A Message to Garcia

“A Message to Garcia” is one of hundreds of essays penned by Elbert Hubbard, a salesman and publisher who founded an artist colony, Roycroft, in upper New York State. Hubbard also published magazines; One, The Philistine, was a periodic collection of his essays. Today, it might be a prominent blog on the Internet. One of his essays was "Garcia," which would become one of the most widely read works at the turn of the 20th century, reprinted countless times by organizations and corporations who wanted to inspire their own workers to greater achievement.

The tale of Rowan’s trek through Cuba is briefly told; most of the essay is taken up with a critique of the incompetence and laziness Hubbard observes among workers in late-19th-century America. The cure, says Hubbard, is a revival of the fortitude and can-do optimism of someone like Rowan, who carries the message to Garcia without complaint and despite many obstacles.

Hubbard was an avowed anarchist; he believed in the fundamental goodness of humans, who therefore don’t need governments to force them to behave. Hubbard also supported Socialism, although his version foresaw a future in which workers managed themselves and their companies. He came to despair ever of realizing such a dream; in the “Garcia” essay, he complains of the “moral stupidity” and laziness of most workers, and that “these are the things that put pure Socialism so far into the future” (6). Hubbard's honest desire for Socialism seems ironic given the laissez-faire, capitalist ideals espoused in the letter, but this misreads his Intention. At first blush Rowan seems a direct response to Bartleby in Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Bartleby can be seen as bearing a “principled refusal to work" in order to exhibit "the frustrations of the other clerks” and protest contemporary working conditions and class divisions (Kuebrich, David. “Melville's Doctrine of Assumptions: The Hidden Ideology of Capitalist Production in ‘Bartleby.’” The New England Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 3, 1996, pp. 381–405). The Bartlebys of the world would seem to deserve no veneration, according to “Garcia.”

However, Hubbard intended “Garcia” as an inspirational tract, part of the personal-growth movement that was getting started in the late 1800s and would soon grow to prominence with such works as Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and The Power of Positive Thinking. Hubbard’s second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, studied at Emerson College in Boston, an institution influenced by New Thought, an early form of the practice of positive visualization for personal and spiritual growth.

Hubbard wrote “Garcia” in 1899 while managing Roycroft, which was located in East Aurora in upper New York State. The colony at one point had 500 members who were practitioners of the Arts and Crafts movement. This distinctive style of design began in Britain, where it was a pushback against the rising tide of industrialization with its mass production of cheap consumer items. Arts and Crafts artisans emphasized craftsmanship and simple elegance in their work; they produced beautiful furniture, art, books, decoration, and architecture.

The Arts and Crafts trend was aligned with Progressivism, a left-leaning political movement that supported women’s voting rights, workplace reforms, and greater government oversight of the economy. The Arts and Crafts movement took pains to support women artists, offering them opportunities they hadn’t had previously.

Hubbard was himself an employer in a demanding and exacting field, one which focused on excellence and mastery of skill. His “Garcia” essay, with its exasperation about worker incompetence, comes across as similar to that of old-fashioned industrial bosses, and in fact the essay appealed strongly to business leaders. Thus, “Garcia” might easily be misread as a right-wing manifesto against worker agitation. Hubbard, however, supported Progressivism and, as mentioned above, its Socialist wing. His wife, Alice, was a prominent women’s suffragist. In keeping with the lofty goals of the Arts and Crafts movement, Hubbard’s is the Progressivism of earnest hard work aligned with the search for competence and high craft. This isn’t to say that competent workers would never go on strike, but it does suggest that, between any such actions, their work would be exemplary, if only to make clear that problems at work lie elsewhere than within their own performance.

The high standards of the Arts and Crafts movement, then, suggest an attitude toward work that Hubbard wishes to impart to everyone who toils in a factory or office. Arts and Crafts was a reaction against mindless industrialization; its love of competence and mastery stood athwart the tide of mediocrity that industrialization brought sloshing onto Western society. Hubbard saw in Rowan an inspiring, heroic example of focus and persistence that demonstrates how such virtues might extend beyond the artist’s world to everyone’s daily work experience.

In “Garcia,” Hubbard mentions Correggio, a Renaissance painter. Hubbard chooses this artist for an example of a simple request for information given to an assistant, a request that gets bolloxed up due to the assistant’s laziness. As a prominent member of the Arts and Crafts movement, Hubbard was heavily influenced by Renaissance design, and it’s likely that a Correggio-type incident at Roycroft formed the basis for the job-assignment example in his essay. Thus, he didn’t have to search far for an example of worker incompetence: He found them among his own staff.

“Garcia” is controversial in part because it mishandles some of the history on which it’s based. It wasn’t President McKinley but a US Army general who formulated the plan to contact the Cuban rebel leader Garcia. Rowan’s trek takes place, not during the war between Spain and the US, but a year earlier. Rowan’s job wasn’t simply to hand a letter to General Garcia but to accompany him and report back to the US military, a task he ignored.

Lt Andrew Rowan, an Army spy, did make contact with General Calixto Garcia, who promptly saw an opportunity and talked Rowan into leading a contingent of rebels back to the US to hold formal discussions with the US military. Rowan leaked news of his exploits to the American press; this caused a sensation, and the lieutenant was lauded as a hero. Rowan’s disregard for secrecy and for his own orders might have earned him a court martial, were it not for his sudden popularity among the American electorate.

That public was deeply alarmed by reports of Spanish cruelties against rebels in its Cuban colony, just off the coast of Florida. Many of these reports may have been exaggerated by a press lately engaged in its own war for subscribers, a battle that encouraged papers, especially in New York City, to create overblown stories in a quest for greater readership. Major papers also tried to influence public policy, and some of them plumped for a war with Spain. These actions were part of a trend dubbed “yellow journalism” (a name with complicated origins), a tabloid-style of reporting that treated the truth casually.

Americans, enraged by news of the 1898 sinking in Havana Harbor of an American Naval vessel, the USS Maine, pressed for war. That the Maine may have exploded by accident—its design made it vulnerable to fires in its fuel supply—quickly got lost in all the shouting. The US went to war and won a massive victory. Now known as the Spanish-American War, the conflict resulted in Spain’s cession to the US of the last remnants of its once-mighty empire. These included Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and several smaller islands. The war also served notice to other nations that America was now a major player in world affairs.

Two films have been made from the “Garcia” essay, each playing faster and looser with the actual details than Hubbard ever did. Hollywood filmmakers don’t exactly lie; instead, they “tell stories.” Historical films often advertise that they’re “based on actual events!” but it’s important to understand the large liberties they take. “Based on” means, “We love this story but we’ve made a lot of changes so it works better as a movie.” Given this context, it’s understandable if Hubbard got some of his facts scrambled. The essay does make a strong case that Rowan’s efforts were monumental, and that the outcome was highly useful to the war effort. At the time it was published, “Garcia” found an audience recently thrilled with the American war victory, and no one cared to examine too closely the story’s particulars. Rowan was simply a hero to be emulated. Hubbard’s summary of Rowan’s actions are lean, to the point, and close enough to the real history to communicate the essay’s moral conclusion.