Studies in American Indian Literatures

By the time of his death in 1935, political humorist Will Rogers had become one of the most famous personalities in the United States. Through his syndicated weekly articles and daily telegrams, films, and radio broadcasts, Rogers reached an estimated audience of forty million. Because of his deft use of the venues of mass entertainment—from the vaudeville stage to Hollywood—and the consequent mainstreaming of his act, it may be easy to pass over the side of Rogers that was not so mainstream: born in 1879 in Indian Territory, Rogers was a member of the Cherokee Nation for the first twenty years of his life. He became a naturalized American citizen after the 1898 Curtis Act brought the disbanding of tribal government and the allotment of land in severalty to the Five Tribes. Billed as a cowboy from Oklahoma and as a self-made diplomat to the president, nominated for the presidency because of the broad appeal of his home-spun humor and common sense, Rogers's commercially crafted all-American public identity is a simplification of a complex personal and national history.

Rogers's humor has been discussed as the American-grown cracker-barrel humor originating with Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard. "Horse sense," as Walter Blair wrote in 1942, is that "good, sound, practical sense" that Will Rogers shares with Franklin, Josh Billings, Davy Crockett, and an assortment of other American humorists (vi). While Blair sees horse sense as peculiar to North America, he does not attribute any part of Rogers's humor to the part-Cherokee identity Rogers claimed as his own. This failure to [End Page 83] acknowledge the tribal specificity of Rogers's humor is probably due to the stereotype of the stoic Indian—the "granite-faced grunting redskin," as Vine Deloria Jr. puts it in his study of Indian humor Custer Died for Your Sins (148). A biography of Rogers, written immediately after his death in 1935, exemplifies the influence of this stereotype. The biographer, P. J. O'Brien, parcels out Rogers's talents among his three lines of descent: his humor is Irish; his business sense, Scotch; his "dignity and reserve," Indian (24). It may be that because no one looked for an Indian sense of humor in Rogers, his audiences missed the sting of his jokes. This obliviousness to Indian humor may have actually contributed to Rogers's mainstream appeal as well.

In a larger sense, Rogers has been appropriated not only as an American humorist but as a mythic American figure. William R. Brown has posited Rogers as an embodiment of four basic cultural myths—the innocent "American Adam" (37), the egalitarian "American democrat" (91), the resourceful "self-made man" (161), and the technologically savvy "American Prometheus" (209). Although Rogers's Cherokee ancestry is featured in Brown's study, Brown mainly wants to incorporate Rogers in a broad American framework, similar to Blair's framework of general American humor, denying Rogers any kind of cultural or political specificity that may endanger this abstract all-American representativeness.

Furthermore, because Rogers was an acculturated mixed-blood, his Native side has not been taken seriously. One biographer, Richard Ketchum, quotes Rogers's son as saying that his father and grand-father were "upwardly mobile" and chose to accommodate white ways rather than traditional Cherokee culture (58). Will Rogers was connected to the Cherokees even less than his father because he married a white woman and lived away from the territory of the Cherokee Nation. But "he became too much of a showman not to realize the appeal an Indian background had for an audience" (Ketchum 58). The implication is that because Rogers was not traditional, he was not a real Indian; he used Indianness simply as a market ploy.

As a result of this mainstreaming, Rogers has long been denied a prominent place in Native American literary history. Recently, however, Native scholars have called for a reassessment of the proper [End Page 84] subject of Native American studies. Robert Warrior encourages a broader approach to Native American writing—open to a greater variety of genres, to issues other than essential identity and survival, and to earlier periods of forced acculturation (xix–xx). Warrior suggests that the reintegration into Native American studies of Will Rogers's political humor would avoid the essentialism that assigns to Native Americans unchanging traditional values and beliefs and the expression of them within certain limited venues.

