William Vann Rogers (1911-1993) was one of those rare juniors who outgrew the shadow of a great father and became his own man, becoming mighty valuable himself. In Rogers case he managed to do so despite having mastered his dad’s trick rope act and having impersonated him on numerous occasions.
One major difference between the son and the original Will Rogers was that Will Rogers Jr did not grow up in Oklahoma, the wellspring of his father’s identity. Will Jr was born during his dad’s vaudeville period, in New York City, and then grew up in Beverly Hills when his dad starred in movies. He graduated from Stanford the same year as his dad’s tragic death, thus making 1935, his 24th year, a clear turning point. That year he became the publisher of the Beverly Hills Citizen, the local newspaper of a very glamorous town, a post which he held until 1953.
Part of Rogers’ time running the Citizen though was spent in service elsewhere. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. army. His ROTC experience at Stanford entitled him to the rank of second lieutenant, but instead he opted to enlist as a private. Shortly after his enlistment, however, Rogers was elected to the U.S. Congress, representing California’s 16th District. Despite the fact that he was in office for less than a year and a half, Rogers accomplished something extraordinary. Largely through the efforts of screenwriter Ben Hecht, he became one of the greatest champions of European Jews within the U.S. Government. He was a key member of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and lobbied hard for the U.S. to build a series of refugee camps around the perimeter of the Axis countries that would be a springboard to safety for thousands of Jews fleeing persecution in Nazi-dominated Europe. After a long struggle, the legislation to do that was on the verge of being passed when FDR pre-emptively established the War Refugee Board…which accomplished something less than Congress had intended with their own Rescue Resolution. Rogers dropped back out of Congress shortly after that, on the eve of D Day so that he could personally participate in the final effort to vanquish the Nazis forever. He served with Patton’s Third Army, was wounded in action, and decorated.
After the war, Rogers ran for Senate in 1946, but lost. As opposed to his dad, a populist who didn’t publicly affiliate with any party, Will Rogers Jr, was most definitely a member of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. He was a believer in a new international order theoretically to be spearheaded by the new United Nations. He managed the Southern California division of Harry Truman’s 1948 Presidential campain, and remained active in his party, but dark conservative forces held the upper hand in the early years of the Cold War, and the country changed direction.
This was when, for about five years, Rogers gave show business a tumble. More accurately, it was something of a return; as a boy, he had appeared in several of his dad’s silent movies. In 1953, he went from publishing the Beverly Hills Citizen to playing a version of himself (a smalltown newspaper editor) on the CBS radio show Rogers of the Gazette. Meanwhile he played his famous father in three films Look for the Silver Lining (1949, a Marilyn Miller bio-pic), The Story of Will Rogers (1952), and The Eddie Cantor Story (1953). He also starred in the 1954 Michael Curtiz western The Boy from Oklahoma, as well as the 1958 picture Wild Heritage, cast as a judge just as his dad had done in John Ford’s Judge Priest 14 years earlier. Rogers also acted in live television dramas, was the host of Death Valley Days (later associated with his political opposite Ronald Reagan), was on variety prgrams like The Ed Sullivan Show and The Colgate Comedy Hour, and hosted The Morning Show on CBS in 1956.
In 1958 Rogers returned to service, taking a seat on the California State Parks Commission from 1958 to 1962, acting as Chairman the last two years. Under President Johnson he was appointed special assistant to the Commission on Indian Affairs from 1967 to 1969, for like his dad, he was part Cherokee.
In the ’70s he continued to appear on TV talk shows, and was one of the narrators of a Bicentennial Minute. After his wife died in 1976, Rogers retired to a ranch in Arizona. As late as 1982, he narrated a section of “The American Adventure” for Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center. Finally in 1993, following many strokes and heart problems, and a painful hip replacement, Rogers exited the world stage by his own hand. He took the cowboy’s way — firearms. We don’t advocate it; we also don’t judge the man on account of it.
For more on show business history please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.