A Remembrance of Oscar Geiger

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, July-August, 1934. Publised the original title: "A Great Soul Passes: Remembering Oscar Geiger"]

It will be sad news to hundreds of his friends who do not yet know of it to learn of the death of Oscar H. Geiger on Friday morning, June 29, of a sudden heart attack.

He died at his home which was also the home of the School that with indefatigable labor he had built to its present proportions, and to the greater success of which he was looking with that hopeful vision that was part of his nature. It was an augury of the future that the student body numbering some eighty pupils, young men and women who have learned of their teacher the vision and practicability of a new and just social order, declared to the very last among them, "The School must go on." The debt they owe to the teacher must be repaid. The truth which they have learned must be passed on to others.

His death was a great shock to those who knew and loved him. The noble qualities of his mind, the supreme devotion, and the sacrifice he had made, were known to many who were close to him. He had done this, for he felt, as many of us did, that he was on the eve of a great achievement. He had, what so many of us seem to lack, imagination. His vision pictured the School growing year by year, until it should exercise a compelling influence upon public thought, on the leaders of opinion.

And this was, we are convinced, no idle hope. It is not yet too late for those who remained cold to the call of Oscar Geiger and the School to step into the breach and save the greatest adventure ever begun in the interest of the movement. God knows that he asked nothing for himself. As pure in heart as in mind, as beautiful and serene a character as ever walked the earth, he gave his all, and by his intensive labors hastened his end. "Those who will live for it if need be die for it." "That is the power of truth." And Oscar Geiger did not shrink from the possibility. "The School must go on," he said to us when urged to relax and seek recreation.

It is not yet too late, we repeat, to make the vision of our friend a reality. Not yet too late, for he has left a group of disciples touched with fire that was all his own who comprise the nucleus of a new army that is forming. And they stand ready to "carry on. " And those who are known to cherish a belief in the cause, who for any motive have held back, have still their opportunity.

To Oscar it will not matter now. He is with the saints. And though something of the sweetness and light has departed, though the world is temporarily poorer for his going, he has left in his life and work much that is destined to bear fruit. Not all of his dream has been realized but he had passed the threshold. Something of the inner beauty of that palace of light and truth, the glorious structure of a new civilization for a freer race of men and women, he had seen and made others see. Perhaps that was achievement enough for any man.

We have said that to him it does not matter now who helps or who, standing idly by, refuses help. But perhaps it does. Oscar Geiger believed he said he knew that the individual consciousness does not die with death. This was a part of his faith on which to all save a few he was nobly reticent. And another faith he held, equally, we fear, as remote from popular apprehension, that the truth for which he gave his life is part of a natural law as irrevocable as that the sun will rise tomorrow. Civilization may go down, but the simple truth of Henry George; which is the truth of God, is implicit in creation.

Oscar Geiger has done his work nobly has he done it He will rest now, but perhaps he will rest better if those to whom he meant so much, not only the students he guided with gentle ministration out of the dark into the light, but we who are older in the movement, give to this truth a renewed devotion. That is all we can do for hin now pure soul, unsullied spirit!

HIS LIFE AND WORK

Oscar Geiger was sixty-one years old but seemed much younger, for he had kept his spirit young. He had studied for a rabbi and was for a time superintendent of the Deborah Orphans Home here. Later he declined a call as pastor of a Unitarian Church in Boston. Then he drifted into the theatrical business and became bookkeeper for Koster and Beal and other managers.

Later he entered the fur business and founded a house of his own which rapidly attained a standing in the retail trade. He became an authority on the subject of fur and later served as buyer for a number of houses ... in Brooklyn, and Arnold Constable in Manhattan. No one in the fur trade was more highly respected for his knowledge and probity. On the very event of assurring the work of the Henry George School he had received a flattering offer from an established fur house which entailed an assured competence and a share in the busines This was declined.

His work in the Henry George movement is known to readers of LAND AND FREEDOM. He was a member of the Committee of Forty-Eight which was swallowed up by the Farmer-Labor Party, and he was the keynote speaker at the Chicago convention, which fizzled out. But I recall how in the finest speech ever made by Mr. Geiger held that convention for a brief space in the hollow of his hand. Almost that great convention was on the point of being swayed by this speech to declare for the only remedy that would have held them together, and perhaps the course of history would have been changed. Certainly the Committee of Forty-Eight would have been saved. But the politicians were too strong, despite the well intentioned purposes of the leaders who did not know what they wanted. But we were all proud of Oscar Geiger for that magnificent appeal which had almost won out.

Mr. Geiger is survived by his wife, to whom the cause her husband served owes almost as much, and his son, Prof. George Raymond Geiger, author of The Philosophy of Henry George.

THE SERVICES AT THE SCHOOL

The funeral services in the School, 211 West 79th street, on Sunday afternoon of July 1, at which perhaps a hundred and fifty or more were gathered, were conducted with dignity by Hon. Lawson Purdy, who read the Lord's Prayer and the great chapter from Progress and Poverty, the Problem of the Individual Life. He closed with Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar," and paid a fine personal tribute to the great dead.

There was hardly a dry eye in the crowded rooms of the School, but it was apparent that those present mingled with their sorrow an intense determination that the cause for which our friend gave his life must not be allowed to die. His words, "The School must go on," seemed ringing in their ears even as his body was lowered in the earth.