Craig Womack calls for a "literary separatism" that would look at literary production not simply as a reflection of culture but as a reflection of sovereignty. Like Warrior, he challenges the stereotype of the traditional Indian as the only real Indian because this stereotype denies Native cultures the ability to change and still preserve their separate political identities. According to Womack,

The tendency to put native people in this reductive tainted/untainted framework occurs, at least partially, because Indians are thought of not in terms of their true legal status, which is as members of nations, but as cultural artifacts. Native people are seldom regarded in terms of the political and legal ramifications of tribal nationalism.

(141)

What Womack proposes as an answer to the vexed question of Native identity is ultimately a politically committed criticism that

roots literature in land and culture. This criticism emphasizes unique Native worldviews and political realities, searches for differences as often as similarities, and attempts to find Native literature's place in Indian country, rather than Native literature's place in the canon.

(11)

Rogers's acculturation may explain the ease with which he became a popular hero, but it obscures his vocal identification as a Cherokee and the subtleties of his Indian humor. His direct involvement in U.S. politics, as an ironic commentator, places Rogers within the framework of Native intellectual independence advocated by Warrior and Womack. Rogers writes from within a tradition of Native intellectuals who engage critically with U.S. political and patriotic discourse. [End Page 85] In fact, Womack claims that Rogers is "the next link" after the Creek journalist Alex Posey "in developing a unique brand of Indian humor" (172).

Like Posey, Rogers commented repeatedly on U.S. Indian policies: allotment, American Indian citizenship, the integration of Indian Territory into the state of Oklahoma, the dissolution of tribal governments, and the participation of Indians in U.S. national politics. Posey wrote the Fus Fixico letters for a Creek audience and chose not to seek mainstream acceptance (Womack 140). In contrast, Rogers took his political commentary to the national media and addressed it to a larger predominantly non-Native audience that grew to love him.

Yet there is no denying that Rogers wrote from a position inherently antagonistic to his audience. He played on his audience's nativist prejudices and used American patriotic rhetoric successfully to reassert its very negation: the Native right to land possession and independence. When he billed himself as an American, Rogers was aware that as a naturalized citizen of the United States he was less than 100 percent American by the standards of exclusive nativist organizations. He considered himself American in a very different sense. Rather than vying for a spot among the mythical Pilgrims who came to America on the Mayflower, some of Rogers's ancestors on both sides of his family tree were indigenous to the continent now called North America. Among its other strategies, nativist writing in the 1920s sought to legitimize European Americans as descendants of the supposedly vanished American Indian; it used the trope of "the vanishing American" to channel its paranoia of continuing immigration (Michaels 32, 29). Rogers's political satire thus could tap for material at the very mainsprings of U.S. nativism.

I have chosen as the main criterion for evaluating the indigenous aspects of Rogers's humor Kenneth Lincoln's observation in Indi'n Humor of the special "rootedness" of Indians (and Indian humor) in the continent of North America (215). In its claim to land possession, Indian humor is, I believe, irreducibly antagonistic to the integrationist categories proposed by Walter Blair but also implied in Lincoln's conclusion that "tribal humor stitches the frayed cross-cultural fabric of multiethnic America" (313)—that is, that Indian [End Page 86] humor ultimately performs a restorative role within the nation at large. If my study stops one step before reconciliation and integration, it is mostly because the understanding of Rogers's humor appears to have suffered from this desire to assimilate it rather too quickly within the larger category of American humor.

Drawing on Native scholars' rationale for exploring the intellectual production of American Indians, I focus on Rogers's response to the conditions that brought him into the fray of U.S. politics: the succession of allotment acts meant to assimilate American Indians, the inclusion of Indian Territory into the state of Oklahoma, the naturalization of American Indians as U.S. citizens, and their participation in U.S. politics. These processes that cut at the root of Native political and territorial independence in the early twentieth century are alluded to in Rogers's humorous comments about his American citizenship and in his nostalgia for the days of tribal sovereignty.

Rogers's Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President appeared in 1926, two years after the passage of the last Indian Citizenship Act.¹ Initially the articles comprising the text ran as dispatches from Rogers's European trip to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, whose editor, George Horace Lorimer, had suggested both the trip and the title (Yagoda 228). What is particularly interesting about this series of letters is not so much Rogers's commentary on European politics and culture but the question of his legitimacy as an American diplomat, a position that carries a citizenship requirement. While the title of the series humorously suggests a breach of appointment procedure, in the very first letter the self-made diplomat raises the question of his status as an American citizen.

