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    A Message to Garcia and Other Writings
    A Message to Garcia and Other Writings
    A Message to Garcia and Other Writings
    Ebook108 pages3 hours

    A Message to Garcia and Other Writings

    By Elbert Hubbard

    3.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIxia Press
    Release dateSep 12, 2018
    ISBN9780486834634
    A Message to Garcia and Other Writings
    Author

    Elbert Hubbard

    Elbert Hubbard was born in 1856 in Bloomington, Illinois. He was a writer, publisher, and artist who was an influential member of the Arts and Crafts Movement. His best-known work is the short publication A Message to Garcia.

    Read more from Elbert Hubbard

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    Reviews for A Message to Garcia and Other Writings

    3.5/5

    33 ratings3 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Wow... should I be worried that my boss asked me to read this? He said it was "really good", I found it to be bullshit corporate propaganda.
    • 2/5
      A message to Garcia is nothing more than a short inspirational essays of not much more than six pages. The self-published author created a hype which made the essay extremely popular. It is claimed to have sold over 40 million copies. The content of the essay is derived from a heroic mission undertaken by Captain Andrew Rowan to convey a message to the Cuban rebels in Spanish-controlled Cuba to establish contact and form an alliance with the United States against Spain.Elbert Hubbard essay, published in 1899, was based on a report he had heard about Andrew Rowan brave mission. Many years later, Andrew Rowan, who was a published author, wrote a short story based on his experience, entitled "How I carried the message to Garcia". While this story is apparently based on Rowan's experience, he has also sometimes asserted that the story is entirely fictional.While A message to Garcia may have had its function in its day, the essay is of no particular value to readers today. It is written in an old-fashioned style, by a boastful and over-self confident author. As the essay is so extremely short, it is now usually printed together with a number of supplementary materials. In the edition by Shanghai Joint Publishing (2010), Andrew Rowan's short story How I carried the message to Garcia is one of the appendices. This is somewhat awkward, because Rowan's story has much more merit, and deserves much more to be read than Hubbard's essay. Rowan's story is a fairly well-written adventurous story of about 40 pages. It would make much more sense to publish Rowan's story and add Hubbard's essay as an appendix.The Chinese edition also includes two further contributions inspired on the theme and related to the aforementioned materials. These contributions are however of a shamefully low quality.The historical background of How I carried the message to Garcia is definitely interesting, and the short story might well be read by a wider audience. Hopefully, the story can be accessed through anthologies.
    • 5/5
      Elbert Hubbard had a way with words! This is his most famous essay, but his other writings that include interviews with luminaries of his time (early 20th century) are also beautifully crafted and worth reading.

    Book preview

    A Message to Garcia and Other Writings - Elbert Hubbard

    A MESSAGE TO

    GARCIA

    AND OTHER WRITINGS

    A MESSAGE TO

    GARCIA

    AND OTHER WRITINGS

    ELBERT HUBBARD

    A Leadership Classic from the U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List

    Mineola, New York

    Copyright

    Copyright © 2018 by Dover Publications, Inc.

    All rights reserved.

    Bibliographical Note

    This Ixia Press edition, first published in 2018, is a new compilation of fifteen essays, thirty-two contemplations, and a pamphlet by Elbert Hubbard. Detailed sources appear on pages 113 and 114. The introduction for this Ixia Press edition has been written by John Grafton.

    International Standard Book Number

    ISBN-13: 978-0-486-82767-4

    ISBN-10: 0-486-82767-4

    IXIA PRESS

    An imprint of Dover Publications, Inc.

    Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

    82767401 2018

    www.doverpublications.com/ixiapress

    CONTENTS

    Introduction

    ESSAYS

    A Message to Garcia

    Apologia

    The Boy from Missouri Valley

    Get Out or Get in Line

    Help Yourself by Helping the House

    Patience and Endurance

    One-Man Power

    Mental Attitude

    The Week-Day, Keep It Holy

    Initiative

    Your Other Self

    Time and Chance

    Pay As You Go

    Success Is in the Blood

    Above the Rabble

    HELPFUL HINTS FOR BUSINESS HELPERS

    CONTEMPLATIONS

    Sources

    INTRODUCTION

    Elbert Hubbard, salesman, businessman, philosopher, student of human nature, reformer, author, lecturer, publisher, and motivational thinker, was born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1856 and grew up in the nearby little town of Hudson. After some early work as a salesman, he eventually moved to New York State and founded the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, near Buffalo, in 1895, taking the name from Samuel and Thomas Roycroft, seventeenth-century British printers. Hubbard and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, died as passengers on the ill-fated British steamship Lusitania when it was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, in the second year of World War One. The Hubbards were two of 128 Americans who were lost on the Lusitania, among the 1,198 passengers and crew who drowned.

