AS THE CROW FLIES
Meyer, Ernest L.
As the Crow Flies By ERNEST L. MEYER TAKE a slab of Mark Twain, a slice of Bill Nye: add a dash of Eugene V. Debs and a seasoning of Sousa. Mix well, and you get some approximation of the makeup...
...bor organizer, and collector of anecdotes more lush than any that have come this way since the funny-bone of America was tweaked by Twain...
...Not that Ameringer is innocent of war and the meanings of war...
...He rang for his secretary...
...He often backed candidates for office, and sometimes was betrayed...
...he writes In his book, "is like feeding melting butter on the end of a hot awl to an Infuriated wildcat...
...He often ran for office, and was defeated...
...whose lively autobiography, "If You Don't Weaken," has just been published...
...Henry Holt, $2.75...
...In this season of war when most of the energy and anxiety of our country is centered in looking to events abroad, it is especially needful for a balanced diet to read this engrossing narrative...
...Go and find out,' he commanded, 'who this—Browning is, and give him some sort of a job that will close his mouth.' " * * * Somehow and quite incredily Ameringer climbed out of each disaster with fresh resolves, new vigor, new dreams, an American searching for some better American way...
...vagabond, publisher, la...
...But ever since his adulthood Ameringer kept his eyes on what he believed the main objective: to help build in America, his adopted land, a political and industrial democracy that works and that assures a minimum of security and some measure of fugitive happiness...
...A whole generation before "Grapes of Wrath" stirred the conscience of the country with its tale of the plight of sharecroppers and migratory workers, Ameringer was down in Oklahoma and Indian Territory studying the future refugees from the dustbowl...
...He organized, started labor papers, and in going broke and starting all over again displayed an amazing versatility that has endured in him to this day...
...Walton, "friend of the people," was elected, moved into a mansion, rode in a limousine, hobnobbed with the Klansmen he had once attacked...
...They roared again in 1914, and they are roaring now...
...Mix well, and you get some approximation of the makeup of Oscar Ameringer...
...He fought the same, lynching spirit when he was associated with Victor Berger on the Milwaukee Leader in 1917-18 and the government cracked down on dissente.-.s against the crusade, and lugged them all, including Ameringer, to the hoosegow on fantastic charges...
...Ameringer, at 70, Is editor of a national weekly, the American Guardian...
...War guns boomed on the very day of his birth in 1870 in the valley of the Danube...
...He and his movement, the Farmer-Labor Reconstruction league, backed Jack Walton for governor of Oklahoma...
...Pursuit of this ideal carried Ameringer down strange and dangerous and sometimes pioneer paths...
...Running a labor paper...
...Heartbroken, Ameringer ran on the front page of his labor newspaper a quotation from Robert Browning's "The Lost Leader": the famous lines: "Just for a handful of silver ne left us . . ." Ameringer adds: "Walton was in the governor's mansion when a copy of our paper was left on his desk...
...It ls fitting that his autobiography is honored with a foreword by another American who in other fields has followed the same quest and grown distinguished: Carl Sandburg...
...He lived with the cropper, survived their bedbugs and mosquitoes and malaria and sowbelly and pone...
...published in Oklahoma: In his lifetime he has crowded the careers of ¦musician, portrait paint-] er, barkeeper, insurance) agent, writer, reformer...
...He fought the Ku Klux Klan...
Vol. 10 • June 1940 • No. 22
