WILL ROGERS AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION

William R. Linneman

Will Rogers was a powerful commentator on social, political and economic issues during the Great Depression in America, and his humor made his analysis acceptable to a wide public. He himself claimed that Americans were saved by their good humor during hard times: the worse the situation, the more Americans laughed. "And every American international banker ought to have printed on his office door, 'Alive today by the grace of a nation that has a sense of humor'" (Vol. 4, 2; hereafter referred to as DT). Roger's commentaries on the Depression helped to reinforce and sustain Americans' proclivity to use humor to contain anxiety.

But while the surface of his commentaries was comic, beneath it lay a set of ideas, emotional inclinations, and assumptions that Rogers held steadily and seriously. These concepts were, in their origin, derived from Jeffersonianism and Populism. Rogers focused on the paradox that Americans were starving in the midst of plenty. He placed the fault with the traditional Populist targets: the rich, the Congress, industry, banking—the anti-democratic structure of power. He feared the growing inequality of classes which such power relations brought about. And he used comedy to reduce his own, and his audience's fears, along with mocking and comically deflating the objects of his fear. The Depression was a paradox? Very well, Rogers seems to have concluded, he would use humorous paradox in order to understand it.

Scattered in his writings over a period of several years, then, Rogers's comments on the Depression formed a record of how one extremely popular figure portrayed the period to his considerable audience. In this paper I will assemble these comments in order to set forth Rogers' comic picture of America in hard times.

Rogers continually warned about the dangers of indebtedness and speculation even during the 1920s. In 1926 he predicted that something was going to happen to the economy in a couple of years (Weekly Articles, Vol. 2, 137, hereafter referred to as WA). And in June 1928, writing about the age of high living, he said that America had been operating on luck and natural resources and that the Lord was liable to turn on us at any minute ( 71). So, when it arrived, the Depression, he suggested, could have been a punishment sent by the Lord. "I don't think Hoover, the Republicans, or even Russia is responsible for this. I think the Lord just looked us over and decided to set us back where we belonged" (DT, Vol. 2, 252).

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All this hardship was for our benefit, and if we could learn from adversity we would be a better nation.

At first Rogers seemed to believe that the Depression was a natural result of excessive abundance, and would be automatically corrected by the curbing of expenditures. When the stock market went into a tailspin in October 1929, Will Rogers was not concerned. It would be a greater loss to America, he said, if the cows were not milked one night. The whole nation was more dependent on the cackling of a hen than on Wall Street ( Vol. 2, 90).

America's real wealth, he argued, lay in its natural resources and agriculture, not in scrip. Rogers regarded the stock exchange as a bunko game to take advantage of suckers. He could not take the lamentations of Wall Street seriously. England, which by international treaty was supposed to protect the Wailing Wall, would have to come to New York to do it. "The Wall runs from the Battery to the Bronx. You know there is nothing that hollers as quick and as loud as a gambler" (DT, Vol. 2,  91).

Rogers avoided stocks for his own investments. He preferred land because "You could always walk on it." Ocean frontage was his specialty because there was only so much of it and they weren't making any more (WA, Vol. 4, 134). He eventually owned several miles of coastline at Santa Monica, California.

But the fact that everybody else was making a killing in Wall Street bothered Rogers some, so he sought advice from his friend Eddie Cantor. Cantor explained how the market worked. It was like a sieve and everything was put into it and shaken up and all the small stuff went through the holes. Rogers knew that Wall Street was crooked. "You can stand at the head of it, and you can only see to the bend. It just won't let you see all of it at once as short as it is." But Rogers still wanted in on the action.  It was only the boobs that went through the holes in Cantor's sieve; he was resolved to hang on with the big boys. He told Cantor that he was forty-nine years old and had never in his life made a dollar without having to chew gum for it.

So Cantor bought some bank stock for Rogers because banks were supposed to make money no matter what happened. But the stock went down, and Rogers received a letter from the broker asking for a check. The loss began to affect Rogers's humor and each night at the Ziegfeld Follies, he grew unfunnier and unfunnier. Cantor could lose and still be comical, but Rogers said that when there was a minus sign before his one lone stock, he just could not be "unctuous." He sold and got out with a moderate loss. Wall Street was "just no place for a weak hearted comedian, and from now on when Eddie wants to help me, he can just give me some of his old jokes" (WA, Vol. 4, 83).

