By Steve Bankhead
**Originally published in the February 18, 2001 Santa Cruz Sentinel**
I sometimes commit the self-indulgent sin of writing columns about my family, including tales of the scandalous actress Tallulah Bankhead, recently portrayed by Kathleen Turner in her one-woman play in San Francisco. I've also recounted the roguish misdeeds of Charles Bankhead, who married Thomas Jefferson's grandchild Anne Randolph, and proceed to shatter the domestic tranquility of Monticello.
However, there's one relative I've never mentioned being a member of my family tree, because I have nothing but praise for the man, and praising your family seems like a shining example of vanity. So I'll belatedly honor my family's foremost columnist and humorist, my maternal grandmother's cousin Will Rogers.
Will and I share the same basic pedigree of Cherokee, Scottish and Irish, though I have an added dash of Choctaw from my great-grandmother Mary Free. My paternal grandfather Frank Bankhead was a friend and classmate of Will's back in Oklahoma. That is, when Will wasn't perfecting the fine art of truancy to fish or practice rope tricks. Later in life grandfather Frank worried in a family diary that Will would wind up in a plane crash if he kept flying around with Wiley Post. Grandfather knew best.
Though Will Rogers' newspaper columns only extended from 1922 to his death in 1935, his discerning eye and folk wisdom transcend the limits of time. An early environmentalist, Will said of our traditional heritage that the pioneer "was a guy that wanted something for nothing.... We are just now learning that we can rob from nature the same way we can rob from an individual. That pioneer thought he was living off nature, but it was really future generations he was living off."
A natural pacifist, Will offered a prophetic warning of World War II: "If war was declared with some Pacific nation, we would lose the Philippines before lunch; but if we lose (Pearl Harbor), it would be our own fault." He also seemed to presage a vision of Vietnam: "We haven't any business in these Far East wars. Seven thousand miles is a long way to go to shoot somebody, especially if you are not right sure they need shooting."
The middle name of Will's mom was America, and she delivered him on Election Day in 1879, so he considered himself to be her revenge for not having the right to vote. On disarmament he wrote: "Maybe a woman can do it. It's a cinch men can't." Of equal rights he blithely noted: "I thought myself that they had too many, and it was mighty nice of them to want to split some of them with the men."
But as Cousin Tallulah was quoted by Kathleen Turner at the Curran Theater: "Politics is the mother's milk of Bankheads." And so it was with Will Rogers. I recently fretted in a column that Will wasn't here to describe the 2000 elections, then I realized he'd already described them more than 70 years ago. Where there's a Will, there's a way.
To those deploring the past presidential election as extraordinarily dirty, I'll offer Will's quotes from around the 1928 contest between Al Smith (the first Catholic presidential candidate) and Herbert Hoover:
"This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it...If by some divine act of Providence we could get rid of these parties and hire some good men, like any other big business does, we would be sitting pretty."
"We have various pestilences once in a while, but the only advertised and known calamity is our elections."
"The candidates are 'High Typed Gentlemen' till the contest gets close, then the 'Brute' comes out in 'em. What starts out to be a nice fight winds up a street brawl."
"More men will be elected tonight through good counting than were elected today through voting...I hope that some of the men who get the most votes will be elected. That, of course, is not always the case."
"Democratic contenders made up. Yes, sir, they made up and decided to bury the hatchet. They decided to bury it in the Republican president."
"The campaign lasted only a few months, but it will take two generations to sweep up the dirt."
Thanks, Will. There's comfort in knowing that Election 2000 was just politics as usual...vile though that might be.