SorryWatch enjoyed Kliph Nesteroff’s book We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans in Comedy, and we weren’t even expecting to find any apologies.

The title’s from a joke by comedian Charlie Hill, explaining that he’s from the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. “We used to be from New York, but we had a little real estate problem.”

There are a couple of interesting apologies, one of the earliest from Will Rogers, a once-virally famous comedian, actor, writer, broadcaster, and social commenter. Born in 1879, Rogers was Cherokee, although most people don’t seem to have categorized him that way. He was a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and 9/32 Cherokee if you want to do that blood quantum thing. He started out in vaudeville doing rope tricks he’d first learned as a young man cowboying in the Nation. During the act one day he complained that the tricks were harder to do because he wasn’t allowed to cuss onstage, which got a huge laugh – and he was off on his long career.

By 1934, Rogers was very busy, very popular. One of his many performance outlets was the Good Gulf Program, a radio show promoting Gulf gasoline. On January 21^st, he included a song, “The Last Round-Up.” Waxing informative, he introduced it by saying “The words to the song are cowboy all right, but the tune is really a [n-word] spiritual.” He used the n-word several more times as he went along.

It was 1934. Did people care about that in 1934? You bet they did. The New York Daily News reported there were “protests from all over the nation last night following his broadcast.” The thriving Black press covered the broadcast, reactions, and protests.

Nesteroff writes: “The Philadelphia Tribune suggested a boycott… campaign. In an editorial reprinted around the country, the paper stated, ‘Will Rogers, by using a certain insulting epithet in referring to Negroes, offers an opportunity for colored Americans to prove to American business that it cannot insult them and get away with it…. It has been asked what is [there to do] about the Rogers insult? Will Rogers is paid to advertise the products of the Gulf Refining Company. Good Gulf Gasoline is its chief product…. The effective protest is not then in writing letters to newspapers… but a refusal to make Will Rogers a successful sales promoter for the Gulf products.’”

A boycott was organized against Gulf stations, Will Roger films, and theaters that showed them.

But wait, don’t be mad! NBC said Rogers was “simply using a term which was common throughout the South and West.” A young Roy Wilkins didn’t buy that. “This excuse is not sufficient for you to permit it to be used over your network. Besides, it is not true. It may be true in Claremore, Oklahoma, where Mr. Rogers had his beginning [but] is the local standard of an Oklahoma town of 3,720 inhabitants to become the standard of a national broadcasting network?””

On his next Gulf show, Rogers addressed the anger. He said he wouldn’t use the n-word again, but said the n-word was harmless and used with love. Certainly it showed no bad thought on Rogers’s part. “I wasn’t only raised among darkies down in Indian Territory. I was raised by them. And Lord, I was five years out on the ranch before I ever knew there was a white child.”

According to biographer Ben Yagoda, he also wrote a long telegram in response to a Mr. Tobias (SorryWatch thinks this was civil rights activist Channing Tobias) “…I think you folks are wrong in jumping too hastily onto someone or anyone who might use the word with no more thought or belittlement than I did. There is millions in the South who use that word, and if the race has more real friends among millions of people down there I don’t know where it is. I am offering no excuse for using it myself, I was wrong, but its the intention and not the wording that you must look for. What in the world, what particle of action had ever lead a single Negro to believe that I hadent the best wishes toward their race?…

“A colored cowpuncher taught me how to rope, and I contributed to him and his wife, and went out of my way to drive by and see them every time I went to my home in Okla. Up to the time of their death, he never worked for a soul during his whole lifetime but us. All these things make this criticism the more unfair and hard on me. If there is a colored performer (I might have known in the old vaudeville days and I knew many) if there is a Negro porter, waiter, or any one of your race, that I have come in contact with in all my years, if you or anyone else can find a one that will say that I ever by action, or word ever did one thing to humiliate, or show in any way that I was antagonistic to them, I will, ah well I would do anything, for you cant find em, for I never did.”

It’s a terrible apology, defensive all the way through. “You folks are wrong”? It ignores the distinction between intent and impact. It also employs the disreputable “Some of my best friends are…” tactic. SorryWatch wondered if that ploy was already old in 1934, and it was. Bradford Plumer, in The New Republic, found a reference as early as 1908 (“Some of my best friends are Republicans”) and it was used in the 1920s (“Some of my dearest friends are Catholic”)

You might have thought Rogers would know better. When Rogers was in military school another cadet referred to an Indian as a “thoroughbred.” (As in a thoroughbred horse.) According to a classmate, Rogers was outraged, angrily said the right word was “fullblood,” and that it spoiled his whole afternoon to hear an Indian called a thoroughbred.

Why didn’t he see that the n-words spoiled a whole lot of afternoons?

In this case Rogers may not have been identifying as a Cherokee member of a persecuted group, but perhaps as Cherokee gentry only a generation removed from slaveholding gentry. His forebears were among the “Old Settlers,” a small group of Cherokee who signed the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, agreeing to give up all land claims east of the Mississippi and settle in Oklahoma. The Old Settlers thereby avoided being forcibly deported, received some payment, and got first choice of places to settle. The U.S. government then used the Treaty of New Echota as an excuse to deport the majority of the Cherokees – who had not signed the treaty, nor had their leaders – on the cruel and forcible Trail of Tears. ‘You gave up your land claims!’

Will Rogers grew up in a prosperous family. The Rogers family had land and cattle (until the next government sliminess – the Allotment Act), and owned slaves. In the Civil War, the Cherokees, surrounded by Confederates, threw their lot in with them. Rogers’s father, Clem Rogers, was thus a former slaveholder and a Confederate veteran.

After emancipation, people who had been enslaved by Cherokees were designated Cherokee Freedmen, and held an anomalous position. Were they citizens of the Cherokee Nation? Could they vote for offices in the Nation? Could they serve? So yeah, solidarity wasn’t always complete.

There’s more to say about the local standards of Claremore, Oklahoma, referenced by Roy Wilkins above. Rogers may have absorbed what was ‘commonly’ said there, but he also influenced that. Yagoda’s biography mentions that because the young Rogers went on cattle-selling drives to Kansas City, he learned and brought back the latest crazes from that metropolis, including what were called “coon songs.” These portrayed black people as “dice-throwing, razor-wielding, fried-chicken-eating, watermelon-stealing savage[s].” Yes, black people performed them too, notably Bert Williams, who later shared vaudeville stages with Rogers. Yes, Rogers’s delight in insulting stereotypes could co-exist with loving respect for people like Dan Walker, who taught him how to rope. But if he hadn’t figured out the problems there by the age of 55, it was because he chose not to. The protests after the broadcast could have been a belated wake-up call, but no. “You folks are wrong…”

Rogers’s bad apology shows that he didn’t get it, in some really classic ways. He didn’t get it – but he got away with it. SorryWatch hasn’t found information that the boycott continued after his lousy apology and pledge not to use the n-word again.