Reading post: The Illiterate Digest

I have finished my sixth book for the Classics Challenge: The Illiterate Digest by Will Rogers (Cherokee), published in 1924. It's not a novel -- it's Rogers' first collection of the weekly columns he wrote under that title for the McNaught Syndicate beginning in 1922. In my opinion, this fulfills category #10, "A humorous or satirical classic." It may not be exactly what the manager of the Challenge was thinking of, but it's the only "classic" (i.e., at least 50 years old) work by a Native American that I could find that was funny. 

And, oh, it is funny. I'm not sure I can explain why it is funny, though. I kept reading bits of it to Teen A and he was extremely under-impressed. For example, one piece is called "Warning to Jokers: Lay off the Prince," and it is about the Prince of Wales repeatedly falling off his horse while playing polo and getting ribbed about it in the press. (This is the future King Edward VIII of England, who was Prince of Wales from 1910 until 1936, and King for only a short time after that, of course.) Will Rogers, who started out as a cowboy and was a very accomplished rider and roper, also enjoyed playing polo and sometimes fell off his horse too:

...But what I want to know from some of these Newspaper Riders is what I am supposed to do in case the Horse falls.
     Are the Prince and I supposed to fall With the Horse, or are we supposed to stay up there in the air until he gets Up, and comes back up under us? Every fall that the Prince has had has been caused by a falling Horse, not by being thrown From one. In the future the Prince and I will personally pay in the papers for the extra two lines that will announce that "the Horse going down had something to do with our going off."

I know that doesn't seem particularly hilarious, but read in the context of the whole column, trust me, it's funny. I think his random capitalization is almost the funniest part of his writing. Supposedly he really wrote like this -- he didn't quite finish high school and I guess didn't pay a lot of attention in class, so his knowledge of formal English grammar was a little sketchy.

As soon as I started reading this, I knew I had to have some help understanding the context, so I turned to Will Rogers: A Biography, by Ben Yagoda, reading it along with Rogers' book. I finished The Illiterate Digest first, because it's so funny, but I eventually finished the biography too. The bio is very interesting and worth reading, even if you've never heard of Will Rogers. I'd heard of him, but I didn't know much about him. In the early 1930s he was one of the most famous people in this country. He was a vaudeville star, a Hollywood actor, a newspaper columnist, and a radio personality, but after he died in a plane crash in Alaska in 1935, the country sort of forgot about him. It's the strangest thing.

Many of the columns in The Illiterate Digest concern politics, and since I'm only up to U. S. Grant in my reading of presidential bios, I had to keep referring to Wikipedia to keep these presidents (and their challengers) straight. He refers to Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), Warren G. Harding (1921-1923), and Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929), as well as those who challenged Coolidge for office. Rogers wrote several columns about the Democratic convention of 1924, so there's a lot about Al Smith and William McAdoo and John Davis. He also wrote about Henry Ford and William Jennings Bryan and other notables of that time period. Even though much of it made no sense to me, it was still funny.

Given my Challenge theme this year, I was interested in how Rogers' Cherokee heritage plays into his writing. The Yagoda biography was helpful here, too. Rogers was about 1/4 Cherokee (both his parents were as well) and grew up on a ranch in Oklahoma -- Indian Territory, actually. Like most of the other young people in the area, Rogers didn't make much of being Cherokee, unlike his closest friend Charley McClellan who wore his hair in a long braid and learned traditional dances. But it was indubitably a part of him, and was one reason his future wife dragged her feet about marrying him. In The Illiterate Digest, Rogers refers to his background a few times. One of his most famous quotes was "My ancestors didn't come over in the Mayflower, but we was there to meet the boat," but there are other little throwaway bits like this one:

Now I am also not to be outdone by an ex-Prime Minister donating my receipts from my Prolific Tongue to a needy charity. The total share of this goes to the civilization of three young heathens, Rogers by name, and part Cherokee Indians by breeding.

He refers to his kids in another column as "our little Tribe," but also as "my Private Herd," which is a reference to cattle, not Indians.

The Rogers family, like many Cherokees, believed in assimilation into white culture, but that didn't save them when the whites decided they wanted their land. The story of Will Rogers' ancestors is very similar to that of John Rollin Ridge's family (his Joaquin Murieta I read in April). The difference is that Ridge was born in 1827 and Rogers was born in 1879 (a year before my grandfather, which helps me place him in time). Fifty-two years makes a difference, and the Trail of Tears was long over by the time Will came along. But his parents were older -- he was the last child born to his family -- and his paternal grandfather died in the same conflict that Ridge's father and grandfather died in. So Will Rogers grew up knowing all the stories of his heritage and it did affect how he saw the world. In addition, when he was 18, Congress abolished tribal law and required that all the land in Indian territory be divided equally among tribal members. This meant, among other things, that Will's father could no longer control the large territory on which he raised cattle, so the family's lifestyle changed again, shall we say.

