Oscar Ameringer and the Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

We seem to be going through a phase of extreme cynicism about politics and politicians, so I’d like to introduce a delightful author and, by all accounts, a very nice man.

Oscar Ameringer was born in a small town in Bavaria in 1870, and brought up in a conservative Lutheran household.  He had a talent for painting and music.  His father was a master craftsman, and young Oscar learned furniture making from him, but in the 1880s, industrial production was taking over traditional craftsmanship.

One after the other, guild masters gave up the ghost [and] were sucked into factories… I never minded learning the furniture trade… There is something fascinatingly creative about helping a dead piece of wood evolve into a thing of beauty and service to man.  But young as I was, I foresaw the end of the golden age of handicraft.

Oscar left for America 8 months before his 16^th birthday – to seek his fortune, but also to avoid call up for military service.

He arrived at a time of bitter industrial disputes, in which recent immigrants were often used as strikebreakers.  He joined the Cincinnati branch of the Knights of Labor – though he had to lie about his age – and marched in their May Day parade.  Soon he had a reputation as an agitator and found it hard to get work, but meanwhile he discovered the local library, where he taught himself English, and developed a deep love of history.  He made a reasonable living for a few years painting portraits and selling humorous pieces to the local papers – and, if his memoirs are anything to go by, chatting up the ladies.

When his mother begged him to come home to see his family once again, he arrived home with 5000 marks in his pockets, a prosperous prodigal son.  For the next 5 years, he studied art at the Royal Academy in Munich, where the leading industries were ‘beer, art and education, and the chief of these was beer.’  But along with the beer, he also absorbed the politics of late 19^th century Germany: ‘my mind had been opened.  The removal of the junk pounded into my young head by school and church had provided the blessed vacuum in which any new idea found welcome and lodging’.  A friend from the industrial city of Dresden introduced him to the ideas of the Social-Democratic movement.

Ameringer returned to America in 1897, bringing his socialist, pacifist ideas with him.  He never made it as a portrait painter, but he became an advocate for socialist causes, a labour organizer, and a journalist.  He settled in Oklahoma and edited various papers: The Oklahoma Leader, The American Guardian, Labor World.  He waged war against the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma, and stood up for the rights of sharecroppers.

In 1932, he wrote a ‘Testimony on Unemployment’ which is scarily resonant today, with its talk of people threatened by foreclosure, unable to meet mortgage payments, and resentful of Washington.

They say the only thing you do in Washington is to take money from the pockets of the poor and put it into the pockets of the rich.  They say that this Government is a conspiracy against the common people to enrich the already rich.

But above all, Ameringer was funny.  Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam: A little History for Big Children (1909) sold over half a million copies, and his autobiography, If You Don’t Weaken (1940) is a joy to read.  It’s available on Google Books here.  His views on politics are thoughtful, cynical, gentle and astute, and he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

In those Munich years most of us stood politically more or less to the left of center.  That is, we were forward-looking.  A rather amusing term, “forward-looking,” because virtually all the forward-lookers I have met since then have been so busy looking backward that they couldn’t even see what was taking place under their very noses.  Anarchists look back to Bakunin and Kropotkin.  Socialists look back to Marx and Engels.  Single-taxers look back to Henry George.  Progressive Republicans look back to Abraham Lincoln, Progressive Democrats to Jefferson and Jackson.  Progressive lawyers quote Blackstone while progressive parsons and rabbis vainly try to forget Moses and Genesis.

Nuff said.

The President and the Barmaid

And I spent my soul in kisses, crushed upon your scarlet mouth,

Oh! My red-lipped, sun-browned sweetheart, dark-eyed daughter of the south.

With all the kissing and cuddling that’s been going on lately between Barack Obama and Julia Gillard, maybe it’s time to quote the words of another American President with a thing for Australian women.

I have heard several times in the last week that until LBJ came to Harold Holt’s funeral in 1967, no American President had visited Australia.  The truth is, Australia is a long way from the rest of the world.  Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said (though I can’t find hard evidence) that he had never visited Australia, because he had never been on the way to Antarctica.  So it is not surprising that world leaders didn’t visit Australia before the era of fast air travel.  Nowadays, of course, they all find an excuse to come, especially during the northern winter.

But in fact, one American President spent a considerable time in Australia and left his mark on it.

Hoover stamp, 1965, from Wikimedia

Herbert Hoover arrived in Kalgoorlie as a young geologist straight out of Stanford University, in 1897.  Hoover worked for a British mining company, Bewick, Moreing & Co, who sent him to the Western Australian goldfields as a manager.  Kalgoorlie was a rough mining town – some would say it still is.  Because of its isolation, miners needed long pockets, so most mining was in the hands of companies with capital, rather than individuals.

One of Hoover’s jobs was to scout out new prospects for his employers.  One likely investment was a small gold mine in the desert begun by 3 Welshmen.  They had acquired a mining licence for the site, but didn’t have enough capital to develop the mine.  He persuaded Bewick, Moreing & Co to buy the mine and put him in charge.  Sons of Gwalia (Latin for Wales) became one of Australia’s most lucrative gold mines.

Sons of Gwalia Mine, Mount Leonora, c. 1921

The 1890s was a depressed decade, and Hoover ran a tough management regime.  He cut wages and increased hours.  He also raised ethnic tensions in the workforce by employing immigrant Italians – ‘the rivalry between them and the [other] workers is no small benefit’, he wrote, because it made united action more difficult.  This was a very American tactic, not often used in Australia.

During his years in Kalgoorlie, Hoover allegedly wrote a poem to a Kalgoorlie barmaid.  The Australian Dictionary of Biography doubts the story, and so does William J. Coughlin (2000).  Such a shame – the poem is quite gloriously awful, but apparently can’t be traced any earlier than 1933.

Hoover worked in Western Australia for 2 years, then returned to America to marry Lou Henry, who also graduated in geology from Stanford, in 1899.  They left the next day for China, where Hoover continued to work for Bewick, Moreing & Co, travelling widely, but based in Tianjin.  He visited the company’s Australian mines again in 1905.

Barack Obama’s visit to Australia, and his speech to the Australian Parliament, were all about America’s attitude to China today.  [see Rory Medcalf, ‘Buildup Down Under’, in Foreign Policy, 17 November 2011]

Obama is one of the first American Presidents with an Asia-Pacific background: he was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia.  But in fact he follows in the footsteps of Herbert Hoover, who went to university in San Francisco, and spent years working in Australia and China.  Hoover and his wife learned Mandarin while living in China, and apparently used it as their private language in the White House, to keep their conversations secret from the servants.

Unfortunately, Hoover’s name is now ineradicably associated with the onset of the 1929 depression.  Let’s hope, for all our sakes, that’s not the case for Barack Obama.  Obama apparently speaks Indonesian, too.  I’m not sure, though, that our very own Daughter of Gwalia speaks Welsh – let alone Mandarin.

Note: I’ve written before about Australia’s relations with China and America – here.

William J. Coughlin, ‘Into the Outback: How the young Herbert Hoover made his name – and fortune – in Australia’, Stanford Magazine, 2000.