Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language

Chapter 12

Reuben A. Tanquist, "A Study of the Social Psychology of the Diffusion of Espe- ranto with Special Reference to the English Speaking Peoples," M.A. thesis, University of Minnesota, 1927.

Reproduced in Esperanto (July-August 1928): 133-56.

See Pamela M. Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Poli- tics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 22-28; and Atina Grossmann, "German Communism and New Women: Dilemmas and Contradictions," in Women and Socialism: Socialism and Women, ed. Helmut Gruber and Pamela Graves (Provi- dence: Berghahn Books, 1998), 139.

The corresponding national data on age and education have been obtained from the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1928, 10-11 and 104; the Statistisches Jah- rbuch ftir das Deutsche Reich (1930), 14-15 and 408-9; Paul Bolton, Education: Histori- cal Statistics (Library House of Commons, 2007), 21; and the Statistisches Handbuch ftir die Republik Osterreich, 1926.

On the extension of Esperanto in primary and secondary schools, see the report of the General Secretariat of the League of Nations, Esperanto as an International Aux- iliary Language (Paris: PUF, 1922). The international demand of Esperanto teachers ex- plains the establishment in the late 1920s of the Cseh Institute (officially the Internacia Esperanto Instituto), with headquarters in Arnhem, whose main goal was to train and certify Esperanto teachers and produce teaching materials. On the institute and its founder, see Eric Borsboom, Vivo de Andreo Cseh (The Hague: Internacia Esperanto Instituto, 2003).

Kokeny et al, Enciklopedio, 54-56. It is important to notice that this was an or- ganization of the blind, but not for the blind. At the beginning of the twentieth cen- tury a new elite of blind people was contesting the patronizing representation of their interests by benefactors, welfare professionals and physicians. In this sense, Esperanto was also important for the empowerment of blind people, since it allowed them to side- step non-blind intermediaries and directly exchange information about living condi- tions and programs for the blind in different countries. On Javal's campaign for Esperanto among the blind, see his book On Becoming Blind, trans. Carroll Everett Edson (New York: Macmillan, 1905), 143-46; and his intervention at the Congres Interna- tional pour VAmelioration du sort des Aveugles tenu a Bruxelles, du 6 au 10 aout 1902 (Manage: Imprimiere de l'Ecole professionelle de l'Institut de la Sainte Famille, 1902), 79-80.

Data on membership in Forster, The Esperanto, 25. The Universala Esperanto Asocio (UEA) was created in 1908. It got momentum after World War I, when the creation of the League of Nations convinced may Esperantists of the need to be repre- sented with a single voice in the international arena. Differences regarding the divi- sion of labor between the UEA and national Esperanto associations drastically affected the former, which not until the second half of the twentieth century was able to operate in an effective manner. For a history of UEA in this period, see Sikosek, Die neutrale, 57-160.

Joseph Gusfield, "Social Movements and Social Change: Perspectives of Linearity and Fluidity," in Research in Social Movements: Conflict and Change, ed. Louis Kriesberg (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1981), 317-39.

Chapter 13

The positivist philosophy of Ernst Mach (1838-1916), sometimes called "neutral Monism," rejected the Kantian dualism between pure and practical reason and left no room for metaphysics, not grounded in empirical data. Mach's materialism tried to su- persede the divide between natural and social sciences. In 1906, and influenced by Mach, the biologist Ernest Haeckel (1834-1919) set up the German Monistic League. Monists campaigned for the substitution of scientific for religion education, against the Chris- tian churches, particularly Catholicism, and for social reforms aiming at the improve- ment of the living conditions of the working class. They also supported the peace movement. However, some Monists, like Haeckel himself, advocated eugenics and Social Darwinism. On the Monist movement in Germany, see Horst Groschopp, Dis- sidenten. Freidenkerei und Kultur in Deutschland (Berlin: Dietz, 1997), 243-99; Niles R. Holt, "Ernst Haeckel's Monistic Religion," Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 2 (1971): 265-80; and from the same author, "Monists and Nazis: A Question of Scientific Responsibility," Hastings Center Report 5, no. 2 (1975): 37-43.

Qtd. in Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 193.

Wilhelm Ostwald, "Scientific Management for Scientists. 'The Bridge.' The Trust Idea Applied to Intellectual Production," Scientific American 108 (1913): 5-6.