ABSTRACT
What follows is a study of an “actin’ man”: Will Rogers. By the time he starred in A Connecticut Yankee (David Butler, 1931), he was already famous.1 Rogers was known as a plain-speaking man of the people with a wry sense of humor who criticized the follies of government and the excesses of capitalism and denounced discrimination against women and people of color. Part Cherokee (which he never let people forget), Rogers was loved by almost everyone-even by such representatives of big business as Ford and Rockefeller. Rogers regularly and deliberately spoke from the margins: as he famously said in So This Is London (John Blystone, 1930), his ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower; they met the boat. Rogers is always Rogers, no matter the character he plays, and he embodies, literally and figuratively, a transcultural, hybridized space.
