Will Rogers Speaks: Bacon, Beans and Limousines
by Rachel Jackson
Osiyo, nigada! Osi yigawolihisdi. Dagwadoa Rachel Jackson. Tsijalagi. Anigaduwa.
Hello everyone in High Plains Public Radio land. This is Rachel Jackson again, from
Oklahoma City. Oklahoma is home to 39 tribal nations, many of whom inhabited these
beautiful plains lands long before any of us. Wadooooo to our relatives for sharing it with us today.
I had such a good time putting together my first two Radio Readers BookBytes about my distant cousin Will Rogers that I volunteered to do a third. I hope y’all don’t mind. But reading Joseph Carter’s Never Met a Man I Didn’t Like: The Life and Writings of Will Rogers sends me down a long verdant trail of memories lined with stories of family and land, the kind of kinships we’re all made of.
My Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Elvin lived in Claremore, Oklahoma, from the time I was a kid to their passing only a few years ago. Every summer, mom loaded me up and took me to her sister’s where I stayed for a week or more. Claremore, with Route 66 rolling right through it, had (and still has) charm, the same kind of charm my aunt and uncle had, too.
They were bright-eyed, jolly people, kindhearted and true to their words. And wouldn’t you know it, they admired the heck out of Will Rogers. They both volunteered for years at the Will Rogers Memorial Museum there in Claremore and so I made many visits. Atop a low sloped hill, Will, his wife Betty, and their three children are buried there, looking down on the town and over what were originally the Cherokee lands of his youth.
Born in 1879, Will grew up on his father’s Dog Iron ranch in Cherokee Territory. Thanks in part to the Chisholm Trail, Cherokee Territory had historically been quite a culturally diverse place. Cowboys of all colors and stripes worked on the Cherokee ranches in the area.
As a boy, Will learned to rope from Dan Walker, a Cherokee freedman, a man formerly enslaved by Cherokee tribal members. As a ranch hand at the Dog Iron, Dan gave Will his earliest lessons in roping and riding. Will went on to make it big with his rope tricks in Will West shows all over the world and thus gain entry into unparalleled celebrity and public life, but Will Rogers never forgot Dan Walker, and maintained a relationship with Dan and his wife Agnes his whole life.
In October 1931, Will was invited to be the opening act on a radio broadcast for President Hoover’s Organization on Unemployment Relief, at a time when our country’s unemployed numbered seven million. It was an opportunity for Will to speak to the American conscience from his own Cherokee heart and soul. He used the time to call the country’s wealthiest to action for the sake of those the economic depression was hitting the hardest. In one of my favorite speeches, called the “Bacon, Beans, and Limousines” speech, Will says:
“it wasn’t the working class that brought this condition on at all. It was the big boys themselves who thought this financial drunk we were going through was going to last forever… you know, there’s not a one of us who has anything that these people that are without it now haven’t contributed to what we’ve got. I don’t suppose the most unemployed or hungriest man in America hasn’t contributed in some way to the wealth of every millionaire in America.”
This simple truth points to the reciprocity we need in our relationships with one another,
the kind of balanced give and take that the Cherokee have recognized as economically just and culturally necessary for centuries. I can’t help but wonder what Will would say to the billionaires now.
This is Rachel Jackson for High Plains Public Radio. Howa wado. Okie doke and thank you. Donadagohv’i – until we meet again!
