If You Don't Weaken

The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer. HENRY HOLT & CO. $2.75.

CARL SANDBURG, in a two-page introduction to this book, bears witness of its author: ’I have seen him . . . taking the platform in a crowded, smoke-filled hall, facing rows of sombre and soberfaced workingmen, talking to them about their troubles, about woe and injustice and inequalities, drawing contrasts, soon bring smiles to the faces and finally roars of laughter. No other orator or platform man in American labor history has had this gift and used it so richly and refreshingly as Ameringer. In his life story he gives his readers from this wellspring of fun and fancy.’ ‘Fun’ is indeed the word. The quasi-official humorist of the labor movement tells the story of the seventy years 1870-1940, and he makes all of them fun for us, as the most woebegone of them seem to have become to the man himself in retrospect. A good half of the seventy have been devoted with energetic sincerity and even passion to that proverbially long-faced business, the cause of union labor, and these years as labor agitator and labor editor he makes the most fun of all — a circumstance that gives his record no mean place among the literary miracles.

As with all the truly great among humorists, Ameringer’s humor (much of it at his own expense) is the overt sign of something less obvious and more important. The fun, the fancy, may be what catches you, but what holds you is simply the size of the man’s heart.

Ameringer, at various intervals since he came to this countrv from a peasant village of the Swabian Oberland as a lad of sixteen, has been in the thick of some stirring and noteworthy affairs, over and above the fantastic personal adventures that he relates so entertainingly. He reports these greater affairs with a balanced candor that inspires complete trust — something that the judicious reader is little accustomed to grant to the partisan historian of labor disputes. One of the pre-war episodes narrated in extenso i ; the great New Orleans brewery strike. One of the war ones is the struggle of Victor Berger’s Milwaukee Leader for survival against the hounding of the United States Post. Office Department.

One of the post-war ones is the so-called Herrin massacre. About each of these, as everywhere, he seems to be telling exactly what he did, saw, and heard, in tacit contempt of the labor-press custom of ‘class-angling’ the news, and letting the chips tall where they fall. His generalized description of the labor press, with side remarks on the almost insurmountable difficulty of getting union workers to read their own organs, is more than a little satirical.

In one particular his book has uncommon and ominous relevance for the time upon which we are entering. The chapters in question are those that chronicle, with the crushing understatement possible only to a good humorist, our war-time treatment of good men and loyal citizens whose convictions were not those of the current majority, though they have become pretty much those of the subsequent majority. Is all that hysteria, like so much other history, on the eve of repeating itself, and without even a state of war to excuse it? If only something could make our hysterics and hotheads quiet down for long enough to glance at, say, Ameringer’s episode of the mob that hanged a civilian and later, ransacking his residence, found the proof that he had been refused for military service on account of physical disabilities!