IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN—Oscar Ameringer—Holt ($2.75).
The East has no labor newspaper like Oklahoma City's weekly American Guardian, no labor editor like the Guardian's 69-year-old Oscar Ameringer. Now available to all sections, however, is Editor Ameringer's autobiography. Too good a book to be dismissed with the term "Americana," If You Don't Weaken breathes a spirit (grass roots Socialist) that the U. S. would have been poor without.
Oscar Ameringer's life began in a German village on the Danube in August 1870. When he was 15, having had flute playing and insurgence beaten into him, he escaped military service by skipping to the U. S.
Tootling for free lunch and beer in Cincinnati saloons, hotel clerking, bartending, tramping from handout to handout in Ohio, getting his sleep all winter in the Cincinnati Public Library (where he picked up U. S. history), barrel-chested young Ameringer was soon at home in the land of the free. He sold humorous pieces to Judge and Puck, painted portraits of well-to-do Ohio farmers at $20 per, and in 1890 returned in prosperous broadcloth to his native village.
After art study in Munich, he went back to Canton, Ohio, in time to help tootle Townsman William McKinley into the White House and to learn "the rule of never voting for a Presidential candidate who had the slightest chance of election." In 1903 he became editor of his first paper, The Labor World, organ of the Brewery Workers Union. As editor he went to New Orleans for the bitter jurisdictional strike of 1903 that nearly ruined both breweries and workers in that city. His narrative of the strike is a small masterpiece of labor history.
Some of the broad, bellylaugh stories Oscar Ameringer has to tell are doubtless the same stories he told the tenant farmers of Oklahoma when he went among them as a Socialist organizer. Angriest pages of his book are those in which he describes—and explains—the plight of those downtrodden U. S. citizens whom other upstanding U. S. citizens ("the rabble on top") turned into Okies. He moved up to Milwaukee, joined Victor Berger on the famed Leader and fought to keep that paper going (as it did) in spite of wartime persecution by Postmaster Burleson.
Good-humored, large and shrewd, Ameringer's story does not idealize the proletariat, rings in no abstruse Marxian patter, no unbuttoned revolutionary blab. He makes a roaring farce out of the campaign of the poor to elect picturesque Jack Walton to the Governorship of Oklahoma; after election, the man of the people took to plus fours and golf with oil magnates.
"Politics," says Oscar Ameringer, "is 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."