philosophy to help define his Roycroft community. Although scholars have focused on the movement's obvious indebtedness to William Morris, John Ruskin and other British sources, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman formed an equally important lens through which Americans viewed the Arts and Crafts movement. Not only did Americans look to these authors to help navigate the anxieties that accompanied the experience of modernity but many of the movement's figures like Hubbard, Gustav Stickley and Edward Pearson Pressey explicitly used Transcendentalism to shape their communities. In addition, many important authors and critics that came to define the movement—like Oscar Lovell Triggs, Horace Traubel and Sadakichi Hartmann—shared a personal connection with Transcendentalist thought.