Oscar Ameringer Visits Oklahoma, 1907

 

NY: Henry Holt, 1940; Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983,

Oscar Ameringer was a German-born socialist organizer and editor of radical labor newspapers. Trained as a cabinet maker and a classical musician, Ameringer came to the United States in 1885 at the age of fifteen. In his mature years, the wit of his writing and speaking made him known as the Mark Twain of American socialism. His autobiography lives up to that epithet.

In the spring of 1907, Ameringer started his first tour of Oklahoma, moving from one socialist encampment to another and relying on the hospitality of local farmers. His initial speaking engagement was in Harrah (about twenty-five miles east of Oklahoma City), "a hamlet of some two hundred souls . . . This indescribable aggregation of moisture steam, dirt, rags, unshaven men, slatternly women and fretting children were farmers . . . . I had come upon another America!”:

[These people] were worse fed, worse clothed, worse housed, more illiterate than the Chicago packing house whops and bohunks Upton Sinclair described in his The Jungle, and whom I had seen with my own eyes while doing my bit in one of their strikes. The Oklahoma farmers' living standard was so far below that of the sweatshop workers of the new York east side before the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and International Ladies' Garment Workers Unions had mopped up that human cesspool, that comparisons could not be thought of. (232-33) 

We  can only be grateful for this kind of description, unmatched for realistic detail in the journalism of the period. To find its equivalent, the reader would have to read James Agee and Walker Evans’ great Depression era report on sharecroppers in Alabama in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).

Shocked by the depth of poverty he encountered, Ameringer asked himself who these people were. Not immigrants, he said: 

They were Scotch, Irish, Scotch-Irish and English with only a few exceptions. They were more American than any present-day New England town.They were Washington’s ragged, starving, shivering army at Valley Forge, pushed ever westward by beneficiaries of the Revolution.” Pushed out of Tidewater Virginia, out of the Piedmont and the valleys of the central Atlantic states, into the hills and mountains of the South Central states, “they had followed on the heels of the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, like the stragglers of routed armies. Always hoping that somewhere in their America there would be a piece of dirt for them.

 The statement is too broad to be good history but perhaps it may stand as poetry.

By the third day, the depth of poverty he sees has acquired greater detail: 

I found toothless old women with sucking infants on their withered breasts. I found a hospital old hostess, around thirty or less, her hands covered with rags and eczema, offering me a biscuit with those hands, apologizing that the biscuits were not as good as she used to make because with the sore hand she no longer could knead the dough as it ought to be. I saw youngsters emaciated by hookworms, malnutrition, and pellagra, who had lost their second teeth before they were twenty years old. I saw tottering old male wrecks with the infants of their fourteen-year-old wives on their laps. I saw a white man begging a Choctaw squaw man who owned the only remaining spring in that neighborhood to let him have credit for a few buckets of water for his thirsty family. I saw humanity as its lowest possible level of degradation and decay. I saw smug, well dressed, overly well fed hypocrites march to church on Sabbath day, Bibles under their arms, praying for God's kingdom on earth while fattening like latter-day cannibals on the share croppers. I saw wind-jamming, hot-air-spouting politicians geysering Jeffersonian latitudes about equal rights to all and special privileges to none  . . .without even knowing, much less caring, that they were addressing as wretched a set of abject slaves as ever walked the face of the earth, anywhere or at any time. (232)

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, has shocked tender-skinned sisters and sensitive brethren who wouldn't lift a finger to wipe the foul blot off the face of America. They have called the book vile, vulgar, and indecent. . . . it is as vile, vulgar and indecent as the condition of the people whom Steinbeck saw and I saw years before him. (233)

They were more American than the population of any present-day New England town. They were Washington's ragged, starving, shivering army at Valley Forge, pushed ever westward by beneficiaries of the Revolution. Pushed out of Tidewater Virginia, and out of the fertile Piedmont, and the river valleys of the Central Atlantic states, into the hills and mountains of the South Central states. They had followed on the heels of the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, like the stragglers of routed armies. Always hoping that somewhere in their America there would be a piece of dirt for them. (234)

For background on the sights that greeted Ameringer in 1907, we can turn to James R. Green’s introduction to the Oklahoma University Press 1983 edition of If You Don’t Weaken: 

Oklahoma Territory sprouted a rich growth of protest movements: conservative and evangelical, liberal and radical, prohibitionist and suffragist, populist and socialist, isolationist and pacifist. When Oklahoma adopted its first constitution in 1907--the most radical organic law in the United States--black nationalists, Indian insurgents, and diehard Populists could still be found in the hills of the old Indian nations. It was easy to arouse these people to protest, and it took decades to quiet them. 

This was the exciting scene Oscar Ameringer discovered in 1907. He did spend a few years in the more familiar cultural milieu of Milwaukee, among fellow immigrant Socialists from Germany who took over the city in 1910. But Ameringer returned to Oklahoma and stayed there, never weakening, until he died in 1943. For three decades he labored in Oklahoma City as an agitator, organizer, lecturer, journalist, publisher, and humorist. His autobiography provides a special entree into Oklahoma’s insurgent past and offers a sympathetic look at radicals and reformers who flourished on the state’s democratic frontier. His story should have special meaning to Oklahomans and Southwesterners, because it uncovers a forgotten and often suppressed chapter of their past.

Green comments that the autobiography was more widely read outside Oklahoma than within, a fact which lamentably remains true down to the present day:

The book will also have a wider appeal. Indeed, as the Daily Oklahoman pointed out, readers outside of Oklahoma greeted If You Don’t Weaken with far more enthusiasm than resident writers and critics. Reviewers in national publications praised its literary qualities and its author’s ability to recount a “rare life.” The New York Times Book Review devoted its front page to If You Don’t Weaken, and so did the Saturday Review of Literature. Clifton Fadiman wrote a glowing review in the New Yorker, and historian Charles A. Beard called the book “The epic of an American radical wandering with laughter and tears through a long stretch of troubled history.” Some reviewers ranked the autobiography with such classics as The Education of Henry Adams and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. . . .

The Midwesterners relished Ameringer’s lively sense of humor. Carl Sandburg commented in his Foreword that the book established the author’s “supreme position in the American labor movement as a man of laughter, wit, satire.” He ranked Ameringer with Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Mark Twain. Ameringer even had qualities lacking in Oklahoma’s most famous wit, Will Rogers. Will was shrewd, according to Sandburg, but he stopped short of really ripping the cover off of things the way Oscar did.

For more about Ameringer and his wife Frieda, like himself a journalist and activist in Oklahoma City, see Wikipedia (Frieda’s article is separate from Oscar’s). On the Ameringers, also see the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma history and Culture (online). James R. Green is the author of Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest 1895-1943 (1978), a brilliant book I have kept near my desk for twenty years while engaged in writing a series of books and articles about early-day Oklahoma .