William Penn Adair Rogers (November 4, 1879 – August 15, 1935) was a Cherokee-American vaudeville performer, actor, and humorist. He was born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, in the Indian Territory, now part of Oklahoma, and is known as "Oklahoma's Favorite Son". As an entertainer and humorist, he traveled around the world three times, made 71 films (50 silent films and 21 "talkies"), and wrote more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns. By the mid-1930s, Rogers was hugely popular in the United States for his leading political wit and was one of the higher paid Hollywood film stars. He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed on takeoff from a lagoon near Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, in northern Alaska.
Rogers began his career as a performer in vaudeville. His rope act led to success in the Ziegfeld Follies, which in turn led to the first of his many movie contracts. His 1920s syndicated newspaper column and his radio appearances increased his visibility and popularity. Rogers crusaded for aviation expansion and provided Americans with first-hand accounts of his world travels. His earthy anecdotes and folksy style allowed him to poke fun at gangsters, prohibition, politicians, government programs, and a host of other controversial topics in a way that found general acclaim from a national audience with, usually, no one offended. His aphorisms, couched in humorous terms, were widely quoted, for example, "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."
One of Rogers's most famous sayings was "I never met a man I didn't like" and he even provided an epigram on this famous epigram:
Early years Rogers was born on his parents' Dog Iron Ranch in the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory, near present-day Oologah, Oklahoma, now in Rogers County, named in honor of his father, Clement V. Rogers.Cunningham, Frank. General Stand Watie's Confederate Indians. (p. 50). University of Oklahoma Press. 1998. The house in which he was born had been built in 1875 and was known as the "White House on the Verdigris River". His parents, Clement "Clem" V. Rogers (1839–1911) and Mary America Schrimsher (1838–1890), were both Cherokee with mixed ancestry, and were Cherokee Nation citizens.Yagoda, p. 8 Rogers quipped that his ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower, but they "met the boat". His mother was one quarter-Cherokee and born into the Aniwodi, or "Paint Clan."Carter, Joseph H. and Larry Gatlin. The Quotable Will Rogers. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 2005:20.
Unlike his father's people, Mary's Cherokee relatives had been expelled from Georgia under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 in an exodus known as The Trail of Tears. Of the 16,000 Cherokees driven to Indian Territory (later Oklahoma), 4,000 perished en route.Yagoda, 1993 p. 5: See here for Indian Removal Act and Trail of Tears casualties. And p. 8: Marys' people "came on the Trail of Tears..." She died of amoebic dysentery when Will was 10 years of age.Yagoda (1993), p. 17: On "May 28, 1890, Mary Rogers died. She was fifty-one." His father remarried in 1893 to Mary Almeda Bible, who died of complications following an unsuccessful appendicitis operation in 1900.
Rogers was the youngest of eight children. He was named for the Cherokee leader Colonel William Penn Adair."Origin of County Names in Oklahoma". Oklahoma History Society's Chronicles of Oklahoma. 2:1, March 1924 (Retrieved January 18, 2009) Only three of his siblings, sisters Sallie Clementine, Maude Ethel, and Mary (May), survived into adulthood.
His mother, Mary Schrimsher, was a sister of Martha Schrimsher Gulager, the paternal grandmother of Clu Gulager, making Rogers and Gulager first cousins, once removed.Michener, Judith "Gulager, William Martin (1928 – )," Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture; accessed August 25, 2016., psychotronicvideo.com; accessed February 12, 2019.
His father, Clement, was a leader in the Cherokee Nation. An attorney and Cherokee judge, Clement owned two slaves he had acquired from his father, and was a Confederate combat veteran of the American Civil War. He was promoted to regimental captain under Confederate colonel (later Brigadier General) Stand Watie and fought at the Battle of Pea Ridge (1862).Yagoda, 1993 p. 6-7: See here for Clem Rogers' ownership of slaves. And p. 8-9: See here for service in the Confederate army.
Clement served as a delegate to the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention. Rogers County, Oklahoma, is named in honor of him.Yagoda, 1993 p. 120-121 He served several terms in the Cherokee Senate.Yagoda, 1993 p. 13
Roach (1980) presents a sociological-psychological assessment of the relationship between Will and his father during the formative boyhood and teenage years. Clement had high expectations for his son and wanted him to be more responsible and business-minded. Will was more easygoing and oriented toward the loving affection offered by his mother, Mary, rather than the harshness of his father. The personality clash increased after his mother's death when the boy was ten. Young Will went from one venture to another with little success. Only after Will won acclaim in vaudeville did the rift begin to heal. Clement's death in 1911 precluded a full reconciliation.Fred Roach Jr., "Will Rogers' Youthful Relationship with His Father, Clem Rogers: a Story of Love and Tension", Chronicles of Oklahoma 1980 58(3): 325–42.