    Hubbard’s personal philosophy was well expressed in a 1910 pamphlet with a title no doubt designed to be slightly shocking, Jesus Was an Anarchist: I am an Anarchist. All good men are Anarchists. All cultured, kindly men, all gentlemen, all just men are Anarchists. Jesus was an Anarchist. A monarchist is one who believes a monarch should govern. A Plutocrat believes in the rule of the rich. A Democrat holds that the majority should dictate. An Aristocrat thinks only the wise should decide; while an Anarchist does not believe in government at all. No man who believes in force or violence is an Anarchist. The true Anarchist decries all influences save those of love and reason. Ideas are his only arms.

    To his amiable anarchism, Hubbard added the peaceful socialism of England’s William Morris, a role model for Hubbard as a thinker, writer, printer, and craftsman. In addition to producing fine printing, handsome furniture, and other kinds of crafts, The Roycrofters attracted many stands of the radicalism of their day: freethinkers, suffragists, and reformers of all kinds. The Roycroft creed was well expressed in this quotation from John Ruskin, which no doubt resonated with Morris as well: A belief in working with the head, hand, and heart and mixing enough play with the work so that every task is pleasurable and makes for health and happiness. To these ideas, Hubbard added a passionate belief in free enterprise and confidence in American know-how. He admired people who got things done. He derided, always with the warm humor and geniality which were his trademarks, those who couldn’t get out of their own way and be effective. In a 1915 obituary Hubbard wrote about a man who had overcome many obstacles in his life: He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade stand. This is the earliest verifiable, recorded use of the concept of the lemons-lemonade aphorism that in our day has become When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

    The little essay which became known as A Message to Garcia was first published without any title in the March 1899 issue of Hubbard’s ironically named periodical The Philistine, just one of the publications he wrote, edited, designed, printed, and mailed out to his subscribers from the Roycroft colony in East Aurora.

    In Hubbard’s version, in the days of mounting tension between the United States and Spain which would soon culminate in the Spanish-American War, President McKinley wanted to communicate directly with the Cuban insurgents, and one of McKinley’s military aides mentioned an Army man named Rowan who, said the aide, could make that happen. This was a good story, but it wasn’t true. President McKinley played no part in the actual events which created the Message to Garcia legend.

    In actual fact, in the days following the explosion of the American battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, American General Henry Clark Corbin gave permission for a subordinate to send spies to Cuba and Puerto Rico to gather information that might be valuable to them. First Lieutenant Andrew Summers Rowan was chosen for the assignment to Cuba. Rowan’s mission was to travel to Cuba, connect with the insurgent, General Calixto Garcia, in eastern Cuba, and remain there to gather information. Rowan left New York on April 9th posing as a civilian on a ship bound for Kingston, Jamaica. In Jamaica, with the help of the U.S. consul in Kingston, Rowan connected with Cuban insurgents who brought him ashore in Cuba on April 25th.

    After several days on horseback, Rowan met with Garcia at Bayamo on May 1st. There was no letter from President McKinley. Rowan’s actual mission was to stay in Cuba and gather information on the overall military situation but instead, for reasons which have never been explained, he told Garcia that he wanted to return to the United States as soon as possible with information about what Garcia might need from the American military. Garcia, it was believed, sensed an opportunity to help himself if he helped the American officer do what he said he wanted to do, and sent Rowan to the north coast of Cuba with some of his own staff. They traveled by horseback to Manatí Bay and set out for Florida in a small boat. A passing steamer picked them up and took them to Nassau, from where they sailed to Tampa, Florida, arriving on May 13th.

    In fact, Rowan, who probably didn’t really have the makings of a spy, had told an Associated Press correspondent named Elmer Roberts about his mission while he was in Jamaica on the way to Cuba. This was not an action designed to keep the mission secret. Once let loose, the news of the fabulous spy mission captivated an American press eager to promote such sensational stories and instantly made Rowan a hero back home while he was still in the Cuban underbrush. This was not what the officers who had sent

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