When the war with Spain broke out in 1898, assorted guerrilla groups were already harassing Spanish forces in Cuba. One of these was lead by a General Calixto Garcia, and President William McKinley wrote him a letter to enlist his support and cooperation for the planned American invasion. He asked the head of the Bureau of Military Intelligence for someone to deliver it -- not much was known of the mountainous interior, and no one knew where Garcia was. Colonel Arthur Wagner sent him Lieutenant Andrew Summers Rowan. McKinley gave him the letter and asked him to deliver it to Garcia. Rowan said "Yes, sir" and left Washington that day, with the message in an oilskin pouch strapped to his chest. He landed in Cuba secretly from a small boat three nights later, made contact with sympathetic local peasants, penetrated the interior, found Garcia, delivered the message, came out on the other coast, and was back in Washington in three weeks. After the invasion, a few papers briefly mentioned the incident. On Washington's Birthday, 1899, Elbert Hubbard was having supper with his son. Hubbard was an odd, flamboyant duck, 43 years old, and a bit of a Bohemian. He hadn't had much education, but he read omnivorously; he'd worked as a salesman and tried his hand at several mercifully forgotten novels, when he stumbled across William Morris. Suddenly inspired, he founded the Roycroft Press near Buffalo, NY (precariously modelled on Morris's Kelmscott Press), which published shoddy editions of material in the public domain -- limp suede covers, deckle-edged pages and the like. He also started The Philistine, an artsy philosophical magazine to run his assorted essays. It was not highly thought of by well-educated or sophisticated people. Hubbard's son mentioned he thought Rowan was the true hero of the war. Hubbard was thunderstruck; the boy was right. He hurried to his desk and turned out a short essay in an hour, which ran, without a title, in the May Philistine. What had hit Hubbard was that Rowan had been given an almost impossible mission, and didn't ask any questions, not even "Where is he at?" He just said "Yes, sir." Hubbard's comment: "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." Hubbard challenged his readers: "You are sitting now in your office -- six clerks are within call." (Hubbard had an inflated notion of his subscribers.) "Summon any one and make this request: Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio." He was willing to bet ten to one nary a one would say "Yes, sir." They'd all ask "Whos was he?," "Which encyclopedia?," "Where is the encyclopedia?," "Was I hired for that?," "Don't you mean Bismark?," "What's the matter with Charlie doing it?," "Is he dead?," "Is there any hurry?," "Sha'n't I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?," or "What do you want to know for?" It was a rousing essay, bemoaning the lack of Rowans in America, and averring the world was crying out for men who could "carry a message to Garcia."

As often happened, a few orders drifted in for reprints; a dozen, fifty, a hundred; then the American News Company wanted a thousand. Such work virtually swamped the small Roycroft Press; when the president of the New York Central Railroad telegraphed for 100,000 of the "Rowan article" in pamphlet form (with a NY Central RR ad on the back), Hubbard had to reply that would take two years to fill, and he gave George Daniels permission to make his own arrangements. By now, about 200 newspapers and magazines had carried the essay. Daniels issued it under the title A Message To Garcia in three half-million lots; not only did his employees get a copy, but for a while all his passengers got one as well. The Director of the Russian Railroads was a NY Central RR guest; he took a copy back, had it translated into Russian, and a copy was issued to every railroad employee in the Tsarist Empire. When war broke out with Japan in 1904, every Russian soldier who went to the front carried a copy; when the Japanese found it in prisoners' knapsacks, they had it translated into Japanese, and by Imperial Rescript, a copy was given to every man, soldier or civilian, in the employ of the Japanese government. Much the same happened in Germany, France, Spain, Turkey, India and China. By 1913, over 40 million copies were in print in every written language -- still a circulation record for an author in his lifetime. Hubbard, now world famous, went down on the Lusitania in 1915 -- and the Lord knows how many have been printed since. In 1936, it became a highly rated movie; Rowan (who was given to wearing straw boaters with his uniform off duty) died a Colonel, and was a marked man the rest of his life. Until after the second World War, the only way a high school or college student could avoid that essay was by suicide. Today, almost no one under 50 has read -- even heard of -- A Message To Garcia. It is, alas, no longer Politically Correct; Hubbard was celebrating Blind Obedience, which is no longer regarded as a virtue in the marketplace, and is even a touchy subject in the military (Obedience, by all means, but Blind?) Rowan, of course, was just adhering to the code he'd been taught at West Point -- often summarized as 10 words of one syllable each: "Do As You Are Told And Keep Your Mouth Shut." It wasn't a bad code in its day, either in the military or (as Hubbard pointed out) in the market place. It made for effective operations with a minimum of dither; it cut the cackle and got the job done. But, with so much else, it went down the tubes long ago -- replaced by what the Navy calls "sea-lawyering" and the civil world "doing your own thing." Pity.

All articles and material contained herein are copyrighted © 1998 by Donald R. Morris.

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