The title was developed by analogy to Lorimer's own successful series "Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son," first published anonymously in the Post in 1901–02 and then issued as a bestselling book. This series of fictional letters expressed Lorimer's belief in traditional American business values and fit squarely into the myth of the self-made man. The humor, the southwestern flavor, and the provinciality of the merchant's speech (Tebbel 29–30) were very similar to Rogers's own anti-intellectual, anti–eastern establishment pose as a cowboy from Oklahoma. The title of Rogers's series [End Page 87] was most probably an attempt to cash in on Lorimer's earlier contagious success.² While the title and the idea for the series were not Rogers's, the change of subject—from business to politics—changes the meaning of self-making, and while Rogers and Lorimer may have had some very similar views and ways of expression, Rogers's relation to the presidency and to American citizenship is peculiarly his own.

The title of Roger's series is humorous because it implies the self-made diplomat's illegitimacy, since diplomats are as a rule officially appointed. The political connotation of self-making is different from the economic, because within the myth of a classless laissez-faire society, the insistence on the possibility of economic self-making and self-reliance is actually one of the basic means of legitimizing the existing social order. Political self-making, however, especially in relation to the admission of Native Americans (and other marginalized groups) to American citizenship, is a much more controversial issue. The "Author's Note" humorously explains the legitimacy of the self-made diplomat on the basis of his "intimate understanding" of President Coolidge's wishes so that the latter did not even have to ask him to go on the trip (5). Because American Indian citizenship supposedly "destined" Indians "to live on the fringes of civilization" (Hoxie 96), Rogers claims an ironic position of intimacy with the U.S. president. He rhetorically occupies the center rather than the margin.

The first article goes on to question the citizenship status of the self-made diplomat and the reality of his "intimate" relationship with the U.S. president. No longer at issue is the breach of appointment procedure in diplomatic circles but the legitimacy of the procedure for granting American citizenship, as steeped as it is in ideological mystification. In his first letter as a self-made diplomat, Rogers gives a Native American treatment of the question "What makes an American citizen?"

The letters pretend to be a running commentary on Rogers's trip to Europe in the vein of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, but with a focus on "the pressing foreign policy issues confronting the nation" (Letters xix). They begin with a commentary on an important domestic [End Page 88] issue, or depending on one's interpretation of Native sovereignty and the persistent duality of Native American citizenship, this issue may be viewed as one of foreign policy as well. The attempt to ascertain Rogers's American citizenship runs into a problem characteristic of the period of mandatory assimilation. Upon applying for a travel passport for his European trip, Rogers is asked to produce his birth certificate, a standard bureaucratic procedure for ascertaining identity and citizenship. Rogers interprets the formality as a paradox—not as proof of his identity, but literally as proof of his birth, and therefore of his existence, implying that his presence in front of the official is not sufficient evidence that he was born at an earlier point in time. The humor of the situation is produced by the confrontation between the official's supposedly unreasonable demand and the "early days of the Indian Territory" (Letters 12) when one's presence was sufficient evidence for one's alleged birth.

When Rogers refers to Indian Territory, he refers to the time before the dissolution of tribal governments when he would have been a well-to-do member of a fully functional Cherokee Nation. The Rogers family lost a great deal of their large estate in the process of allotment.³ While the Cherokees adapted to allotment and Oklahoma statehood, in his writing Rogers often bemoans the loss of Indian Territory and satirizes the interests that created the state of Oklahoma. Part of his sentimentality and nostalgia may be for a simpler agricultural past, but it is also nostalgia for a state of affairs that involved the hope and efforts until 1907 that the disparate Indian tribes that had been removed to Indian Territory over the course of the nineteenth century may be allowed to form their own state. In a weekly article of January 24, 1924, Rogers writes:

There is a good deal in the papers about giving my native state of Oklahoma back to the Indians. Now I am a Cherokee Indian and very proud of it, but I doubt if you can get them to accept it—not in its present state.

