Oscar ameringer biography

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He began writing Socialist pamphlets; one of the most popular was The Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam: A History for Big Children (1912). If You Don't Weaken. 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 his tribute, President Johnson said that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. 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".

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.

Back home, he established the Oklahoma Leader in 1914.

His readable autobiography, If You Don't Weaken (1940), brought him a new audience. Ameringer waged a high-profile campaign in the Leader against the Ku Klux Klan, which was highly influential in Oklahoma during the early 1920s. He joined the Socialist Party shortly after it was formed in 1901 and became editor of the Labor World, financed by the Brewery Workers Union.

Meanwhile, Sandburg set out to become an authority on Abraham Lincoln (see Vol. 3). But it is a niche that he has made uniquely his own." Sandburg was the labor laureate of the United States. The repression it precipitated, along with a decline in farm tenancy, caused the swift collapse of the Oklahoma Socialist Party.

Returning to Oklahoma City after the war, Ameringer published a radical newspaper, the Oklahoma Leader, which, as the American Guardian from 1931 to 1941, developed a national circulation.

He was remembered as the "Mark Twain of Labor" and the "Workers' Will Rogers.

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. At age 13 he left school to roam the Midwest; he remained on the road for six years, working as a day laborer.

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. He reported on the general strike that tied up the port of New Orleans in 1907. In 1960 he received a citation from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a great living American for the "significant and lasting contribution which he has made to American literature."