Will Rogers didn't try to hide his Cherokee heritage and at times embraced it. But it's complicated. Mostly-white Cherokees like him often looked down on full-blooded Cherokees, and other Indians as well. But part of his shtick as a writer and speaker was that he liked everyone. Yagoda, his biographer, argues that Rogers' ability to get along with (almost) everybody was related to the Cherokees' role as peacemakers, negotiators. Rogers, though probably more of a Democrat than a Republican, never officially took sides or joined a party, and he saw good and bad in all political figures, making it easier to tell jokes about everyone.

Incidentally, many Cherokees owned slaves before the Civil War, and Rogers got into a lot of trouble in the 1930s for using the N-word in a radio broadcast. Though he was friendly with various Black people, he doesn't seem to have had any conception of how hard their lives were.

Then there's the whole cowboy thing. The idea of "Cowboys and Indians" sets up these two groups as different, but Rogers was both. He was a working cowboy briefly as a young man, and then for the rest of his life played one on stage. Later in life when he was a wealthy movie star he bought a ranch in (what is now) Pacific Palisades, where he kept many horses (it's now Will Rogers State Historic Park).

Anyway, this isn't a review of the biography or Will Rogers' life, it's a review of The Illiterate Digest, so I'll go back to that (even though I highly recommend the biography). It's uneven, or perhaps I should say that columns which might have seemed very funny and interesting back in 1923 or so don't necessarily play the same way in 2021. Still, some of the political ones are funny.

One column I greatly enjoyed was "How to Tell a Butler, and Other Etiquette," which is mostly a lot of jokes about how Will isn't very knowledgeable about Etiquette with a capital E, as espoused by Emily Post. Etiquette is an easy target, of course, but still the piece is funny. A bit of background: Two friends of Will's wife are coming over for dinner and he has to introduce them to each other. Emily Post apparently said that when introducing people, you should use an inflection that sounds like "Are you there?" for the more prominent person and an inflection that sounds like "Is it raining?" for the less prominent person (which makes no sense to me, but don't worry about it).

     So, when they arrived I was remembering my opening Chapter of my Etiquette on Introductions. When the first one come I was all right; I didn't have to introduce her to anyone. I just opened our front door in answer to the Bell which didn't work. But I was peeping through the Curtains, and as I opened the door to let her in 2 of our Dogs and 4 Cats come in.
     Well, while I was shooing them out, apologizing, and trying to make her believe it was unusual for them to do such a thing, now there I was! This Emily Post wrote 700 pages on Etiquette, but not a line on what to do in an emergency to remove Dogs and Cats and still be Nonchalant.
     The second Lady arrived just as this Dog and Cat Pound of ours was emptying. She was the new Prescription Store Owner's Wife and was to get the "Are you there?" inflection. Her name was (I will call her Smith, but that was not her name). She don't want it to get out that she knows us.
     Well, I had studied that Book thoroughly but those animals entering our Parlor had kinder upset me. So I said, "Mrs. Smith, Are you there? I want you to meet Mrs. Jones. Is it raining?"
     Well, these Women looked at me like I was crazy. It was a silly thing to say. Mrs. Smith was there of course, or I couldn't have introduced her, and asking Mrs. Jones if it was raining was most uncalled for, because I had just looked out myself and, besides, any one that ever lived in California knows it won't rain again till next year.

OK, you probably thought that wasn't very funny, but I just howled over this column. The illustration helps. Oh well, humor is subjective. I enjoyed the book; you might not. So be it.

Post-note: Will Rogers appeared in roughly 36 silent movies and 21 talkies, so I really wanted to see one of them. The Video Station would have had an assortment, but the Video Station closed four years ago, so forget that. The Boulder library doesn't own any of his films, but the Longmont library has a few, so I borrowed "Life Begins at 40" and watched it tonight. I loved it! and I especially loved him in it. He's so appealing on film. He doesn't act like an actor -- in most of his scenes he's looking down, not forward. You find yourself waiting and hoping that he'll look up.

So now I want to see more Will Rogers films, preferably not on YouTube, but we'll have to see. It will be a project.