(A rip-roaring radical romp through American history, from...)
A rip-roaring radical romp through American history, from the man known as the Mark Twain Of American Socialism. Ameringer, socialist organizer, editor, pamphleteer and public speaker, was remarkable forerunner of what would today be called a stand-up comedian. In this, his most famous work (originally published in 1909, selling half a million copies by 1914!), the ‘official’ history of the text-books is hilariously laid bare; the author’s satirical barbs aimed at the exploiters’ ideology bristle on every page. An outstanding classic of American labor historiography and humor. With an introduction from Paul Buhle.
Oscar Ameringer was an American labor organizer, editor, and Socialist pamphleteer. He was known as a prominent organiser of the Socialist Party of Oklahoma and the author of the famous work The Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam.
Background
Oscar Ameringer was born on August 4, 1870 at Achstetten, near Ulm, in the German kingdom of Wurttemberg (now Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany). His father, August Ameringer, was a talented musician and a master cabinetmaker; his mother, whose maiden name was Hoffman, came of the Swabian Oberland peasantry. Ameringer had a brother and a sister, both older. When he was six the family settled in Laupheim.
Education
An "unruly boy, " Ameringer attended a local Catholic school, but the rigid discipline made him "miserable, " and after seven years he left to become an apprentice in his father's shop. He also pursued interests in music and art.
Career
Ameringer immigrated to the United States to avoid military service before his sixteenth birthday. Living at first in Cincinnati, where his brother had settled, Ameringer found work in a furniture factory, but was fired when he became an organizer for the Knights of Labor. For a time he played the cornet in a traveling band. After a jobless winter (1887-1888), during which he began a program of self-education in the Cincinnati Public Library, he successfully took up portrait painting in nearby towns.
In 1890, shortly after becoming an American citizen, he returned to Germany to visit his mother and went on to study art at Munich, where he stayed for five years. He came back in 1896 in time to pick up a job in the Canton, Ohio, band that aided McKinley's "front porch" campaign, and then tramped over the Middle West and into Texas, teaching music and directing bands.
His wanderings came to a temporary halt when Ameringer married and settled in Columbus, where he worked for a time as a life insurance salesman. Influenced by the writings of Edward Bellamy and Henry George, and perhaps even more by the "muck-raking" journalists, Ameringer ran in 1903 for the state legislature as a single-taxer and for mayor of Columbus as a Socialist. That same year he launched a newspaper, the Labor World, in which he favored industrial unions and denounced the American Federation of Labor and its "high priest, " Samuel Gompers.
When the Labor World folded, Ameringer moved on in 1907 to Oklahoma, attracted by rising Socialist sentiment among laborers and tenant farmers in the Southwest. Thereafter Oklahoma City remained his home base. As a field organizer for the Socialist party, he spoke at schoolhouse meetings and Socialist encampments, entertaining as well as instructing his audiences.
He began writing Socialist pamphlets; one of the most popular was The Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam: A History for Big Children (1912). Around this time he launched a newspaper, the Industrial Democrat, and, when this failed, the Oklahoma Pioneer. He also organized the Oklahoma Tenant Farmers Union.
Invited in 1910 to Milwaukee to assist in the Congressional campaigns of Victor Berger and other Socialists, Ameringer, with his knowledge of the German language and of the farmer's problems, effectively reduced the normally large Republican vote in Waukesha County and thereby helped Berger win election. His reward was appointment first as state and then as Milwaukee County organizer of the Socialist party. While in Milwaukee he also edited the Voice of the People, a campaign sheet which was revived periodically, and wrote editorials for the party organ, the Milwaukee Leader.
Back home, he established the Oklahoma Leader in 1914. That year he ran on the Socialist ticket for mayor of Oklahoma City and came close to winning. When the Milwaukee Leader was one of several radical journals whose mailing privileges were revoked, he went to Milwaukee and helped raise money to keep it alive.
In 1918 he was the unsuccessful Socialist candidate for Congress from Milwaukee. He was indicted for obstructing military service but was not brought to trial.
After the war Ameringer returned to Oklahoma, where he and his trouble-beset Oklahoma Leader helped form the Farmer-Labor Reconstruction League, a coalition of progressives, Socialists, and farmer and labor organizations modeled on North Dakota's Non-Partisan League. Capturing the Democratic primaries, the group in 1922 elected Jack C. Walton, former mayor of Oklahoma City and member of a railroad union, to the governorship, but his impeachment the next year in an aura of scandal seriously jeopardized Ameringer's newspaper. Aid came, however, from Illinois members of the United Mine Workers, whose newspaper, the Illinois Miner, he edited and published at his plant in Oklahoma City from 1922 to 1931. For it he wrote a vigorous, earthy, frequently humorous column under the pseudonym "Adam Coaldigger. "
His own paper, renamed in 1931 the American Guardian, became widely known in workingmen's circles. During the economic depression of the 1930's Ameringer wrote so vividly about the anomaly of poverty and hunger in the midst of plenty that he was called upon to testify before a subcommittee of the House Labor Committee investigating unemployment (February 1932). His readable autobiography, If You Don't Weaken (1940), brought him a new audience. The book included his definition of politics as "the art by which politicians obtain campaign contributions from the rich and votes from the poor on the pretext of protecting each from the other".
Following a prolonged illness that included a liver ailment, he died in the Polyclinic Hospital in Oklahoma City of a cerebral thrombosis at the age of seventy-three.
Ameringer was born a Roman Catholic, but later became a member of the Unitarian Church.
Politics
Ameringer was a staunch supporter of the rights of the disadvantaged and like many other Socialists opposed American involvement in World War I. He also advocated a tolerant, nonsectarian form of Marxism.
Views
Quotations:
"Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other. "
Personality
Ameringer's special strength was his ability, as speaker and writer, to put a broadly Socialist message into witty, pithy, down-to-earth prose. He was remembered as the "Mark Twain of Labor" and the "Workers' Will Rogers. " Carl Sandburg found in Adam Coaldigger's fables "the art of Aesop, " their author holding "a supreme position in the American labor movement as a man of laughter, wit and satire. "
Connections
Ameringer was first married to Lulu Wood of Mount Sterling, Ohio, but the couple divorced; in 1930 he married Freda Hogan, daughter of an Arkansas Socialist. He had three sons by his first marriage, Siegfried, Irving, and Carl, and a daughter, Susan, by the second.