Will Rogers

From the Dog Iron Ranch in the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory to vaudeville stages, film sets, newspapers, and radio microphones, William Penn Adair Rogers carried a plainspoken Oklahoma voice into national life. Born on November 4, 1879, near present-day Oologah, Oklahoma, he was a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and later became known as “Oklahoma’s Favorite Son.” His parents, Clement V. Rogers and Mary America Schrimsher, were both of mixed race with Cherokee ancestry and considered themselves Cherokee. Rogers liked to joke that his ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower, but “met the boat.”

His childhood mixed ranch life, Cherokee public life, and loss. His father was a leader in the Cherokee Nation, an attorney, Cherokee judge, former Confederate combat veteran, and later a delegate to the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention. His mother, born into the Paint Clan, died of amoebic dysentery when Will was ten. Rogers was the youngest of eight children, though only three of his siblings survived into adulthood. He attended schools in Indian Territory and Missouri, read The New York Times, and later joked that he “studied the Fourth Reader for ten years.” What truly held him was not the classroom, but cowboys, horses, roping, and the lariat.

Those skills became his way into show business. In 1899 he appeared in the St. Louis Fair as part of the Mulhall Rodeo. In 1901, he and Dick Parris left home hoping to work as gauchos in Argentina. After losing their money, Rogers sailed to South Africa, where he was hired at a ranch near Mooi River Station. There he began performing as a trick roper in “Texas Jack’s Wild West Circus.” Texas Jack helped shape his original stage act and taught him, as Rogers remembered it, the show business secret of knowing when to get off. Rogers went on to Australia with the Wirth Brothers Circus, returned to the United States in 1904, appeared at the Saint Louis World’s Fair, and tried his roping skills on the vaudeville circuits.

Vaudeville led Rogers to the Ziegfeld Follies, and the Follies led to movie contracts. Over time he made 71 films, including 50 silent films and 21 talkies. In the 1920s, his nationally syndicated newspaper column and radio appearances made him even more visible. He wrote more than 4,000 newspaper columns, traveled around the world three times, and gave Americans first-hand accounts of those travels. By the mid-1930s, he was hugely popular in the United States for his political wit and was among the higher paid Hollywood film stars.

Rogers’s humor worked because it sounded casual while cutting close to the bone. With earthy anecdotes and a folksy style, he poked fun at gangsters, prohibition, politicians, government programs, and other heated subjects, usually without leaving people feeling attacked. He could write, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat,” and make a political jab feel like porch talk. He also became closely associated with the line, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” a phrase that fit his public image as a comic who joked about prominent people without seeming mean.

Rogers died on August 15, 1935, with aviator Wiley Post, when their small airplane crashed on takeoff from a lagoon near Utqiaġvik, formerly Barrow, in northern Alaska. His words still travel well because they are brief, funny, and suspicious of human foolishness wherever it appears. A line like “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people that they don’t like” has the same snap as his best political jokes: friendly in tone, sharp in meaning, and hard to forget.