Will and Eddie
Happy Will Rogers Day! The boy who would grow up to become the beloved Cowboy Philosopher was born on this day, November 4, 1879. That year it was Election Day. In 2020, it is merely Aftermath Day. Rogers’s death day, … Continued
Weighty Elections
Change was long overdue. The stock market had crashed in Hoover’s first year as president. Prospects looked bad for the next two years before turning truly dire in 1931. Democrats, who hadn’t held power since the war, knew their time … Continued
“The Great Ziegfeld” Captures American Excess of the 1920s
Watched The Great Ziegfeld last night. The movie, produced in 1935-36, was an homage to the recently departed impresario. (He had died barely three years earlier.) It was also a lifeline for his indebted widow, Billie Burke, who sold the … Continued
Four Horsemen
“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.” This would not have … Continued
92 Years Ago Today: Channel Fever
In late summer, 1926, the North Atlantic world was struck by Channel-crossing Fever. Five hearty souls had already swum the waterway dividing England and France, beginning as far back as 1875, so what was all the fuss? For starters, three … Continued
Two Okies, Both Loved
Before Woody Guthrie strummed out his version of “Hobo’s Lullaby,” he had probably seen–and laughed at–Will Rogers’s lovable tramp, Jubilo, in the movies. As an older teenager, he had likely heard–and was moved by–Rogers’s words on the radio: “The only … Continued
“Will Rogers Says”: Divide the Country in Two
Divided. Polarized. Broken. Is the state of our politics at an all-time low? Is our grand experiment in republican government breaking apart? Our fears may overblown, yet they are hard to dismiss out of hand. The nation faced its greatest … Continued