For some reason, he had cut himself off from his own parents, presenting himself to the family he created as a patriarch without a past, original as Adam, the only authority on himself.
He had a problem with drink, the kind of thirst that came upon him only now and again, but with desperate urgency, removing him from home and job for a few days, during which he might or might not be seen alight in this bar or passed out in that alley; a problem of the kind that killed many men, but one he resolved on the day his Tin Lizzie struck a woman crossing a street to mail a letter. Whatever the circumstances, he was not charged with wrongdoing but felt responsible; the family whisper implied that he had been much less than sober. The woman was critically injured, and Thomas’s prayers for her recovery included a promise of absolute abstinence. She lived; he never drank again.
And then there was the story of his second wife’s medical emergency. In their late middle years, Leone became suddenly, desperately ill. While she dropped into a coma, the doctors explained to her husband that only an immediate operation could save her. The problem was that Leone—a woman I remember as still possessing, in miniaturized old age, the sparkling blue eyes of an attention-loving tease—had long since deserted the One True Faith for Mary Baker Eddy’s Church of Christ, Scientist, and was among those believers who insisted on referring all health problems, without exception, to prayer and divine intervention. To save her life, Thomas would either have to violate her most holy hopes or pray even harder than he had over the auto accident.
The anticlimactic story goes that he never gave the matter a second thought. The operation was a success. If Leone awoke angry, no one ever heard about it. And she never left Mrs. Eddy’s church.
When, despite all prayers, Papa in turn lay dying, he still seemed powerful just lying there, though perhaps this time the potency was all around him: in my great-grandmother’s tears, in the grown-up whispers with which we were reminded of Papa’s importance, ushered into his presence. More than likely, somebody else—maybe my father, the budding historian—told the San Juan Hill story once again, believing it or not, for Papa’s sake.
The fact that I remember it may be a measure of how urgently the story was told, on that occasion, as the grown-ups struggled to keep something of him by pressing Papa’s story upon us, his great-grandchildren. It says something, because the story itself can’t have meant much to me, at six years old. But I remembered those names, the story, and the day: You know, Papa O’Brien charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.
I remember the words, though I don’t remember who said them. And memory—or something both less and more honest—insists that a pair of flags were draped on the wall behind Papa’s headboard, in the space my family normally reserved for a crucifix. One was the Stars and Stripes, of course. I didn’t recognize the other, with its broad blocks of color and single, white star, but I understood it to be a relic of his war.
Perhaps there really were flags—though none of my siblings or cousins recall them. Or the big banners in my memory might have grown from something much smaller, some framed keepsake: a certificate from some veteran’s league, a patriotic newspaper poem, the sheet music to “That Starry Flag of Ours” or “Willie Has Gone to the War.” Then again, those flags may have been superimposed by lingering awe and a little more knowledge, grade-school research revising the visual truth in an unconscious act of childish homage.
In any case, the memory or imagining stuck. Years later, I learned that Papa’s mother-in-law—my great-great-grandmother—had been Teddy Roosevelt’s cook at Sagamore Hill, his Long Island, New York, estate. The fascination deepened. There’s no counting the hours I’ve spent reading up on Teddy, the Rough Riders, and the Maine, studying The West Point Atlas of American Wars, trying to imagine Papa’s moment in history, trying to picture young Thomas O’Brien among the buffalo soldiers and cowboy volunteers braving shellfire and bullets, assaulting Spanish entrenchments to win a doubtful day.
And now, having come this far in that study, this close to the Rough Riders’ Calvary, I faced nothing more than rush-hour automotive exhaust, but I wasn’t sure I could climb another quarter mile.
Still, I kept walking, because standing there was out of the question. I walked forward because turning around would have taken some thought, and my head hurt too much to argue with even the momentarily smog-dimmed impetus of Papa O’Brien and all those years’ curiosity. I copied the Cubans all around me, moving through the smog at a stolid pace, frowning but pushing through.
