An interesting story in the current issue of American History says that humorist Will Rogers would be at home in today's mass media tweeting. Although the folksy Rogers died more than 70 years before Twitter was invented, he did something similar with his daily telegrams that were published for years in hundreds of newspapers.
Rogers already was something of a multimedia sensation when he began writing the telegrams. He broke into show business in 1902 doing rope tricks with Wild West shows. In between his tricks, Rogers told jokes based on the news of the day. In the early 1920s he began writing a syndicated weekly newspaper column. He also appeared in movies. At the suggestion of Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, Rogers began sending telegrams about his experiences during a trip to Europe in 1926. By the end of the year, 92 other newspapers were publishing his daily observations and eventually more than 600 papers carried the popular feature.
As the article notes, "Like tweets, Rogers' telegrams were short, informal, chatty, sometimes wise, frequently trivial, occasionally foolish." Here are a few that capture the flavor of the remarkable Rogers:
LONDON, Aug. 2, 1926--A bunch of American tourists were hissed and stoned yesterday in France but not before they had finished buying.
NEW YORK, N.Y., May 22, 1927--Of all the things that Lindberg's great feat demonstrated, the greatest was to show that a person could still get the entire front page without murdering anybody.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif, Dec. 15, 1929--Passed the Potter's Field yesterday and they was burying two staunch old Republican, both of whom died of starvation, and the man in charge told me their last words were, "I still think America is fundamentally sound."