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After the Crash, there were investigations of the market and resulting scandals. Rogers summarized one Senate investigation of Wall Street by saying that they discovered that the street was "located in the sharp end of N. Y. City, that not only the traders but the street itself is short, and neither end don't lead anywhere" (DT, Vol. 3, 155). He approved of the several restrictions put on the exchange by the New Deal. When Roosevelt cut the trading sessions down to three hours a day, Rogers said that this was FDR's way of telling the brokers that there were only three hours allowed to work on the suckers, "and the other twenty-one hours they are under the protection of the fish and game laws" (DT, Vol. 4, 59).

Rogers explained another regulatory bill with this metaphor: the government was going to put traffic lights on Wall Street because it had always been a hit and run street. "The red light tells you you better stop and wait before buying, the green light tells you that you are a sucker anyhow and you might just as well go ahead. The yellow light means, put up no more margins, let 'em sell you out" (DT, Vol. 4, 173).

Although Rogers was no Pollyanna, he was able to discover certain benefits about the Crash. One of them was the shift in the locus of power of the country. Power was being taken out of the hands of the New York financiers. The meaning of the New Deal was summed up in the newspaper headline: "Wall Street anxiously awaits the President's message." The "Old Deal" would have had the President anxiously awaiting the message being sent to him by Wall Street (DT, Vol. 4,260).

Rogers's farming interests had alerted and prepared him for the Great Depression. He knew what a hard time farmers had been having during the Twenties. He had had to send some of his movie salary back to Oklahoma to help his nephew Herb McSpadden out on the home ranch.

The farm problem was one of over-production. U.S. farmers had expanded to meet the needs of Europe in World War I. After the War this market decreased as European agriculture was restored, but American production remained high. Prices declined until even the best farmers were losing money. So it seemed that farmers suffered from all sorts of plagues. "If it's not the boll weevil, it's the tariff. If it's not the cinch bugs, it's the Federal Reserve. . . . But there is one pest that he is always free from, that's the income tax" (DT, Vol. 2, 199).

President Hoover had created the Farm Board which was supposed to solve the problems. When the Farm Board ordered every third row of cotton plowed up, Rogers said this was a good idea that ought to be carried farther. We should also destroy every third Senator, Congressman, and stock broker. Turn cows into every third golf course, and convict every third gangster arrested (DT, Vol. 3, 66).

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Rogers was amused one day when farm machinery went up on the stock market. Where was the farmer who could buy any? As it was, he couldn't even pay his taxes or buy groceries. "He can plow with a forked stick and raise more than he can sell" (DT, Vol. 3, 197).

The dust storms added a new dimension to the farmer's troubles. Rogers wrote that these were going to bring up some queer cases of law. If Colorado blows over on top of Kansas, who owes the taxes on the soil? It wasn't doing the Kansas farmer any good because it was covering up his crops. Besides, next year at this time, it might be in Missouri. "In the Middle West now you got to put a brand on your soil, then in the Spring go on a round-up looking for it" (DT, Vol. 4, 292).

Of all the New Deal programs, Rogers thought the least of those in agriculture. Henry Wallace's attempts to restrict production were no different than the policies of the Farm Board under Hoover. At the same time the government was encouraging homesteading through the resettlement of eastern farmers on range land. Rogers had a cowboy's prejudice against sod-busters. He knew that land west of the Hundredth Meridian should not be plowed. It was natural grazing land. Row crop farming was responsible for the Dust Bowl.

Mr. Ickes, the Secretary of Interior, means the best in the world, what he is doing sounds rather liberal and in favor of the poor man with no home. But if Ickes had ever passed a homesteaders [sic] house on a cold windy day, no wood, no water, wind blowing his little crop right out of the ground, he would be the most guilty man that ever lived for being responsible for bringing that poor devil out West. The West has got lots of open country but none that you can live on. (WA, Vol. 6, 61)

Thanksgiving Day, wrote Rogers, was originated to give thanks for a bountiful harvest. Well, in 1930 it was that bountiful harvest that was causing our problem. "Too much wheat, too much corn, too much cotton, too much beef, too much production of everything. So we are going through a unique experience. We are the first nation to starve to death in a storehouse that's overfilled with everything we want" (DT, Vol. 2, 240).

Another reason for the Depression was the overextension of consumer credit through installment buying. "We spent six years of wild buying on credit (everything under the sun, whether we needed it or not) and now we are having to pay for 'em . . . and we are howling like a pet coon. . . . This would be a great world to dance in if we didn't have to pay the fiddler" (DT, Vol.2, 183).

