Oswald Garrison Villard was owner and editor of the New York Evening Post and The Nation during the first half of the twentieth century. His career as a pacifist paralleled the buildup of the American military from a minor auxiliary of the state to the “military-industrial complex”¹ that dominates the economy of today.

The arms buildup began in the 1890's when private American enterprises encouraged government policymakers to develop a strong military, using the argument that national security required protection of foreign markets. Until that time, with the exception of the Civil War, the United States Army had never exceeded twenty-five thousand men. The United States was first industrially in 1880 and therefore possessed the economic capacity for such an endeavor. By the close of World War II the United States had the most powerful military in the world, while its forty-three percent share of industrial output was unsurpassed.

Villard fought against military expansion and conscription through writing and editing articles and books and by encouraging organizations such as the American Union Against Militarism. However, the United States economy was fundamentally strengthened by our involvement in the two world wars. No other country sacrificed so little and gained so much from these conflicts.

In his struggles Villard was assisted by a tradition that allowed him to place principle above expediency. His father had emigrated to New York after the 1848 German revolution to avoid facing combat against a Bavarian government set up by his uncle. As a reporter for the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he represented a German-language newspaper and later covered the Civil War for American journals. His favorable reportage brought him to President Lincoln's attention and led to his marriage to the daughter of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. After the war northern big business flourished, and in 1881 Henry Villard acquired control of the Northern Pacific Railroad through the use of British and German capital. Young Oswald's view of his father was rapturous:

It was a precious heritage, indeed, to have a brave and handsome father, noble always in his integrity and his ideals.

… in all those precious years he never heard from his … lips one selfish or self-seeking word, nor any expression or opinion that could be described as else than high-minded and liberal.

He never urged that we should learn to make money; on the contrary he wished us to be professional men.²

In 1910 Villard dedicated a biography of John Brown to his father's “Beloved and High-Minded” memory.³ He also drew inspiration from his maternal grandfather, who had been vehemently opposed to the American war against Mexico that led to the seizure of one third of that country in order to secure slaveholding Texas.

But it was to his suffragist mother that he attributed his heightened sense of vigor when under fire, and he was often under fire after 1910 for his negative views on war as an instrument of national policy.

Always she was in her person a dainty aristocrat, dressing with exquisite taste and never with extravagance—an aristocrat in her fineness but entirely a democrat in her views and in her heart … One could hardly refuse that mother anything! … To modify any position she took for reasons of expediency—that was unthinkable; to shift her ground in order to gain a personal advantage, or to avoid unpleasantness, was as impossible for her as for her father … But her certainty of the correctness of her positions, and her taking it as a matter of course that everyone she met agreed with her, quite often led her into difficulties and into injuring the feelings of others she could have been the last to wish to hurt.

These were the parents who gave me every opportunity in life, every benefit that wealth could bestow, and forged for me the tools that I used in my effort to mold the public opinion of my time.⁴

Villard's preference for a nonbusiness career was supported by his parents, and the difficulties his father encountered with members of his own class were transferred to his son.

Father was never liked by the leaders in Wall Street … He never attended their churches—often very important from the business point of view—or belonged to their pet clubs. They did not like his being a free trader and an independent Democrat, or “Mugwump,” and they held him at least partly responsible for Godkin and The Evening Post's vagaries.⁵

Though Villard emerged from the upper class with all the advantages that came with an 1890's Harvard education, he was not afraid of criticizing his peers whom he felt were responsible for destroying the liberal republican values that made this country admired the world over. His mother, father, grandfather, and uncle were all iconoclasts and exceptions to what they felt was the amorality of their class. They may not have understood the structural imperatives of the system, but they did regard certain moral imperatives as dear. Of his father and grandfather Villard wrote:

Henry Villard and his father-in-law were alike in their fundamental beliefs and ideals, and approached life from the same point of view, although they could hardly have had more dissimilar upbringings … Both men were republicans to their finger tips, could conceive of no other defensible form of government, and passionately believed that it was possible to build the edifice of a perfect State upon American soil. Both held to the same social idealism, were complete liberals, were ardent internationalists in that they abhorred war, were devoted free traders, and believed in the brotherhood of man. Both were steeped in the doctrines of the Manchester school of British liberalism, and both personally knew and admired John Bright and Richard Cobden.⁶

Young Villard believed that opposition to war was a more noble act than being involved in military conflict, a curious inversion until we realize the importance Villard attached to setting a high moral standard for others to follow. So powerful was his need to be true to the principles of his maternal grandfather, so mutually reinforcing were his parents and the general circumstances of his upbringing that Villard could make a convincing case for condemning someone like John Brown for his actions while praising him for his beliefs.

