SECOND REVISED Will Rogers

Transcription

1 A01_ANDE5065_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/1/10 4:02 PM Page i Will Rogers

2 A01_ANDE5065_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/1/10 4:02 PM Page ii Between filming scenes on the Fox studio lot, Will Rogers pecks out another newspaper column. (Will Rogers Memorial Museum)

3 A01_ANDE5065_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/1/10 4:02 PM Page iii Gary Clayton Anderson The University of Oklahoma Will Rogers and His America THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY Edited by Mark C. Carnes Prentice Hall Boston Columbus Indianapolis New York San Francisco Upper Saddle River Amsterdam Cape Town Dubai London Madrid Milan Munich Paris Montreal Toronto Delhi Mexico City São Paulo Sydney Hong Kong Seoul Singapore Taipei Tokyo

4 A01_ANDE5065_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/1/10 4:02 PM Page iv Executive Editor: Ed Parsons Editorial Assistant: Amanda A. Dykstra Senior Marketing Manager: Maureen E. Prado Roberts Marketing Assistant: Marissa O Brien Operations Specialist: Renata Butera Cover Designer: Karen Salzbach Creative Art Director: Jayne Conte Manager, Visual Research: Beth Brenzel Manager, Rights & Permissions: Zina Arabia Manager, Cover Visual Research & Permissions: Karen Sanatar Cover Illustration: Will Rogers Memorial Museum Full-Service Project Management: Joseph Barnabas Malcolm Composition: PreMediaGlobal Printer/Binder: Edwards Brothers/ Lillington Cover Printer: Lehigh-Phoenix Color/ Hagerstown Text Font: Sabon Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anderson, Gary Clayton Will Rogers and his America / Gary Clayton Anderson. p. cm. (The library of American biography) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: ISBN-10: X 1. Rogers, Will, Entertainers United States Biography. 3. Humorists, American Biography. I. Title. PN2287.R74A dc Photo credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on appropriate page within the text. Material taken from James M. Smallwood & Steven K. Gragert, eds., Will Rogers Weekly Articles and James M. Smallwood & Steven K. Gragert, eds., Will Rogers Telegrams in chapters 3-7. reprinted with the permission of Will Rogers Memorial Museum, Claremore, Oklahoma. Copyright 2011 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Prentice Hall. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. This publication is protected by Copyright, and permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission(s) to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, NJ Many of the designations by manufacturers and seller to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and the publisher was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial caps or all caps. ISBN-10: X ISBN-13:

5 A01_ANDE5065_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/1/10 4:02 PM Page v To my children Kari, Evan, and Jon

6 A01_ANDE5065_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/1/10 4:02 PM Page vi Contents Editor s Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Will Rogers and His America xi Chapter 1 Will Rogers, the Opening Act 2 Chapter 2 The Pursuit of Fame 24 Chapter 3 The Renaissance 51 Chapter 4 A Liberal in an Illiberal Age 85 Chapter 5 Will Rogers, the Journalist 122 Chapter 6 Will Rogers and the New Liberalism 162 Epilogue 200 Study and Discussion Questions 205 A Note on the Sources 209 Index 212 vi

7 A01_ANDE5065_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/1/10 4:02 PM Page vii Editor s Preface Think of humorist Andy Rooney, political satirist Stephen Colbert, and TV journalist Anderson Cooper. Imagine them morphed into a single person. Then you will be close to envisioning the Will Rogers of this biography: a pioneer in journalism who inaugurated the transition from print to electronic media, an iconoclastic and funny pundit who shaped public opinion in the fateful decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Readers may be surprised by this Will Rogers, because the popular version is somewhat different. That Will Rogers is a lariat-twirling cowboy turned B movie actor, master of homespun one-liners such as The income tax has made more liars out of Americans than golf. But few know about Rogers the journalist, the man whose column was regularly read by nearly every adult American during the social, political, and economic transformations of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. In funny and memorable ways, Rogers described the American nation and its people during a time of great hardships. He also influenced events. Rogers preached calm during the worst of the economic storms and exuded confidence in FDR s proposals to expand the role of the federal government in people s lives. As the Great Depression worsened, Rogers came to believe that government should feed desperate people and provide them with jobs. His common sense, laced with humor, did much to change the political attitudes of an American people who had always believed that the common man should pick himself up by his own vii

