International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals

   

Periodical: The Open Road

Summary:  From Pat Deveney's database:

Open Road, The.
Official Organ of the Society of the Universal Brotherhood of Man.
1907—1930? Monthly ("as often as possible")
Pigeon-Roost-In-The-Woods, IN. Language: English.
Editor: Bruce T. Calvert, editor and publisher. Corporate author: Rational School of Right Living / Society of the Universal Brotherhood of Man
1/1, July 1907-1930(?) 50 cents-$1.00 a year ($10 for life membership in Calvert’s Rational School of Right Living and 99-year subscription), 32-54 pp.

Calvert (1867-1940) was one of the rural (he published from Pigeon-Roost-In-The-Woods, Indiana and then in Mountain View, New Jersey) philosophers and prairie socialists who sprang up in the United States around 1900. He was an eccentric writer and pamphleteer, an early pioneer of the nudist movement in the United States, an admirer of Whitman, the Roycrofters and Elbert Hubbard, Jack Jack London and Emma Goldman, and the journal was replete with New Thought offerings and carried extensive advertising for the works of the lesser-known New Thought mages of the period. He organized a Harmonic School of Rational Education which taught lessons on health, breathing, diet, "sex ethics" and eugenics, "Harmonica of Nature" and rational education, and was a pamphleteer on divorce, socialism, Christian Science, white slavery, woman, and right living generally. Noted in The Occult Digest, 1930, and in Rosicrucian Brotherhood, 1909, and given full-page notices in the Initiates, 1908. The issue for October 1911 carried an article by Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

Other Sources:Pennsylvania State University; University of Michigan (microfilm); University of Illinois; National Library of Australia.
Issues:Open Road V1 N1 Sep 1908
Open Road V2 1909
Open Road V3 1909
Open Road V4 1910
Open Road V5 1910
Open Road V6 1911
Open Road V7 1911
Open Road V8 1912
Open Road V9 1912
Open Road V10-12 1913-15
Claude-Generated Themes:   The Open Road is Bruce Calvert's simple-living 'little magazine,' and its own pages name its milieu: Elbert Hubbard, Elizabeth Towne, William Walker Atkinson, and Horatio Dresser — the New Thought and self-culture set. It braids New Thought's language of success, 'the silence,' and opulence with a back-to-nature program of breathing culture, vegetarian diet, and nature-cure, all carried on a Whitmanesque 'open road' individualism and a recurring 'brotherhood of man' ideal. That last phrase inflates the occult panel, but it is humanitarian rather than theosophical; read plainly, the magazine is a New Thought and self-improvement organ of the simple-life movement rather than an occult one.

Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
Topics:Dianetics and Scientology | New Thought | Rosicrucianism | Socialism and Labor Reform