Biography of Will Rogers

One of the most celebrated humorists and public figures of his day, Will Rogers (1879-1935) offered dry, whimsical commentaries on a plethora of political, social, and economic issues. His aphoristic, satirical observations, which he voiced in magazine articles and nationally syndicated columns, revealed the foibles and injustices of American society and reaffirmed the humorist's role as the voice of the "average" citizen.

Born in Oklahoma into a prosperous ranching family of mixed Cherokee descent, the young Rogers was an expert rider and lariat stuntman. He appeared in Wild West shows throughout the world, and in 1905 he made his vaudeville debut. In vaudeville he enlivened his performances with off-the-cuff lectures on the art of roping. Rogers's humorous chatter, nonchalant delivery, and southwestern drawl proved a popular combination, resulting in an invitation to join the Ziegfeld Follies. His wife suggested that he vary and supplement his material with comments on contemporary personages and events. Following this advice, he delighted audiences with his homely philosophy and pungent remarks, becoming a renowned humorist and interpreter of the news. Rogers's first two books, The Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference and The Cowboy Philosopher on Prohibition, were drawn from his Follies monologues. His subsequent works, such as The Illiterate Digest,There's Not a Bathing Suit in Russia, and Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President, were garnered from the newspaper columns "Will Rogers Says," "The Worst Story I Ever Heard," "The Daily Telegram," and also from his serialized correspondence from abroad appearing in The Saturday Evening Post. Rogers's death in a 1935 plane crash sent the entire country into mourning, prompting Carl Sandburg to reflect, "There is a curious parallel between Will Rogers and Abraham Lincoln. They were rare figures whom we could call beloved without embarrassment."

In his writings, as on the stage, Rogers affected a pose of ignorance, emphasizing his simple, rural background and lack of formal education. In reality he was a well-informed and thoughtful commentator, skilled in the use of the pun, metaphor, and hyperbole. By assuming the stance of a good-natured, naive country boy, Rogers was able to lampoon Congress, presidents, and foreign heads of state without occasioning offense or indignation. His The Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference, for example, mocks the diplomatic stratagems of the Versailles talks, while The Cowboy Philosopher on Prohibition examines the futility and hypocrisy of the Volstead Act. Rogers's shrewd, fundamentally pessimistic point of view has been compared to Mark Twain's, as has his profound distrust of the motives and objectives of those in power. Unlike Twain, however, he was incapable of sustaining an idea at length. Rogers's forte was the pithy sentence--the short but highly suggestive statement calculated to effect an immediate response. While some critics no longer consider his topical humor relevant and find his intentional misspellings and grammatical errors excessive, others value his writings for the insight they provide into the concerns and opinions of the United States during the tumultuous 1920s and 1930s. Damon Runyon offered this assessment: "Will Rogers was America's most complete human document. He reflected in many ways the heartbeat of America. In thought and manner of appearance and in his daily life he was probably our most typical native born, the closest living approach to what we like to call the true American."

Will Rogers was one of the best-loved celebrities of his era and one of the twentieth century's best-known humorists. Forty years after his death, collections of his essays and quips were still appearing in bookstores. His career spanned several media, from vaudeville to film to print journalism. Rogers's wit was delivered in the vernacular of the American Southwest, where he was raised, and in his printed works he strived to capture the flavor of the ungrammatical patois through atrocious spelling and inept punctuation. Poking fun at the perfidies of the power centers of New York City and Washington, DC, gained him a loyal following during the twenty-year span of his fame. Rogers posed as the cowboy philosopher, a rural American gaping wide-eyed at the shenanigans of a modern world run by business tycoons and dishonest politicians. In the years following World War I, life for the average American was changing sometimes too rapidly, and Rogers's humor served to diffuse the confusion felt by those struggling to keep up. Later, during the difficult years of the Great Depression, the dismal state of the world's richest country made politicians and business leaders an easy target for public scorn. Yet although Rogers's brand of populist humor appealed to the average citizen, he himself became a part of the establishment he mocked. He befriended members of Congress as well as business leaders, and at one time publicly supported the Fascist regime of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Rogers, as quoted by James Feibleman in In Praise of Comedy: A Study in Its Theory and Practice, once stated that he wished his epitaph to read, "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I have never met a man I didn't like."

Rogers was born in 1879 and raised in a large family on a ranch near Claremore, Oklahoma, which was then Indian Territory. He was one-quarter Cherokee and liked to boast that this heritage, combined with his early vocation as a cowboy, made him the epitome of the American citizen. His early adult years were spent intermittently working on the family ranch and traveling the world, and it was in South Africa that Rogers began his performing career with a wild west show as a trick rider. He later joined a circus, then worked back in the United States in another wild west show, which eventually led to a job in vaudeville. In this arena he spent over a decade as a minor performer, but in 1916 he joined the Ziegfield Follies, where his career blossomed. At his wife's suggestion, he began a running commentary on current events for the audience while he performed his rope tricks. Rogers had a keen eye for the more absurd elements of the day's stories and delivered his jokes with a dry wit and a pronounced Oklahoma drawl. Rogers's jests were told from the viewpoint of the uneducated, quasi-illiterate common citizen, but from a philosophical standpoint the humor was based on common-sense principles.

