Though I have read other biographies of the national institution known as Will Rogers, Steven Watts’ new biography of him, called Citizen Cowboy, seems a little different. Rogers mastered every entertainment medium in existence, bringing his humor and insight to more people than anyone had ever before. And most of those media did not yet exist when he was born in 1879. The result was the biggest star the world had ever known: famous, beloved, rich and respected to the point where the whole country would have gladly voted him in as president in 1932 if he hadn’t continually discouraged it.

He started out in outdoor wild west shows, all over the world, from South America to Africa, paying his dues as a cowboy in show business. When he came back to the USA, he mastered vaudeville, which was a new medium enabled by the railway network that came into existence in the late 19th century. His success there got him into top billing at the Ziegfeld Follies, the apex of live variety shows. He got offered a newspaper column and then two – one weekly and one daily (but much shorter). They ran in 600 newspapers across the country. He collected his writings for books, and with all the material he had accumulated, took to public speaking at an exhausting pace. He got invited to make silent movies, then Broadway plays, then radio and talking pictures, all of which he mastered seemingly without effort. Had he not died in a plane crash in his prime, he most certainly would have been number one in TV, well ahead of Milton Berle. It was an amazing ride.

Rogers’ shtick was the bashful, humble, uneducated cowboy, totally unsophisticated, and a real man of the people. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but his polo-playing friend Walt Disney based his Bashful Dwarf on Rogers.) He came to this personality in fits and starts. He began with lasso tricks that wowed everywhere he went, even bringing his horse onstage in New York. It took years for him to ever say a word while performing, but he got a laugh the first time he did, and that changed everything. Soon, it was just him talking to the audience, and the horse stayed home.

What he told audiences was his simple view of life, politics and the USA. Absolutely everyone could relate to his simple takes, seemingly common sensical and relatable. So his star kept rising. As he set more and demands of himself in all the various media, he devoured more and more news all the time. Everywhere he spoke he bought the local papers and found local issues and politicians he could make fun of. No matter where he was, he typed up his columns on a tiny portable typewriter and telegraphed them to New York for distribution to his network. He repeatedly said all he knew was what he read in the papers, and nobody read as many as he did.

The Rogers shtick was typical for show business at the time. He had a number of ticks that made his act work. He would push his hat forward and scratch the back of his head, giving him a couple of seconds to find a comeback or wisecrack to make. He chewed gum, which drew attention away from waiting for his next joke. He put himself down all the time, reducing expectations that he was about to say something new, unique and brilliant. Finally, his languid western drawl allowed him to slow and control the pace, as compared to some of the many rapid fire comedians of the era. The package worked better for him than any other act in the world. Watts doesn’t see this as stage shtick, but rather as components of Rogers’ persona. He might be right, but students of show business know these ticks and how performers leverage them, from George Burns’ cigar to Henny Youngman’s violin to Chico Marx’s Italian accent. They are tools of the trade. And Rogers was hyper conscious of his trade.

The main thing he had going for him was stage presence. Few have it at all, and even fewer have it like Will Rogers did. Watts cites the veteran actor, dancer and voiceover star of 70 years in showbiz, Sterling Holloway. Holloway said no matter how Rogers was dressed or where he was in the scene, or what he was saying (if anything at all), he still totally dominated the shot. No matter what was going on, all attention was tightly focused on Will Rogers. He had an absolute lock on the audience.

It meant he could play himself no matter what role he was assigned. It meant he could get away with never learning a part, but improvising his way through his films. And it meant no matter how ordinary the film was, people remembered Will Rogers as being great in it. That, more than anything, at least to me, was the essence of Will Rogers. I was amazed that Watts did not see it this way, but rather seemed to remain in awe of Rogers’ abilities with different roles and different audiences in different media.

Watts examines Rogers by the media he worked in, roughly following his life. He reports the criticisms as well as the praise, which is very helpful. One “problem” is that Rogers’ life was largely a straight line, diagonally rising from nothing to new high after new high, with rarely even a pause. (And he was smart enough to know “Everything I have done has been by luck, no move was premeditated. I just stumbled from one thing to another.”) His setbacks were minor and brief. His health was almost always great. He got precisely the girl he wanted – for life. He was able to channel his huge reserve of energy (constantly chewing gum, rubber bands, string, or the rubber sealing ring from a storage jar) and nervous fidgeting into global travel. He always needed new stimuli, and the invention of the airplane in his lifetime was literally his ticket to the whole world. He could not relax or sit still. He needed to be learning and experiencing continuously. It brought him perspective that helped him relate and communicate even better to an ever wider audience.

It’s all a bit ironic, since he started out as an ignorant spoiled brat. He was a rich kid who hated school, refused to learn and take over the family ranching business, and ran off to join the circus. That’s when he realized what he really wanted was for people to pay him just for being Will Rogers. His stated goal was simply to avoid ever being a day laborer. Like so many others with little or no education, he grew hungry for learning, more and more every day. And all these factors played into the character he became when he finally broke the fourth wall and began talking to the audience.

One criticism I have of Watts’ way of organizing his book is that he finds it necessary to repeat stories because they fit different chapters. For example, if a story fit both his family life and his newspaper column efforts, he will tell it in both places. He did this with the day laborer story, among others. It got a little offputting when he told the same story of Rogers’ wife Betty claiming he was “running me ragged,” three times in the book. And there are several other such repeat stories.

