Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 11 Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen — Inside the Classic

Hubbard's Moral Vocabulary

Throughout the excerpts, Hubbard deploys a consistent set of ethical terms. He praises 'production' and 'service,' while condemning 'gambling' and 'speculation'—even when his subjects engage in the latter. Of Astor, he writes that buying land and holding it 'is not production, either,' yet he presents the practice as 'legitimate and right' for its time. This tension reveals Hubbard's method: he measures each businessman against an ideal of honest, productive labor, but he also historicizes their actions, noting that 'morality is a matter of longitude and time.' His language is blunt and evaluative: Owen 'had no respect' for caveat emptor; Astor 'knew enough of biology to know that religions are not revealed.' The diction is plain but forceful, relying on short declarative sentences and repeated key words like 'profit,' 'value,' and 'belief.'

The Rhetoric of Contrast

Hubbard structures his profiles around sharp oppositions. Owen is a 'democratic optimist' who 'believed in the people,' set against a world that practices caveat emptor. Astor is a member of the Dutch Reformed Church who 'lived out his days with a beautiful and perfect disbelief in revealed religion.' Peter Cooper is listed as 'laborer, clerk, mechanic, inventor, manufacturer, financier, teacher, philanthropist and philosopher'—a cumulative series that implies a progressive moral ascent. These contrasts are not accidental; they are the engine of Hubbard's argument. He uses them to suggest that great businessmen are complex, often contradictory figures, and that their true significance lies not in wealth alone but in the ideas they embody or betray.

Anecdote as Evidence

Hubbard rarely relies on statistics or balance sheets. Instead, he builds character through anecdote and reported speech. He quotes Owen's challenge to a 'right-reverend prelate' and repeats Astor's confession to Washington Irving that 'it was only business responsibility that prevented his being a novelist.' These vignettes serve as proof of personality. Hubbard also uses small, telling details: Astor 'brought over a leader from Germany' for his orchestra; Owen 'scorned' the maxim caveat emptor. The effect is to make each subject vivid and memorable, but the reader should note that Hubbard selects these anecdotes to support his own moral framework. The excerpts do not provide full biographies; they offer curated glimpses designed to illustrate Hubbard's themes of production, honesty, and the proper use of wealth.

The Author as Character

Hubbard's own voice is as prominent as his subjects'. He uses first-person plural ('we say, Back to Robert Owen!') and direct addresses to the reader. His judgments are unapologetic: 'Happy indeed is the man who escapes the critics by leaving his literary masterpiece in the ink.' He frames the entire volume as a moral lesson, opening the Owen chapter with a call to 'go on to Robert Owen' rather than back. This self-assured tone gives the book a polemical energy, but it also means that the profiles are filtered through Hubbard's idiosyncratic worldview. Readers interested in the businessmen themselves will need to weigh Hubbard's assertions against other sources. The value of this volume lies as much in its author's perspective as in the lives it recounts.

Hubbard's Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen rewards readers who enjoy strong authorial personality and moral argument. The sketches are not neutral biographies but persuasive essays, each built around a central paradox or lesson. To read them is to encounter both the subjects and their interpreter. Approach the text with attention to Hubbard's rhetorical strategies—his contrasts, his anecdotes, his evaluative diction—and the portraits will reveal as much about early twentieth-century American attitudes toward wealth and work as about the men themselves.

I remember sitting with my grandfather’s ledger books, the ink faded like Hubbard’s portraits of Astor’s stubbornness. He always said wealth was just stored labor, a thought that returned while reading Fundamentals of Prosperity: What They Are and Whence They Come — A Reader’s Guide. Both books made me pause over the quiet arithmetic of a life, not the sums, but the choosing.