1856-1915: Origins of HWA's Ideology ....

The majority of people alive today, have not, in all probability, ever heard of Elbert Green Hubbard, and that also explains why most people do not know what made Herbert W. Armstrong and his more famous son Garner Ted, think they way they did.

Elbert Green Hubbard was born at on June 19, 1856, and both he and his wife drowned off Ireland on board the Lusitania. It had  which had just been torpedoed by a German submarine on May 7, 1915.

Elbert Hubbard; John D. Rockefeller; Ida Tarbell and Herbert W. Armstrong all knew each other. They became contemporaries, but they did not necessarily share the same views about life.

While John D. Rockefeller began the age in which you now live, that is the age of North Sea natural gas and oil, he also begat a gigantic monopoly.  He achieved this in some ways that are similar to the methodology used by the Italian Mafia. Ida Tarbell decided that his business practices needed to be exposed, but not everyone agreed and she was dubbed as being a 'muckraker'.

But there was a problem.

John D. Rockefeller was a loyal member of the Baptist Church, which is the same denomination that Billy Graham later represented with those 'crusades' of his that began in London, England just after World War II. But back in the USA decades earlier there arose something very 'American' about a combination of the Protestant faith and capitalism. Both got wrapped in the Stars and Stripes; the Holy Bible, and small town America, which embraced capitalism as Godliness, and perceived communism to be Satanism.

Wading into that polemical mixture was Elbert Hubbard. He was an anarchist, according to some, while others, today, might see him as a 'Green' - of sorts. But Hubbard became a friend of Rockefeller just as the automobile age was about to dawn. It was the time of Thomas Edison and the invention of the electric light bulb, and America was about to be sucked into World War I, and Edison's company was being absorbed into another monster in the making called the General Electric Company.

Hubbard did not see what happened next because a German submarine took his life. But prior to that event, Ida Tarbell, the 'muckraker', had begun exposing Rockefeller's monopoly. It was her revelations that caused the U.S. Government to target Rockefeller's monopoly and try to break it up. Hubbard did not like that at all, even though Rockefeller only became wealthier in the process, and so Hubbard wrote an article which Rockefeller then turned into a booklet and distributed.

As a young man, Herbert W. Armstrong got to know Hubbard and became very impressed by him, because Hubbard was considered to be an 'advertising man' who taught Armstrong how to write copy that sells. Now add to Armstrong's life another writer with an interest in turning Jesus into a pragmatic salesman who believed in capitalism, and all of these influences began to create in Herbert W. Armstrong a man who not only believed in his own abilities, but a man who also believed that the end justifies the means.

We will lift the lid off all this tomorrow, and began to examine the details.

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