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Who really said it

When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states

Not Will Rogers — an anonymous newspaper joke Unknown Credited to Will Rogers (1879–1935) only from 1970 · true originator unknown
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Will Rogers died in 1935, and Quote Investigator ↗ could find no match for this quip anywhere in his writings. The joke first appears in print in April 1939 — after Rogers was already dead, and told about two Mississippi counties rather than Okies. It attaches to the Okie migration by January 1955, and Rogers’s name is first attached to it in February 1970, when Oklahoma Governor Dewey F. Bartlett told a Long Beach audience “I like what Will Rogers once said.” QI’s verdict is that Rogers probably did not employ this joke.

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states” attributed to Will Rogers, but not his. Rogers died in August 1935; the joke is documented in print from April 1939 (told about two Mississippi counties), reached the Okie migration by January 1955, and was first credited to Rogers in February 1970. Source: Quote Investigator, "Quote Origin: When the Okies Migrated To California, It Raised the I.Q. in Both States," 16 October 2021.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Will Rogers. Use the credit shown above instead.

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We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Source in Rogers
None — no match located in his columns, telegrams or broadcasts
Earliest known instance
“The Jackson Go-Round” by Herbert L. Carver, McComb Daily Journal (Mississippi), 6 April 1939, p. 5
Earliest Okie version
The Seminole Producer (Seminole, Oklahoma), 5 January 1955, p. 6 — industrialist Harry Woodhead, quoted by Leland Gourley
First credited to Rogers
Los Angeles Times, 6 February 1970 — Governor Dewey F. Bartlett, speaking in Long Beach

“Hundreds of thousands of Okies migrated to California during the dust bowl days,” Woodhead relates. “Right after this, they made a survey and found the I. Q. of both states had been raised considerably.” Earliest Okie version, January 1955

This is the earliest version tied to the Okie migration that Quote Investigator located — and it is not Will Rogers speaking. It is the industrialist Harry Woodhead, quoted in an Oklahoma newspaper in January 1955, long after Rogers’s death, telling a joke whose earliest documented form (1939) had nothing to do with Oklahoma at all.

Quote Investigator: When the Okies Migrated To California, It Raised the I.Q. in Both States

How we traced it

  • The joke is older than its Okie form. The earliest instance Quote Investigator ↗ located ran in the McComb Daily Journal of Mississippi on 6 April 1939, in a column by Herbert L. Carver: a man “moved from one south Mississippi county to another, and when he did he raised the intelligence level of both counties.” QI conjectures that Carver was already repeating an existing quip.
  • It then travelled through the 1940s and 1950s attached to whoever was handy — a preacher going to Arkansas (1941), two arguing farmers in The Rotarian (1942), a student transferring from Michigan to Ohio State (1944), a man moving from Nebraska to Kansas (1955), an Oklahoman moving to Texas (1962) — each transcribed with a full citation by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • Rogers’s name enters in 1970, and only there. Governor Dewey F. Bartlett had told the joke unattributed in September 1969; on 6 February 1970 the Los Angeles Times reported him prefacing it with “I like what Will Rogers once said,” and in 1975 he credited Rogers again, this time with a Texas variant, in testimony to a U.S. Senate committee Quote Investigator ↗.
  • Wikiquote offers the attribution no help either: its Will Rogers page lists the line in neither its sourced quotations nor its misattributed section Wikiquote: Will Rogers ↗.

No rights status can honestly be asserted here. The sentence in circulation matches none of the dated instances on record, so there is no identifiable author, work or first-publication date against which copyright could be assessed — and the earliest documented ancestor, a 1939 newspaper column, is neither this wording nor Will Rogers’s. Treat the line as an anonymous saying of unestablished origin rather than as public-domain Rogers material.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

The misattribution, step by step

This is a joke that travelled for three decades before anyone put a famous name on it. The name it eventually got was the most plausible one available — Oklahoma’s own humorist, dead since 1935 and therefore in no position to deny it.

Will Rogers Credited from 1970

Rogers died on 15 August 1935. The first documented time anyone put this joke in his mouth was 6 February 1970, when Oklahoma Governor Dewey F. Bartlett told a Town Hall of California gathering in Long Beach, “I like what Will Rogers once said: When the Okies migrated to California, it raised the I.Q. in both states.” Bartlett had used the very same joke the previous September, reported in the Sequoyah County Times, with no attribution to anyone at all Quote Investigator ↗.

No documented source Folk joke, smoothed over time

None of the dated instances Quote Investigator transcribes — 1939, 1941, 1942, 1944, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1959, 1962, 1969, 1970 — uses the polished sentence that circulates today. The earliest of all, in the McComb Daily Journal of Mississippi on 6 April 1939, is about one man moving between two Mississippi counties; the earliest Okie version, from January 1955, has a survey finding “the I. Q. of both states had been raised considerably” Quote Investigator ↗.

