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• 57 • 3 APresidentialCrinoline I L L R O G E R S was unique. At first the arrival in 1904 of the funny, disarming, and oddly enchanting cowboy, whose show business debut coincided with the cresting popularity of vaudeville, did not augur any profound change in the state of the nation’s humor or the relationship between the American people and their president. During the next three decades, however, this self-described “ropin’ fool” ingeniously mastered the revolution in mass media and the related expansion of the entertainment industry to become not only the country’s favorite comedian but also its foremost political commentator and social critic. By the early 1930s, when legendary Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille described him as “the American who least can be spared,” millions of others—from paupers to presidents, Democrats and Republicans, rural folk and urban dwellers, progressives and isolationists—agreed. As such, Will Rogers earned the nation’s permission to poke open fun at the chief executive in unprecedented ways, and he convinced much of America that performing political humor was more than merely good entertainment; it served a vital public service. Almost singlehandedly , Rogers taught his grateful countrymen and women—sobered by increasingly obvious social disparities, one world war, depression, and what another master of humor named Franklin D. Roosevelt would later call “fear itself”—a decidedly different dance. He called a high-spirited, participatory reel that encouraged Americans to employ humor to do the serious work of democracy, and he challenged the presidency to keep up. Not only did Franklin Roosevelt accept the challenge, but also by 1935, when Rogers was killed in an airplane crash, the president was calling the steps.1 As myriad other studies have well established, humor feeds off incongruity and contradiction, using them to wrest power from laughter where there might otherwise be nothing but resignation or despair. Similarly, comedians W • 58 • c h a p t e r t h r e e most often come from the ranks of those most affected by the discrepancies that define the Great American Joke, be they immigrants, minorities, or others whose social, economic, or personal origins relegate them to the margins of mainstream America. Will Rogers’s life was thoroughly intertwined with such incongruity. His fame and influence sprang from cultural and geographical borderlands similar to those that produced Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and Mr. Dooley, although Rogers embodied this dissonance and harnessed it for humorous purposes more completely than anyone else before or since. He was born in 1879 in the Cooweescoowee district of the Cherokee Nation, which had been exiled west of the Mississippi River during the 1830s following the Indian Removal Act to clear much of northern Georgia for white farmers. The Cherokee—inspired to create their own constitution by the founding ideals of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson , then sold out by the presidential betrayals of Andrew Jackson—teetered on the threshold of accommodation and rebellion in a region that made the transition during Will’s youth from the Indian and Oklahoma territories into the state of Oklahoma in 1907. During the Civil War the region sat in the pleat between North and South. Many Cherokee were slaveholders, and most—including Will’s father—fought for the Confederacy, which offered more freedom and better prospects than the federal government. Will was the youngest of eight children and the only surviving son of black-haired, broad-faced Mary Rogers, who died in 1890, and fair-haired, blue-eyed Clem, both of whom were products of mixed-blood marriages, which made Will—like them—slightly more than one-quarter Cherokee. Clem was almost frighteningly industrious. Forced to reinvent himself constantly in the face of changing times, he conquered every challenge with a keen sense of innovative pragmatism. As a rancher he controlled a cattle range of some sixty thousand acres within the Cherokee framework of communal land ownership, but the arrival of the Missouri Pacific Railroad in 1889 effectively bisected his property. More significantly, in 1887 the Dawes General Allotment Act began the process of transferring reservation land from communal to individual ownership; as a result Rogers’s holdings shrank considerably, and he diversified into other endeavors, managing to maintain his wealth in the process. He energetically embraced political life as well, never losing an election, and served as a district judge for eight years, then in the Cherokee senate. In 1896 he was chosen as one of the Cherokee delegates who met with...

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