His best-known work came after he founded
Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts community in East Aurora, New York, in 1895. This grew from his private press which he had initiated in collaboration with his first wife
Bertha Crawford Hubbard, the Roycroft Press, inspired by
William Morris'
Kelmscott Press. Hubbard edited and published two magazines,
The Philistine—A Periodical of Protest and
The FRA--A Journal of Affirmation.
The Philistine was bound in brown butcher paper and featured largely satire and whimsy. (Hubbard himself quipped that the cover was butcher paper because: "There is meat inside.") The Roycrofters produced handsome, if sometimes eccentric, books printed on handmade paper, and operated a fine bindery, a furniture shop, and shops producing modeled leather and hammered copper goods. They were a leading producer of
Mission style products. Hubbard's second wife,
Alice Moore Hubbard, was a graduate of the
New Thought-oriented
Emerson College of Oratory in Boston and a noted
suffragist. The Roycroft Shops became a site for meetings and conventions of
radicals,
freethinkers, reformers, and suffragists. Hubbard became a popular lecturer, and his homespun philosophy evolved from a loose William Morris-inspired
socialism to an ardent defense of free enterprise and American know-how. Hubbard was mocked in the Socialist press for "selling out". He replied that he had not given up any ideal of his, but had simply lost faith in Socialism as a means of realizing them. An example of his trenchant critical style may be found in his saying that prison is, "An example of a Socialist's Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied and competition is eliminated." In 1908, Hubbard was the main speaker at the annual meeting of
The Society in Dedham for Apprehending Horse Thieves. Before he died, Hubbard planned to write a story about
Felix Flying Hawk, the only son of Chief
Flying Hawk. Hubbard had learned about Flying Hawk during 1915 from
Major Israel McCreight. In 1912, the passenger liner
RMS Titanic sank after hitting an
iceberg. Hubbard subsequently wrote of the disaster, singling out the story of
Ida Straus, who as a woman was supposed to be placed on a lifeboat in precedence to the men, but refused to board the boat, and leave her husband. Hubbard then added his own commentary: ==Conviction and pardon==