(When the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment stormed Fort...)
When the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment stormed Fort Wagner July 18, 1863, only to be driven back with the loss of its colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, and many of its rank and file, it established for all time the fact that the colored soldier would fight and fight well.
Editor of the "Nation" magazine, Oswald Garrison Villard was one of the foremost American liberals of the 20th century. He was noted for his moralistic, uncompromising commitment to pacifism and minority rights.
Background
Oswald Garrison Villard was born on March 13, 1872, in Wiesbaden, Germany, to Henry and Helen Frances “Fanny” (Garrison) Villard, American citizens on one of their several excursions abroad. Villard was strongly influenced by his parents, adopting their political values and personal styles much as his own. His father’s experience as a battlefield journalist during the Civil War left him a convinced pacifist, and despite his wealth, he developed a hatred for Wall Street. His mother was the daughter of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; she was an uncompromising moralist who supported equality, woman’s suffrage and peace.
Education
Villard was educated at private schools. He then received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard University, in 1893 and 1896 respectively.
After a brief apprenticeship on a Philadelphia paper, in 1897 Villard joined the staff of the New York Evening Post, which his father happened to own. He soon rose to editorial prominence on the paper and, after his father's death, became the owner and publisher.
During his time with the Post Villard carved out an unconventional political position. Along with many others of his class and outlook, he condemned America's imperial ambitions as displayed by the Spanish-American War, but he began to move toward pacifism. He joined his father in supporting the rights of women (his mother was a dedicated leader in this battle) but also championed the rights of African-Americans, Jews, and other minority groups. He departed from traditional laissez-faire thought and defended the right of workers to organize into labor unions and to strike. Villard helped form the Political Equality Association of Cambridge, on behalf of women’s suffrage. In 1902 he addressed the National Suffrage Convention in Washington. Also in 1902 his interest in Negro education led him to attend an annual “Conference on Education in the South”. The trip resulted in Villard’s becoming president of the board of directors of the Manassas Industrial School, which involvement lasted for twenty-two years. In 1909 Villard was asked to help organize a national conference on the “plight of the Negro,” commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. In publicizing the conference, Villard wrote in Fighting Years that if “Mr. Lincoln could revisit this country in the flesh, he would be disheartened and discouraged.” More than one thousand people attended. The outcome was the founding by Villard and four others of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He served as treasurer and chairman of the board for five years, and remained on the board for the rest of his life.
During 1915-1917 years, Villard’s writings on pacifism and non-resistance cost him much prestige. He was increasingly at odds with his pro-Wilson newspaper staff, he was attacked by professional patriots, and he was asked to resign his presidency of the New York Philharmonic Society in 1917. By the end of the year he stopped writing for the Post altogether. In 1918 he separated the Nation from the newspaper, sold the paper, and assumed editorship of the Nation. Villard needed his own vehicle for his opinions.
When Villard joined the Post in 1897, his uncle, Wendell Phillips Garrison, was the current literary editor, and also editor of the Nation, which he had co-founded with Godkin and others. From its beginning in 1865, the Nation's main political thrust was to ensure full civil rights for newly freed slaves; its main professional interest was in the reform of American journalism, away from exaggeration and inaccuracy. By the time Villard came on the scene, the small weekly journal had achieved unique admiration and respect in the worlds of politics and journalism, though for a time after it was merged with the Post it was devoted more to literary matters than to politics.
In 1918, Villard spent 150,000 dollars on changing the journal’s content from literature to politics; he restored news features, expanded foreign coverage, introduced a lengthy bi-weekly international section, and hired new editors and reporters whose views mirrored his own. However, the Nation achieved high marks from liberals nationwide for its coverage of the six-months long Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
Villard covered the conference in person, after surviving a perilous winter-time Atlantic crossing and pulling strings to overcoming official objections to his landing first in England, then in France. In 1918 Villard had publicly supported Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but when he got to Paris in 1919 and discovered that after the first public meeting, the Peace Conference was to be closed to the press—“the President’s first yielding was on his ‘open covenants, openly arrived at’”—he lost hope, as did many other American journalists, Villard recounted in Fighting Years.
Villard decided to go to Munich, despite Wilson’s decree forbidding travel to Germany, and concocted a scheme to legitimately cover the Second Socialist International meeting, being held in Berne, Switzerland. He then violated the decree and crossed into Germany, stuffing his pockets and his trunk with food and other items for his war-bound aunt in Munich—all of which he successfully smuggled across the border. In Munich Villard found anarchy, chaos and starvation.
When he returned to Paris, he learned that his warnings had been widely publicized and were ultimately responsible for the lifting of the blockade. Back home, Villard called the peace conference a “fraud”, the Versailles treaty “a covenant with death,” and the League of Nations “only another Holy Alliance,” according to Achal Mehra in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. In March, 1919, he published an editorial by William MacDonald which attracted international attention. Called “The Madness at Versailles,” the editorial denounced the peace treaty as “undisguised vengeance”; of Woodrow Wilson, it noted that “the one-time idol of democracy stands today discredited and condemned.” The editorial and Villard were denounced by many, but in the end, the Nation contributed greatly to the defeat of the Treaty of Versailles and American involvement in the League of Nations.
After the war Villard campaigned for independence for Ireland and India from the British, and for ending American imperialism in Haiti. He was credited for having helped forge a settlement of the Irish question, and he almost single-handedly forced the withdrawal of United States marines from Haiti, according to McWilliams in One Hundred Years of the “Nation”. He worked for the release of Eugene Debs, imprisoned under the Espionage Act for a speech, and later, in 1920, supported Deb’s candidacy for president on the Socialist ticket. Through Villard, the Nation argued against the violations of civil liberties and civil rights committed by United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. He also fought for the freedom of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian-immigrant anarchists sentenced to death in Massachusetts on the basis of what many felt was dubious evidence.
In the late 1920s Villard (among others) was blacklisted by the Daughters of the American Revolution from speaking at their meetings.
In domestic politics, Villard and the Nation supported the progressive movement-government ownership of the railroads, federal child labor laws, ending life-time terms of federal judges, allowing Congress to override Supreme Court decisions, and the establishment of a new political party.
Also in the 1920s Villard began writing more books. In 1923 he published a series of character sketches of newspapers called Some Newspapers and Newspapermen. In 1928 he wrote portraits of some eighteen public figures, that were published as Prophets True and False.
In 1933, after numerous extended visits to Germany, Villard wrote The German Phoenix, dealing with politics in that country since 1918. In 1939, now sixty-seven years old, he offered a criticism of the American military program titled Our Military Chaos: The Truth about Defense, and he also issued his autobiography, Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor. A year later, Villard produced Within Germany, based on a 1939 visit to both Germany and England. In 1944 he re-visited his old profession with The Disappearing Daily: Chapters in American Newspaper Evolution, and in 1948, though paralyzed by a stroke, he published a lengthy attack on tariff systems called Free Trade, Free World.
By 1932, with the Nation's circulation relatively high and its influence established, Villard retired from actively managing the journal. For the next eight years, he was content to write regular columns. By the time he sold the Nation in 1935, however, Villard’s consistent adherence to his old political positions had put him at odds with the journal’s staff, and in the ensuing years, with many of his old liberal supporters as well.
Villard was best known as a civil rights activist, as well as a founder of the American Anti-Imperialist League, favoring independence for territories taken in the Spanish-American War. He provided a rare direct link between the anti-imperialism of the late 19th century and the conservative Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s.
On February 21, 2009, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Villard's civil rights work.
A sincere pacifist, Villard opposed American participation in World War I. In 1918, with war fever at its height, the pressure on Villard and the Post to form "patriotic" readers and advertisers had become financially unbearable, and he was forced to sell it. When the war ended, he attacked the Treaty of Versailles, claiming that its unjust nature proved his contentions about the unjust nature of the war.
During the 1920s Villard's Nation was one of the few strong voices of liberalism in the United States.
Villard remained a favorite of many liberals into the 1930s, when he supported Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. However, at the end of this decade his pacifism again isolated him. He refused to support rearmament and aid to the Allies during World War II, and in June 1940 the Nation stopped printing his weekly signed articles. He continued to oppose the war after Pearl Harbor and rapidly isolated himself from the mainstream.
Views
Quotations:
"No American journalist had a heavier load to carry than I with my pacifism and my German birth and ancestry."
Membership
Villard was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as a board member and later president of the New York Philharmonic Society. He was also a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, the Third Party Movement, the Political Equality Association of Cambridge, the Society for Ethical Culture, the New York Peace Society, the American Friends of Russian Freedom and the America First Committee.
Connections
Villard was married to Julie Sanford, a Confederate captain’s daughter from Kentucky. The union produced a daughter Dorothy Villard Hammond and two sons - Henry Hilgard Villard and Oswald Garrison Villard Jr.
Father:
Henry Villard
He was an American journalist and financier who was an early president of the Northern Pacific Railway.
Daughter:
Dorothy Villard Hammond
She was a member of the American University in Cairo.
Son:
Henry Hilgard Villard
He was head of the economics department at the City College of New York and the first male president of Planned Parenthood of New York City.
Son:
Oswald Garrison Villard Jr.
He was a prominent professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University.
Prophets on the Right
Prophets on the Right examines the views of five conservative critics of American foreign policy from the 1930s to the Cold War era.
