Will Rogers: A Political Life

Nine. The Dark Humor of Depression

Nine  The Dark Humor of Depression S oon after the beginning of 1930, a year when “optimism was overrated and pessimism was underrated,” Will Rogers realized the stock market collapse was no longer a joking matter and much more serious and prolonged than just a temporary Wall Street setback.1 As the future looked bleaker and bleaker, the country turned gloomy, pessimistic , even cynical. The expectation of difficult times ahead not only caused stock prices to fall but led potential buyers of products to defer purchases . When demand waned, manufacturers cut back and laid off workers, who in turn could not pay their bills, much less purchase new goods, leading to more cutbacks, more layoffs, and more unsold goods. As the downward spiral continued, the country plunged into the Great Depression, a decade-long national tragedy that destroyed the lives, livelihoods, and dreams of millions of Americans. As he watched the economy worsen, Rogers’s newspaper columns and radio talks took on a more sober tone, and his humor, while still present, was darker, more critical, and often bitterly sarcastic. He was also somewhat fatalistic when explaining the market collapse, as when he wrote: “The Lord was wise to the World and he just wanted to show ’em that, after all, he was running things, in spite of the New York Stock Exchange. Well, that was a terrible blow to finance to learn that the Lord not only closed the Market on Sundays, but practically closed it on week days.”2 As the Depression deepened, Rogers provided his audiences with a running account of bank failures, joblessness, ineffective monetary policies, trade imbalances, depressed stocks, and scores of other sad results of the Depression. He watched forlornly as paper profits vanished and businesses tottered or went bankrupt: eight hundred banks closed their doors in 1930 and twenty-three hundred the following year. Unemployment skyrocketed, from one and a half million in 1929, to four and a half million in 1930, to eight million in 1931, to twelve million in 1932—or roughly 30 percent of the American workforce. Industrial production plummeted, putting 45 percent of all factory workers in the breadlines. By 1933, over 40 percent of the nation’s home mortgages had defaulted, while thirteen hundred local governments went bankrupt, as well as the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina.3 Americans also felt the Depression in their stomachs. While bumper wheat crops broke records, the surplus of grain depressed prices below the farmers’ margin of profit. Banks foreclosed on farm mortgages across the country. Millions went hungry for lack of bread. An angry Rogers told his radio listeners: “So here we are in a country with more wheat and more corn and more money in the bank, more cotton, more everything in the world— there’s not a product you can name that we haven’t got more of than any other country ever had on the face of the earth—and yet we’ve got people starving. We’ll hold the distinction of being the only nation in the history of the world that ever went to the poor house in an automobile.”4 In the small village of England, Arkansas, five hundred farmers and their wives who were denied credit stormed into town demanding food, which the merchants supplied. Rogers sympathized with the farmers, writing: “We got a powerful government, brainy men, great organizations, many commissions, but it took a little band of five hundred simple country people (who had no idea they were doing anything historical) to come to a country town store and demand food for their wives and children, they hit the hearts of the American people, more than all your Senatorial pleas, and government investigations .”5 In Oklahoma City, several hundred hungry rioters raided a grocery store and were dispersed by police using tear gas.6 The city of Detroit, deciding it could no longer justify operating its zoo, slaughtered the animals to feed hunWill Rogers [ 170 ] gry people.7 Rogers was appalled at the government’s inability to reduce the public suffering, writing in his weekly column: “If you live under a Government and it don’t provide some means of you getting work when you really want it and will do it, why then there is something wrong. You can’t just let the people starve, so if you don’t give ’em work, and you...