The point of Rowan’s mission was not to deliver a message but to collect intelligence. His exploit succeeded because Garcia ordered two Cuban officers to accompany the lieutenant back to the States: “General Garcia … had saved me months of useless toil and had given my country the means of obtaining as minute information of the existing situation in the island as that possessed by the Cubans themselves; certainly as good as the enemy had.”
In his memoir Serving the Republic, General Miles is clear about who had the goods. “Lieutenant Rowan had reached General Garcia in the eastern part of Cuba, and on his return was accompanied by two officers of General Garcia’s staff, Brig.-Gen. Enrique Collaza and Lieut-Col. Carlos Hernandez. From them I obtained information concerning the active measures of that very able Cuban General …”
Miles entrusted Collaza and Hernandez with his return communication to Garcia, requesting Cuban assistance in keeping Spanish troops away from landing beaches near Santiago. The intelligence provided by the Cuban officers—and the informed strategy it made available to Miles—were by far the most important results of Rowan’s mission and may well have ensured victory for Shafter’s V Corps.
Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia” ignores every factual lesson to be learned from Rowan’s mission. After all, the truth, he writes, is a story “I have no special desire now to tell in detail. The point that 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?’”
This is the insight that made a superseller of Hubbard’s “Message”: Lieutenant Rowan, at a meeting with President McKinley that never took place, did not take a nonexistent letter from the chief executive’s hand and immediately ask the great man, in backwoods grammar, how to find the addressee.
In Hubbard’s logic, this nonevent demonstrates that “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.’”
Hubbard’s essay is a plea for sympathy for
the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long, patient striving with “help” that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned … [In] our pitying let us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold in line dowdy indifference, slipshod imbecility, and the heartless ingratitude which, but for their enterprise, would be both hungry and homeless.
In 1899, the nation was still struggling to recover from speculation-driven Wall Street panics in 1893 and ’96 that spiked unemployment into double digits six years running. The tremendous labor actions of 1894, including violent confrontations in bituminous coal mining country and the epochal Pullman Strike, registered the distress of workingmen; the six thousand Washington-bound marchers in “Coxey’s Army” represented a tiny sampling of the unemployed.
Nevertheless, this “stuff about Garcia” appeared at just the right moment to flatter the nation’s fading blush of postwar triumphalism. Many Americans saw nothing paradoxical in a sermon that preached both unquestioning obedience to authority and rugged self-reliance.
Not surprisingly, the greatest fans of “A Message to Garcia” were businesses, governments, and armed forces hoping to inoculate their employees with a dose of ours-is-not-to-question-why.
Its first great patron was the New York Central Railroad, which reprinted it in half-million batches. During the first decade of the twentieth century, U.S. corporations purchased and distributed millions of copies. Prince Hilakoff, director of tsarist Russia’s railways, visiting the United States as the New York Central’s guest, got the Message right away; a translation was given to every Russian railway worker.
Then, as Hubbard recalled fourteen years later, in the foreword to yet another reprint, “Other countries … took it up, and from Russia it passed into Germany, France, Spain, Turkey, Hindustan and China. During the war between Russia and Japan, every Russian soldier who went to the front was given a copy of A Message to Garcia. The Japanese, finding the booklets in possession of the Russian prisoners, concluded it must be a good thing, and accordingly translated it into Japanese. And on an order of the Mikado, a copy was given to every man in the employ of the Japanese Government, soldier or civilian.”
Forty million copies were soon in circulation. Hubbard had tapped the mother lode of oligarchic morality. As he modestly noted, the “Message” was “said to [have] a larger circulation than any other literary venture has ever attained during the lifetime of an author, in all history.”
Over time, Hubbard—whose nephew, the science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, grew up to found Scientology—became a well-paid preacher of conformity to dollar-driven values. Many reprints of the “Message” are prefaced by a “Horse Sense” sermonette declaring, “If you work for a man, in Heaven’s name work for him. If he pays wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him, speak well of him, think well of him, and stand by him, and stand by the institution he represents.”
Though the “Message” made Hubbard famous, it did little or nothing for the career of Andrew Summers Rowan. His liaison with Garcia was a minor story eclipsed by much bigger news. By the time Rowan returned to Washington on May 14, the United States was in the grip of Deweymania, an obsession made all the more powerful for Dewey’s obscurity and absence; with a hero so unknown and far away, the press could indulge in weeks of epic puffing without fear of factual contradiction. It was weeks before the papers felt the need for another hero, and by then Rowan was old news.
Twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Hobson, U.S.N., became America’s next idol by scuttling the collier Merrimac under the guns of Morro Castle on the night of June 2. Dewey’s great limitation as a hero was his age, which made him a mighty father figure but not a heartthrob. Hobson answered that pressing home-front need, and his capture by the Spaniards not only excited tender concern but also put him safely incommunicado for the duration of the Santiago campaign, allowing the press to chisel its own marble Hobson just as enthusiastically as it had inflated its own Dewey.
And then came Teddy Roosevelt’s uphill apotheosis.
In comparison to these celebrity bonfires, Rowan enjoyed only a brief, Warholian glow.
