Will Rogers: A Political Life

Eight. This Country Is Bigger Than Wall Street

Eight  This Country Is Bigger Than Wall Street T hroughout the Roaring Twenties, Will Rogers filled his newspaper columns with mostly upbeat and harmless anecdotes, bringing chuckles to millions of Americans each day. In one such column he described his taste in the popular music of the day. “Now I personally have always considered the drummer the best part of a jazz band,” he wrote. “I think if all the members of a jazz band play the drums it would make better music.”1 In another article he complained about shameless flappers flaunting their rising hemlines and strutting about with bobbed hair. “My wife can’t appear in public with me,” he griped. “She still has long hair.”2 He even took an absurdly lighthearted view of more serious conflicts in Europe: “The Balkan nations have gone into a huddle. It looks like Bulgaria’s ball on Rumania’s ten-yard line. Poland was penalized ten yards for being offside against Lithuania. Mussolini is the triplethreat man of the game. It will all wind up like the last one, just another incompleted war. They will have to bring it back and line up again.”3 Rogers had reason to be carefree, for the Roaring Twenties was one of the most prosperous periods in history, a time when, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald , “America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.”4 Investors became overnight millionaires as stock prices soared, with General Motors stock rising from $9.62 a share in 1921 to $229 in 1928. RCA stock closed at $101 in 1927 and a year later peaked at $420.5 The twenties “raced along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money,” Fitzgerald wrote. “Even when you were broke you didn’t worry about money, because it was in such profusion around you.”6 But the twenties also troubled Will Rogers. The rising stock market failed to disguise the economic inequities of the era. He was well aware that, while stocks still climbed at the end of the decade, nearly three-quarters of American families had an income below the $2,500 minimum for a decent standard of living.7 He saw a society that blithely discarded the high-buttoned morals of the Victorian age and replaced them with a licentiousness he had never imagined. He watched as the divorce rate skyrocketed, increasing from one per eighteen in the 1880s to one in six in the 1920s. He half-joked about people flocking to Nevada, where at first a divorce could be obtained after living there six months, reduced to three months in 1927, and then to six weeks in 1931.8 While he did not attend church, he watched church attendance drop off as more Americans bought automobiles and decided to take Sunday drives instead of attending services. He worried about American society, writing the following in the Saturday Evening Post in 1928: Our children are delivered to schools in Automobiles. But whether that adds to their grades is doubtful. There hasent been a Thomas Jefferson produced in this country since we formed our first Trust. Rail splitting produced an immortal President in Abraham Lincoln, but Golf, with 20 thousand courses, hasent produced even a good A Number-1 Congressman. There hasent been a Patrick Henry showed up since business men quit eating lunch with their families, joined a club and have indigistion from amateur Oratory.9 The social turmoil of the twenties especially disturbed Rogers, a man with a fear of disorder and chaos. The front pages of the newspapers he read every morning were splattered with stories that scared him. He may have “never met a man he didn’t like,” but he feared that same man when he joined a mob. And there were plenty of mobs to fear during the twenties, a time of notorious crimes, race riots, labor strikes, Klan rallies, and lynchings. During World War I, the NAACP campaigned for a federal ban on lynchings. This Country Is Bigger Than Wall Street [ 14 7 ] A bill passed in the House in 1922 but failed in the Senate due to filibusters by Southerners who argued they were defending states’ rights.10 The Ku Klux Klan, with five million members in the 1920s, still possessed fearful power.11 A series of race riots erupted across the country, beginning in Chicago in 1919. In May 1921, violence...