We passed the zoo gates and continued onto the hill’s broad shoulder, where the evening breeze was already in play. The road kept rising, and soon another gate to the right opened on an attraction unmentioned by my guidebook: El Parque de Paz, the Peace Park, with memorials to all those who once fought over the ridgetop ahead. I turned aside to visit the past, but my fellow pedestrians paced on into the steadily bettering air.
The Peace Park is more parking lot than parque, a long loop of asphalt in a rectangle of low bushes and palms uninviting enough to attract the occasional couple in need of a dead spot for serious necking. Their privacy is interrupted only by infrequent shortcutters walking to apartment blocks farther up San Juan Hill.
The park’s symbolic arbol de la paz—the modest ceiba tree under which American and Spanish officers signed their armistice on July 16, 1898—was felled by a storm some years back.
That leaves just one other prominent attraction: the monument to General Calixto Garcia.
Or, rather, to the general’s famous letter of July 17, 1898, one of the key documents of Cuban national identity. The monument’s series of rough, white stone slabs, standing seven to nine feet tall, bear a yard-high likeness of the general and several bronze “pages” lettered with Garcia’s protest to his American ally General William Shafter.
Garcia’s letter to Shafter is a historical touchstone as familiar to most Cubans as the Gettysburg Address is to many Americans: They can’t necessarily recite the whole thing, but they know what it means. They know that, like Lincoln’s brief, it’s the indispensable statement of a people’s experience of a war, of their aim in fighting it, and their hope for its outcome. Unfortunately, Garcia’s letter is also a testament to hope betrayed.
Until Philip S. Foner reprinted it in his iconoclastically titled two-volume 1972 work The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, the letter had vanished from U.S. history. Its omission was the result of a deliberate U.S. effort to write the Cubans out of the war—an effort so successful that Americans still call it “the Spanish-American War,” as if no Cuban ever fired a shot.
When U.S. troops landed at Daiquiri on June 22, 1898, the last of Cuba’s several wars for independence from Spain had been in devastating progress since February 1895. Never more than sixty thousand strong, the Liberation Army’s mambi rebels had nevertheless established control over most of the island, penning up nearly 250,000 demoralized Spanish regulars in a dozen cities.
With the acquisition of light artillery, Calixto Garcia Iniguez and other generals serving under the Liberation Army’s chief strategist, Dominican-born freedom fighter Máximo Gomez, had even taken several important provincial towns. They could not storm fortified capitals such as Havana and Santiago, but they could wear the Spanish down with hit-and-run tactics, seconding the assaults of disease, which killed ten Spaniards for every battle death. (When asked to name his best generals, Gomez replied, “June, July, and August,” the yellow-fever months.)
The rebels made ruthless use of economic warfare. Whatever the Spanish did not destroy to keep out of rebel hands, the mambises ruined to take the profit out of Spain’s imperial prize. After three years’ fighting, only 10 percent of the three million cattle that had made Cuba self-sufficient and export-rich in beef survived. Of 350 sugar mills, only forty remained operable. As the Spanish generals were willing to starve Cuba’s peasantry in concentration camps, so the rebels were willing to liquidate Cuba’s
wealth until even its most intransigent upper-class royalists would urge the mother country to let go.
Implacable idealists, Cuba’s freedom fighters were no less hard on themselves. Garcia, a fifty-eight-year-old veteran of decades of bush fighting, had led his underfed, poorly armed, but unstoppable mambi volunteers in years of uninterrupted campaigning. Self-brutalizing defiance was his trademark trait, even more closely associated with his name than a genius for guerrilla tactics and the canny use of spies.
As a twenty-three-year-old officer in the Ten Years’ War (1868–78), Garcia had led a small detachment’s desperate stand against encircling Spanish troops. Soon all Garcia’s men were dead or wounded, his situation hopeless. Rather than submit to capture, he put a .45-caliber pistol under his chin and pulled the trigger. The bullet exited his forehead but somehow failed to kill. His mother, informed of his capture, insisted that any man the Spaniards had taken alive could not be her son; when told about his suicide attempt, however, she claimed him proudly: “First dead, then captured!”