Three years later the first two collections of his humor appeared--The Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference and The Cowboy Philosopher on Prohibition, both published in 1919. It was his initial effort at humorous writing, and the events of the year provided him with a wealth of material widely-discussed by Americans at the time. World War I had ended and United States president Woodrow Wilson had engineered a controversial policy of self-determination that redrew the map of Europe. The Versailles Treaty, as Wilson's plan was known, effectively broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire and called for an international League of Nations, a precursor of the United Nations. The Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference poked fun at the political machinations of the Treaty and at the key diplomatic figures involved. The second volume aimed its barbs at the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1919, which outlawed the sale and consumption of alcohol.

To effectively capture the manner in which his quips were originally delivered, Rogers used the same colloquial expressions, sometimes combined with phonetic spelling, to transfer the homespun quality of his humor to the printed page. Much of these idiosyncracies were drawn from the argot of the Southwest and included such terms as "hokum," "sitting pretty," and "geezer." In an introductory essay to The Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference for a 1975 reprint of the book, Joseph A. Stout, Jr. and Peter C. Rollins opined that Rogers's first literary effort effectively captured the reasons behind his burgeoning popularity as a comic. "Rogers's humor helped close the gap between Americans and their leaders," they wrote. "Rogers's humor could entertain, but it served equally well to indict human selfishness; Rogers's employment of metaphors from everyday life brought abstract problems to the level of average comprehension."

Rogers and his wife and children moved to California, where he acted in a number of films, beginning with 1918's Laughing Bill Hyde. Rogers's two-year contract was terminated, however, when the studio changed hands. He then began his own film production company, but when the endeavor failed he was forced to return to New York and the Ziegfield Follies. To supplant his income, Rogers began a secondary career as an after-dinner speaker, and his oratory success led in 1922 to a syndicated weekly newspaper column. The first two years of these columns were collected in the 1924 book The Illiterate Digest. The columns showcase the pointed barbs Rogers aimed at government, the influence of big business, and the then-popular topic of world disarmament in the aftermath of World War I. He propagated a rather cynical yet pragmatic view of American politics and the collusion between elected government and the interests of powerful business leaders; this attitude dovetailed well with the era's marked decline of idealism among the populace. In one diatribe, Rogers reflected, "You wire the State or the Federal Government that your Cow or Hog is sick and they will send out experts from Washington and appropriate money.... You wire them that your Baby has the Diphtheria ... and see what they do"--a sentiment based on the tragedy he and his wife suffered when their youngest child, Freddie, died of the illness when they lived in California. In a New York Times Book Review critique of The Illiterate Digest, John Crawford praised Rogers's seemingly effortless style of trenchant humor, calling him "an expert satirist masquerading as a helpless, inoffensive, ineffectual zany."

Rogers next moved onto the international stage of political humor. The Saturday Evening Post sent him abroad and his columns from Europe were collected in Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President, published in 1926. The articles were published in the magazine in the form of fictional letters to then-president Calvin Coolidge and were full of humorous advice to the chief executive gleaned from Rogers's European observations. The next leg of the journey for the Post took Rogers to the Soviet Union, and his columns about this experience appeared in There's Not a Bathing Suit in Russia. This 1927 volume chronicles his trip to the world's first Communist government, a huge country that was then idealistically engaged in radically transforming itself. Rogers's populist attitude toward the admixture of government and big business had similarities to some of the Bolshevik tenets, and was directly antagonistic to others, but at the onset of the volume the humorist declared that he undertook the trip into Soviet Russia with an open mind. In his articles, Rogers poked as much fun at the bureaucracy and political machinations of the Soviet state as he had done at the American political institutions. He ruminates on the leadership of Joseph Stalin and the pervasive cold weather of the land, from whence the title remark was drawn. A New York Times Book Review contributor praised the volume for its quirky observations, noting, "it is a fine achievement to succeed simultaneously in two such difficult and mutually exclusive fields as humor and politics."