Watts tries to nail down how Rogers was funny, citing endless reviewers and other experts. And as usual, this fails. Nothing definitive comes of it. But I did notice two elements that kept cropping up as I read his quips. One is that he used irony more and better than anyone I’ve admired. It was easy to show how dumb Congress could be, missing its own point, ruining its own achievements, and embarrassing itself with its wrongheaded assumptions and conclusions. One famous example (which Watts uses twice) is the business of Congress giving money to the rich so they could spend it and thereby have some of it trickle down to the poor (Sound familiar?). He expressed amazement that Congress thought money trickled down and that they “dident 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.” Or this great quip defending soldiers who came back from the war to end all wars, only to be refused service by US banks: “Thank goodness there will be no more wars. Now you tell one.” Rogers could develop irony and sarcasm out of every little weekly newspaper and the politicians he heard or read.

This relating took everyone’s mind off the fact that far from a humble cowboy, Rogers had become one of the richest people in the country – during the Great Depression. When he moved to LA for his silent movie contract, he purchased over 200 acres opposite the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset, followed by hundreds more north of Santa Monica in what is now Pacific Palisades. He had huge income streams from every medium, in the thousands of dollars every week, when millions of his fans couldn’t put a dollar together to buy groceries. He lived a contradiction, but he did it so well there was absolutely no one more loved than Will Rogers. At the depth of the depression, ticket sales for his films only dipped by about a third. He was a priority, a salvation.


The second factor I found is the overall method of his jokes. Rogers told what we now call dad jokes. Most everything was mild if not corny; eyerolling when not cringeworthy. That it came from this simple common man in cowboy chaps, speaking slowly and cautiously, made it heartwarming, funny and true for millions. But reading it now, a hundred years later, it’s mostly pathetic dad jokes.

Once again, delivery was everything. George Burns would not have gotten the laughs Rogers did with those jokes. Neither would Jerry Lewis or Eddie Cantor. It was the delivery Rogers hesitatingly developed over the decades that made him the biggest star the country had ever produced. Watts acknowledges in two different places that Rogers worked hard to consciously develop “natural” delivery and timing, but doesn’t pull it together into the package that Rogers made of it all. But for his fans, they could “hear” him performing this delivery if they read him in print. They could picture him scratching the back of his head as he stalled. And yet, they were mostly just terrible dad jokes. That is powerful and remarkable, and should have been elaborated in the book, since Watts seems to be all about his exploiting the media.

Unfortunately, my personal favorite Will Rogers story didn’t make it into Citizen Cowboy. On one of his visits to Italy, the Vatican invited Rogers to meet the pope. He was introduced: “Holiness, Mister William Rogers of the United States of America.“ Rogers approached and shook hands with the pope, but also leaned in and said softly into the pope’s ear: “Sorry. I didn’t catch the name.” A dad joke to end all dad jokes.

God bless you, Will Rogers.

David Wineberg

Citizen Cowboy is a probing biography of one of America's most influential cultural figures. Will Rogers was a youth from the Cherokee Indian Territory of Oklahoma who rose to conquer nearly every form of media and entertainment in the early twentieth century's rapidly expanding consumer society. Through vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies and Broadway, syndicated newspaper and magazine writing, the lecture circuit, radio, and Hollywood movies, Rogers built his reputation as a folksy humorist whose wit made him a national symbol of common sense, common decency, and common people. Though a friend of presidents, movie stars and industrial leaders, it was his bond with ordinary people that endeared him to mass audiences. Making his fellow Americans laugh and think while honoring the past and embracing the future, Rogers helped ease them into the modern world and they loved him for it.

This book is an exhaustive biography of Will Rogers and the impact he had across a broad spectrum. It covers how he developed his style in vaudeville and carried it over to radio, movies and one man shows. It was a bit of a struggle to read at times as the author has the unfortunate habit of repeating himself numerous times throughout the book. That may work for some readers, but once is enough for me. An additional warning is that this is not a once over lightly easy read.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of Net Galley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook page.

I’m not customarily a non-fiction reader, but I needed to review this book for Literary Society of the Southwest. Sadly, this was a mediocre read for me. The beginning of the book read like a term paper and the content never really made me care for Will Rogers or his contribution to Americana. I prefer not to share this unfavorable review with Goodreads or Literary Society, so I’m not providing links. Thank you to NetGalley and Cambridge University Press for the opportunity to read this book.

This was a fascinating read. I've known a bit about Will Roger's as my grandparents and parents were big fans. So to have further knowledge of this man, his life and perseverance was good to read. His strength of character really came out. I will be recommending this title to those who are looking for a biography that they might like as a surprise, in that this was a surprise to me that I enjoyed a great deal.

Citizen Cowboy by Steven Watts is probably one of the most intricately detailed yet utterly immersive biographies I have ever read (and I don't say that lightly) It is a hefty tome but every part is relevant in detailing the life and work of Will Rogers, a man of the people for the people who famously said;

"I joked about every prominent man of my time but I never met a man I didn't like"

Everything about Will Rogers' life was polarity but without conflict and he was well liked for it. A huge star of stage and screen, from Vaudeville, to silent movies and then the talkies, Rogers was able to turn his natural humour and wit to any medium.

Citizen Cowboy follows Rogers career juxtaposing it against American history and the huge cultural changes between 1899 and his untimely death in an aviation accident in Alaska in 1935. Not only does the book explore a glittering public career, but also Rogers private life which was a direct contrast to his public persona

This biography is fascinating on so many levels, not just about this incredible icon

Thank you very much to Netgalley, Cambridge University Press and the author Steven Watts for this compelling ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own