Lieutenant Andrew Sumner Rowan was charged with making contact with the Cuban rebels to determine what assistance they might provide or role they might play in the American confrontation with Spain. At great danger he managed to slip into Cuba, make contact, and make his way back out and return to Washington with communications from the Cuban insurgents.
Walker highlights a vignette that sheds light on some of the remarkable past events which slip into cultural amnesia.
Except for such encomia and some glowing accounts of his exploit in the press, Rowan's mission might have vanished quickly from a public consciousness already grown accustomed to newspaper war heros. But the story did not die, thanks to an irrepressible optimist and super salesman who published a "Periodical of Protest" called The Philistine from his farm in upstate New York.Two million copies. The population of the US in 1898 wasn't much more than 75 million. That would be the equivalent of a book selling 8 million copies today. And yet, who today remembers "A Message to Garcia"
Elbert Hubbard was a forty-two-year-old Illinois-born eccentric who latched on to the Rowan exploit while searching for filler material for his magazine. He had read Rowan's artless memoir of the mission in McCLure's and Leslie's Weekly and in an hour of inspiration Hubbard composed a one-thousand-five-hundred-word editorial that he said "leaped hot from my heart" about a man who got an order to deliver a message to Garcia and who delivered it without even asking, "Where is he at?"
With its leitmotif of being "loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies, do the thing" unquestioningly - in brief, a sermon on blind obedience to orders - "A Message to Garcia" sold two million copies in pamphlet form within a few months of its publication and a hundred million by the time of Hubbard's death on the Lusitania in May 1915.
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It's interesting that a publisher like Elber Hubbard & Roycroft publishing should succeed in gaining a lot of attention with A Message to Garcia. One wonders why the essay begins with a hitchhike ride on the Lt A Rowan story to digress into a diatribe over employee behavior. Hubbard, with no military background is hardly a qualified evaluator and merely anoints the tale with Heroic qualities for merely getting a job done. Lt Rowan did have the experience with intelligence gathering, West Point training and language skills - but these are not mentioned in the essay. So, the contrast between Lt Rowan and "generic employees" is stretched. Workers, in spite of the equal pay policies of Roycroft, are maligned in a diatribe hardly based on workplace experience. These degrading characterizations fail to describe the experience of this writer with work at Walmart where obedience is prized over initiative and management abuse frequently cited by workers and filings in Legal complaints. Roycroft Press does not survive, and Hubbard son seems not to have the Lt Rowan anointment to save the Company or the workers' jobs. Thus, the Essay serves a private urge of Hubbard, yet is ignored by readers and corporate influencers to some end. But that end and why has this fabrication survived so long? Americans need to look inward and see its biases and foolishness.
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