When industrialization created radio, it also created a new stage for political candidates. Professional comedians quickly recognized it as one upon which they too could clown as candidates for president. The speed with which comedians took to the airwaves to run for president was nothing short of remarkable. NBC tested the first coast-to-coast broadcast that hooked together a network of local stations in 1926; CBS followed suit the very next year, and just a year after that Will Rogers, the nation’s preeminent political humorist in that era, took to those airwaves as a presidential candidate against the Democrat’s 1928 nominee, Governor Al Smith of New York, and the Republican’s Herbert Hoover.
Rogers ran as the nominee of the Anti-Bunk Party. Acknowledging that, after being nominated, it was customary for the candidate to register modesty, Rogers commenced his campaign by declaring he didn’t feel that way at all. “After all,” he told voters, “it’s only the office of Candidate that I am accepting. You know it don’t take near as good a man to be Candidate as it does to hold office. That’s why we wisely defeat more than we elect.”1
But Rogers did not make this acceptance speech on radio; he made it in Life magazine—at the time a satirical magazine, prior to its reinvention as the hugely successful forum for photojournalism. At the outset Rogers’s campaign was less a reflection of radio than of the 1848 bid for the White House generated by the similarly satirical magazine, The John-Donkey. In this instance Life magazine launched the campaign when it solicited, or at least claimed to be soliciting, suggestions from readers for a “bunkless” candidate, casting aside political party prejudices. In the issue that followed, an article titled “Will Rogers for President” claimed that the famous humorist was the overwhelming response they had received.2 Life wholeheartedly agreed, noting, “If elected, he would be the first president in sixty-two years who was funny intentionally.” A funny line in itself, and one that provides a sense of how admired Rogers was, assuming it to be a (mathematically faulty) comparison to Abraham Lincoln—arrived at by subtracting 62 from 1928 and assuming they were not referring to Andrew Johnson, who has not come down in history for his wit. While Lincoln is most remembered for his Emancipation Proclamation, he was also known for his many humorous (some said annoying) anecdotes.
After accepting the nomination, Rogers gave the equivalent of twenty-two stump speeches in the pages of Life, which the magazine featured under banner headlines trumpeting a series of antibunk virtues:
America loved it. After all, who wouldn’t love a candidate that vowed to eliminate such things as slogans? “Slogans,” Rogers declaimed, “have been more harmful to this country than Bo-Weevil, Luncheon Clubs, Sand Fleas, Detours, Conventions, and Golf Pants.” Regarding the controversy over the prohibition of alcohol, in force at the time, Rogers told voters, “The Republicans will try and get by on the old gag, ‘We are for law enforcement,’ which . . . don’t mean anything more than an Aviators’ convention going on record as being in favor of ‘Tail Winds.’” Going on to predict the Democrats would dodge the issue by nominating a presidential candidate on one side of the issue and a vice presidential candidate on the other side, Rogers made his “no bunk” position crystal clear: “Wine for the rich, beer for the poor, and moonshine liquor for the Prohibitionist.”
Under the Life headline “Our Candidate Insults the Voters,” Rogers noted a remark by an up-and-coming figure in the Democratic Party named Franklin Roosevelt. Young Roosevelt declared that the Republican Party’s claim that it was the party of prosperity was false and that Americans were too smart to be misled again by such bunk. In response to which Rogers said, “Of all the bunk handed out during a campaign, the biggest one of all is to try and compliment the knowledge of the voter and tell him he can’t be fooled like he used to be.”3
The public ate it up. So much so that radio came a-calling. Rogers, no stranger to radio (or film or vaudeville), answered the call. Having already hosted the largest network hook-up of stations to date (an event so momentous it received front-page coverage in the New York Times that filled an entire page in its continuation), Rogers knew the power of radio and knew ways to put that power to work. As in that historic January 4, 1928, network program, which featured a variety of celebrity appearances, Rogers’s radio campaign for the presidency featured a line-up of endorsement performances by the likes of the popular song-and-dance comedian Eddie Cantor, the columnist Walter Winchell, and the highly intellectual newspaper humorist Robert Benchley. As Election Day neared, numerous newspapers reported that the grand finale of the Rogers campaign would be a “torchlight parade” featuring the nation’s most recent aviation hero, Amelia Earhart, proclaiming her endorsement of Rogers.
The torchlight parade took place in a CBS radio studio.
The news media wanted as much of this campaign as it could get. It spread to Rogers’s regular letters to the New York Times that appeared in syndication nationwide and into the numerous public appearances he made for other purposes.
While all this was good business for Rogers, there was also a serious side to his humor—one that, in that 1928 election, went beyond bunk: freedom of religion. For the first time in the nation’s history, a major political party had nominated a Catholic for president, that candidate being Al Smith, and that fact explaining the meaning not only of Life’s banner “Our Candidate Won’t Sling Mud” but of the next week’s more explicit banner, “Our Candidate Has No Religion.”