Some of the unemployment problem was being caused by technology. "It's inventors that's put us where we are today. There ain't enough jobs to go around. Why? Because every lazy man . . . has invented something to knock others out of work" (DT, Vol. 2, 234).

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Looking back after the first year of the Depression, Rogers had to admit that the experience had taken some of the conceit out of the country. "We was a mighty cocky nation, we originated mass production, and mass produced everybody out of a job with our boasted labor-saving machinery. They forgot that machinery don't eat, rent houses, or buy clothes" (DT, Vol. 2, 252).

All through the first year of the Depression President Hoover kept promising the people that prosperity was just around the corner. Will knew that the people were tired of promises, and he expressed their impatience in a parody of Amos and Andy.

"Yes, but dident I see by de papers dat Mr. Hoover is bringing us posterity and we all goin' to be doin' better before we nows it?"

"Well, mayby we's doing better now and don't know it, what's he keeping it from us fur?"

"Well de paper say dat Mr. Hoover has jes talked with Mr. Mellon and Mr. Ford and Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Capone and dat means de good times is right round de comer."

"Well, why don't dey tell us what comer, so we can go round there. If we can get some of dis resiprocity by jes going round de comer, I is a man dat's going to start turning right now." (WA, Vol. 4, 147)

Hoover's initial response to the Depression was "jawboning." He tried to talk the nation back to confidence and on several occasions asked Rogers to help him. They appeared together on a broadcast about unemployment and relief on October 18, 1931. Rogers's talk contains the germ of his criticism about the Depression. Even his title, "Bacon and Beans and Limousines," tells much. It implies that some people were doing very well while others were concerned about the necessities of subsistence.

The whole Depression as Rogers saw it was ironic: there was plenty of everything, yet most people were experiencing need. And what was Congress doing? Arguing about Prohibition. What did Prohibition amount to when your neighbor's children were going hungry. "It's food, it ain't drink that we are worried about today. Here a few years ago we were so afraid that the poor people was liable to take a drink that now we've fixed [it] so that they can't even get something to eat" (Radio Broadcasts of Will Rogers, 66; hereafter referred to as RB).

Rogers had been stirred into action for relief in January 1931 when five hundred farmers, mainly black sharecroppers, had marched on the business section of England, Arkansas, demanding food for their families. "Paul Revere woke up Concord. These birds woke up America" (DT, Vol. 2, 252).

Almost immediately Rogers was on his way to Washington, D.C., "Flying all day over Oklahoma and the poor red clay hills of Missouri

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and then Indiana, looking down on those dejected, desolate, anemic-looking rented farm houses. Nowhere to work and no crops for six months. Yet you don't wonder how they eat. You wonder how they keep warm. If the government thinks it's unsound to feed 'em, maybe they could compromise with their conscience by giving 'em some coal" (DT, Vol. 2, 257).

Hoover believed in the concept of private charity, not public aid. He felt that aiding the poor would set a harmful precedent. Once people got relief, they would always expect it. Nevertheless, there were relief bills up for action in Congress. Rogers lobbied for a relief food bill that called for an appropriation of fifteen million dollars; but he saw Congress vote it down. At the same time Congress approved a bill for an equal amount "to improve entrances to national parks. You can get a road anywhere you want to out of the government, but you can't get a sandwich. Well, in two years there won't be a poor farm that won't have a concrete road leading up to it. I am staying all night with 'em [Congress], but I am sleeping in my overcoat" (DT, Vol. 2, 258).

Rogers gave up on the government and went to Arkansas himself. He found the Red Cross feeding 8,000 families in two counties, with an average of six to the family. "You don't know what hard times are till you go into some of these houses. . . . This is not a plea, it's just a report, but it's the worst need I ever saw" (DT, Vol. 2, 262).

Again, it was the irony of need amidst plenty that seemed so absurd to Rogers. People were starving in Arkansas, and across the border in Oklahoma farmers were feeding surplus wheat to cattle to get rid of it. (WA, Vol. 4, 225).

After six weeks Congress finally acted, but what this body enacted seemed ludicrous to Rogers. "Now here is something you mustn't get wrong. The government Saturday passed a bill to appropriate 20 millions as a loan to farmers in the drought area, but it was to be loaned on security. Now the man and his family that are hungry down there has no security. If he had any security he wouldn't be hungry. He would have already put it up" (DT, Vol. 2, 272).

