On The 80th Anniversary Of The Death Of Will Rogers (And Wiley Post)
Will Rogers Helped Popularize Radio With Pointed Humor
Humorist Will Rogers takes to the speaker's stand at the Democratic National Convention June 29, 1932. AP hide caption
itoggle caption AP 
Humorist Will Rogers takes to the speaker's stand at the Democratic National Convention June 29, 1932.
AP Will Rogers was 55. He was flying through Alaska with his friend, the pilot Wiley Post, to mine some material for his newspaper column and radio show when they crashed near Point Barrow.
Will Rogers was a real Oklahoma cowboy, part Cherokee, who could rope and ride but found he could make more by roping and talking. He put wry asides and funny observations into his lariat tricks, went into the circus, vaudeville, then Broadway, shuffling onstage to say, "All I know is what I read in the papers," then talk about news, politics, and the human comedy.
"The American people will vote dry as long as they are able to stagger to the polls," he said of Prohibition.
"The truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that could happen to you," he liked to say.
And once: "You wire the state or the federal government that your cow or hog is sick and they will send out experts from Washington and appropriate money.... You wire them that your baby has the diphtheria ... and see what they do."
Will Rogers' son, Fred, died at the age of two from diphtheria.
He became famous onstage, and in movies, books, and a new medium called radio, which could reach millions of people at the same time
And what drives the spread of a new communications technology? Jokes.
"I don't belong to any organized political party," Will Rogers liked to say. "I'm a Democrat."
"Everybody is ignorant," he reminded audiences. "Only on different subjects."
He told a joint session of Congress, "... When you make a joke, it's a law!"
"I would keep them in session the year round for my business," Will Rogers told his radio audience, "but I have some consideration for people."
Mort Sahl, late-night monologues, Jon Stewart, Amy Schumer, the real-time satire of The Onion — they all owe something to Will Rogers. He was never profane and rarely partisan, but Will Rogers could sure be pointed.
"I have a scheme for stopping war," he once said. "No nation is allowed to enter war until they've paid for the last one."
He had a sharp mind, and an open heart. The line for which Will Rogers is best remembered is still worth hearing in full:
"When I die, my epitaph or whatever you call those signs on gravestones is going to read: 'I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn't like.' "
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
You never know what is going to show up in the media and the social network these days to remind you of something long past. The other day I was listening to some radio show and the name Will Rogers came up. It seems that this is the 80th anniversary year of his death in a plane crash (along with pilot Wiley Post). Now that fact might rate a small thought in the blogosphere and particularly here on the American Left History blog since Rogers represented a certain populist folk humor and folk wisdom back then which has had some more recent cracker-barrel type imitators and progeny.
So yes Brother Rogers gets an honorable mention here. But more than that since as a radio, newspaper and assembly hall orator and wit he reached many people he get a retroactive kudo from my late grandfather, Timmy Riley via me his grandson, Sam Lowell. See Grandpa was a devoted listener to the Will Rogers program (at least that is what he told me back when I was a kid) and told me he got many a laugh and some profound thought (his words) out of the mouth of that general store philosopher. But go figure this. How did a laid-back old Okie from out in heartland get under the skin of a crusty old Irish immigrant who still harkened back to the Fenian Brotherhood, to the boys of Easter 1916 and to the heroic figure of James Connelly commandant of the Irish Citizens Army. Yeah, Will must have had something that my grandmother, my mother (his daughter) and my four brothers and I missed. Adios Will.
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