Volume 14 , Issue 43

Remembering Oklahoma's Favorite Son, Will Rogers

Will Rogers was a stage name, as Will's birth name was William Penn Adair, son of Clem. It was 15 August 1935, the day that struck many like a simultaneous earthquake in both politics and entertainment. A day that Oklahoma's humorist, politician and actor, Will Rogers, died in a plane crash with Wiley Post, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "His appeal went straight to the heart of the nation. Above all things, in a time grown too solemn and somber her brought his countrymen back to a sense of proportion."

It has been reported in newspapers about a story recounted by one of his many biographers, "In Locust Grove, Oklahoma, half a dozen Cherokees were building a fence when an old man drove along the road to tell them the news. After a time, some of the Indians spoke of how they had known Will or remembered a favor he had done for someone. Then one said,'I can't work any more today,' and all of them stacked their tools and quietly walked away."

Will Rogers was born on November 4, 1879, in Oologah, Cooweescoowee District, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory. He came into this world with a slightly more pretentious handle than "Will" -- William Penn Adair Rogers. He was born, as is Cherokee custom, into his mother's Paint Clan. His family was typical of the intermarriage that had been going on in the Cherokee Nation starting in the 17th century. His Paint Clan mother, Mary America Schrimsher, was one-fourth Cherokee by blood. His father, Clement Vann Rogers, known as Clem, was one-eighth. Then as now, a person was either a Cherokee citizen or not, regardless of blood quantum, and the Rogers family was. His father attended the Cherokee Male Seminary and then served the Cherokee Nation as a judge and later as a senator. His mother studied music at the Cherokee Female Seminary near Tahlequah. Rogers used to say, "I had just enough white in me to make my honesty questionable."

By the time Rogers was born the shooting part of the Indian Wars was winding down. 1879 was the year of dull Knife's revolt at Fort Robinson. In 1875 Quanah parker had surrendered. sitting Bull surrendered in 1881. When Geronimo gave it upon 186, the robbery with a six-gun stopped and what woody Guthrie would later call robbery with a fountain pen began. In 1887 the Dawes Act was passed and led to the theft of Indian property on a scale that far surpassed anything accomplished by military action.

When Rogers was 9 years old, white settlers lined up on the border of Indian Territory to run for the "free Indian land." This was also a time that cheating ran rampant in the land rush days . . . the people who staked their claims in advance were dubbed "sooners."

After the Dawes Act, Rogers and his father Clem were left with an allotment of 148.77 acres for Rogers and 69.93 acres for is father clem. This was all that remained of a 60,000 acre ranch Clem had worked under the Cherokee law of usufruct. [Usufruct is a right of enjoyment, enabling a holder to derive profit or benefit from property that either is titled to another person or which is held in common ownership, as long as the property is not damaged or destroyed.]

We find that Will Rogers first became an entertainer while in South Africa when he joined Texas hank's Wild West show with an act composed of rope tricks he had perfected back on the ranch in Oologah. Rogers was billed as the Cherokee Kid, a moniker that stuck for many years. This enabled Rogers to make his living in the world without making it day by day as a labor. From 1922 until his death in 1935, Rogers published a syndicated weekly newspaper column and a daily "squib." The daily squib was a precursor of the modern blog or Twitter feed, that appeared not eh font page of most major newspapers starting in 1926.

Rogers was a man who never held political office, except, briefly, as honorary mayor of Beverly Hills, California. Rogers became a personal friend of every president from Teddy Roosevelt to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Rogers also practiced political punditry with a prickly sense of humor, similar to Mark Twain before him . . . And Jon Stewart in our day.

In 1932, Oklahoma delegates at the Democratic Convention in Chicago cast their 22 votes for Rogers as "favorite son" to lead the presidential ticket. Rogers, who was in town to write about the convention, joked that he took a nap after the first ballot and "somebody touched me for my whole roll, took the whole 22 votes, didn't even leave me a vote to get breakfast on."

The only time Rogers went along with being a candidate was his 1928 run for the Anti-Bunk Party, under the slogan, "Whatever the other fellow don't do, we will! ... He promised that if elected, he would resign ... probably the most serious part of his candidacy.

Rogers was opposed to women voting or participating in politics, but he became close friends with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, who was prominent in U.S. politics all her life. Rogers was also close friends with Nancy Astor, the first woman to sit in the British Parliament. When he talked with or wrote about these women, it was as if his ideas about women in politics did not exist.

When the Dawes Act destroyed tribal land bases, Rogers had plenty to say about the thievery, "They sent the Indians to Oklahoma. They had a treaty that said, 'You shall have this land as long as grass grows and water flows.' It was not only a good rhyme but looked like a good treaty, and it was till they struck oil. Then the government took it away from us again. They said the treaty only refers to 'Water and Grass; it don't say anything about oil.' "

Rogers personally lobbied President Herbert Hoover against the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill, which modern economists agree only deepened the Depression. Rogers took the side of ordinary people, particularly farmers, in the Great Depression. Hoover signed the bill anyway. Rogers continued telling the truth in his humor when he remarked that Argentina, "exports meat, wheat and gigolos, and the United States puts a tariff on the wrong two."

On August 15, 1935, he was off on what might have become his fourth trip around the world, with his friend Wiley Post at the controls of an aircraft custom-built for the trip. Over a lagoon the indigenous people call Walakpa, more than 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the plane lost power and crashed during a water takeoff. Rogers was 55 years old. He was survived by his wife, Betty, and three of their four children.

At his untimely death in a plane crash in 1935, Will Rogers' ranch consisted of a 31-room ranch house, a stable, corrals, riding ring, roping arena, polo field, golf course, and hiking trails -- in 1944, the ranch became Will Rogers State Historic Park, Pacific Palisades, near Santa Monica in Los Angeles County, California.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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