A Message to Garcia
A Message to Garcia is a widely distributed essay written by Elbert Hubbard in 1899, expressing the value of individual initiative and conscientiousness in work. As its primary example, the essay uses a dramatized version of a daring escapade performed by an American soldier, 1st Lt. Andrew S. Rowan, just prior to the Spanish–American War. The essay describes Rowan carrying a message from President William McKinley to “Gen. Calixto García, a leader of the Cuban insurgents somewhere in the mountain vastness of Cuba—no one knew where”. The essay contrasts Rowan’s self-driven effort against “the imbecility of the average man—the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it”.[1]:17–18
The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?” By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing- “Carry a message to Garcia!”
A Message to Garcia was originally published as filler without a title in the March 1899 issue of The Philistine, a periodical which, at that time, was written entirely by Elbert Hubbard.[2] His complaints about lazy and incompetent workers struck a chord with many corporate executives. One of these was George H. Daniels, a promotion-minded executive with the New York Central Railroad. Daniels reprinted the essay hundreds of thousands of times as part of the railroad’s Four-Track Series of pamphlets. Hubbard’s Roycroft Press, the publishing arm of an arts and crafts community he founded in East Aurora, New York, reprinted and sold the essay in a variety of bindings—suede, embossed, paperback, and so on—and as paid promotional literature for organizations as disparate as Wanamaker’s department store, the Boy Scouts of America, and the United States Navy.[1]:9–11[3] It was also reprinted in many anthologies of inspirational literature. Modern editions are readily available today on the Internet.
In Hubbard’s version of Rowan’s journey, President McKinley needed to communicate with Gen. Calixto Garcia, a leader of the Cuban insurgents.
[S]omeone said to the president there was ‘a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you if anybody can.’ Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How the ‘fellow by the name of Rowan’ took the letter, sealed it up in an oilskin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on the other side of the Island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia – are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail.[1]:18–19
In fact, the only true statement Hubbard wrote was that Rowan “landed … off the coast of Cuba from an open boat”. All the rest, including McKinley’s need to communicate with Garcia and Rowan’s delivery of a letter to the general, was false.
It was Maj. Arthur L. Wagner, head of the Military Information Division, who successfully petitioned Adj. Gen. Henry Clark Corbin for permission to send spies to Cuba and Puerto Rico to gather military information. Wagner selected forty-year-old 1st Lt. Andrew S. Rowan to join Gen. Calixto García, commander of the rebel forces in eastern Cuba.[4] On April 9, Rowan, posing as a civilian, boarded a steamer in New York bound for Kingston, Jamaica.[5] With the help of the U.S. consul in Kingston, he connected with the Cuban Revolutionary Junta, some of whose members transported him by open boat during one of their trips to the southeastern coast of Cuba.[6]:46–52 They went ashore the morning of April 25.
