My natural interest in the subject led me to scan the pre-1961 Unitarians for interest in Esperanto after yesterday’s post about the Universalists. I don’t think there’s much more interest overall. While the American Unitarian Association published tracts in a variety of languages, there was not a word I’ve found in Esperanto. Articles were usually neutral. But the Esperantists did have a champion among the Unitarians.
Glenn P. Turner (Wikipedia link) was a Madison, Wisconsin lawyer, radio announcer and sometime Socialist politician. Based on his letters to the Unitarian magazine Christian Ledger — usually to stoke interest in the language — he was well informed about the workings of First Unitarian Society there, so presumably a member. (Of note, in one of his letters, there was a tiny postwar worship group of Esperantists among the British Unitarians.) On the Esperanto side, he ran a book service for many years and participated the first (1953) United States congress of the rival, reformed and current national organization. (S-ano is short for samideano, a title that literally means “a member having the same idea” and means “fellow Esperantist” but reads with a touch of “fellow-traveller.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used today non-ironically.)
Not noted in the English Wikipedia article, but cited in the Esperanto version is that he owned the Sherlock Hotel in Madison, the headquarters of the United States Esperanto congress in 1928.
Later. Somehow I missed this from the report of the 1953 congress:
Sunday, July 5
Two special Sunday services were held in the modernistic Unitarian Meeting House — the first was conducted by S-ano Sayers in English, and the second conducted in Esperanto by S-ano Lewine. The Congress photo was made at the Meeting House which, delegates were interested to learn, was built largely with money contributed by Dr. Charles A. Vilas, Secretary of the Wisconsin State Esperanto Association in 1909.