“Well, the campaign is degenerating,” Rogers wrote in the first of these two addresses. With his aw shucks manner bolstered by occasional aw shucks spelling and grammar he told voters, “It started in by ‘Whispering.’ . . . At first we was all hearing so many whispers that it begin to look like everybody that spoke to you had lost their voice. We laid it to bad colds for awhile, then we discovered that everybody couldent have Phenomonia at once. . . . [Later] it was the idea of whispering that made everybody sore, so they quit whispering and started saying worse things at the top of their voice.”4
In his own way, Rogers too was testing the waters with whispers, but it wasn’t until his next address in Life that he gave it full voice. “I told you last week that the ‘Whispering’ would stop,” he began, “and they would start ‘Shouting’ instead.” He too, this time, went on to yodel what most troubled him: “A woman in Virginia sent out a Scenario saying that the Catholics would not make good Postmasters, that the mail would be read in Rome before delivery. . . . Then the only white Republican in Alabama [back then still solidly anti-Lincoln Democrats] felt called upon to instruct what few constituents he had that could read, that in case of Al’s election the Protestants would be called on to meet a Lion in a catch-as-catch-can combat for the jollification of Tammany Hall and the visiting Cardinals.”5 Rogers then used humor to lasso as many readers as he could regarding this serious issue, proudly asserting that his own Anti-Bunk Party “not only kept clear of Church, but also of State matters.”
In regard to his own candidacy, Rogers himself appears to have engaged in a backroom deal to create whispering before shouting. Prior to Life asking its readers to suggest a bunkless presidential candidate, a letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun urged “the conscription of Will Rogers” for president.6 While the letter writer, one L. J. Quinby, was clearly writing in jest, unknown to Baltimoreans was that Quinby was a professional writer who lived in Hollywood.7 Three weeks later the local Democratic Party in the county where Rogers grew up voted to honor their hometown celebrity by offering his name as a presidential candidate. Somehow this seemingly benign local event triggered national news coverage.8 Rogers responded by declaring, “I do not contemplate becoming involved in a political conflict of any nature during the Autumn of 1928.”9 Which, as it turned out, was bunk—albeit comic bunk. After all, he did accept the satiric nomination of Life magazine. The events that preceded his acceptance, however, provide reason to suspect that Rogers and the magazine had themselves engaged in a whispering campaign. But Rogers opted not to drop his rope over this bunk and drag it into the daylight—understandably; after all, he was a performer.
If indeed Rogers’s antibunk campaign was itself bunk, the significance is not an indictment of Rogers. The significance is in recognizing the symbiotic relationship between politics and performance. And in recognizing the curtain that is used to hide that relationship from public view. Rogers couldn’t say so outright; it would ruin the humor. But he often had an ironic twinkle in his eye, particularly when he said such things as “I do not contemplate becoming involved in a political conflict of any nature during the Autumn of 1928.”
So effective was that curtain in this instance, some seriously began to ask whether or not Will Rogers should be elected president. This despite the fact that, starting with his acceptance address, Rogers repeatedly stressed the first and foremost point in his party platform: “If elected, I absolutely and positively agree to resign.”10
“While the candidacy of Will Rogers is providing the laughs in the presidential campaign,” Wisconsin’s Fond du Lac Reporter predicted, “it may also corral more votes than some folks anticipate”—a not so humorous prospect that Life liked so much it printed it in a piece that also included Connecticut’s Bridgeport Post opining, “Nobody can see through the politicians at Washington more clearly than Rogers. Nobody holds them in less awe. As President, he certainly would not be afraid of the Senate; the Senate would be afraid of him. Every time one of the Senate windbags began to gas, Rogers would utter a piercing remark of perhaps ten words and deflate him.”11
No less a figure than the automobile magnate Henry Ford (who himself periodically tested the waters for a presidential bid) declared, “The joke of Will Rogers’s candidacy for President is that it is no joke. It is a serious attempt to restore American common sense to American politics. . . . There is however, one item in his platform with which I cannot agree—‘If elected, I will resign.’ . . . The real reason for electing him is to see what kind of a President he will make.”12
Not all the endorsements from famous Americans were so bold; indeed, most were as tongue-in-cheek as the political promises of the candidate himself. When, for instance, Amelia Earhart (with whom Rogers shared a passion for aviation) spoke on his behalf at the grand torchlight parade on radio, she shifted from a lighthearted endorsement of her friend to serious remarks about her own ideas regarding the development of air travel.13
Even at the height of Rogers’s ballyhoo of laughter against bunk there were occasional journalistic turds in the punchbowl. “A candidate for President on the no-bunk ticket, Will Rogers deals in just about as much bunk as the average politicians,” Iowa’s Waterloo Times-Tribune insightfully, if drearily, observed in an editorial. Which Life, in fairness and self-insightfulness, included in its periodic roundup of what newspapers were saying of their candidate, albeit under the headline “An Insult.” Similarly Life had previously included, from Oregon’s Corvallis Gazette, “LIFE has started a boom for Will Rogers for President to head a ‘bunkless’ party. On such a party platform, Will would get about one per cent of the votes . . . because bunk appeals to the majority more than anything else.”14
The Corvallis Gazette got it right, in that it said “about.” Of the 36,808,961 votes that were cast in the 1928 election, Rogers received some percentage of the 323 votes cast nationwide (less than .001 percent) for candidates other than Herbert Hoover, Al Smith, or those representing third parties on that year’s ballots.15