Will Rogers: Cowboy Speaking to a Nation--
a preview essay for “Will Rogers was
not
just a cowboy. . .”
![Labels never do justice to real people. So, it needs to be said right off that Will Rogers was not just a cowboy, not simply a vaudevillian or Follies or movie star, not simply a newspaper columnist or radio humorist, not just a friend of “big men” in industry and politics, not simply a common rube who “joked about all the prominent men” of his time. He was all of these, and he was more. Rogers’ own billings included mixed references like “cowboy philosopher” and “poet lariat.” Clearly, Will was no academic philosopher or poet, but neither was he only an “Indian cowboy” or a “roping fool.” Even so, he did embody several of the positive characteristics associated with the true cowboy: respect for the land and its creatures, a longing for freedom and adventure, a willingness to help the less fortunate.
The complexity of Will Rogers may help to explain the American West in which he grew up. Like many “white” men born in a West working harder to deny than embrace its Native traditions, Rogers could boast that his parents were part Indian; what made him a little unusual was that he actually did boast of it: “My father was a cowman,” he said, but he was also “one-eighth Cherokee Indian,” and “my mother was a quarter-blood Cherokee” (Day 5). Even in childhood he must have been aware of the tension. His first school, he said, “was all Indian kids . . . and I . . . had just enough white in me to make my honesty questionable” (6). But when Will was first attracted to Betty Blake, whom he would marry, he found his access to her blocked in part by the prejudice of her socially superior white friends. In his later public life, Will could have “passed” for white but happily embraced his Indian heritage as a tie to other prominent Indian men and women. Indeed, Will’s pride in his inheritance covers a range of the elements that shaped Oklahoma.
His father, Clem Rogers, had come to Indian Territory before the Civil War to raise and sell cattle, and he had settled where he did to get free access to the natural grass on Cherokee tribal lands. A descendent of the “Old Settlers” among the Cherokee, Clem was no simpleton Westerner either. Before his death in 1910, he had driven cattle from Texas to Missouri, had fought in the Civil War, run a successful ranch operation, organized and operated a bank, served on the Dawes Commission, and been an active player in the politics of the emerging state of Oklahoma. As most Oklahomans know, Rogers County was named for Clem, not for Will.
Will’s mother, Mary America Schrimsher Rogers, descended from Cherokees who traveled the Trail of Tears, a fact that later scholars like Angie Debo knew would have separated her socially from the Old Settlers. She had a better formal education than Clem, embraced music and dance, and was religiously devout. Her death in 1890 was a blow to young Will. Though he never spoke much about her, he said that some claimed he got his sense of humor from her, but that what he remembered was not her humor but her “love and understanding of me” (Radio Broadcasts 28).
Will’s tie to the West wasn’t just Native inheritance. It was also cowboy culture. When he fled Kemper Institute midterm at age eighteen and “quit education forever,” it was to Texas and a ranch job that he ran. Maybe he sought the free life of the mythical cowboy. What he found was work on a ranch near Higgins, in the panhandle, and he spent what he later recalled as happy times trailing cattle headed for a rail connection in Kansas.
In fact, during Will’s several months as a Texas cowboy in 1898, he “was already participating in something of an anachronism” (Yagoda 31). The range cattle industry was fast coming to an end. Charles Goodnight, one of the cattle drive era’s legendary figures, had been settled into ranching for twenty years, had divided and sold off most of the JA Ranch, and was operating a much smaller place in the eastern panhandle (Lamar 440). But if the mythical West was quickly passing from the scene, Will was nevertheless profoundly moved by its character. He recalled his cowboy experiences as an idyll to the end of his life, and he longed to buy and retire to a ranch of his own. No surprise that one of his favorite books was Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian. Its portrayal of strong figures in an eroding wilderness surely seemed more like memory than fiction to Will.
Part of the era’s change was America’s growing awareness of its place in the world. The Spanish-American War began while Will was in Texas, and he was attracted to its prospect of adventure. It is not clear if he actually saw or met Theodore Roosevelt on his trip to Amarillo recruiting rough riders, but Will did try to enlist, perhaps supposing that his military training at Kemper would give him an advantage. If it did, it wasn’t enough to overcome his youth; Will was turned down, and he continued his cowboy life for a while longer (Ketchum 44).
Will’s own international adventure began when he persuaded a friend to go with him in search of another mythic wilderness, this one in South America. After a year or so managing Clem’s cattle operation back home on the Dog Iron ranch, Will set off for Argentina, by way of New York and London. What he found was another already disappearing frontier land. From Argentina, he went to South Africa, and from there to Australia. By the time he returned to the U.S. in the spring of 1904, Will had spun and thrown ropes around much of the world in wild west shows and circuses. As the “Cherokee Kid” and “America’s Champion Mexican Cowboy,” he had set himself on a path to a life in show business.