Will Rogers attended school in Indian Territory, at the Willie Halsell College at Vinita in 1895 and 1896, and then the Kemper Military School at Boonville, Missouri, over the 1897–98 school year. He was a good student and an avid reader of The New York Times, but he dropped out of school after the 10th grade. Rogers later said that he was a poor student, saying that he "studied the Fourth Reader for ten years". He was much more interested in cowboys and horses, and learned to rope and use a lariat. First jobs In 1899, Rogers appeared in the St. Louis Fair as part of the Mulhall Rodeo.Hoots, G. 2020. Lucille Mulhall and the Mulhall Wild West Show. Series Lucille Mulhall and the Mulhall Wild West Show. in Flint Hills Special Digital Magazine [Accessed March 23, 2022]; https://flinthillsspecial.com/2020/12/04/lucille-mulhall-and-the-mulhall-wild-west-show/. Near the end of 1901, when he was 22 years old, he and a friend, Dick Parris, left home hoping to work as gauchos in Argentina. They arrived in Argentina in May 1902, and spent five months trying to make it as ranch owners in the Pampas. Rogers and his partner lost all their money, and he later said, "I was ashamed to send home for more." The two friends separated and Rogers sailed for South Africa. It is often claimed he took a job breaking in horses for the British Army, but the Boer War had ended three months earlier. Rogers was hired at James Piccione's ranch near Mooi River Station in the Pietermaritzburg district of Natal.Yagoda, p. 56
Career Rogers began his show business career as a trick roper in "Texas Jack's Wild West Circus" in South Africa:
Grateful for the guidance but anxious to move on, Rogers quit the circus and went to Australia. Texas Jack gave him a reference letter for the Wirth Brothers Circus there, and Rogers continued to perform as a rider and trick roper, and worked on his pony act. He returned to the United States in 1904, appeared at the Saint Louis World's Fair, and began to try his roping skills on the vaudeville circuits.
Vaudeville
On a trip to New York City, Rogers was at Madison Square Garden, on April 27, 1905, when a wild steer broke out of the arena and began to climb into the viewing stands. Rogers roped the steer to the delight of the crowd. The feat got front page attention from the newspapers, giving him valuable publicity and an audience eager to see more. Willie Hammerstein saw his vaudeville act, and signed Rogers to appear on the Victoria Roof—which was literally on a rooftop—with his pony. For the next decade, Rogers estimated he worked for 50 weeks a year at the Roof and at the city's myriad vaudeville theaters.
Rogers later recalled these early years: I got a job on Hammerstein's Roof at $140 a week for myself, my horse, and the man who looked after it. I remained on the roof for eight weeks, always getting another two-week extension when Willie Hammerstein would say to me after the Monday matinee, 'you're good for two weeks more'... Marty Shea, the booking agent for the Columbia, came to me and asked if I wanted to play burlesque. They could use an extra attraction....I told him I would think about it, but 'Burlesque' sounded to me then as something funny." Shea and Sam A. Scribner, the general manager of the Columbia Amusement Company, approached Rogers a few days later. Shea told Scribner Rogers was getting $150 and would take $175. "'What's he carrying?', Scribner asked Shea. 'Himself, a horse, and a man', answered Shea." Scribner replied, "'Give him eight weeks at $250'".Will Rogers on Sam Scribner, January 1925 newspaper article, New York City
In the fall of 1915, Rogers began to appear in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. The variety revue began at midnight in the top-floor night club of Ziegfeld's New Amsterdam Theatre, and drew many influential—and regular—customers. By this time, Rogers had refined his act. His monologues on the news of the day followed a similar routine every night. He appeared on stage in his cowboy outfit, nonchalantly twirling his lasso, and said, "Well, what shall I talk about? I ain't got anything funny to say. All I know is what I read in the papers." He would make jokes about what he had read in that day's newspapers. The line "All I know is what I read in the papers" is often incorrectly described as Rogers's most famous punch line, when it was his opening line.
His run at the New Amsterdam ran into 1916, and Rogers's growing popularity led to an engagement on the more famous Ziegfeld Follies. At this stage, Rogers's act was strictly physical, a silent display of daring riding and clever tricks with his lariat. He discovered that audiences identified the cowboy as the archetypical American—doubtless aided by Theodore Roosevelt's image as a cowboy. Rogers's cowboy was an unfettered man free of institutional restraints, with no bureaucrats to order his life. When he came back to the United States and worked in Wild West shows, he slowly began adding the occasional spoken ad lib, such as "Swingin' a rope's all right... if your neck ain't in it." Audiences responded to his laconic but pointed humor, and were just as fascinated by his frontier Oklahoma twang.
By 1916, Rogers was a featured star in Ziegfeld's Follies on Broadway, as he moved into satire by transforming the "Ropin' Fool" to the "Talkin' Fool". At one performance, with President Woodrow Wilson in the audience, Rogers improvised a "roast" of presidential policies that had Wilson, and the entire audience, in stitches and proved his remarkable skill at off-the-cuff, witty commentary on current events. He built the rest of his career around that skill.
A 1922 editorial in The New York Times said that "Will Rogers in the Follies is carrying on the tradition of Aristophanes, and not unworthily." Rogers branched into silent films too, for Samuel Goldwyn's company Goldwyn Pictures. He made his first silent movie, Laughing Bill Hyde (1918), which was filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Many early films were filmed and produced in the New York area in those years. Rogers could make a film, yet easily still rehearse and perform in the Follies. He eventually appeared in most of the Follies, from 1916 to 1925.
Films Hollywood discovered Rogers in 1918, as Samuel Goldwyn gave him the title role in Laughing Bill Hyde.Rogers, 1941 p. 143: "Will made his film debut in the summer of 1918...[in] Laughing Bill Hyde..."O'Brien, 1935 p. 74-75: "...Laughing Bill Hyde...Rogers played the title role..."