When the white folks come in and took Oklahoma from us, they spoiled a mighty happy hunting ground, just to give Sinclair a racing ground, and Walton a barbecue.

(WA 1:185)⁴ [End Page 89]

Rogers here responds to the mainstream quip that when something does not work it should be given back to the Indians, implying either that it was defective to begin with or that it has malfunctioned and is discardable now. Although he deflects from the political import of his writing with the stereotypical description of Indian paradise as a "happy hunting ground," Rogers is clearly separating the Indian Territory governed by Indian tribes from what he sees as its subsequent corruption by white entrepreneurs and politicians. There is a sense in this passage that before Indian Territory was incorporated into the state of Oklahoma, it was Indian not only in name; it actually belonged to the Indians.⁵

This emphasis on Indian possession of Indian Territory is evident in Rogers's writing on a number of other occasions as well. On March 7, 1926, Rogers admits, "Really at heart I love ranching. I have always regretted that I didn't live about 30 or 40 years earlier, and in the same old Country, the Indian Territory. I would have liked to got here ahead of the 'Nestors,' the Bob wire fence, and so called civilization" (WA 2:160). Significantly, in the first decades after the Civil War (roughly the period to which Rogers alludes), the few whites in Indian Territory were an underclass of tenants to wealthy Indian ranchers (Zissu 16). Rogers obviously regrets the passing of this economic and political dominance of Indians in Indian Territory.

The Cherokee Nation is also a referent in the passport scene of the first letter of the self-made diplomat. After Rogers's initial "naive" misunderstanding that his birth certificate is the only way to verify his existence, the female bureaucrat is forced to clarify that she needs the certificate to ascertain Rogers's American citizenship. Rogers writes:

That was the first time I had ever been called on to prove that. Here my Father and Mother were both one-eighth Cherokee Indians and I have been on the Cherokee rolls since I was named, and my family had lived on one ranch for 75 years. But just offhand, how was I to show that I was born in America? The English that I spoke had none of the earmarks of the Mayflower.

(Letters 12) [End Page 90]

The opposition that Rogers sets up is between the myth of America as an immigrant nation and himself as an enrolled Cherokee Indian, who was born on Cherokee land and therefore on the contested territory of North America. His status as a Cherokee is not in question, but his status as an American is. He does not qualify under the nativist theory that the only true Americans were of Anglo-Saxon descent and derived from the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. Rogers may be native to North America, but he is still outside the ideological parameters of the United States. He does not dwell on the legal complications of his case—that it was because he was allotted land that he became an U.S. citizen in the first place.

During the film version of this scene in So This Is London (1930), Rogers adds that his ancestors actually "met the boat," and "it is to the everlasting discredit of the Indian race that they ever let the Pilgrims land" (May 31; The Story of Will Rogers). According to this version, the Indians at a certain time in history had the power to make the decision of who belongs in North America that now is in the hands of the bureaucratic descendants of the Pilgrims. Rogers draws an opposition between Native Americans, the true Americans if citizenship is guaranteed by place of birth, and all immigrant Americans, including the Pilgrims. If it is a matter of precedence that established the Mayflower passengers' claims to authenticity over later immigrants, Native Americans have the advantage of being the first known settlers of North America.⁶

Rogers satirizes not only the Pilgrims but also the current uses of them by people like President Coolidge, who built his credentials on being their descendant and named his boat the Mayflower. Addressing the president, Rogers writes: "So as you sail down on the Mayflower tomorrow to keep away from the Congressmen I will be on the Leviathan with my oldest son of 14—who is also a naturalized American citizen" (Letters 13). Rogers distinguishes himself not only from the original Pilgrims but from the president he addresses: they are sailing on different ships ("ships of state" being a metaphor for political government). In this statement, Rogers acknowledges clearly what he refused to admit earlier: that he was a naturalized American citizen, that is, that the U.S. government treated the indigenous [End Page 91] people of North America no differently than the first-generation immigrants to the continent. Such an acknowledgement shows his awareness of the actual legal procedure of granting citizenship to Indians. This awareness, however, is slipped very discreetly in a joke that focuses on the parodic regurgitation of nativist myths.

