Description: If You Don't Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer By Oscar Ameringer(Foreword by Carl Sandburg)Published by Henry Holt, 1940. First Edition, May 1940. Very good hardcover, in good dustjacket. Tight binding, solid spine, clean unmarked text, edge-wear and small tears to dj have been repaired with archival tape. The autobiography of a major American labor leader. Index, 476 pages.Born in Germany in 1870, Oscar Ameringer was a 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.One doesn't expect style from the autobiography of socialist, but this book has plenty of it. 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. What he found, he said, was “another America.” Around Harrah (about twenty-five miles east of Oklahoma City), he reported:“I found toothless old women with sucking infants on their withered breasts. I found a hospitable 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 platitudes 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. . . .[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.”We can only be grateful for this kind of description, unmatched for realistic detail in the journalism of the period.Loc: GL1-3StoreAdd to FavoritesFeedback1940 Socialism Oklahoma Farming Satirist Radical Politics First Edition Equality If You Don't Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer By Oscar Ameringer(Foreword by Carl Sandburg)Published by Henry Holt, 1940. First Edition, May 1940. Very good hardcover, in good dustjacket. Tight binding, solid spine, clean unmarked text, edge-wear and small tears to dj have been repaired with archival tape. The autobiography of a major American labor leader. Index, 476 pages.Born in Germany in 1870, Oscar Ameringer was a 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.One doesn't expect style from the autobiography of socialist, but this book has plenty of it. 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. What he found, he said, was “another America.” Around Harrah (about twenty-five miles east of Oklahoma City), he reported:“I found toothless old women with sucking infants on their withered breasts. I found a hospitable 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 platitudes 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. . . .[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.”We can only be grateful for this kind of description, unmatched for realistic detail in the journalism of the period.Loc: GL1-3
Price: 51.5 USD
Location: Tonawanda, New York
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Return shipping will be paid by: Seller
All returns accepted: Returns Accepted
Item must be returned within: 30 Days
Refund will be given as: Money Back
Features: Dust Jacket
Format: Hardcover
Personalize: No
Number of Pages: 476
Topic: Modern History, Politics, Socialism, Farming, Labor, Biography
Book Series: None
Vintage: Yes
Era: 1940s
Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
Ex Libris: No
Edition: First Edition
Language: English
Publication Year: 1940
Book Title: If You Don't Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer
Intended Audience: Adults, Young Adults
Author: Oscar Ameringer
Original Language: English
Signed By: N/A
Narrative Type: Nonfiction
Publisher: Henry Holt
Inscribed: No
Signed: No
Genre: Business, Economics & Industry, Economics, Farming, History, Management, Personal & Professional Development, Politics & Society, Sociology, Nonfiction, Biography, Socialism
Personalized: No
Type: Hardcover
