Will Rogers and His Complications

Will Rogers was born on November fourth, eighteen seventy-nine, in Oologah, in what was then the Cherokee Nation, before Oklahoma was a state. His father, Clem Rogers, was a prominent Cherokee citizen who had served in the Confederate Army and operated a successful ranch. Will grew up speaking Cherokee, riding horses, and learning the rope tricks that would eventually make him famous in New York, London, and Hollywood.

By the nineteen twenties, he was the most-read newspaper columnist in America, his syndicated dispatches reaching forty million readers. By the nineteen thirties, his radio voice was familiar to most of the country. He played himself in films, advised presidents, and made gentle mockery of politicians so disarming that the politicians sometimes laughed. He said things like "I never met a man I didn't like," and people believed he meant it.

He was forty years old when he said that. He had also never said much publicly about what it meant to be Cherokee in an America that had been systematically dispossessing the Cherokee Nation for a century. His national image was that of a universal democratic humorist, a man of the people so encompassing that his specific people were mostly invisible.

His family history included a fact that his public image smoothed over: the Rogers family, like many prosperous Cherokee families, had held enslaved African Americans before the Civil War. Under the terms of the post-war treaty between the Cherokee Nation and the United States, the freedmen and their descendants were to receive full citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. That obligation was contested for much of the following century, and the Cherokee Freedmen citizenship question has been litigated and relitigated into the twenty-first century.

Rogers died on August fifteenth, nineteen thirty-five, in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside his friend, the aviator Wiley Post. He was fifty-five years old. The memorial in Claremore holds his archive, his family photographs, and the parts of his story that his national image kept quiet.