Will Rogers's Radio: Race and Technology in the Cherokee Nation

In March 1935, a few months before his death in an airplane crash, Will Rogers (1879–1935) wrote to his first cousin Lizzie Tripplett. At the time Lizzie was a patient at the Indian Hospital in Claremore, Oklahoma, the first Indian hospital in the country. In fact, the building of the facility itself was due to Rogers's celebrity lobbying efforts; he mentioned the hospital several times in print and on the air and likely spoke privately to influential senators about the idea.¹ As was typical of Rogers, he tried to boost Lizzie's spirits through humor. In reference to his most recent film he wrote, "I think we gotta pretty funny one coming out next called 'Life Begins at Forty.' Course, life don't really begin 'till you start to swim in the Verdigris," a reference to the river that runs through the northwestern part of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. In his subsequent paragraph Rogers took a more serious tone. "I bet you don't have a radio down in them sticks," he wrote.

Well, here is a check to get them patients one. Get this and also get a lot of extra earphones so they can be connected at the beds, and send me the extra bill for that. Fix it up so all of them can hear at any time, quietly and not disturb the others.²

A few years earlier, in March 1928, Rogers paid a visit to his "eastern Cherokee brothers" (figure 1). While he was there Rogers donated a radio for use in the Cherokee schools. The nearby Asheville, North Carolina, newspaper covered the story: "Now the Cherokee Indians will tune in and hear the world go round!"³

Rogers wanted these patients and students to have access to what many believe was the most important technological innovation of the early

Figure 1.

Rogers and two unidentified Cherokee girls in Asheville, North Carolina, circa 1928. Uncredited photo from Mary Newman Fitzgerald, The Cherokee and His Smoky Mountain Legends (Asheville, NC: Inland Press, 1946), 4.

twentieth century.⁴ The popularization of radio was part of the increasingly centralized establishment of the mass consumption of information and entertainment in the 1920s. During Rogers's radio heyday—from the mid-1920s into the early 1930s—people began to read the same news, hear the same voices on the radio, and watch the same plots unfold on the movie screen. Still, as Susan Douglas points out in Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, early radio did not necessarily lead to cultural accord but pointed to the nation's cultural differences, national distinctions that citizens shared and experienced through listening:

While it has become a commonplace to assert that radio built national unity in the 1930s and beyond, we must remember that what radio really did . . . was allow listeners to experience at the same time multiple identities—national, regional, local—some of them completely allied with the country's prevailing cultural and political ideologies, others of them suspicious of or at odds with official culture.⁵

The awe with which the radio was received is apparent in contemporary discussions of the invention. In his 1936 study of radio, for example, the German Rudolf Arnheim declared:

This is the great miracle of wireless. The omnipresence of what people are singing or saying anywhere, the overleaping of frontiers, the conquest of spatial isolation, the importation of culture on the waves of the ether, the same fare for all, sound in silence.⁶

Evidently, though some expressed concern over the flattening effect this medium would have on the nation's (indeed, the world's) geographic and cultural distinctions, others recognized its ability to build a nationwide community, united despite its differences. Regardless of its mixed effects, radio was pervasive. The number of radios in U.S. homes doubled between 1929 and 1933, years that overlapped with those in which Rogers regularly talked into the microphone, a device he claimed "always put me in mind of an automobile radiator cap and I...