Imagine the biggest movie star in the world who is also the nation's most trusted political commentator, read daily by 40 million people, and the undisputed voice of the common man. That was Will Rogers, a level of centralized cultural gravity we simply don't see anymore. And he was born not a U.S. citizen, but a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

This deep dive explores how an Oklahoma trick roper with a profoundly complex heritage became an anchor of stability through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. He roasted the most powerful politicians to their faces, stayed universally beloved, pioneered the mass parasocial relationship, and died at the absolute peak of his influence.

• The clashing legacies in his household, his mother's Trail of Tears survivors and his Confederate slave-owning father
• How missing rope tr ...