Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986) was an American author and the founder of Scientology. A prolific writer of pulp science fiction and fantasy novels in his early career, in 1950 he authored the pseudoscientific book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and established organizations to promote and practice Dianetics techniques. Hubbard created Scientology in 1952 after losing the intellectual rights to his literature on Dianetics in bankruptcy. He would lead the Church of Scientology – variously described as a cult, a new religious movement, or a business – until his death in 1986.
Born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911, Hubbard spent much of his childhood in Helena, Montana. While his father was posted to the U.S. naval base on Guam in the late 1920s, Hubbard traveled to Asia and the South Pacific. In 1930, Hubbard enrolled at George Washington University to study civil engineering but dropped out in his second year. He began his career as an author of pulp fiction and married Margaret Grubb, who shared his interest in aviation.
Hubbard was an officer in the Navy during World War II, where he briefly commanded two ships but was removed from command both times. The last few months of his active service were spent in a hospital, being treated for a variety of complaints. After the war, he sought psychiatric help from a veteran's charity hospital in Georgia. While acting as a lay analyst, or peer counselor, in Georgia, Hubbard began writing what would become Dianetics. In 1951, Hubbard's wife Sara said that experts had diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia and recommended lifelong hospitalization. In 1953, the first Scientology organizations were founded by Hubbard. In 1954, a Scientology church in Los Angeles was founded, which became the Church of Scientology International. Hubbard added organizational management strategies, principles of pedagogy, a theory of communication and prevention strategies for healthy living to the teachings of Scientology. As Scientology came under increasing media attention and legal pressure in a number of countries during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hubbard spent much of his time at sea as "commodore" of the Sea Organization, a private, quasi-paramilitary Scientologist fleet.
Hubbard returned to the United States in 1975 and went into seclusion in the California desert after an unsuccessful attempt to take over the town of Clearwater, Florida. In 1978, Hubbard was convicted of fraud in absentia by France. In the same year, 11 high-ranking members of Scientology were indicted on 28 charges for their role in the Church's Snow White Program, a systematic program of espionage against the United States government. One of the indicted was Hubbard's wife Mary Sue Hubbard; he himself was named an unindicted co-conspirator. Hubbard spent the remaining years of his life in seclusion, attended to by a small group of Scientology officials.
Following his 1986 death, Scientology leaders announced that Hubbard's body had become an impediment to his work and that he had decided to "drop his body" to continue his research on another plane of existence. The Church of Scientology describes Hubbard in hagiographic terms, though many of his autobiographical statements were fictitious. Sociologist Stephen Kent has observed that Hubbard "likely presented a personality disorder known as malignant narcissism."
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on March 13, 1911, the only child of Ledora May Waterbury, who had trained as a teacher, and Harry Ross Hubbard, a low-ranking United States Navy officer. Like many military families of the era, the Hubbards repeatedly relocated around the United States and overseas. After moving to Kalispell, Montana, they settled in Helena in 1913. Hubbard's father rejoined the Navy in April 1917, during World War I, while his mother worked as a clerk for the state government. After his father was posted to Guam, Hubbard and his mother traveled there with brief stop-overs in a couple of Chinese ports. In high school, Hubbard contributed to the school paper, but was dropped from enrollment due to failing grades. After he failed the Naval Academy entrance examination, Hubbard was enrolled in a Virginia Preparatory School to prepare him for a second attempt. However, after complaining of eye strain, Hubbard was diagnosed with myopia, precluding any future enrollment in the Naval Academy. As an adult, Hubbard would privately write to himself that his eyes had gone bad when he "used them as an excuse to escape the naval academy".
Hubbard was sent to the Woodward School in D.C., as graduates qualified for admission to George Washington University without having to take the entrance exam. Hubbard graduated in June 1930 and entered GWU. Academically, Hubbard did poorly and was repeatedly warned about bad grades, but he contributed to the student newspaper and was active in the glider club. In 1932, Hubbard organized a student trip to the Caribbean, but amid multiple misfortunes and insufficient funding, the passengers took to burning Hubbard in effigy and the trip was canceled by the ship's owners. Hubbard did not return to GWU the following year.
For much of the 1920s and 1930s, Hubbard lived in Washington D.C., and he would later claim to have interacted with multiple psychiatrists in the city. Hubbard described encounters in 1923 and 1930 with navy psychiatrist Joseph Thompson. Thompson was controversial within the American psychiatric community for his support of lay analysis, the practice of psychoanalysis by those without medical degrees. Hubbard also recalled interacting with William Alanson White, supervisor of the D.C. psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths. According to Hubbard, both White and Thompson had regarded his athleticism and lack of interest in psychology as signs of a good prognosis. Hubbard later claimed to have been trained by both Thompson and White. Hubbard also discussed his interactions at Chestnut Lodge, a D.C.-area facility specializing in schizophrenia, repeatedly complaining that their staff misdiagnosed an unnamed individual with the condition:
There's a place by the name of Walnut Lodge... They don't see anything humorous in that, by the way... They sent three people to see me and every one of them was under treatment—and this was their staff! But anyway, very good people there, I'm sure... Didn't happen to meet any. Have some fine patients though! Anyway, they treat only schizophrenia. And so they take only schizophrenics. Now how do they get only schizophrenics? Well, anybody sent to Walnut Lodge is a classified schizophrenic. And they take somebody who is a dementia praecox unclassified or a more modern definition, a mania-depressive and they take him from Saint Elizabeths and they take him over to Walnut Lodge and he goes onto the books as a schizophrenic. Why? Because Walnut Lodge takes only schizophrenics.
In 1933, Hubbard renewed a relationship with a fellow glider pilot, Margaret "Polly" Grubb and the two were quickly married on April 13.
The following year, she gave birth to a son who was named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr., later nicknamed "Nibs". A second child, Katherine May, was born two years later. The Hubbards lived for a while in Laytonsville, Maryland, but were chronically short of money. In the spring of 1936, they moved to Bremerton, Washington. They lived there for a time with Hubbard's aunts and grandmother before finding a place of their own at nearby South Colby. According to one of his friends at the time, Robert MacDonald Ford, the Hubbards were "in fairly dire straits for money" but sustained themselves on the income from Hubbard's writing.
Hubbard began a writing career and tried to write for mainstream publications. Hubbard soon found his niche in the pulp fiction magazines, becoming a prolific and prominent writer in the medium. From 1934 until 1940, Hubbard produced hundreds of short stories and novels. Hubbard is remembered for his "prodigious output" across a variety of genres, including adventure fiction, aviation, travel, mysteries, westerns, romance, and science fiction. His first full-length novel, Buckskin Brigades, was published in 1937. The novel told the story of "Yellow Hair", a white man adopted into the Blackfeet tribe, with promotional material claiming the author had been a "bloodbrother" of the Blackfeet. The New York Times Book Review praised the book, writing "Mr. Hubbard has reversed a time-honored formula and has given a thriller to which, at the end of every chapter or so, another paleface bites the dust."