The Cowboy Philosopher

He was King of All Media—decades before the title was coined. To
columnist Damon Runyon, he was America’s “most complete human document”;
to critic H. L. Mencken, alluding to Rogers’ national influence, “the
most dangerous man alive.” Youngest of eight children, humorist William
Penn Adair Rogers was born on November 4, 1879, on a ranch outside the
settlement of Oologah, near the town of Claremore, Indian Territory, in
present-day Oklahoma. His father, Clement Vann Rogers, had fought for
the Confederacy under Cherokee cavalry general Stand Watie and later
took up ranching, rising to local prominence as a cattleman, banker,
district judge, and legislative delegate to the state constitutional
convention. His mother, Mary Schrimsher Rogers, whom the boy was said to
take after, was the daughter of a Cherokee family that had , migrated
west into the Territory. Tribal rolls list Will as being one-quarter
Cherokee, and although his ancestry was predominantly European,
throughout life he would identify more closely with his Native-American
forebears.“My ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower,” he later
quipped, “but they met the boat.” Ranch life provided the boy a key to
fame and fortune: the lariat. Early lessons were provided by his
father’s top hand, freed slave Dan Walker, with tree stumps and fence
posts (and, occasionally, his mother’s turkeys) standing in for
livestock. In 1893, on a trip with his father to Chicago’s Columbian
Exposition, he was inspired by the great Mexican roper Vicente Oropeza,
performing in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West extravaganza. After the
death of his mother when he was ten, Will was sent to—and, for
disciplinary reasons, withdrawn from—a series of schools in Oklahoma
Territory and Missouri. He was a restless young cowboy, sometimes at
odds with his authoritarian father. In 1898, with money borrowed from a
sister, he decamped from Missouri’s Kemper Military School to find work
as a ranch hand in Texas and attempting unsuccessfully, in that year of
the Spanish War, to enlist, underaged, with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough
Riders. He returned to Oologah, where his father made him ranch foreman
and staked him his own land and cattle. In 1902, Will sold his holdings
and sailed with a friend to Argentina. Funds quickly dissipated,
however, and, eager to see something of the world, he worked his way on
a cattle boat to South Africa. After stint breaking horses for the
British Army in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War, he found work as “The
Cherokee Kid: Fancy Lasso Artist and Rough Rider,” with Texas Jack’s
Wild West Show. A jump to the Wirth Brothers Circus took him to New
Zealand and Australia, where he continued to hone his roping skills,
before returning to the States in 1904. Almost incidentally, the cowboy
had become a journalist: amusing letters to his family, reporting on his
antipodean adventures, were forwarded by his sister for printing in "The
Claremore Progress." Rogers’ roping had risen to world-class level,
earning him a spot with Oklahoman Colonel Zack Mulhall’s Wild West Show
(featuring the impresario’s trick-riding daughter, Lucille, for whom the
term “cowgirl” was coined by the press). The troupe, including Rogers’
friend, future silent-film cowboy Tom Mix, appeared at the St. Louis
World’s Fair, then at Madison Square Garden, where Rogers made headlines
by roping a frantic steer that had bolted into the stands. He left the
show to form his own vaudeville act, touring England and Europe in 1906
and advancing steadily to become a top-liner. In 1908, after a
desultory, eight-year courtship of correspondence and occasional
meetings, he married Betty Blake of Rogers, Arkansas, with whom he
raised four children: Will, Jr. (born 1911), Mary (1913), James (1915),
and Freddie (1917; lost to diphtheria in 1920). Onstage, with Betty’s
encouragement, he increasingly interspersed his rope tricks with
humorous, topical commentary: an innovation that won him a place in
Broadway-showman Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies in 1916. With America’s
entry into the Great War came speaking engagements at important banquets
and fundraisers, throwing Rogers in company with senators, congressmen,
corporate leaders, film stars, and millionaires. Grinning, fiddling with
his lariat, “All I know is what I read in the papers,” he would begin,
regaling (and frequently ribbing) roomfuls of the nation’s elite. And
the elite loved it. Rogers’ film career began in 1918 as the title
character in Samuel Goldwyn’s "Laughing Bill Hyde." In 1919, urged by
his friends Eddie Cantor and W. C. Fields (who, like Rogers, turned his
phenomenal dexterity, as a juggler, into a successful stage, radio, and
film career), Will, Betty, and the children moved to Hollywood, where
Rogers would star in fifty silent films and twenty-one talkies,
becoming, for a time, Fox studio’s highest-paid performer. Corporate
greed, international diplomacy, the stock market, crime, movies,
advertising, Prohibition: all were grist for the Rogers humor mill—his
articles readily adaptable for book compilation, beginning with "The
Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference" and "The Cowboy Philosopher
on Prohibition" (1919), and "The Illiterate Digest" (1923). In 1922 he
made his first radio address, from Pittsburgh—first step toward future
network broadcasts to millions of Americans—and in December began a
weekly column in "The New York Times" that won immediate popularity and
wide syndication. Contracted by "The Saturday Evening Post," he filed
articles from Europe (compiled into "Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to
His President" in 1926), then from the Soviet Union ("There Is Not a
Bathing Suit in Russia and other Bare Facts," published the following
year). At its peak, his daily Will Rogers Says column, begun in 1926,
appeared in more than 500 newspapers nationwide. As Champion of the
Little Guy and confidant of presidents, film stars, sports heroes, and
royalty, the Oklahoman had, by 1935, become the best-known American
humorist since Mark Twain.

Among Rogers’ famous friends Wiley Post, record-setting long-distance
aviator and first solo pilot to circle the globe. Favoring planes to
trains whenever possible (by 1935, the humorist had logged an estimated
500,000 passenger miles), Rogers eagerly accepted Post’s invitation to
accompany him on a survey of a potential airmail-and-passenger route
from the West Coast to Siberia. The pair set out from Seattle in early
August in Post’s modified, single-engine Lockheed Orion-Explorer, a
hybrid aircraft, retrofitted, against Lockheed’s recommendations, with
oversized pontoons, giant gas tanks, and overladen with hunting and
fishing gear. On August 15, out of trim and seriously nose heavy, the
machine stalled on takeoff from Walakpi, Alaska, sixteen miles from
Barrow, and crashed into the river. Both men died instantly. An Inuit
eyewitness, Clair Okpeaha, ran most of the way to Barrow with the news,
where an Army Signal Corps operator relayed the report to a shocked,
worldwide public. Never before had the death of a private citizen
grieved so many Americans.

The humor of Will Rogers is rooted in the aw-shucks, down-home tradition
of 19th-century American writers such as Seba Smith (“Jack Downing”),
Charles Farrar Browne (“Artemus Ward”), David R. Locke (“Pertroleum V.
Nasby”), and Mark Twain: topical commentary, delivered in Rogers’ case
entirely without rancor and received by millions through a media network
of stage, print, radio, and film his predecessors would have envied.
Uncannily resonant with today’s headlines, the homespun humor of Will
Rogers weaves a resilient thread in the fabric of our culture. His
legacy lives on in more than fifty biographies; in the name of countless
schools, airports, theaters, shopping centers, public parks, and
philanthropies; on Broadway (where "The Will Rogers Follies" swept the
Tony Awards in 1991); and in the memories of millions of visitors to the
Will Rogers Memorial—his final resting place—in Claremore, Oklahoma.
Through the giddy years of Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties—even in
the Dust-Bowl depths of the Great Depression—Will Rogers’ homey,
commonsense wisdom and Everyman’s take on the American scene struck a
chord that echoes to this day. —Reba Neighbors Collins