A Message to Garcia

     Today, we mainly talked about A Message to Garcia, which was written by Elbert Hubbard in the March 1899 issue of the Philistine  It went "viral" and everyone wanted to read it who heard about it, so they started printing out pamphlets with the story inside.  There were 40 million copies by 1913 and 80 million copies by 1936.
     
      A Message to Garcia is set during the Spanish-American War.  Garcia was in Cuba fighting off the insurgents.  William McKinley, who was president at the time, wanted to get a letter to Garcia, so he asked a messenger named Rowan.  Rowan was given the task to get the letter to Garcia, and he did it with no questions asked, which was different.  Most people ask questions or are too lazy to do the task.  

     ''On your life he will not.  He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:
Who was he?
Which encyclopedia?
Where is the encyclopedia?
Was I hired for that?
Don't you mean Bismarck?
What's the matter with Charlie doing it?
Is he dead?
Is there any hurry?
Shall I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?
What do you want to know for?
I wasn't hired for that anyway!"

     Basically, Hubbard was ranting about the laziness of some people and he's saying that there needs to be more Rowan's in the world.