Rogers put together a vaudeville troupe to play relief benefits in the Southwest. His monologue went like this: "Well, folks sure glad to be here with you, glad you are starving, otherwise I would never had met you. . . . The first three years of a Republican Administration is the hardest. . . . Senators are drinking corn when two years ago they would have turned up their nose at less than Bourbon. Lobbyists are working on commission and starving to death" (WA, Vol. 4, 427).

Another controversial relief measure that caught Rogers's attention was the matter of a bonus for World War I veterans. The opposition to the bonus was led by Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon for whom,

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as we shall see, Rogers reserved especially sharp satire. When financiers said that the veterans' bonus would be bad economy. Will responded: "When was there anything connected with the war good economy? Even entering it wasn't a stroke of financial genius" (DT, Vol. 2, 277). In 1932 when the Bonus Army gathered in Washington and there was argument over their right to be there and demonstrate, Rogers pointed out that they had as much right to be there as any other lobbyist ( Vol. 3, 191).

Rogers always had a low opinion of Congress and the federal government, but it was never lower than in the years 1930-1933. He thought that elected officials were out of touch with the country; their attempts at economy were ridiculous. Their only actions were to appropriate pork barrel projects that would keep their home districts safe for them. They would do nothing that might disturb the support which they counted upon from special interests.

One of Rogers's Daily Telegrams pretended to be the diary of a United States Senate trying to raise two billion dollars that it had appropriated but didn't have as revenue. The "diary" caricatures the Senate's contradictory and shallow thinking:

Monday—Soak the rich.
Tuesday—Begin hearing from the rich.
Tuesday afternoon—Decide to give the rich a chance to get richer.
Wednesday—Tax Wall Street sales.
Thursday—Get word from Wall Street. "Lay off us or you will get no campaign contributions."
So Thursday afternoon—Decide "We was wrong about Wall Street."
Friday—Soak the little fellow.
Saturday morning—Find out there is no little fellow. He has been soaked until he is drowned.
Sunday—Meditate.
Next Week—Same procedure, only more talk and less results.  ( Vol. 3, 163)

But Congress was not much worse than the rest of the country. Most everyone had lost contact with reality during the Coolidge years: "cuckoo land," Rogers called it. People thought they could have anything they wanted by buying on time. "The thought of money changing hands was considered rather vulgar" (WA, Vol. 4, 75). Coolidge had recommended economy when he was president, but in 1931 he was writing newspaper articles advising people to spend more. Rogers replied that this advice was very uncharacteristic of Coolidge and that his success had come from doing the exact opposite. Rogers's advice was to save. "Since when did saving become a national calamity?" (D T, Vol. 2, 239). Spending without resources was what created the Depression, Rogers claimed. He advised: "Don't make the first payment

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on anything" (DT, Vol. 2, 189).

The solution to the problems seemed simple to Rogers: it was to create more jobs. The big men who were giving speeches about better times coming would do more if they gave jobs instead of speeches. There were plenty of schemes for relief but few that promised work. "We will just about have to save ourselves accidentally. That's the way we stumbled on prosperity" (DT, Vol. 3, 67).

Rogers was generally sympathetic with the presidents, but he took the gloves off during the last two years of Hoover's administration. Hoover's attempts to hit upon a solution by creating commissions tried Rogers's patience, and he became especially impatient with some of the appointees. "He [Hoover] picked every bank president and corporation head who have handled their own affairs so ably in the last year and a half that it is their stockholders that constitute the present needy" (DT, Vol. 3, 68).

As I have indicated, Rogers attacked Andrew Mellon frequently and bitterly. When Mellon announced that the deficit for fiscal 1931 was a billion dollars, Rogers commented that a billion was getting to be a lot of dough (WA, Vol.5, 34). He noticed that Mellon borrowed the money to make up for the deficit at three percent. Mellon could have got it at one and a half, said Will, but he "wanted to give the boys a break. This means they are going to finance by borrowing instead of increased taxes on those able to pay" (DT, Vol. 3,71). Rogers also observed that Mellon was mainly concerned about keeping taxes low for the wealthy. For the Republicans an income tax on higher incomes would be a national calamity (DT, Vol. 2, 277). When the government floated an $800,000,000 loan and Al Capone took most of it, Rogers wrote: "There is the guy that should be Secretary of Treasury" (DT, Vol. 3, 39).