The Speaker’s Quote Book (1997) How it hardened

Roy B. Zuck’s The Speaker’s Quote Book printed it flatly under Rogers’s name in a first-person form he is not documented using — “When I moved from Oklahoma to California the IQ of both states went up” — which is how an unsourced platform joke turns into a reference-book fact Quote Investigator ↗.

Robert Muldoon New Zealand version

The identical gag is credited to New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, about New Zealanders moving to Australia; a journalist reported hearing him tell it in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1990, and the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (2008) files it under his name as “attributed.” Muldoon really did tell it — but, as with Rogers, the joke was old long before he got to it Quote Investigator ↗.

Quote Investigator’s conclusion is that the quips credited to Rogers and to Muldoon belong to “an evolving family of expressions which was initiated by 1939” — and that Will Rogers probably did not employ this joke Quote Investigator ↗.

Context

The joke that became a medical term

The Dust Bowl migration is the thing this joke is standing on. Through the mid-1930s hundreds of thousands of farming families left the Great Plains and Southwest for California, and Californians began calling all of them “Okies” whether or not they came from Oklahoma — a label that started as an insult and only later got reclaimed as a badge of honour Okie ↗. The gag insults both ends of the road at once, which is why an Oklahoma governor could tell it about his own state and still get a laugh.

Then it had a second life nobody expected. In 1985 the clinician Alvan Feinstein and colleagues borrowed the line to name a real statistical trap in cancer staging: better scanning moved patients who looked healthy out of the ‘good’ stage and into the ‘bad’ one, so survival figures improved in both groups while no individual patient did any better. They called it the Will Rogers phenomenon, and the name stuck in medicine Will Rogers phenomenon ↗.

A joke nobody can source became a technical term in oncology — under the name of a man who is not documented ever telling it.

How the statistical effect works

The paper is Alvan R. Feinstein, Daniel M. Sosin and Carolyn K. Wells, “The Will Rogers phenomenon. Stage migration and new diagnostic techniques as a source of misleading statistics for survival in cancer,” New England Journal of Medicine 312, no. 25 (20 June 1985): 1604–8 PubMed record ↗.

The mechanism is the same as the joke’s: move members from one group to another whose average they sit between, and both averages rise even though nothing about the members themselves changed. That is a genuinely useful idea, which is part of why the misattribution has proved so durable — the name now travels through medical literature, not just through quotation books.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Knowledge Change

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator — the full investigationquoteinvestigator.com

Every dated instance from 1939 to 2008, transcribed with citations, and QI's conclusion that Will Rogers probably did not employ the joke.
Will Rogers phenomenonen.wikipedia.org

The statistical effect named for the quip, and the article's own note that the line was first attributed to Rogers decades after his death.
Wikiquote: Will Rogersen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's sourced and misattributed Rogers lists — the Okie quip appears in neither one.
Feinstein, Sosin & Wells, NEJM 1985pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The paper that gave the joke its scientific name: 'The Will Rogers phenomenon. Stage migration and new diagnostic techniques…', NEJM 312(25):1604–8.
Will Rogers Memorial Museum — Writingswww.willrogers.com

Downloadable PDFs of Rogers's daily telegrams and weekly articles, so you can search his actual output yourself.
Okieen.wikipedia.org

Background on the Dust Bowl migration and the pejorative the joke turns on.

Popularly credited author

Why it gets pinned on Will Rogers

Will Rogers

1879–1935 · American humorist, newspaper columnist and film star

Will Rogers was a trick roper from Indian Territory — born near Oologah in 1879 — who became the most quoted American of his day: more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns, 71 films, and a Sunday radio show for Gulf Oil, all built on plainspoken jokes about the news. He died on 15 August 1935, when Wiley Post’s plane crashed in Alaska Territory, and that date is what settles this quote: the joke is not documented anywhere in print until 1939. His name became a magnet for orphaned one-liners precisely because homespun American wit was the thing he sold — an Oklahoma joke about Okies sounds like him, which is exactly why it stuck.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

No source in Rogers — earliest documented 1939 (Chicago)

No source located in Will Rogers’s columns, telegrams, films or broadcasts. Earliest documented instance of the joke: Herbert L. Carver, “The Jackson Go-Round,” McComb Daily Journal (McComb, MS), April 6, 1939, 5. Earliest Okie-specific instance: Leland Gourley, “Seeds From the Grass Roots,” The Seminole Producer (Seminole, OK), January 5, 1955, 6. Earliest attribution to Rogers: Robert E. Wood, “‘Okie-Type Companies’ Cutting Job Erosion,” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1970, sec. 3, p. 10. See Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: When the Okies Migrated To California, It Raised the I.Q. in Both States,” October 16, 2021.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/when-the-okies-left-oklahoma-and-moved-to-california-they/

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