Since immigration is the main reason for regulating travel to and from the United States, and since naturalization works the same way for both Indians, who are native-born to the American continent, and immigrants, who are not, Rogers raises the issue of the similarity between Native Americans and the new arrivals to the big cities on the U.S. eastern seaboard: "It was as hard to find an American in New York as it was to get a passport" (Letters 13). Nativists like Lothrop Stoddard claimed that "the Nordic native American" was disappearing because of the influx of immigrants, who may have become American citizens but could never become Americans in the narrow ideological sense in which the nativists defined their entitlement (Michaels 29). In this sense, Rogers spoofs the nativist paranoia about the changing character of the nation. In another sense, Rogers comments on his own isolation in New York—away from his own nation and in the heart of the United States, where there is no one to authenticate him as an American. While he sets an opposition between himself and the recent immigrants, Rogers also understands the similarity of their situation when confronted with the exclusive category of 100 percent Americanism. The witness he finally finds to prove his birth tells him: "Why, sure I knew your Father well, and I know that you are an American. Not 100 percent ones like the Rotarray's and Kiawanises and Lions, but enough to pay taxes" (Letters 13).

Rogers explains his sailing on the Leviathan as a further justification of citizenship in terms of concrete civic actions that merit recognition: "Being not what is proclaimed as a 100 percent American, I went over on an American boat. The 100 percenters all go on English or French, such as Hotel Men and Rotary Associations" (Letters 15). Rogers here draws a distinction between birthright and commitment to one's country, or earning one's citizenship, that is reminiscent of the call for a committed Americanism in the Progressive Era before World War I. [End Page 92]

The self-made diplomat's earnest protestations betray an uncertainty about his own status as a naturalized citizen of the United States. Indians, according to Rogers, seem to have remained permanently outside the Union. He suggests as much in his comment on the backwater habits of the Kentucky mountains: "It's the last stand of primitive and hundred per cent Americanism (leaving out us Injuns, which of course they always do. Left 'em out so long till they are perpetually out)" (WA 5:234). In its gist, the 100 percent Americanism is what unites the members of the exclusive Rotary Club and the mountain hicks of Kentucky. The joke pokes fun not only at the social pretenses of the exclusive nativist clubs but also at Rogers's own position as a mock political commentator, an equal to American presidents, even a mock andidate for the presidency. In spite of all these self-appointed roles, Rogers is unsure about his precise status in the United States; yet he is certain about belonging in North America.

The forced remaking of Native Americans into American citizens was never a completely successful process, but it brought enough Native public figures within the halls of the state and federal senates and involved them directly in American policy making. As a rule, the engagement with U.S. politics was the domain of the mixed-blood Native elites. Will Rogers's father, Clem Rogers, made the transition from the Cherokee tribal government to the state government of Oklahoma. During his tenure as a political commentator, Rogers covered the careers of Native politicians like the part-Cherokee U.S. senator from Oklahoma Robert Owen and the part-Kaw Kansas senator Charles Curtis. Curtis was directly involved in the setting of U.S. Indian policy with arguably disastrous results for American Indians. Yet he was nevertheless hailed as a success and a hope for change by his own tribe and by Rogers, who appears to have been unaware of the precise role Curtis played in forcing the Five Tribes into allotment and into the state of Oklahoma.

Senator Curtis of Kansas was of a mixed Kaw, Osage, and French descent, and like Rogers and other Indians involved in politics at the time, he belonged to an already acculturated Native elite. William Unrau, in Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, argues that in pushing [End Page 93] through his allotment bill Curtis was motivated by his desire to show that mixed-blood children should have equal rights to tribal property. Curtis set out to prove the importance of mixed-bloods to the U.S. government, thus turning a personal issue into a political program. Unrau describes the contradictory nature of Curtis's claims and actions in relation to the passage of his bill:

Before 1898, Curtis had complained about the Dawes Com-mission's intent unilaterally to abrogate time-honored Indian treaties, but in fact this was precisely what the bill that he wrote accomplished. By abolishing tribal courts, by instituting civil government in Indian Territory, by requiring that tribal individuals submit to allotment regardless of the consequences, and by providing the guidelines for political union with the state of Oklahoma, the act was far more radical than the one that the Dawes people envisaged prior to 1898. The very title of the law, "An Act for the protection of the people of the Indian Territory and for other purposes," was a clever deception, designed to give the impression that the exploitation of the Oklahoma Indians was a thing of the past.

