A Message to Garcia
This week, I'm sharing a story with you — A Message to Garcia.
I was introduced to this story while a senior in high school. It sat in a cardboard box for many years after. Then, in my 30s, I found it during a move and understood A Message to Garcia differently this time around.
For the past 16 years, I have been gifting this story to friends and clients. I hope you enjoy it as well.
Life-Changing Classics
Volume III
Elbert Hubbard
Introduction
Andrew Summers Rowan, the inspiration for this small masterpiece, carried his famous message to Cuban insurgent leader Calixco Garcia y Ignigues during America's war with Spain — and received the distinguished service cross for his effort.
Born in 1857 in Monroe County, Virginia (now West Virginia), Rowan graduated from West Point in 1881 and spent a number of years with the U.S. Army Information Bureau in Central America. He was still a lieutenant when he was called upon to render service in Cuba.
Afterward, he continued to serve during the Philippine insurrection, held posts at several military bases in the U.S., and taught military science and tactics at Kansas State Agriculture College.
Colonel Rowan retired in 1909 and spent the remainder of his years in San Francisco, where he died in 1943. The service that he offered his country was beyond reproach, and a grateful nation offered its recognition. His greatest contribution, however, was almost certainly the inspiration that he unknowingly provided to Elbert Hubbard, who immortalized the story of his daring mission to Cuba in A Message to Garcia, for it is through this modest essay that Colonel Rowan has influenced the lives of countless millions.
A Message to Garcia
In all this Cuban business, there is one man who stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at Perihelion.
When war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain vastness of Cuba — no one knew where. No mail nor telegraph message could reach him. The President must secure his cooperation, and quickly. What to do!
Someone said to the President, “There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan who 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 Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin 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 to now tell in detail. The point that 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 needed, not 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!”
General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias. No man who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed but has been well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man — the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it.
Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook or threat he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God on His goodness performs a miracle, and send him an Angel of Light for an assistant.
You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office — six clerks are within call. Summon anyone and make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio.” Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?
On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:
Who was he?
Which encyclopedia?
Where is the encyclopedia?
Was I hired for that?
Don’t you mean Bismarck?
What’s the matter with Charlie doing it?
Is he dead?
Is there any hurry?
Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself? What do you want to know for?
And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the question, and explained how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help him try to find Correggio — and then come back and tell you there is no such man. Of course, I may lose my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not.
Now, if you are wise, you will not bother to explain to your “assistant” that Correggio is indexed under the C’s, not in the K’s, but you will smile very sweetly and say, “Never mind,”and go look it up yourself. And this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of this will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift — these are the things that put pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all.
A first-mate with knotted club seems necessary, and the dread of getting “the bounce” Saturday night holds many a worker to his place. Advertise for a stenographer, and nine out of ten who apply can neither spell nor punctuate — and do not think it necessary to.
Can such a one write a letter to Garcia?
“You see that bookkeeper,” said the foreman to me in a large factory.
“Yes, what about him?”
“Well, he’s a fine accountant, but if I’d send him uptown on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main Street would forget what he had been sent for.”
Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia?
We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the “downtrodden denizens of the sweat-shop” and the “homeless wanderer searching for honest employment,” and with it, all often go many hard words for the men in power.
Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne'er-do-wells to do intelligent work, and his long, patient striving after "help" that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned.
In every store and factory, there is a constant weeding-out process going on. The employer is constantly sending away "help" that have shown their incapacity to further the interests of the business, and others are being taken on. No matter how good times are, this sorting continues: only, if times are hard and work is scarce, the sorting is done finer — but out and forever out the incompetent and unworthy go. It is the survival of the fittest. Self-interest prompts every employer to keep it the best — those who can carry a message to Garcia.
I know one man of really brilliant parts who has not the ability to manage a business of his own, and yet who is absolutely worthless to anyone else because he carries with him constantly the insane suspicion that his employer is oppressing or intending to oppress him. He cannot give orders, and he will not receive them. Should a message to Garcia, his answer would probably be, "Take it yourself!"
Tonight this man walks the streets looking for work, the wind whistling through his threadbare coat. No one who knows him dare employ him, for his is a regular firebrand of discontent. He is impervious to reason, and the only thing that can impress him is the tow of a thick-soled Number Nine boot.
Of course, I know that one so morally deformed is no less to be pitied than a physical cripple; but in our pitying, let us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold in line dowdy indifference, slipshod imbecility, and the heartless ingratitude which, but for their enterprise, would be both hungry and homeless.
Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming, I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds — the man who, against great odds, has directed the efforts of others, and having succeeded, finds there's nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner pail and worked for day's wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides.
There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous. My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the "boss" is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no luring intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid off" nor has to go on a strike for higher wages.
Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Nothing such a man asks shall not be granted. He is wanted in every city, town and village — in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such: he is needed and needed badly — the man who can
“Carry a Message to Garcia”.
About Elbert Hubbard
Elbert Hubbard was born in 1859 in Bloomington, Illinois, And never received more than a grade-school education. A self-made man in many respects, Hubbard filled in the gaps in his knowledge through voracious reading, a passion which became manifest in the founding of the Roycroft Shop, a publishing house specializing in deluxe binding. He wrote a series of 182 biographies under the series titled Little Journeys to Homes of the Great and also published two magazines, The Philistine and The Fra, producing much of the content himself.
Elbert Hubbard and his wife, Alice, were traveling to England on the Lusitania and went down with the ship when it was struck by a German torpedo on May 7, 1915.