Oscar Ameringer

• Oscar Ameringer
• Born: August 4, 1870
• Died: November 6, 1943

Socialist and labor journalist, was born in the village of Achstetten, Bavaria. His father was a skilled cabinetmaker whose livelihood was impaired by the inroads of machine-made furniture. His mother was of peasant origin. Young Ameringer’s rebellious spirit collided with the discipline of his father and of the rural school at which his seven years of formal education were obtained. At the age of fifteen he joined an older brother who lived in Cincinnati. He brought with him a gift for drawing and an ability to play wind instruments.

Ameringer, at his brother’s urging, joined the Knights of Labor and attended labor and socialist meetings. He studied American history and, with the help of a friendly librarian, improved his English. His musical gifts led to employment in bands and with traveling vaudevillians. He augmented his income by decorating household objects and drawing portraits. By 1890 he was affluent enough to go to Europe to visit his mother. He went on to Munich, where he spent five years studying art and enjoying a bohemian existence. Returning to the United States, he painted portraits, taught music, and played in bands, including one that accompanied William McKinley during his “front porch” campaign for the presidency in 1896. From this experience Ameringer concluded that “the ballot is too precious lightly to be thrown away on candidates ... of the two old parties.”

Ameringer taught music in Texas and sold insurance in Columbus, Ohio, where he read the popular muckrakers of the day. He devoured Henry George’s Progress and Poverty and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and became convinced by the single-tax philosophy of the one and the Utopian socialism of the other. His membership in the musicians’ union led him, in 1904, to become editor and publisher of a trade union journal, The Labor World, which launched him on his career as a labor journalist. Before 1890 he had already tried his hand at writing short humorous pieces and had found a market in such magazines as Puck and Punch, but he spurned temptations offered by a career of writing humorous tidbits. His sympathies were now fully engaged by the cause of industrial unionism and the ideal of social democracy.

In 1907 he was in Oklahoma, where the Socialist party—composed principally of impoverished farmers—was well established. The appalling conditions of these descendants of the American Revolution and of the American Indians with whom they coexisted strengthened Ameringer’s commitment to socialism. He called socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs “the only thorough-going Christian I have met in the flesh.”

Ameringer moved to Milwaukee, where he assisted in the 1910 campaign that elected a socialist municipal government and that sent Victor L. Berger to Washington as the first socialist member of Congress. Ameringer became an editorial writer and columnist for the Milwaukee Leader. Carl Sandburg, still some years away from fame as a poet, was the paper’s labor reporter, and the two became friends.

In the early years of World War I, Ameringer was back in Oklahoma, trying to raise funds to establish an Oklahoma version of the Leader. Later he was helped by his second wife, Freda Hogan Ameringer, who came from a small Arkansas mining camp, where her father, Dan Hogan, ran a print shop and a small labor weekly. The Ameringers had one child, a daughter. There were three sons born of the first marriage, which ended in divorce.

Oscar Ameringer was one of many socialists whose opposition to World War I brought about their indictment under the Espionage Act and other statutes. Ameringer’s case was eventually quietly dropped, but a large number of socialists and other radicals spent years in prison on similar charges.

The Oklahoma Leader finally began publication in 1918; in difficulty from the start, it soon went from a daily to a weekly schedule. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the paper’s reforming views became common currency, it changed its name to The American Guardian and gained a national circulation from 1931 to 1942. Ameringer’s lively columns, under the pen name of “Adam Coaldigger” (a damn coaldigger), supported industrial unionism and attacked the pretensions of big corporations. Written with considerable homely wit and sarcasm, the columns helped readers to examine societal relationships of the time and to explore alternatives to a private enterprise economy. Sandburg, among others, called him the “Mark Twain of Labor.” Ameringer died in Oklahoma City at seventy-three, still professing his faith in “a better tomorrow, always the better tomorrow in spite of night and death.”

One of the inheritors of the Populist tradition, Ameringer used his pen to express confidence in the democratic thrust of American life. He put his trust in the common sense of the awakened common people. He devoted most of his life to agitation for a cooperative society, for union rights, and against the Ku Klux Klan—a formidable force in Oklahoma. He never despaired of “rearing the kingdom of peace, plenty and security promised by both faith and science.”

Biographical sources include If You Don’t Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer (1940), anecdotal and entertaining but vague about names, places, and dates. His Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam: A Little History for Big Children (1909) went through many printings and updates to 1938. The American Labor Who’s Who (1925) is helpful for some dates and facts. See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973). An obituary tribute to Ameringer by M. Coleman was published in The Nation, November 27, 1943. The New York Times, November 7, 1943, contains an obituary.