The wound gave Garcia an incomparably ferocious reputation, a lifetime of herculean headaches, and an iconic scar. The hole never entirely healed, and to the end of his life the general plugged it with small wads of cotton.
In this and other ways Garcia was, as the American adventurer and soldier Frederick Funston recalled, “a man of most striking appearance, being over six feet tall and rather heavy,” with “snow-white” hair and mustache. “His bearing was dignified, but he was one of the most approachable of men. He seldom smiled, and I never heard him laugh but once, and that was when on one occasion he fired every one of the six shots in his revolver at a jutea,” a racoon-sized Cuban rodent, “without disturbing its slumber.”
If Garcia’s sense of humor was, at best, grim, it was no wonder. “With him,” Funston wrote, “life had been one long tragedy of war and prison.”
William Rufus Shafter, the general to whom Garcia addressed his protest, was another brave and stubborn man. He just didn’t look the part.
Sixty-two years old in 1898, Michigan-born Shafter had been a soldier since leaving Prairie Seminary in 1861 to fight for the Union. At the Battle of Fair Oaks, Virginia, Lieutenant Shafter concealed his own painful wounds so he could stay with his men and fight another day. His courage won him a commendation, a brevet colonelcy, and, many years later, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Captured at Thompson’s Station, Tennessee, Shafter survived several months on starvation rations in Richmond’s fever-ridden Libby Prison. After a prisoner exchange, Shafter led a regiment of black troops in hard combat at the Battle of Nashville. He stayed in the postwar army as a lieutenant colonel, and again led black troops on frontier duty in Texas.
Despite accumulating tremendous weight, Shafter took the field for decades of Indian-fighting duty, chasing Comanches, Apaches, and other tribes across the southwestern states and into Mexico. Still, by the time he was picked (apparently for his lack of political ambition) to lead the invasion of Cuba, Shafter was a balloon of a man. Disembarking at Daiquiri, he weighed approximately three hundred pounds and was in no shape for active campaigning. He was soon laid low by the heat and an acute attack of gout, and during his twenty-seven days on-island was sometimes carried from tent to tent on a door.
One of Shafter’s subordinates wrote his wife that he found the gouty general sitting on a camp stool in dirty undress. “One foot was swathed in a dirty white cloth. His immense abdomen hung down, yes, actually hung down between his legs … He was not a pleasing object in figure or face.”
In fact, after the average Cuban soldier, Shafter was probably the public figure most ridiculed by the American press. He seems to have gotten on the correspondents’ bad side by refusing to pamper the vanity of celebrity journalist Richard Harding Davis.
At Daiquiri, Shafter forbade reporters from going ashore with the first troops. Davis protested that he was no mere correspondent, but “a descriptive writer.” The general, preoccupied by the knowledge that a handful of well-hidden Spaniards could slaughter boatloads of his men, said, “I do not care a damn what you are! I’ll treat all of you alike!” At that moment, another correspondent observed, “pencils began to be sharpened for General Shafter.”
In addition to the scorn directed at his physical grossness (“Avoirdupois Shafter” was a popular nickname), Shafter was written up as indecisive, incompetent, a poor disciplinarian, and a coward. The War of 1898 was the first American war to mobilize a vastly augmented telegraphy network and the spanking-new telephone—both feeding stories to the high-speed newspaper printing press—as well as high-speed photography and the motion-picture camera. Appearances—the media-packaged perception we call “image” today—were taking on unprecedented importance in politics and war. Poor Shafter was not a media-friendly general.
Yet it’s difficult to criticize any of his strategic decisions in this campaign. For starters, he declined Admiral Sampson’s plan to land his troops at the entrance to Santiago Bay and send them up a 230-foot cliff to assault Morro Castle. He took Cuban general in chief Máximo Gomez’s advice instead. Landing miles to the east, on beaches cleared of Spaniards by the mambises, Shafter’s troops marched overland to attack Santiago. The U.S. commander had no choice but to move as fast as possible, hoping to force a Spanish surrender before yellow fever and malaria destroyed his army. He made the best of absurdly antiquated equipment and led his undisciplined volunteers about as forcefully as they would allow themselves to be led. Though tempted to retreat after a near-disaster at San Juan Hill, he instead bluffed the Spanish commander with a surrender demand.