Mellon, who had been Secretary of Treasury since Harding appointed him in 1921, finally resigned to become Ambassador to England. In that diplomatic post he replaced Charles Dawes, Vice-President under Coolidge, who returned to America to head up the newly created Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The RFC was a government agency organized to loan money to banks and industries in order to stimulate business activity. Its initial object was to stop bank failures.

Dawes was head of RFC for only a short time before resigning to rescue his own struggling bank, the Central Republic Bank and Trust Company of Chicago. He rescued it with a $90,000,000 loan from the RFC. Democrats howled "collusion," but Hoover defended the loan, saying a financial panic would have resulted if the bank had failed (Mitchell, 80). While the loan may have been proper, it only served to lend credence to the claim that the Republicans, while denying welfare

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to the poor, could find ways to assist the rich.

This unfairness was obvious to Rogers at the time the RFC was created. "See where Congress passed a two-billion dollar bill to relieve bankers' mistakes and loan to new industries. You can always count on us helping those who have lost part of their fortune, but our whole history records nary a case where the loan was for the man who had absolutely nothing" (DT, Vol. 3, 121).

But three days later he was wondering whether loaning money to people was such a good thing. Hoover had signed an appropriation for the land banks, which made loans to farmers. "You can tell this is an election year from the way these appropriations bills are passing. It will take the taxpayers fifty years to pay for the votes in this election. Our only solution of relief seems to be to fix it so people who are in a hole through borrowing can borrow some more. Borrowing, that's what's the matter with the world today" (DT, Vol. 3, 121-122).

The Hoover theory for relief was to provide welfare by "percolation." Money given to those at the top would "trickle down" to the needy. Rogers was not sure that finance followed physical laws. He thought Hoover was making a false analogy. Hoover was an engineer and knew that water flowed downhill. "But he didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands" (WA, Vol. 5, 207).

All one had to do was look at what happened to the money loaned to the railroads and smaller banks. They had not used it to create jobs. Instead, they paid off their loans to the New York banks. "So the money went uphill instead of down. You can drop a bag of gold in Death Valley, which is below sea level, and before Saturday it will be home to papa J. P. [Morgan]" (DT, Vol. 3, 271).

Rogers's father Clem had been a small town banker, so there may have been some Oedipal rejections in Will's negative appraisal of that vocation. The real blame for the Depression, he thought, lay with the big bankers who were a target of many Western social critics (WA, Vol. 5, 136). President Roosevelt's first act was to close all the banks, and Rogers said it was a good thing he acted quickly because he beat the depositors to it by about twenty-four hours ( Vol. 6, 6). Instead of being criticized, Roosevelt should have been praised for saving American banking. He allowed the solvent banks (and most of them were) to sort out from the overextended. A few days later, FDR gave a fireside chat. Rogers said, "Our President took such a dry subject as banking . . . [and] made everybody understand it, even the bankers" (DT, Vol. 4, 4).

One of Rogers's guests at the Santa Monica ranch during the first

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days of the New Deal was Walter Lippman, and the two columnists talked late into the night about current events. Rogers reported the next day that the great pundit thought that the green lights were now with America. There was only one thing that could stop us again—prosperity ( Vol. 4, 12).

Rogers thought the people were happy once FDR became President and started to act. They might not have any money or jobs, "But they know they got a man in there who is wise to Congress, wise to our big bankers and wise to our so-called big men" (DT, Vol. 4, 1). The country was united under Roosevelt. For three years the people had been given the message by Republicans that "America is fundamentally sound" when the message should have been, "America is fundamentally cuckoo." Rogers looked to the Roosevelt administration to restore sanity to public affairs and economic policy.

The first "hundred days" of the New Deal saw many bills passed and many new agencies created. People became amused—rather than perplexed—by the alphabet soup of the new bureaucracy because Rogers, along with other comic writers, helped to keep up the national comic spirit through humor. "The President just created the FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Association) and the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration) . . . to work in conjunction with the NRA with the financial help of the RFC who will pay the CODs of the CCC (Citizens Conservation Camps) and take in return for all money loaned out to all these initials, lOUs. Never was a country in the throes of more capital letters than the old USA. But we still haven't sent out the SOS" ( Vol. 4, 82).

When the New Deal theories went into application, FDR got into trouble with the Supreme Court. While Rogers agreed with those critics who said that we hadn't had any trouble with the Constitution under Hoover, he added that we had had trouble with everything else (DT, Vol. 4, 333).

