Will Rogers: A Political Life

Two. Battling Suffragettes and Bootleggers

Two  Battling Suffragettes and Bootleggers F eeling like he had lost a good friend, Will Rogers mourned terribly after Theodore Roosevelt died. Rogers met every president during his adult life and befriended each of them, but he seemed to resonate most closely with the former Rough Rider. Without fail he agreed with what Roosevelt said and did, especially supporting his overall progressive philosophy as well as his efforts to build a strong military and “carry a big stick.” Also like the former president, Rogers was not sure whether women should be allowed to vote, summing up his feelings on suffrage by wishing for “a return of old Jeffersonian democracy, when men chewed tobacco and women could bake real biscuits.”1 Like Prohibition, the suffrage movement was a longstanding crusade and a major issue debated during the Progressive Era. During the years surrounding World War I, the move to allow women to vote exerted increasing political pressure, culminating on August 18, 1920, when Tennessee became the last state needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Rogers later told a radio audience that “we’re not quite sure if we didn’t make as big a mistake [with suffrage] as we did with the Prohibition Amendment.”2 Using comic exaggeration to mask a more serious criticism, Rogers proposed that suffrage be expanded beyond women. “We have done it for the wife,” he wrote. “Let’s do it for the kiddies. Children have the same qualification for office the grown-ups have, they are out of work.”3 In another article he continued to exaggerate: To us fellows that are not in Politics we are tickled to death, to see the Women folks dealing such misery to the Politicians. And in the long run it’s good for humanity. Every job a Woman can grab off it just drives another Politician to either work or the poor house. . . . But this Nineteenth Amendment is worrying more people in the country than the Eighteenth. It’s not only caused millions of men to go hungry, (by their wives being away at a rally) but it is causing a lot of them to go Jobless, all because the whole thing was misunderstanding. The men give ’em the vote, and never meant for them to take it seriously. But being Women they took the wrong meaning and did.”4 Rogers not only opposed women voting, he was against them serving in politics. “I don’t think a woman belongs in there [Congress]. Not a nice woman anyhow.”5 He believed women were too fragile to compete in the rough-and-tumble male political arena, writing: “The women, poor souls . . . have paid more attention to the material in the dress than they have to the material in the speech. They mean well and act awful sincere. But the Girls just ain’t there. It gets ’em out and gives ’em a chance to get away from home, and wear badges. But it just seems like they havent added anything constructive to the art of politics.”6 One of the few exceptions Rogers made was for his friend Alice Longworth , the outspoken daughter of Theodore Roosevelt whose political influence as Washington’s grand dame spanned the presidencies from William McKinley to John F. Kennedy. “Of all the she political minds I have ever met,” Rogers wrote, “Alice has forgot more than most of the others know put together. When you meet up with a mind like hers, it gives you a little encouragement for the Nineteenth Amendment.”7  When Will Rogers traveled to Washington DC in March 1917, dozens of suffragettes marched along Pennsylvania Avenue, picketing the White House, lighting bonfires, and defying the local police to arrest them. Led by the militant Alice Paul and her National Women’s Party, the suffragettes Battling Suffragettes and Bootleggers [ 23 ] handed out leaflets accusing President Wilson of being a hypocrite, saying he championed democracy throughout the world but thwarted it at home by denying the vote to women. At the time, Rogers was in the nation’s capital to perform in Ziegfeld’s Follies, and again Wilson attended the performance. The president laughed loudly when Rogers joked about the suffragettes who had been demonstrating since New Year’s Day—on one evening they burnt an effigy of the president. “The more you see of civilization,” Rogers remarked later, “the more you feel that those old cavemen...