From wild west shows to vaudeville to the sophisticated Ziegfeld Follies, Will’s star rose steadily. Spinning ropes and telling gags based on “what I read in the papers,” he entertained audiences wherever he went, and he traveled often. But his “star roping performance,” he said, was the “day I roped Betty” (Ketchum 121). They had met in Oolagah before he left for Argentina, but she resisted wedding bells until 1908. Perhaps she thought to rein him in and settle in Oklahoma, but Betty followed Will to New York, became his advisor and manager as well as his wife and best friend. She bore his four children there and kept the home while he performed on stage and later on screen.
The family moved to California in 1919. The movie industry was staking its claim in the West, and Will had just signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn. His success in New York had outstripped even his own dreams, but the chance to go up with the new medium was too strong to deny. Indeed, the next few years would prove a dizzying maze of opportunities and contracts, engagements and journeys. Movies, radio, newspapers, the stage--each medium seemed to want a part of Will Rogers--and he can hardly be blamed for being ambitious.
For the most part, he was a success in this new world of entertainment, but there were disappointments. Goldwyn didn’t renew the movie contract when it expired in 1921. That spurred Will to produce his own films--a mistaken calculation that left him deeper in debt than he had ever been and required him to return to New York and work for Ziegfeld for parts of the next several years. The death of their youngest child, Fred, in 1920 was stunning. Will had always counted himself the “luckiest man in the world,” but this loss proved him vulnerable. He worked hard to overcome the financial reversal, and he soon repaired that damage, but the personal grief he suppressed, mostly, as he had done with previous losses of family and friends.
Perhaps there was always a conscious distinction between Will Rogers the man and the performer his family often referred to as “WR”; such complexity and separation of identities seems utterly sensible. But Will’s public recognized little difference between the man and his image, his words, his voice--and that public grew at an astounding rate after the early 1920s. From 1922 to the end of his life, his weekly newspaper columns (and Daily Telegrams, too, after 1927) were widely published and enthusiastically read; Will’s take on politics and personalities and places all across the United States and beyond served as the common man’s window on the world. Most of Will’s movie roles, especially after the transition to what he called the “audibles,” were merely Will playing himself in the guise of a character, but the public loved the characters and put Will atop the popularity charts. On his weekly radio show, the droll humorist mixed social and economic and political commentary and gags; though the programs were not improvisation, Will’s remarks often had to be punctuated by an on air alarm clock that became yet another gag.
“WR” made Rogers a wealthy man. If he came to feel “at ease” among the nation’s leaders--its presidents and senators and congressmen, business tycoons and entertainment personalities--perhaps it was because he understood their successes. Yet the genius and perhaps the honest-to-goodness truth of Will Rogers lay not in his associations with or his jokes about the prominent men of his time so much as it lay in his ability to understand and voice the concerns of the common man all over the country, in good times and in bad times.
The foolishness of politicians and pretensions of show business folks were easy targets for him, but he endeared himself more to the public by his folksy movie portrayals and his written reminders of the enduring human needs of the unfortunate—the unemployed, the victims of floods and earthquakes and hurricanes, the farmers displaced by drought and dust and low prices. He criss-crossed the country speaking to them and for them, raising and contributing money to help them, and they considered him to be one of them.
Perhaps it is not too foolish to suggest that, for Will Rogers, the nation in its crisis times was like one big Western cowboy camp in need of working together, of sharing the wealth and the responsibility. The complex of identities and successes and concerns were, he believed, the stuff of democratic society. “We will never have true civilization,” he said, “until we have learned to recognize the rights of others” (Weekly Articles, I, 153) It was a vision the nation had not achieved by the time Will died in 1935, nor yet today, but it still seems like a good one.
Bibliography
I. Primary
Charles Smallwood, Stephen Gragert, et al., eds. The Writings of Will Rogers, 21volumes.
Stillwater, OK: The Oklahoma State University Press, 1973-83. [including Weekly Articles,
Daily Telegrams, Radio Broadcasts, etc.].
The repository of Will Rogers’ papers is the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore OK.
II. Secondary
Joseph Carter. Never Met a Man I Didn’t Like: The Life and Writings of Will Rogers. New York:
Avon Books, 1991.
Donald Day, ed. The Autobiography of Will Rogers. Chicago: People’s Book Club, 1941.
Richard M. Ketchum. Will Rogers: His Life and Times. New York: American Heritage Publishing
Company, Inc., 1973.
Howard R. Lamar, ed. The New Encyclopedia of the American West. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998.
Betty Rogers. Will Rogers: His Wife’s Story. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941.
Ben Yagoda. Will Rogers: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. [For biographical information
about Will Rogers, Yagoda’s book, now published in paperback by the University of Oklahoma Press,
is the best single volume source available.]
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