One of the controversial issues in the first days of the New Deal was that of the gold standard. The proclamation which closed the banks also sequestered gold by forbidding its export or its use for the redemption of gold certificates. There was much public outcry, and Rogers tried to calm things down with a little common sense. He pointed out that no one used gold anymore in daily transactions. The last time he himself had had gold pieces was in South Africa thirty years before (DT, Vol. 4, 110). Yet people had been writing as if they were used to handling gold every day and that "they lost an old brother that they had been practically rooming with continuously" (WA, Vol. 6, 15). He pointed out that most nations did business with money that wasn't backed by gold. England found out that her export trade increased when she went

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off the gold standard. It was obviously the best thing for us to do because England and France were both against us doing it. As for currency, we had the right to declare anything we wanted to for money: "poker chips, possum hides, empty gin bottles, niblicks or canceled Congressman's checks to bootleggers" (DT, Vol. 3, 83).

Although Rogers was a fiscal conservative both privately and publicly, he began to accept the condition of deficit spending and an increased national debt. "This thing of worrying about what our grand children are going to have to pay, well most folks say . . . 'our children seem to think they are smarter than we are, so if they're, the chances are that their children will be smarter than they are, so if they are that smart why maybe they can think of some substitute for money that they can pay off their national debt with, and they will wonder why we didn't have a bigger one' " (DT, Vol. 4, 29). One time Rogers got into an argument with a banker on the subject of inflation. The banker had an economist with him. "Pretty near everybody's got one [economist], either that or a police dog, and the more wealthy have got both" (DT, Vol. 4, 251).

So economics was not a science. It was merely a stratagem to protect or advance a special interest. The fact that so many economists were college professors didn't justify the subject any in Rogers's eyes. When FDR began raiding Columbia and Harvard Universities for his "brains-trust," Rogers commented that the President was dragging "he-schoolmarms" out of little red school houses; they had more plans than they had shirts. The Republicans usually worked with just one plan. "It was: 'Now, boys, my head is turned; just get it while you can'" (RB, 125).

Rogers said that these professors had degrees after their names until they sounded like a radio station. Not only were they impractical and theoretical, but they used a language that was incomprehensible. One of Rogers's targets was Rexford Tugwell, a Columbia professor who became a New Deal theorist. Rogers explained that on one occasion, Tugwell knocked down Congress with a "pair of 'dogmas' called 'modernized process' and 'experimental approach'" (DT, vol. 4, 166).

However, Rogers didn't seem to object when other countries used experts. In fact, he applauded their good judgment. "[England] has men that are trained from the cradle up to do nothing[,] only study what to do when a situation arises. Some guy is not [in] a high place there just because he dug up $50,000 for the campaign. He is attending conferences because he knows something" (WA, vol. 6, 176).

No New Deal plan or theory was more controversial than the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Rogers said the only good thing NRA did was to bring the Supreme Court together in an unanimous decision when they found it unconstitutional ( 165). The

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NRA was supposed to create cooperation between government, business, and labor. It was modeled on the War Industries Board set up by President Wilson to meet the exigencies of World War I. Rogers remembered the War Industries Board because he had told jokes about it in the Ziegfeld Follies. The Board consisted of two hundred captains of industry who worked for a dollar a year. They were all Republicans. Wilson asked Bernard Baruch, who had been picked to assemble the Board, why there were no Democrats. Baruch replied that Wilson had told him to get prominent men from every industry, and he did. "Now I can go and get you some Democrats but they won't be very prominent and won't have any Industries with them. Besides, I doubt if you can get a Democrat to work for a $1.00 a year. They are used to getting at least $1.00 a day" (WA, Vol. 1, 327).

General Hugh Johnson, who had served under Baruch on the War Industries Board, was picked to run the NRA. Each industry was supposed to formulate a code of fair competition. These codes had to guarantee a minimum wage, a maximum number of hours, and the right of collective bargaining. No code could promote a monopoly or eliminate a small business. If a code met all the requirements, it became the law of the land (Mitchell, 239).

Rogers said he was going as a delegate from the American Comedians Association to get a code for comedians from General Johnson. "He claims that Senators and Congressmen come under our code. I claim theirs is a separate union, that they are professionals and in a class by themselves and thus us amateur comedians should not be classed with 'em. I hate to defy this NRA, but I am going to carry my fight to the country, because, according to his code, it would give work to more Senators and Congressmen, and I claim that's the only thing we don't want any more of (DT, Vol. 4, 68).