Over the course of the Santiago campaign, Shafter would be mocked, defied, and even betrayed by many of his own officers, but never by the Cubans.
Directed by his government, Garcia wrote on July 17, he had cooperated with the U.S. Army, “following the plans and obeying the orders of its commander. I have been until now one of your most faithful subordinates, honoring myself in carrying out your orders as far as my powers have allowed.”
And Shafter had every reason to respect those powers. The United States had placed great faith in Cuban intelligence for invasion planning, thus acknowledging the mambises’ mastery of their own terrain and appropriate tactics. In fact, President McKinley had ordered the War Department to dispatch an officer to seek General Garcia’s aid and advice.
McKinley’s directive was the subject of “A Message to Garcia,” the most famous and widely read business-motivational tract of all time. Three American generations and tens of millions of readers in thirty-seven other languages around the world knew this tract—by at least its title and a glance inside.
“A Message,” written in 1899 by popular philosopher Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915), is a brief essay of 1,487 words. Only about 172 of them could be said to have anything to do with West Pointer Lieutenant Andrew Rowan’s mission on his president’s behalf, requesting Cuban help for the coming invasion. Those first few paragraphs of Hubbard’s “Message” describe Rowan’s unhesitating—and, more to Hubbard’s point, unquestioning—embrace of his dangerous commission. Hubbard’s Rowan sees the job through, never complaining, never second-guessing, never doubting either his superiors or his duty. The rest of the essay compares Rowan’s attitude with that of lazy, complaining, unreliable employees who deservedly wind up in dead-end jobs—or out on the street.
Much of Hubbard’s “Message”—the most widely distributed account of the Spanish-American War ever published, and the only one many millions of people have ever read—is either hyperbolic blather, a fabrication, or both.
He erred in calling Garcia the insurgent’s commander in chief; that was Máximo Gómez.
Neither McKinley nor his military men were so naïve about the game of war as to wait until the day “[When] war broke out between Spain and the United States” to begin coordinating with the Cuban Army of Liberation. Rowan was dispatched on April 8, 1898, seventeen days before Congress declared war. He got the “go” signal i
n Jamaica on April 23, the deadline day of our ultimatum to Spain. He landed in Cuba the next morning—the day Spain declared war on the United States. The following day, when Congress declared war, Rowan was already well up in the Sierra Maestra.
The army’s commanding general, Major General Nelson A. Miles, had been crying out for information about Cuban and Spanish troop strengths, equipment, morale, and locations. Rowan was a veteran of the inevitable frontier postings who also had served in the Latin American intelligence section. He could speak Spanish and was fascinated by Cuba, which he had never visited but had studied in sufficient depth to coauthor an 1896 book, The Island of Cuba: A Descriptive and Historical Account of the “Great Antilla.” He also was an expert interpreter of topography, a skill he practiced as an avid mountain climber. Photographs show a round-headed, sharp-nosed fellow whose eyes glint with enthusiasm above a Clouseau mustache. While Hubbard’s introduction holds Rowan up as an example to youth, the soldier turned forty-one on the day he left Jamaica for his great adventure.
Finally, Rowan was not given a letter for Garcia to seal “in an oilskin pouch, strapped … over his heart.” Rowan received his instructions over lunch at the Army and Navy Club from his boss, Colonel Arthur Wagner, head of the Bureau of Military Intelligence. His errand was espionage; there was never a question of risking the mission by burdening him with anything so incriminating and insecure as an actual letter. In his brief memoir “How I Carried the Message to Garcia,” Rowan recalled Colonel Wagner’s instructions:
Written communication, further than is necessary to identify you, will be avoided. History has furnished us with the record of too many tragedies to warrant taking risks. Nathan Hale of the Continental Army, and Lieutenant Richey in the War with Mexico were both caught with dispatches; both were put to death and in the case of the latter the plans for Scott’s invasion of Vera Cruz were divulged to the enemy. There must be no failure on your part; there must be no errors made in this case.
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