Will Rogers: A Political Life

One. A Funny Man Turns Serious

One  A Funny Man Turns Serious W ill Rogers liked to brag that he was born on Tuesday, November 4, 1879, Election Day. For the next fifty-five years, politics would be an ever-increasing part of his life. Rogers was raised on his family ranch four miles from where the small town of Oologah would be settled a few years later in the Cherokee Nation, a vast tract of Indian Territory that became part of the new state of Oklahoma in 1907. When Rogers was a boy, Oologah’s one dusty street was lined with a train depot, a two-story frame hotel, a livery stable, a lone church that served as the school, a few clapboard buildings with rickety plank sidewalks in front, and reeking stock pens. There was not a tree in sight.1 The rolling prairie surrounding Oologah was an unlikely place to produce one of the country’s most penetrating political wits, but politics came naturally to Rogers. He inherited much of his savvy from his father, Clement Vann Rogers, a blustery and loud former Confederate cavalry officer. One of the most influential men in the Indian Territory, Clem served on various boards and commissions, became a district judge in 1877, and two years later was elected senator of the Cherokee Nation.2 A Jeffersonian Democrat who backed William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896, Clem advocated many Progressive reforms such as initiative and referendum, a popularly elected railroad commission, and state control of primary elections, but opposed women’s suffrage. As a former slave owner he defended racial segregation. Over the years, Clem became a wealthy man by buying cattle in neighboring states, fattening them up on the lush, belly-deep bluestem grasses growing wild near the Verdigris River, and selling them for a fair profit in the Kansas City and St. Louis markets.3 Prospering, he built a big two-story house from heavy walnut logs cut from the nearby river bottom, with a whitewashed portico covering the front entrance and two wide stone chimneys standing at each end of the house. It was in this house that Will Rogers was born.4 Will always took pride that his father and mother, Mary America Schrimsher Rogers, were about one-fourth Cherokee Indian.5 Mary, a tall, thin woman with dark hair, sparkling black eyes, and a “tongue quick as a jaybird’s wing,” grew up in a well-off family and studied music at a Cherokee female seminary.6 Will inherited his mother’s gay spirits and her love of jokes, singing, dancing, and meeting with kinfolk. The family valued educaWill Rogers [ 4 ] Clem Rogers (father) Mary America Rogers (mother) A Funny Man Turns Serious [ 5 ] tion, and the parents encouraged their children to read. Clem was one of a few residents of the Territory who subscribed to the New York Times.7 Young Will was a funny, homely little boy with mischievous blue-gray eyes, a big smile always on his mug, and a lock of brown hair forever flopping down into his face. When he turned seven, Clem sent him to a one-room school near Chelsea, about twelve miles from home. He attended several schools over the next few years, earning mediocre grades and rebelling against his piano lessons. In January 1897, Clem enrolled Will in the Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri. The boy could not have been more out of place when he arrived, his schoolmates wearing neat gray military cadet uniforms while Will walked into the barracks wearing his Stetson hat, a flaming red flannel shirt, red bandanna knotted at the throat, and high-heeled red-topped boots with jingling spurs.8 From the first day, he refused to adapt to the military Cadet Rogers at military school regime, piling up demerits for being late to formation, wearing an unkempt uniform, and spouting wisecracks at upperclassmen. His grades were barely passable, although he showed an interest in political economy and received a perfect 100 in American history.9 Fed up with school, Rogers ran away from Kemper in the spring of 1898, heading to Texas’s northeast panhandle to work as a cowhand on a thirteenthousand -acre ranch. The ranch owner, Perry Ewing, was a great reader and kept up with politics. Rogers shared his interest and devoured the owner’s Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle each day. When Rogers read that...