(123; emphasis in original)

To Unrau, the Curtis Act was the response of a conservative Republican to the potential threat of the formation of a separate Indian state in Indian Territory that would be democratic and would oppose the big business interests in the area (121–23). This part of Curtis's resume was not advertised during his electoral campaign as Herbert Hoover's running mate. His part-Indian background could be safely exoticized because in the 1920s Curtis was not really interested in the state of Indian affairs and made no campaign promises for a change in federal policy toward the Indians (161, 163). Rogers's support of Curtis's electoral campaign in 1928 shows how much his impression of the politician's character is influenced by media reports as well as the spin Rogers puts on those reports.

Rogers never gives up his belief that Curtis will represent Indian interests. What seems even more important to him is that Curtis is at least part-Indian and successful in politics. His bid for Curtis [End Page 94] shows Rogers's anxiety about anti-Indian discrimination. But most important, Curtis seems to have fascinated Rogers because his political aspirations provide material for a joke that Rogers savors repeatedly. He follows the forced assimilation of Native Americans to a self-destructive end: if an Indian becomes an American president, then he could dismantle the institution of the presidency and the United States as a whole.

On June 9, 1928, he reminds the Republican Convention about their obligation to Curtis's candidacy:

And don't forget Charley Curtis. You Republicans owe him more than you do anybody outside of your Campaign contributors. The trouble is he is so faithful that the chances are he will never be rewarded. He has stayed with you through all your disgraces and never got mixed up in any of them. He is an Indian. I wish he would get in. Us Indians would run these White people out of this country.

(More Letters 91)

After Curtis is nominated, Rogers writes in a telegram dated June 15, 1928:

I been telling you for days that Curtis would be the one. He is a Kaw Indian and me a Cherokee and I am for him. It's the first time we have ever got a break—the only American that has ever run for that high office. . . . Come on, Injun! If you are elected let's run the white people out of this country.

(DT 1:223–24)

Rogers advances these propositions as jokes, and their humorous threat is deactivated anyway by the complicity of mixed-blood Indian politicians in destructive U.S. Indian policies. The point, however, is that this type of humor cannot be written off as an example of all-American humor because of its peculiar anti–United States intent, especially because, for Rogers, America and the United States are not synonymous.

In December 1928, Rogers was disappointed at seeing Curtis "set . . . back to nothing but a Toastmaster" (WA 3:235–36), and in a 1930 radio broadcast on Curtis he repeats the relative unimportance of the vice presidency and of Curtis's role, which he turns into a joke: [End Page 95] "When he is not asleep in the Senate, he is at the races" (Radio 19). While Unrau attributes Curtis's ineffectiveness to his lack of interest in Indian affairs, Rogers gives Curtis the benefit of the doubt, describing him as a victim of political machinations. Despite his disappointment, in 1930 Rogers returns to his initial humorous proposition, albeit in a slightly different form: "So good luck to you, Charlie, old Injun, and I hope you are elected President some day and we will run the White House out of this country" (Radio 20). In this version, Rogers uses a pun to produce the mixed effect of both conducting and ending American presidential politics, much in the same way as his earlier joke hoped that Indian involvement in American politics would bring an end to the non-Native occupation of North America.