During this period Rogers further expanded into another media--the burgeoning field of radio. He gave his first broadcast over the airwaves in 1926 and by 1930 had his own weekly slot. Like each of his speeches and syndicated columns, the radio declamations centered around a topic of current interest and were filled with Rogers's anecdotes and wry commentary on the issue. One such popular target was Prohibition, of which he took a dim view. The newfangled forum served to increase his audience and his fame, and by the end of the 1920s Rogers was using his position in the spotlight to campaign for humanitarian causes. During devastating flooding along the Mississippi in 1927, he visited the ravaged areas, gave special performances and donated the proceeds to flood victims, and testified before Congress advocating increased disaster aid to the area. Rogers also won audiences on Broadway with his stage appearances in such shows as 1928's "Three Cheers." During the presidential race of the same year he was a national political commentator and found ample news items about the campaign through which to lampoon the electoral process. Rogers also returned to the movies and began appearing in newly-developed talking films that better utilized his slang-based humor. In 1929 he underwent a gallbladder operation and wrote about his experiences in Ether and Me, published the same year.

The year 1929 had severe repercussions on the American frame of mind--in October the stock market crashed and the country was plunged into a deep economic depression, putting millions out of work. Rogers continued in his role as the foremost humorist of the nation's "little people" in his radio broadcasts and journalistic essays. In one piece, quoted by E. Paul Alworth in Will Rogers, he wrote: "Now everybody has got a scheme to relieve unemployment, but there is just one way to do it and thats for everybody to go to work. `Where?' Why right where you are, look around and you see lots of things to do, weeds to be cut, fences to be fixed, lawns to be mowed, filling stations to be robbed, gangsters to be catered to...." Rogers supported the radical transformations President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented under the New Deal beginning in 1933. The celebrity spoke out in favor of lending a helping hand to the country's newly destitute and again gave benefit performances.

He continued to star in films and indulged in his passion for aviation. In August of 1935 a small plane carrying Rogers and a pilot friend, en route to survey air routes from the United States to the Soviet Union, crashed over Point Barrow, Alaska, killing the entertainer. Rogers was fifty-five. His death was an occasion of national mourning. Newspapers and radio commentators eulogized him, a memorial was dedicated near his Oklahoma birthplace, and several volumes of his speeches, essays, broadcasts, and aphorisms appeared in print. The Autobiography of Will Rogers was published in 1949, but its title belies its contents--the tome is a compendium of thirteen years of his syndicated newspaper columns. Other such collections surfaced in print until well into the 1990s, including The Will Rogers Scrapbook,Will Rogers: A Centennial Tribute, and The Wit and Wisdom of Will Rogers. In the early 1990s Rogers's life was made into a Broadway stage musical starring Keith Carradine as the Oklahoma cowboy-philosopher.

Associated Works

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Will Rogers (1879-1935)
• At the time of Rogers's birth:
• Mary Baker Eddy founded The Church of Christ, Scientist
• Saccharin was discovered at Johns Hopkins University
• Rutherford B. Hayes was president of the U.S.
• At the time of Rogers's death:
• C. F. Richter developed the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes
• The Nuremberg Laws deprived the German Jews of rights and citizenship
• The Social Security Act was passed
• Franklin D. Roosevelt was president of the U.S.
• The times:
• 1830-1914: Industrial Revolution
• 1860-1890: Indian Wars
• 1865-1900: Realistic Period of American literature
• 1870-1914: Realistic Period of English literature
• 1900-1930: Naturalistic and Symbolist Period of American literature
• 1901-1914: Edwardian Age of English literature
• 1914-1918: World War I
• Rogers's contemporaries:
• Carl Jung (1875-1961) Swiss psychologist
• Henry Dale (1875-1968) British physiologist
• Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) American writer
• Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) American dancer
• Maud Slye (1879-1954) American cancer researcher
• Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) Russian leader
• Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-born American physicist
• Helen Keller (1880-1968) writer
• Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) American general
• Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Spanish artist
• Selected world events:
• 1881: Clara Barton established the American Red Cross
• 1889: The Wall Street Journal began publication
• 1894: Audiences viewed the world's first motion picture
• 1898: The U.S. annexed Hawaii
• 1907: New Zealand gained independence from England
• 1910: The Boy Scouts of America and Camp Fire Girls of America were founded
• 1914: The Panama Canal opened
• 1916: Jeannette Rankin became the first U.S. Congresswoman
• 1926: Josef Stalin became dictator of the Soviet Union
• 1933: Prohibition ended in the U.S.

Further Reading

• Alworth, E. Paul, Will Rogers, Twayne, 1974.
• Brown, William R., Imagemaker: Will Rogers and the American Dream, University of Missouri Press, 1970, 304 p.
• Croy, Homer, Our Will Rogers, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1953, 377 p.
• Day, Donald, Will Rogers: A Biography, David McKay Company, Inc., 1962, 370 p.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 11, Gale, 1982.
• Dockstader, Fredrick J., Great North American Indians, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1977; 243-45.
• Feibleman, James, In Praise of Comedy: A Study in Its Theory and Practice, Allen & Unwin, 1939.