Essay: A Message to Garcia

Overview
Elbert Hubbard’s 1899 essay A Message to Garcia became a brisk parable about personal initiative at the dawn of the American century. Published in the March issue of The Philistine, the short piece uses a wartime anecdote from the Spanish-American War to praise the rare worker who acts without dithering, excuses, or supervision. Its premise is simple: society advances because a few people can be trusted to take a task, shoulder it, and finish it. Hubbard’s lean narrative and sermonlike exhortations made the essay one of the most reprinted works of its era, crossing from literature into managerial folklore.

The Anecdote
The essay centers on First Lieutenant Andrew S. Rowan, sent to make contact with General Calixto García, leader of the Cuban insurgency in 1898. Hubbard frames the mission starkly: President McKinley needs to reach García; Rowan accepts the charge without questions and disappears into the Cuban interior. The details of travel scarcely matter to Hubbard; what matters is Rowan’s implicit “I will.” He navigates dangers, finds García, and accomplishes the mission. The episode stands as emblem and proof: a single dependable person, acting without handholding, can cut through uncertainty faster than committees or instructions.

Purpose and Themes
Hubbard’s target is the everyday friction of work, employees who stall, demand minute directions, or hunt for alibis. He argues that the indispensable trait in any organization is the capacity to execute: to take responsibility, use judgment, and deliver results. The phrase “carry a message to Garcia” becomes shorthand for initiative joined to fidelity. Beneath the anecdote lies a broader social claim. Commerce, the professions, and the military all rely on a minority who can be trusted to act when the lines go down and the plan is unclear. Hubbard associates this ethic with character: honesty, industry, and self-reliance are not ornamental but operational virtues.

Style and Tone
The prose is clipped, exhortative, and peppered with rhetorical questions. Hubbard mixes praise and scold, contrasting Rowan’s tacit competence with clerks, applicants, and soldiers who supposedly cannot be left alone with a task. He avoids technical history in favor of moral clarity. The result reads like a shop-floor sermon: brisk imperatives, vivid examples, and aphoristic certainty. The voice reflects turn-of-the-century faith in efficiency and personal grit, values congenial to industrial managers and military leaders who sought dependable execution over debate.

Impact and Legacy
The essay leapt beyond its magazine origins. It was reprinted as a pamphlet by Hubbard’s Roycroft press and widely circulated in businesses, schools, and the armed forces. Managers adopted it as a hiring and training touchstone; officers used it to model initiative under mission command. It was translated into multiple languages and reportedly distributed in large numbers abroad. In American culture, “message to Garcia” entered the idiom as a praise-word for the colleague who simply gets things done, especially under ambiguous conditions.

Caveats and Critique
Later accounts complicate the legend. Rowan worked under the Army’s Military Information Division rather than by direct presidential order; he traveled with guides and intermediaries, and the mission’s particulars differ from Hubbard’s spare tableau. Critics also challenge the essay’s managerial moral: unquestioning obedience can shade into servility, and good execution often requires clarifying questions, feedback, and ethical judgment. Yet the core appeal endures because the problem Hubbard names persists. Organizations still need people who can translate intent into action. As a result, A Message to Garcia survives less as history than as a compact creed about trust, responsibility, and the power of an unhesitating “I will.”