In different versions, this joke has proven a favorite among Native Americans, who have adapted it to changing historical circumstances. Deloria provides two later adaptations of it. In a poll during the Vietnam War, which characteristically shows Native Americans not following the antiwar protests of the period, "only 15 percent of the Indians thought that the United States should get out of Vietnam. Eighty-five percent thought they should get out of America!" (Deloria 157). The second version is Clyde Warrior's response to the argument that, since 70 percent of Americans live in the cities, the bid for traditional Native life seems behind the times, "Don't you realize what this means?" Warrior asks. "It means we are pushing them into the cities. Soon we will have the country back again" (168). Rogers tells a wide variety of other jokes that Deloria has identified as central to Native humor; these include jokes about Columbus, Custer, broken treaties, and land theft.⁷ They all place Rogers squarely within the tradition of Indian humor and outside mainstream American humor.

Rogers keeps open the hypothetical possibility for rhetorical mastery of such concepts as the vice presidency and the presidency. He often toys with the idea of running for president himself; yet it is interesting that when his mock candidacy was picked up in 1928 by the editor of the humorous Life magazine, Rogers participated only half-heartedly in the election campaign on his behalf.⁸ It may be [End Page 96] true that, as his editor says, the mock campaign gave Rogers another opportunity to mock politicians (He Chews ix); yet Rogers scorned any serious suggestion that he run for president since he believed that the United States was not as desperate as to elect its comedians.

Thus in an early 1925 self-nomination, Rogers simply spoofs President Coolidge's candidacy by claiming that if he were elected, Rogers would show Americans "some life"; he would liven up the inauguration by bringing to Washington Cherokees, cowboys, movie stars, and aviators, that is, all groups with which he was closely associated (WA 2:1–3). Rogers's view of the presidency here is detached not only because his attitude towards U.S. politics is not simply that of an American citizen but also because as a humorous commentator, he is above all an entertainer. He is thus twice removed from U.S. politics. Since the Cherokees are "the most highly civilized tribe of Indians in the World . . . they could have stood it a few days in Washington even among those low brow surroundings" (WA 2:1). The implication of this statement is double: that Rogers, as a Cherokee, could not have survived long in Washington and that the civilization of the Cherokees is different and superior to the political and social climate in the capital (even though the Cherokees were named a "civilized tribe" precisely because of their adoption of some of the trappings of white political culture early on in their history).

Will Rogers died in a plane crash in the summer of 1935. His sudden death did not allow him to comment on the reform of federal Indian policy begun by John Collier. Nevertheless, on June 8, 1934, he recorded briefly his appreciation of Collier's efforts: "If that Wheeler-Howard Indian bill don't pass there is no justice. I think we got a real Indian agent in this man Collier. The Indian has just lost 100 years in his civilization, and Collier is trying to get him back" (DT 4:182). Ten days later, the Wheeler-Howard bill, a greatly modified version of the Collier bill, became the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), a major piece of legislation under which "any tribe or the people of any reservation could organize themselves as a business corporation, adopt a constitution and bylaws, and exercise some form of self-government" (Deloria and Lytle 5). The law also provided for the end of allotment and for the restitution to tribes of unallotted [End Page 97] lands (Prucha 323). As usual, the act was applied to the Five Tribes in Oklahoma with some delay in the modified form of the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936. While the modifications of the original bill and the problems of administration of the reorganization acts themselves took away the radical edge of Collier's original proposals, the IRA and its modifications nevertheless brought back to the fore the viability of Native sovereignty. When he went to Oklahoma to explain the original bill in March 1934, Collier was met with great resistance by the Five Tribes in the eastern part of the state, which were weary of reorganization (Prucha 327). Rogers, however, had already commented approvingly on the bill. That as an acculturated individual, living away from his homeland, Rogers could appreciate the importance of the future IRA is telling of his abiding interest in Indian affairs, not as an exotic component of American life and a boost to his own career, but as a civilization in need of independent existence.

His commentary on U.S. politics gives the sense that, for Will Rogers, Native tribes are both at the center of North America and somehow outside of the United States. This special place from which the Native humorist speaks contributes to his particular brand of humor despite the many concessions Rogers necessarily makes to his audiences. If his political humor, then, is to be acknowledged as American humor, it will have to be accepted with its call for the end of both U.S. politics and non-Native possession of the land on this continent.