Rogers said that the NRA fell because of its complicated structure. The whole plan for fair employment practices would have been written on a postcard.

Who ever wrote the Ten Commandments made 'em short. They may not always be kept, but they can be understood. . . . Moses just went up on the mountain with a letter of credit and some instructions from the Lord, and he just wrote 'em out, and they applied to steel men, the oil men, the bankers, the farmers, and even the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Hugh Johnson went up on Capitol Hill and come down with 24 truckloads of codes. He just couldn't come out plain and say, "Thou shalt pay so much. And thou shalt work men only so much."

This wouldn't have solved our troubles any more than the Commandments solved human weaknesses, but they did stop all arguments as to whether an action was right or wrong. (WA, Vol. 6, 206)

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The worst consequence of the Depression, as Rogers saw it, was the growing inequality of the American classes. The rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. The best way to rectify this situation would be to increase the taxes on high incomes and plug loopholes. Rogers was continually amused by the complaints about taxes from those who were making money. When they talked about the "good old days" before the New Deal, Rogers reminded them that "The good old days with most of us was when we didn't earn enough to pay an income tax" ( Vol. 4, 293).

Another tax that Rogers approved of was the sales tax because it was both painless and productive. The gasoline tax was a sales tax.

Now if a tax on gasoline keeps up all the roads why wouldn't a tax on light wines and beers keep up the House of Representatives, one on Coca-Cola and Jamaica ginger and Camembert Cheese keep up the Senate, White Rock and cracked ice the State Legislatures, and so on. (DT, Vol. 3, 116)

But on reflection, Rogers wondered if a tax on alcohol was such a good idea. The time to have had a tax on liquor was "from 1919 to 1933 when people were drinking" (DT, Vol. 4, 127).

There were so many complaints about taxes that Rogers once suggested the country have a lottery to raise money—a facetious suggestion that has since become a reality. Gambling was instinctive to Americans, said Rogers. The whole Depression had been brought on by gambling. The lottery would be compulsory. Everyone would have to spend 5 percent of his or her gross income for tickets, and the rich would have to give half their tickets to the poor. "The whole thing is a sort of glorified Wall Street, only you don't need as much money and you have more chance to win" ( Vol. 139).

If the people could only get that crazy Wall Street and the dream of easy money off their minds, thought Rogers, there was a way for Americans to live well off the land. At a chance meeting with Henry Wallace at the San Juan Capistrano Mission in California, Rogers and the Secretary of Agriculture discussed the life the Indians had under the Mexican missionaries. Each community raised what it needed without any overproduction, no tariffs or taxes, no killing of hogs, "no plowing under every third row of free holy beans. Thousands lived in each of these valleys until the Gringos come." The "white man" gummed it up proper. So Mr. Wallace knew there was a sensible way for people to live "because he stood on the very ground where it worked" (WA, Vol. 6, 126).

At the core of Rogers's criticism of the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon culture and American capitalism was his aversion to progress, especially through industrial technology. Despite all his accolades about the

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airplane and the automobile, he preferred horses. "There is a lot of this so-called 'Progress' that I can't keep step with. An axe handle wrapped with cowhide, I believe, would have fit and felt better in my hands than a Niblick. I wish I could have lived my whole life and drank out of a Goard [sic] instead of a paper envelope" (WA, Vol. 2, 267). Like Robert Frost, another Jeffersonian Democrat, Rogers wanted to return to the bucolic past. In some ways this is what the New Deal was also trying to do: parity for farm prices was established on averages for the years 1909–1914.

Almost all historians of the Depression comment on the confusion and distress caused by the economic collapse. A study of Will Rogers's humorous treatment of economic depression helps to show another side of the period. Essentially conservative and optimistic in spirit, Rogers's humor suggested to a large public that the Depression was, after all, not only intelligible but manageable. The lightness and calmness of his comic touch suggested that the Depression did not worry him, it did not dry up his humor. And his stress on traditional values as the basis for his comic criticisms assumed, comfortingly, that when the current madness passed, America would become America again.

ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY, NORMAL-BLOOMINGTON

WORKS CITED 

The Writings of Will Rogers. 21 Vols. Ed. James M. Smallwood, et. al. Stillwater, OK.: Oklahoma State University Press, 1973–1983.
Mitchell, Broadus. Depression Decade. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1947.

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