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 was Bruce Calvert's little magazine, published from Griffith, Indiana, from about 1908, and it belongs to the simple-living wing of American New Thought. Its own pages name its company — Elbert Hubbard, Elizabeth Towne, William Walker Atkinson, Horatio Dresser — the self-culture and mind-power set of the period's small-press world. Calvert braided their language of success and the silence with a back-to-nature programme of deep breathing, plain vegetarian diet and drugless health, and with a Whitmanesque individualism from which the magazine takes its title. Behind that runs a Tolstoyan strain: an admiration for the man the world would not let live in peace, an argument with socialist readers about what the coming order would actually look like, and a conviction that reform begins with how a person chooses to live rather than with how society is organised. Its frequent talk of the brotherhood of man is humanitarian rather than occult, and the magazine is best read as a document of the simple-life movement.

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