Steven Watts is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri. This interview is based on his new book, Citizen Cowboy: Will Rogers and the American People (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
JF: What led you to write Citizen Cowboy?
SW: In the 1990s, I began writing a series of biographies on major figures in modern American culture, including Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Dale Carnegie, and John F. Kennedy. Will Rogers, a tremendously popular and influential cowboy humorist, newspaper columnist, movie star, lecturer, radio host and the most beloved man in America in the early 20th century, seemed like a natural addition to this long-term project.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Citizen Cowboy?
SW: The book contends that Rogers (1879-1935), a Cherokee Indian from the Oklahoma territory, drew a vast audience because his folksy, cracker-barrel, witty observations shed much light on a great historical transformation in this era that took the nation from a village republic in the 19th century to an urban, consumer, leisure, celebrity-drenched society in the 20th century. Making ordinary Americans laugh and think while honoring the past and embracing the future, he helped ease them into the modern world and they loved him for it.
JF: Why do we need to read Citizen Cowboy?
SW: Examining Rogers’ career helps us understand the emergence of some of the key values of modern culture in the early 1900s—consumerism, media, celebrity, “personality,” entertainment, “self-fulfillment.” Grasping the nature of his efforts in exploring and promoting this new cultural ethos helps us understand the first years of our own time.
JF: Why and when did you become an American historian?
SW: I became a historian because of a desire to understand the process of how and why America evolved into its present form, something probably inspired by a boyhood spent in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. This career choice began to take shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s when pursuing academic degrees that demanded original research and writing, an endeavor that I grew to love.
JF: What is your next project?
SW: I am planning to write a big book on the history of American populism from the early 1800s to the early 2000s which will analyze not only its political aspects but its economic and cultural dimensions as well.
JF: Thanks, Steven!