Oliver Allstorm

File:Oliver Allstrom.jpg

Oliver Allstorm (1878 - 1963)

Oliver (Olivene) Allstrom later Oliver Allstorm (August 7, 1878 - March 1963) was a Swedish American poet and salesman. He was the son of Carl Magnus Allström (1833-1917), but changed his last name to Allstorm.

Oliver Allstorm married Sarah Davis in 1904 who was from Wales. His second wife was Bessie Rice whom he married on October 25, 1912 in Texas. There is no other information on Sarah Davis.

In Texas, Allstorm supported himself as a drummer, which at the time was another name for a traveling salesman.

Oliver Allstorm was originally from Chicago and there retired at 4735 N. Magnolia.

Poet and songwriter

Oliver Allstorm styled himself as "The Kipling of Texas" and became well-known as the Texas poet. Beverage companies such as Coca-Cola and Bone-Dry sponsored Allstorm’s poetry. He published Bone dry Ballads which consisted of poems in support of America’s war efforts in World War I.

He wrote several poems related to race relations; the most noted was the anti-miscegenation poem, "The Saddest Story Ever Told." Others include "Caucasian Courage" and "The Half-Sisters." In "Caucasian Courage" Allstorm retells the story of Mamie Blanha, a model at the Art institute of Chicago who was fired for refusing to pose nude before "a negro member of an art class of white students." "Have the negro leave my presence," was her stifled, low request, "I am faint and all a-tremble--I shall never bear my breast Till his leering eyes have left me--till his smile that seems to gloat, And the seeming of his fingers have been taken from my throat."

During World War II Allstorm took an anti-interventionist positon and praised Charles Lindbergh and his efforts to keep the US out of the European war with the poem "The Lone Eagle's Litany." Lindbergh responded to Allstorm in a letter and said “it exactly mirrored his sentiments about the present situation.”

Alstorm also co-authored the city's official song "Houston Municipal Song".

Allstorm poem

In 1955 Oliver Allstorm wrote a poem concerning the Supreme Court's Brown decision. In his later years Allstorm would regularly write poems that were race-related and have them published in The White Sentinel.

"Nine traitors to the white man's race

Sat in our Court Supreme,

And all agreed that whites and blacks

Must join their mongrel scheme...

These 'nine white men' in Washington

Would mongrelize our land.

They even have the gall to think

We'll fall at their command...

The time has come, sure as the night

Flees from the rising sun;

For white men to protect their own

If need be with a gun.

A hundred million white men cry

That they will not obey

This 'traitor-law' which would destroy

The white man's U.S.A.

Works

• Chords from a Strange Lyre (1902) text
• The Evanstonians
• Leisure Moments of a Traveling Man (1911) text
• Poems (1915)
• What is the Old Flag made of? and other Poems (1917)
• Bone dry Ballads (1918) text
• Poet and Priest: One Hundred Percent Americans and Not a Flag but the Flag, a Story of the Flag Incident at Houston, Texas U.S.A. (1921) The Houston flag incident occurred when a local priest refused to salute an American flag purchased by the Ku Klux Klan.
• The Thinker: Immortality, That Place Called Hades And Other Poems (1926)
• The Kidnaped Evangelist (1927) Story of the "kidnaping" of Aimee Semple McPherson
• Windy City Poems (1931)
• Old Rocky, The World's First Billionaire: Centenary 1839-1939 (1939)

Pamphlets and poems

• Stop Russia Now
• A White Girl Marries A Negro (1953)
• The Mongrel (1953)
• Let Us Isolate America From Air Warfare And Mind Our Own Business [1]

See also

• National Citizens Protective Association

External link

• "Oliver Allstorm" on Swedish Wikipedia