Will Rogers: A Political Life

Thirteen. Circling the Globe Again—and Again

Thirteen  Circling the Globe Again—and Again I n July 1934 Will Rogers, never able to sit still for very long, decided to take another trip around the world. He traveled to Washington early that month to discuss his itinerary with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who soon afterward wrote his ambassadors in Moscow and Istanbul to arrange for Rogers to meet with Joseph Stalin and Kemal Pasha. While in Washington, Rogers met with the Soviet ambassador, Alexander Troyanovsky, and discussed his plans to take a long train journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway across the heart of Russia. Troyanovsky, whom he first met in Tokyo in 1931, gave him permission to send his daily dispatches from Russia without censorship. On July 22, 1934, Will, Betty, and their two boys sailed west from San Francisco on the SS Malolo. Their daughter Mary, an aspiring actress, did not make the trip, as she was in Maine playing in summer stock. While steaming to Hawaii, Rogers learned that FBI agents had ambushed and killed the legendary bank robber John Dillinger outside a Chicago movie house. He wondered what picture got Dillinger. “Hope it was mine,” he wrote. It wasn’t.1 Arriving in Hawaii five days later, Rogers spent his first evening dining with Franklin Roosevelt in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel’s presidential suite. The president was taking a four-week vacation to escape the stifling Washington summer, a major renovation of the White House, and to make the first presidential visit to Hawaii. Sailing on the cruiser USS Houston, Roosevelt had stopped in the Virgin Islands, Haiti, Colombia, and Panama; he later sailed from Hawaii to Portland, Oregon, to begin a cross-country train tour on his way back to Washington. That night in Honolulu, Roosevelt and Rogers stayed up late discussing world affairs, particularly the latest events in Russia and their opinions of revolutionary Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s minister of foreign affairs and a key player in convincing Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union the year before. They also discussed the Far East where the Japanese invasion of Manchuria had Roosevelt on edge. “Will, don’t jump on Japan,” the president told Rogers. “Just keep them from jumping on us.”2 While in Hawaii, or what he described as “some Japanese islands in the middle of the Pacific,” Rogers found time to play polo and tour Oahu, including getting caught speeding by a local policeman.3 He took a seaplane to Waimea to tour the half-million-acre Parker Ranch with its herd of thirty thousand purebred steers. He also visited the army fortifications at Schofield Barracks and the huge naval base at Pearl Harbor. At the time, and seven years before the Japanese attack, he observed firsthand the vulnerability of American forces. “If war was declared with some Pacific nation we would lose the Philippines before lunch, but if we lost [Pearl Harbor] it would be our own fault.”4 On August 3, Rogers and his family left Hawaii and sailed for Yokohama on the Empress of Canada. He spent six days in Tokyo, where he “saw a lot of golf courses being put in. That’s the beginning of a nation’s commercial decline.”5 In Tokyo he met with Baron Takeichi Nishi, a charismatic Japanese army officer whom he had watched win an equestrian gold medal at the 1932 Olympics. “He was just about the most popular little rascal that was here,” Rogers wrote.6 Nishi would die in 1945 leading a tank regiment while defending the island of Iwo Jima. From Japan the Rogerses traveled to Korea, then to Manchuria, renamed Manchukuo although the United States and other nations did not recognize Japan’s annexation. They stopped in Mukden and Harbin, the region where fighting broke out when the Japanese invaded three years before. The two cities were quiet during Rogers’s latest visit, but he sensed increasing tension Will Rogers [ 256 ] when he visited Hsinking, the railhead of the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway and the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway. “This country [Japanese Manchukuo] is so mad at Russia that they’ve broken off diplomatic relations that never existed,” Rogers wrote. “Looks like we’re going to have peace over here all week long.”7 Throughout Manchuria he saw detachments of the Japanese army on a warlike footing, while just across the border in Siberia he observed...