Oscar Ameringer

Oscar Ameringer

Oscar Ameringer (aka Oskar Ameringer , born August 4, 1870 in Achstetten , † November 5, 1943 in Oklahoma City ) was a German-American carpenter , musician , editor and politician .

Life

Oscar Ameringer was the son of a carpenter. After attending school, he completed an apprenticeship in his father's workshop and emigrated to the USA in 1886 . There he married first Lulu Wood in 1903, with whom he had three children, and the second marriage to Freda Hogan, the daughter of a Social Democrat from Arkansas .

Ameringer first lived in Cincinnati ( Ohio ) and worked as a carpenter. He was involved in the Knights of Labor union and then spent several years as a musician in the USA. From 1890 to 1895 he returned to Munich to study art. In 1896 he was back in the United States and initially continued to work as a musician. Ameringer became a member of the American Federation of Musicians and founded several newspapers that campaigned for the goals of the unions. He was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Wisconsin .

In 1912 Ameringer was a candidate for the governor of Wisconsin and in 1918 a candidate for the United States Congress . During the 1920s he was the editor of Illinois Miner , a union newspaper. He reorganized the United Mine Workers Union and, with the works he edited, became the most influential socialist publicist in the United States, about whom numerous biographies were written.

Works

• If You Don't Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ISBN 0-8061-1861-X )

Web links

• English-language biography with photo (accessed January 9, 2012)
• Literature by and about Oscar Ameringer in the catalog of the German National Library