Will Rogers, who was born November 4, 1879, didn’t let elections get to him. He did point out that “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” “Do the best you can,” he also said, “and don’t take life too serious.”
Rogers was an enormously popular star in the 1920s and 30s. He was born in Oklahoma in the Cherokee Nation, and grew up learning all the things a boy in Oklahoma in the late 1800s learned — riding, roping, and wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat. The county where he was born is now called Rogers County, but not after him — it was named for his father Clement, who was a senator in the Cherokee Senate and a judge. Will may have been more impressed by the Cherokee Senate than the US one; he later noted “About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.”
He didn’t set out to be an entertainer at first. He worked at his father’s spread — the Iron Dog Ranch — until he was 22, and then set out for Argentina to work as a gaucho. When he arrived in 1902 he and a friend tried to start their own ranch, but lost all their money. He hadn’t followed his own advice: “Don’t gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it ’til it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” Rogers gave up on Argentina and boarded a ship for South Africa, where he got another job at a ranch.
While he was working the ranch, Texas Jack’s Wild West Circus came to town, and when they left for the next town, Rogers went with them with an act as a pony rider and trick roper. When he wanted to move on, which didn’t take long, Texas Jack gave him a letter of introduction to the Wirth Brothers Circus in Australia. After all, as Rogers put it, “Even though you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.”
Rogers stayed with the Wirth Brothers Circus for a year or so, then headed back to the US in 1904. He brought his show to the St. Louis World’s Fair, then started touring on the Vaudeville circuit. On April 27, 1905, he was at Madison Square Garden — not performing right then; there was another wild west act going on. A steer got loose and climbed into the stands. Rogers ran up and roped the steer. That turned out to be his big break when his feat made the front pages of all the New York newspapers. “Get someone else to blow your horn and the sound will carry twice as far,” he observed.
Rogers got a contract to appear at the Victoria Roof, a popular Vaudeville show that was on the roof of the Victoria Theater. He appeared there 50 weeks per year, and worked the city’s other theaters as well, getting more popular as he went. By about 1915 he’d graduated to the Ziegfeld Follies show, which was the pinnacle of the Vaudeville business. By then he’d added a monologue to his roping and pony show — but it was never the same two nights in a row. He started off by saying “I ain’t got nothin’ funny to say. All I know is what I read in the papers.” That line, by the way, is sometimes called his punch line, but it was really his opening. All his jokes were based on the day’s news stories. “I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I’m in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times,” he said.
Rogers’ jokes didn’t carry over into his film career very well, because, well, silent films. It worked out pretty well anyway; he made 50 silent movies. When the “talkies” came out, he made another 21 of those. But film was never his main career. “I’m not a real movie star,” he explained, “I’ve still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.”
In the early 1920s, he started touring the lecture circuit (without his horse) and writing a newspaper column. By 1926 the column was daily and nationally syndicated, so it was available to 40 million readers. In those days, that was about 35% of the population of the country. As soon as radio began to be popular, Rogers began a weekly show, the Gulf Headliners, on Sunday evenings (“Gulf” referred to the Gulf Oil Company that sponsored the show). It, too, got to be hugely popular. He had trouble adapting, though, to the time limits in radio. In his early shows he would lose track of the time and get cut off in the midst of a sentence — so he added an alarm clock that would ring (the audience could hear it too) to remind him to start winding things up. He never worried overly much about time. “Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we’ve rushed through life trying to save,” after all.
All of his success made Rogers wealthy, and since his advice was “Buy land. They’re not making any more of the stuff,” that’s what he did. He and his family lived most of the year in New York and summers in Oklahoma, then in 1911 he bought a 20 acre ranch in California for $500 per acre. Nowadays that would be over $13,000 an acre. It’s not clear whether he was talking about himself when he said “When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the IQ of both states.”
Rogers would want everybody to remember, though, that “things ain’t what they used to be and never were.” Memory isn’t something to mess with though: “When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do, well, that’s Memoirs.” But regardless, “Let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we’re doing every day, only in a different way.”
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