8 A01_ANDE5065_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/1/10 4:02 PM Page viii viii * E DITOR S P REFACE bootstraps. Indeed, Rogers was arguably the most effective proponent of liberalism of his age perhaps surpassing even Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For his part, Roosevelt borrowed some of Rogers techniques, including homespun humor and radio-broadcast chats with the American people. Veteran biographer Gary Clayton Anderson first became interested in Rogers because of his humor. Anderson, who is George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma, was also drawn to Rogers because Rogers, a Cherokee Indian, was from the Indian Territory in remote eastern Oklahoma. Anderson was astounded that Rogers could rise from such obscure origins to journalistic prominence, surpassing in readership two of the titans of print journalism of the twentieth century: Walter Lippmann and H. L. Mencken. Anderson has the good sense to allow Rogers, a master of the one-liner, to speak for himself; few biographies, consequently, are as consistently fast-paced and amusing as this one. Yet Anderson also advances a thesis of enduring relevance. Nowadays pundits bludgeon their way to public notice; but Rogers realized a deeper truth: the best way to change people s minds is to get them to laugh. Rogers delivered an emblematic gag when he tried to interview Leon Trotsky in the Soviet Union in Being disappointed by the strongmen in power, Rogers simply wrote that he would like to have met Trotsky, for I have never met a man that I didn t like. It was that attitude, the belief that everyone had a story to tell, that there were always positive and negative sides to every story, that make Rogers a house-hold name. MARK C. CARNES ANN WHITNEY OLIN PROFESSOR OF HISTORY BARNARD COLLEGE/COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

9 A01_ANDE5065_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/1/10 4:02 PM Page ix Acknowledgments Those who have helped formulate my rendition of Will Rogers include a host of professionals both in publishing and in the academy. Michael Boezi, formerly the U.S. History editor at Pearson Longman, and editorial assistant Amanda Dykstra, both saw the biography as ideal for the Library of American Biography Series and supported it from the start. Those of my colleagues who have read sections and offered criticism include my good friend Richard Lowitt and University of Oklahoma colleagues Robert Griswold, David Levy, Richard Lowitt, Brad Raley, Ben Keppel, and William Savage. Perhaps no one knows as much Oklahoma history and thus Will Rogers history as Bill Savage. Several of my graduate students have found time in their busy schedules to read and critique. They include Emily Wardrop and Catharine Franklin. My close friend Charles E. Rankin, Editor in Chief at the University of Oklahoma Press, has been a wonderful foil for discussing Rogers and national politics. Chuck has also graciously allowed me to use quotations from the press s recent publication of the Will Rogers Papers, in five volumes, a magnificent achievement that took ten years to put together. I also wish to thank Steven K. Gragert, Director of the Will Rogers Memorial and Museum; in addition to supplying photographs, he kindly allowed me to quote from two wonderful but poorly known publications of Rogers articles and telegrams, the Weekly Articles (in six volumes) and the Daily Telegrams (in four ix

10 A01_ANDE5065_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/1/10 4:02 PM Page x x * A CKNOWLEDGMENTS volumes). While all of this material was originally published in newspapers, bringing it together into two publications makes it so much easier for scholars to pursue research on the views and impact of this very interesting American. The Will Rogers Museum is located in Claremore, Oklahoma, and maintains an active publishing agenda. As usual, my lovely wife, Laura, has been there through it all, watching and helping with the pacing or, rather, the thought process that comes with writing. GARY CLAYTON ANDERSON GEORGE LYNN CROSS RESEARCH PROFESSOR THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA