Oswald Garrison Villard

• Oswald Garrison Villard
• Born: March 13, 1872
• Died: October 1, 1949

Social critic, antiwar spokesman, feminist, editor, was the son of entrepreneur Henry Villard and Helen Frances (Garrison) Villard, daughter of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. His parents were staying temporarily in Wiesbaden, Germany, when Oswald—the third of four children and the second of three sons—was born. Henry Villard (formerly Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard) adopted this name when he came to the United States in 1853. Family wealth was to confer many opportunities upon Oswald Villard; his upbringing also seems to have encouraged later dedication to freedom and resistance to chauvinism.

The Villards lived in Boston and then in New York City, while maintaining a summer home in Dobbs Ferry, New York, thereby allowing young Villard the pleasures of both urban and rural life. He was not a bookworm at either James Herbert Morse’s private school or Harvard College (from which he graduated in 1893); but after a postgraduate tour of Europe with his father, Oswald Villard returned to Harvard as an assistant to the respected historian, Albert Bushnell Hart. He enjoyed this work, which resulted in an M. A., but he was ultimately attracted to the more active profession of journalism. His father owned The New York Evening Post and its weekly literary supplement, The Nation. An apprenticeship in 1896-97 on The Philadelphia Press, making him critical of newspaper practices, prepared him to join the Post in 1897 (following his father’s advice), while Edwin L. Godkin was editor-in-chief. The latter paper’s opposition to the war with Spain in 1898 tutored the young journalist in nonconformism.

On February 18, 1903, Villard married Julia Breckinridge Sandford from Covington, Kentucky; they had a daughter (Dorothea Marshall) as well as two sons (Oswald Garrison, Jr., and Henry Hilgard). In 1909 Villard helped convene a national interracial conference to observe the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth; at the time he was also interviewing survivors of the antebellum period for his book John Brown: Fifty Years After (1910). From the conference emerged the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), of which—with W.E.B. Du Bois and others—Villard was a major organizer. He urged the NAACP to be “aggressive” as a “watchdog of Negro liberties” and go beyond the tendency of such previous spokesmen as Booker T. Washington, who accommodated themselves, he felt, to white attitudes.

Villard was committed to equal rights for ethical reasons. While a Harvard student he had spoken out for woman suffrage, and in 1911 he was to endure hostile taunts and rotten eggs as one of the few men to march down New York City’s Fifth Avenue in a parade for women’s rights. But in an overall sense he believed diversity to be important, especially ethnic diversity, for the fulfillment of democracy and the flowering of intellectual life—an opinion later expressed in his autobiography: “I could not begin to measure the debt that this country owes to Jews and other minorities for idealism and liberalism and other values.” Villard saw the liberty of diverse groups as cementing a coherent political strategy, including the fight for social and economic reform. In perceiving this liberal scheme as instrumental to a basic American purpose, Villard was joined by such social critics as Randolph S. Bourne, who called for a “Transnational America.”

Villard found his beliefs severely tested by President Woodrow Wilson. In addition, during 1913-21 (the year’s of Wilson’s administration), Villard’s sense of the connections among varied reform movements—for black rights, women’s rights, civil liberties, and peace—was validated. Wilson’s early interest in social reform suggested that Villard, as chairman of the NAACP, might gain presidential support for a scientific study of blacks and for a National Race Commission, headed by Jane Addams. Proposed by the NAACP, this study would examine education, economics, health, and other conditions of black life. Wilson, an idealist with a conservative southern background, wavered and held out some hope in an interview with Villard on May 14, 1913. But the prospect of alienating southern senators and losing southern support prevented him from accepting Villard’s argument that black destitution was intolerable for the white South.

To garner public support for the NAACP plan, Villard spoke before cheering church audiences in Baltimore, Washington, Boston, and other cities. Charging that capitulation to racism and sexual discrimination marred Wilsonian democracy, he opened hostilities with the administration. In 1915, after the outbreak of the European war, Villard became the Post’s Washington correspondent. Eager to avoid American involvement, he suggested to Joseph P. Tumulty, the Wilson aide whom he knew, the phrase that America was “too proud to fight.” Wilson reiterated these very words publicly but without Villard’s justification that international conflicts of interest could be negotiated without resort to the slaughter of war.

As reporter and editor Villard attacked the war and, suspicious of Wilson, supported Republican Charles Evans Hughes for president in 1916. He saw Wilson’s 1913-16 intervention in Mexico as murderous and the president’s apparent proclivity toward entering the World War as connected to lapses in social reform legislation. One journalist wrote jestingly that Wilson was preparing a detention camp for Villard alone; the putative victim replied that the president, moving toward war, was now a hero to monied interests. Villard, sympathetic to the German people, not to their war, had written Germany Embattled (1915) on life under wartime conditions. When the United States entered the conflict in 1917, he commented on American life by remarking that deprived blacks, as victims of economic and legal discrimination, should not have to fight for a system that was—and here Villard quoted abolitionist Wendell Phillips—”a magnificent conspiracy against justice.”

During the war Villard protested violations of civil liberties including the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs and of conscientious objectors. Like other opponents of the war, he was attacked as pro-German. After the war he reported on the Paris Peace Conference, attacking the Treaty of Versailles as a “covenant with death” that was laying the basis for another major war. At home he assailed the Palmer raids—the arrests of aliens and radicals made in 1919-20 by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer—and other abuses of individual freedom. He also called for Americans to sympathize with the Russian Revolution (which he later denounced as the totalitarian nature of the government it created evolved).

His wartime role cost Villard The New York Evening Post, which had lost circulation and money. He sold it to Thomas W. Lamont in 1918; but he kept The Nation, a medium for his own opinions, which rose in circulation from 7,000 to almost 40,000 in the 1920s-30s and became a leading liberal journal. Now less in the public marketplace, Villard still had to defend The Nation against federal suppression in 1918 and to protest his own exclusion as a speaker in public halls. In 1921 he required police protection from angry crowds when he spoke in Cincinnati.

The 1920s both calmed the public and presented Villard with avowedly conservative administrations to criticize. He attacked the corruption exposed in the Teapot Dome scandal, Tammany Hall, trusts, tariffs, legislation to benefit corporations, and blacklisting by the Daughters of the American Revolution. When Villard himself was blacklisted, he organized a “blacklist party” on May 9, 1929, with 1,000 participants. He advocated regulation of the stock market and corporate activities, birth control, free-trade unionism, and prison improvements—a full spectrum of liberal reform. He welcomed the independent Progressive presidential candidacy of Senator Robert M. La Follette from Wisconsin in 1924, briefly considering running as a Progressive senatorial candidate himself. But he found the La Follette campaign old-fashioned in its attempt to recapture the era of small business enterprise without stressing its planks of governmental appropriation of railroads and electric power. After the election, however, Villard persisted in attempts to keep the Progressive party alive.

The accession to power of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the advent of the New Deal seemed to promise greater hope to liberals than previous administrations. Villard saw much of the welfare legislation of the 1930s as positive. But like Norman M. Thomas, among other progressives and intellectuals, he had reservations that went beyond the uncritical shibboleths of liberal supporters. There were corporate aspects of the New Deal that seemed to Villard to have authoritarian implications, containing the seeds of the Italian fascist, corporate state. Concerned about the repression of human rights in Europe, he warned about the dangers of German militarism and Nazism, while joining John Dewey in condemnation of the Moscow purge trials in 1936 and the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.

The war issue stirred Villard again as conflict drew closer in Europe and American intervention appeared likely. He supported the investigation of Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota into armament manufacture and its influence upon public policy. He argued that the dangers posed by Hitler had been created by “the wicked Treaty of Versailles,” as was “the economic crisis in which the world floundered.” He opposed intervention vigorously. And he dared again to write sympathetically of the German people, though he attacked their Nazi leaders. The German Phoenix (1933) deals with the Weimar Republic, and—based upon a visit—Within Germany (1940) exposes the dictatorship.

As war neared even progressives like Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska began to support the interventionist President Roosevelt. (In his 1928 Prophets True and False, Villard had lauded Norris for his attentiveness to principle.) Now Villard supported Republican Wendell Willkie for president in 1940, reluctantly. He had yielded his ownership and editorial control of The Nation in 1932 to write a weekly column “Issues and Men.” But on June 31, 1940, he yielded this too, because of his differences with The Nation’s editors over defense issues. He began to write for The Progressive and The Christian Century. Somewhat embittered, he cooperated in 1941 with the America First Committee in its antiwar activities, although this committee contained many rightists who strongly disagreed with Villard’s reform views. Villard inveighed against the intellectuals generally for lending support to war and attacked the military establishment, which he had discussed in Our Military Chaos (1939). But, increasingly isolated, he turned back to editing, this time Lincoln on the Eve of ‘61 (1941), working with his son Henry. He had often spoken of the need for passion. He still had that passion, but few joined him in his indignation against the war. Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, ended the debate.

Villard enjoyed a full personal life outside politics. He sailed on his yacht, owned the Nautical Gazette from 1918 to 1935, and relished the peaceful security of his country home near Watertown, Connecticut, where he wrote his last book, Free Trade—Free World (1947). After a heart attack in 1944, he suffered a stroke in New York during 1949 and died two days later. He was praised as a rigorous expert in his profession and for his ethical commitment.

Villard sought to connect the various threads of reform, to pursue liberalism with moral fervor and vigor. He accomplished much; but during the 1930s, and with the approach of World War II, the previous concerns of reform seemed to split apart. As he wrote in 1941, he felt—though he could not measure fully—”the dissolving throes of a social order he loved.”

Villard’s voluminous papers and correspondence can be found in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. His autobiography, Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor (1939), narrates the vicissitudes of his life and public career with vigor and a generous as well as acerbic temper regarding the people and causes he knew. His writings appeared in The New York Evening Post and The Nation. M. Wreszin, Oswald Garrison Villard: Pacifist at War (1965) is the significant modern biography. Other sources include D. J. Humes, Oswald Garrison Villard: Liberal of the 1920s (1960); A. Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (1922); F. L. Broderick, W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis (1959); M. Lerner, “Liberalism of Oswald Garrison Villard,” in Ideas Are Weapons (1939); and The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1974). See also newspaper accounts at the time of his seventieth birthday and his death, particularly in The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune, October 2, 1949.