Career
An active trade unionist, Oehler joined the Communist Party United States of America in its early days, and by 1927 was a district organizer for the party in Kansas. He was also known for his ability to organize workers, both in the southern textile mills and the mines of Colorado. At the 7th National Convention of the Communist Party United States of America in 1930, Oehler controversially demanded that the Trotskyists be permitted to rejoin the party, abruptly ending his career with the official party.
He was soon elected to the group"s governing National Committee.
He organised unemployed workers during the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934. As a result, he exited the Workers Party in November 1935 to form the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) with Cleveland organizer Tom Stamm and Sidney Lens.
During the Spanish Civil War, the RWL supported only the Workers" Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). Oehler visited Spain to report for the RWL, where he was involved in the Barcelona May Days struggles, and wrote Barcelona Barricades about his experiences.
When he tried to leave the country, he was arrested on charges of spying and held without communication with the outside world for a month, before eventually being permitted to return home.
Stamm countered that Trotsky had degenerated in 1928, and the two split. In 1939, he severely criticised Trotsky"s position for an independent Ukraine. In a polemic, he described his main differences with the Trotskyists as being "on revolutionary defeatism, on support for left-bourgeois governments, on support for third capitalist parties".
With the declaration of the Trotskyist Fourth International, Oehler concentrated on finding international contacts, which he grouped into the Provisional International Contact Commission for the New Communist (Fourth) International.
However, World World War II proved the start of a dramatic decline for the RWL, which appears to have been disbanded in the early 1950s, and Oehler faded into obscurity. In the 1970s, Oehler lived in Denver, Colorado, and was interviewed there by Prometheus Research Library archivist Carl Lichtenstein.