His reward for the Garcia mission was the esteem of General Miles. This was expressed in effusive praise—“Lieutenant Rowan performed an act of heroism and cool daring that has rarely been excelled in the annals of warfare”—and Miles’s recommendations that Rowan be promoted to lieutenant colonel and given command of the Sixth U.S. Volunteers.
The Sixth was an “immune” regiment of black soldiers recruited in Kentucky and Tennessee and presumed, on the basis of prevailing racial theory, to be unaffected by yellow fever and other tropical diseases that destroyed white men. The “immune” concept proved to be just another racist delusion; the nine-hundred-man regiment served in Puerto Rico, a relatively healthy post, from October 1898 to February 1899, suffering no combat casualties but losing thirteen men to disease. Lieutenant Colonel Rowan spent most of the rest of the war on special missions for the Army, including a two-thousand-mile reconnaissance of Cuba’s road net, with an eye to the efficient movement of American troops.
Not, as he told the New York Times on his return, that he thought there’d be any need for U.S. soldiers to fight in Cuba again:
I don’t believe a single Cuban has disarmed, not even in the Santiago district, but I do not believe there will ever be a serious disagreement between the Cubans and this country … I heard nothing but gratitude expressed by the people for the part we played in gaining their freedom. All seem to realize that sooner or later their country will become a part of the United States … but they want to be free and try their hand at self-government for
a limited period from a mere sentimental standpoint.
As the war ended, so did Rowan’s fame. There was a spate of Medal of Honor talk in 1900, but nothing came of it, and Rowan slipped into an obscurity that lasted to his death in 1943.
Elbert Hubbard was a year younger than Rowan but died almost thirty years earlier. In 1915, Hubbard and his wife, Alice, sailed to Europe on a peace crusade. They drowned when their passenger liner, the Lusitania, was sunk by a German torpedo on May 7. The Lusitania atrocity helped push the United States into a fight that gave Hubbard’s essay unbelievable ink: Every U.S. sailor and Marine in World War I got a government-issued copy of the “Message.”
Corporate enthusiasm for the essay redoubled in the economically turbulent 1920s and ’30s. The notion of the persuasive power of “Message” was still so strong in 1941 that a copy was provided for every world War II sailor and Marine. “A Message to Garcia” was a standard recitation text in schools across the country. Reprints eventually numbered in the hundreds of millions.
But did Hubbard’s “Message” really get through?
The “Message” didn’t seem to buck up Russian troops in 1904–1905, or prevent Russian railway workers from forming soviets in 1918. Early- and mid-twentieth-century Americans questioned corporate authority’s wisdom with unprecedented fervor and success, especially after the laissez-faire cataclysm of the Great Depression. They voted for FDR, enabling Wall Street oversight, banking insurance, Social Security, and the GI Bill, bringing on the country’s most unionized, best compensated, and—not at all coincidentally—most prosperous era.
Meanwhile, Hubbard’s title became a bromide and then a punch line, joining a long line of ironic American mantras that has since stretched to include “Prosperity is just around the corner,” “I am not a crook,” “It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is,” and “Mission accomplished.” Thanks to relentless reprints, Hubbard’s unintentional joke had a long half-life: When a World War II Marine suffering from dysentery rushed away into the bushes, someone was likely to crack, “He’s got a message for Garcia.”
General Shafter certainly knew what he owed to Calixto Garcia, Máximo Gómez, and Cuban troops. He chose Gómez’s strategy for landing east of Santiago, and then relied on Garcia’s forces to clear the landing sites at Daiquiri and Siboney. Cubans scouted for the allies and fought alongside American troops. Most importantly, Spanish troops who might have reinforced Santiago were held back by Garcia’s men.
One Spanish column did get through, but not for want of Cuban resistance. A band of six hundred mambises harassed a thirty-seven-hundred-man Spanish force so effectively that it took five days to complete a ninety-mile march from Manzanillo. During those five days, the allies won their close-call victories at San Juan Hill and El Caney. (Larger Cuban units successfully blocked the arrival of nearly ten thousand Spaniards from Holguin and thousands more from Guantánamo; Garcia had been prevented from reinforcing his Manzanillo blocking force by Shafter’s direct order.)
The mambises had done all this and more, including transporting supplies and digging trenches and gun emplacements for U.S. troops. Yet on July 17, as Garcia wrote Shafter, “Santiago surrendered to the American army, and news of that important event was given to me by persons entirely foreign to your staff. I have not been honored with a single word from yourself informing me about the negotiations for peace or the terms of capitulation.” No Cuban had been invited to sign the armistice under the ceiba tree. “The ceremony of surrender and taking possession of the city by yourself took place, and I only learned of these events by public reports.”
Not only were Cuban allies not included in negotiations or invited to the surrender ceremony; Spanish officials, “the same Spanish authorities that for three years I have fought as enemies of Cuban independence,” had been left in power, while the Cuban Army was forbidden to enter the city it had helped conquer.
