Someone said to the president, “There is a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.”

Does anyone read “A Message to Garcia” anymore? It was in my ninth-grade literature book, if I recall aright. At the time, at the age of 13, I had no idea who Garcia was and little more of where Cuba was, and I could not see why the delivery of some message—whose contents, by the way, are never disclosed in the essay—to this unknown person in an unimaginable place should be of concern to me. Yet, by some magic evidently known to educators once but now forgotten or dismissed by their successors, the story and its lesson have stuck with me.

Garcia was General Calixto García e Iñiguez (1839–1898), who was from an early age involved in uprisings against the Spanish authorities in Cuba. By 1896 he was second in command of the insurrectionary army. It was in that capacity that he was drawn into an uneasy alliance with U.S. forces that began landing on the island in June 1898.

So much for background. Now, what about that message, and why do we (some of us, anyway) remember it?

To begin with, there was no message to Garcia. But there was a messenger. He was Lieutenant Andrew S. Rowan (1857–1943) of the U.S. Army. Rowan, traveling in secret, went ashore in Cuba on April 24, 1898, and made his way to Garcia’s headquarters in Oriente province. There he gathered information about the strength and disposition of the rebel forces, and he then made his way back to the United States. Having been promoted to captain while on the mission, he later served in the Puerto Rico campaign, in the occupation of Cuba, and in the Philippines.

None of which military minutiae explains why generations of American schoolchildren were obliged to read about some imaginary message to Garcia, and why for decades into the next century it was possible to raise a chuckle with the graffito “Garcia—call your wife.”

For that remarkable circumstance we must turn to one of the unlikely characters who have made themselves a prominent place in American life from time to time, the salesman-writer-bohemian-huckster Elbert Hubbard. Picture him: longish hair, a broad-brimmed soft hat, wide and flowing tie, frock coat, and cape. The very image of the Mauve Decade aesthete. And yet, that’s not quite who he was.

Hubbard was born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1856 (the year the Republican Party nominated its very first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont). After newspaper work in Chicago, he became a sales and promotions manager for the Larkin Company, manufacturers of soap, in Buffalo, New York. In 1892 he left Larkin to devote himself to learning and writing. On a visit to England he met the English writer and designer William Morris and evidently decided that America needed just such a promoter of artisanship.

In 1895, in the Buffalo suburb of East Aurora, he founded the Roycroft Press, modeled on Morris’s Kelmscott Press. Gradually workshops were added to the printing works, and a corps of craftsmen and their students soon gathered to produce furniture, metalwork, pottery, and other useful and decorative items for the home, all in what has become known as the Arts and Crafts style. Objects produced at the Roycroft shops are avidly collected today.

From the beginning, the Roycroft Press was occupied chiefly in printing the writings of Hubbard, who proved to be a fountain of philosophizing. Biographies of various admired persons, padded out with much commentary, were issued monthly as Little Journeys. The Philistine, a monthly literary magazine of some daring, soon followed. To these he added the monthly The Fra in 1908. And he wrote some books as well, one of which bore the unfortunate title So Here Cometh White Hyacinths (1907). The torrent of text that flowed from Hubbard’s pen is astounding. As for what he wrote about, and with what authority, his wife Alice probably said it best:

Elbert Hubbard, the most positive human force of his time, is a man of genius in business, in art, in literature, in philosophy. He is an idealist, dreamer, orator, scientist…. He is like Jefferson in his democracy…. He is like Paine in his love for liberty…. He is like Lincoln in that he would free all mankind…. Elbert Hubbard is a unique figure in history…. Like Shakespeare, he has access to universal knowledge.

Well, let’s grant that Alice was a little biased. But in encouraging her to publish this encomium, Elbert was certainly not registering disagreement.

Our everyday experience with men who throw themselves into a life of art, handicrafts, philosophy, and the delight of telling others how they should live usually leads us to expect that such a man will offer up some crackbrain muddle of socialism and medievalism as his solution to the ills of the world, as, indeed, Morris had. Not so with Hubbard. A muddle he may have offered, in that his writings amount to no clearly organized worldview—he is best thought of as a writer of miscellanea, enough to stock Borges’s Library of Babel—but Elbert Hubbard stood foursquare in favor of individual liberty and responsibility, hard work, loyalty, and initiative. He was, in short, a classical liberal with a strong disposition in favor of business.

Here is an excerpt from his “Prayer of Gratitude”:

I am thankful for the blessed light of this day, and I am thankful for all the days that have gone before. I thank the thinkers, the poets, the painters, the sculptors, the singers, the publishers, the inventors—the businessmen—who have lived and are now living. I thank Emerson for brooking the displeasure of his Alma Mater. I thank James Watt, the Scotch boy who watched his mother’s teakettle to a purpose. I thank Volta and Galvani, who fixed their names, as did Watt, in the science that lightens labor and carries the burdens that once bowed human backs. I thank Benjamin Franklin for his spirit of mirth … his patience, his commonsense. I thank Alexander Humboldt…. William Humboldt…. Shakespeare…. Arkwright, Hargreaves, Crompton…. Thomas Jefferson…. Baruch Spinoza…. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer…. Tyndall…. Draper…. Herschel…. Bjornson…. Adam Smith…. These men and others like them, their names less known, have made the world a fit dwelling-place for liberty. Their graves are mounds from which flares Freedom’s torch.

Not the words, nor the heroes, nor the sentiments of a dandy or an ideologue.

So what about that message? According to what Hubbard himself reported 14 years after the fact, it was his son Bert who suggested to him that Lieutenant Rowan was the hero of the Cuban campaign.

It came to me like a flash! Yes, the boy is right, the hero is the man who does his work.

In an hour he had written out the essay, some 1,500 words, in time for the March 1899 issue of The Philistine, which was just then going to press. All that was required was his natural prolixity and a generous dash of imagination:

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. 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.”

The piece attracted the notice of an official of the New York Central Railroad, who had it reprinted in runs of half a million copies each for distribution to employees and others. Newspapers and magazines picked it up, and it was translated and widely distributed around the world in dozens of languages. Hubbard guessed that more than 40 million copies had been printed by the time he wrote about the phenomenon in 1913, and he modestly noted that it was said that this was more than any other piece of writing had ever achieved during the life of its author. Two motion pictures were made from the Hubbard version of the story, one in 1916 starring Robert Conness as Lieutenant Rowan, and the other in 1936 with John Boles (and Barbara Stanwyck, Wallace Beery, and Alan Hale in supporting roles).

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 lurking 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.

Elbert and Alice Hubbard went down with the Lusitania when it was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland in May 1915. The idea of teaching American schoolchildren character through a homily such as “Garcia” would eventually be torpedoed as well—itself becoming history.

Robert McHenry writes the American Civilization column. The former editor of Encyclopædia Britannica, he last wrote for the magazine about the birth of the 20th century.

Illustration by Edwin Fotheringham.