This insult was the climax of a policy of escalating humiliations and exclusions. From the start of the campaign, Shafter had declined Garcia’s offer of command over Cuban forces; the norteamericano was clearly under orders not to do anything that would imply official recognition of the Cuban government-in-arms. Nevertheless, Shafter made requests that Garcia treated as orders, and many U.S. officers arrogantly bossed Cuban troops about, assuming a disdainful authority in the country they’d come to “save.”
If anything could have been more galling to Cuban soldiers than being locked out of Santiago, it would have been the sudden apprehension that they might be cheated of independence. Shafter had declared Santiago—and, by extension, anyplace occupied by U.S. troops—a “part of the Union,” to be ruled by fiat for as long as the U.S. government deemed necessary.
Of course, this concept contradicted the ideal of Cuba libre, the war’s original justification. It was a quest that many U.S. officers—and, more to the political point, many reporters in the expedition’s boisterous press corps and their millions of readers—still believed in. But the McKinley administration had already decided to take and keep the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico outright, and to assert as much control over Cuba as the Teller Amendment would allow—and with the U.S. Army already in possession of Cuba’s second city and a U.S. fleet blockading the entire island, that was a great deal of control.
How to justify such a takeover to the American public? Over the coming weeks, the administration and its imperialist allies in Congress and the press would perfect the proposition that Cuba—so long represented in editorial cartoons as a dusky maid in danger of “outrage” by leering Spanish dons—now needed Uncle Sam’s protection from … Cubans. In fact, she must be shielded from the degenerate cruelty of the very mambises who had been fighting for years to free her.
Years of dispatches and drawings from correspondents covering the Cuban rebellion had celebrated the mambises’ ragged, barefoot defiance. Now that same poverty was depicted as dirty and vicious, and the Cuban volunteers who had tended, in previous years’ illustrations, to look rather Castilian, suddenly darkened several shades. The heroic mambi was portrayed as an ignorant, thieving ex-slave incapable of controlling his lusts—or his country.
“There are not freemen here to whom we could deliver this marvelous island,” wrote Stanhope Sams, a New York Times correspondent with Shafter at Santiago. “We have fought for a spectral republic … If we are to save Cuba, we must hold it. If we leave it to the Cubans, we give it over to a reign of terror—to the machete and the torch, to insurrection and assassination.”
This imaginary issue was taken up by other writers, including a virulently anti-Cuban Associated Press reporter who claimed, after interviewing Shafter, that the Cuban Army’s chagrin at being excluded from Santiago had nothing to do with patriotism, honor, or insult: “[They] had confidently counted upon having Santiago turned over to them to loot and plunder, as they had in succession sacked Daiquiri, Siboney and El Caney.” None of these towns had been sacked—all were, in fact, occupied by U.S. troops—but such lies were sold to millions of American readers.
Presumably Shafter knew the truth—though there’s no telling how much his picture of the situation was dependent on subordinates increasingly disenchanted with their Cuban allies.
From the moment they’d landed at Siboney and Daiquiri, U.S. troops had been experiencing a disconnect between the dreamscape of the quest they’d been sent on—a tropical paradise inhabited by noble peasant soldiers and shapely damsels in distress—and the wartime desperation of Oriente Province’s poor, black populace.
A sympathetic British reporter, John Black Atkins of the Manchester Guardian, observed that most norteamericanos were at first overwhelmed and then quickly disgusted by the Cubans’ unabashed need. “[The] Cuban insurgent regarded every American as a kind of charitable institution, and expected him to disgorge on every occasion.” It seemed that every time a U.S. soldier turned around, there would be another nearly naked Cuban soldier “pointing to the American’s shirt, coat, or trouser
s, and then pointing to himself, meaning that he desired a transfer of property.”
Atkins reported that Cuban “cruelty” also offended sentimental Yankees, and told the story of a Siboney bull that Cuban soldiers wouldn’t let their U.S. allies shoot. Instead, the mambises “stabbed and stabbed with their knives until it fell, and the incident sank more deeply than one would have supposed into the minds of the [U.S.] soldiers.” Even Atkins, who did his best to understand both sides, attributes this slaughtering method to “cruelty,” rather than the habit of troops trained not to waste hard-to-get bullets on beasts. The U.S. troops, he writes, decided that the Cubans, in their apparent brutality, were “‘no better than the Spaniards.’ And it escaped the notice of nearly all, that mean and savage ways were to be expected of those who had long been treated with meanness and savagery.”
Given the desperation not only of hundreds of Cuban troops but also of thousands of Cuban refugees—and the American military penchant for piling up gear and supplies—thievery was inevitable, and did nothing to improve first impressions. Reporting for the New York World, Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage, wrote that the Cubans “would not fight, but stayed in the rear to eat up rations and steal the belongings of American soldiers … Both officers and privates have the most lively contempt for the Cubans. They despise them.” But even if poverty, racism, different cultures, and different languages hadn’t separated them, the U.S. and Cuban armies were bound to be problematical allies. They were, in essence, armies of two completely different types.
Cuba’s army was an irregular resistance movement, living off the land and fighting with minimal technology and supply, relying as much on the machete as on costly bullets, and more on ambush and other live-to-fight-another-day tactics than on costly frontal assaults.
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