In Virginia, John Brown atoned for Pottawatomie by the nobility of his philosophy and his sublime devotion to principle, even to the gallows [my italics].

It was the weapon of the spirit by which he finally conquered. In its power lies not only the secret of his influence, and his immortality, but the finest ethical teachings of a life which, for all its faults, inculcates many an enduring lesson, and will forever make its appeal to the imagination.

For the Abolitionists, it will be remembered, he had nothing but contempt. Theirs were “but words, words;” yet it was by words, and words, embodying his moral principles, the theological teachings he valued so highly, the doctrines of the Savior, who knew no distinction of race, creed or color and by the beauty of his own peace and spirit in the face of death, that he stirred his Northern countrymen to their depths and won the respect even of the citizens of the South.⁷

Valuing word over deed led Villard to condemn American statesmen for engaging in violence and brutality in the conduct of foreign affairs.

It was not until our conquest of Cuba and the Philippines, with its needless waste of life and, in the archipelago, shocking cruelties, that I arrived at my anti-war position.⁸

He did not consider the military an American institution and felt that our involvement in the Spanish-American War was a betrayal of American principles, rather than a reflection of them.⁹ He was quick to condemn President McKinley for his role in this conflict:

McKinley could have prevented war had he been sincere in his desire to do so … Spain had surrendered on nearly every point and had offered to submit to arbitration those on which she had not yielded … The blood of every American who died in that war and in the subsequent Philippine hostilities rests squarely upon the head of William McKinley.¹⁰

Theodore Roosevelt was excoriated for his “crass brutality and cave-man savagery.”¹¹ Roosevelt, in turn, had once spiced a staid dinner with the remark “I wish that somebody would take Oswald Villard to pieces and forget how to put him together again.”¹²

Even when critical, Villard savored such presidental recognition.

I look back upon my relations with Mr. Taft with the greatest satisfaction. For a time his private secretary in the White House was Charles Dyer Norton, one of the most attractive and brilliant young men of his day, who had married at Thorwood [Villard's father's estate in Dobbs Ferry, New York] my cousin, Katherine Garrison, to whom I have always been bound in ties of especial affection. This gave me a particular interest in the Taft administration, so far as that was possible for one of my radically different political philosophy.¹³

Villard was committed to the principles of free trade and believed that a stronger military establishment would only serve to divert resources from socially productive ends.

If I were dictator I should abolish every tariff because I know that the rapid rise of the three great industrial nations of modern times has been due chiefly to the fact that within their respective empires it has been free trade that has made them powerful and prosperous. Particularly I should say that this is true of the United States.¹⁴

These beliefs coincided with those of E. L. Godkin,¹⁵ founder of The Nation, who had borrowed his notions of free trade from Cobden and Bright. Their ideas had helped shape the ideology of the Liberal Party, which came to power as England was attaining the height of its industrial and military power relative to the rest of the world. To those who ran the British Empire free trade was equated with progress and a free world.

Such views became more acceptable in American intellectual circles after the First World War had taken twenty million lives, and Villard's pacifism coincided with the isolationism of the 1920's. The Nation became a magnet for war-bred disillusionment, and into this spiritual vacuum he introduced the crusading values of free trade—his practical cure for war.¹⁶

Yet, the free trade principle had also been important to Woodrow Wilson, who thought it would resolve the market demands of a dominant and dynamic American corporate capitalism.¹⁷ Free trade makes perfect sense for the capitalist power in a position of economic supremacy. The absence of trade barriers assists its large corporations in supplying certain advanced technologies for use by the elite native to a particular country. In return, this local elite allows its own people to be stripped of their raw materials, thereby preventing them from ever emerging as economic rivals to the capitalist nation. Exploitation of this cheaper labor power is at the expense of the worker in the dominant country, whose earning power can then be lowered to match that of the superexploited, less developed society. In addition, the more powerful and developed nation provides the international cartel or multinational corporation with legal protection at home and military protection abroad. In other words, free trade, as, for example, conducted by the United States in Latin America, coincided with the very “spirit of nationalism,” which Villard maintained was the “greatest stumbling block” to its success.¹⁸ Thus, Villard's promotion of free trade actually served to undermine his pacifist position.

The historical irony that Villard never integrated into his writings is that free trade among capitalist powers has only been possible when stronger nations are able to impose this policy upon the rest of the world through colonialism and imperialism. This relationship is inherently unstable as the larger capitalist countries are never satisfied with their rate of profits. As they become ever more dependent on foreign markets as a means of simultaneously relieving and enhancing their economies, they become more reliant on the military as a means of forcibly penetrating these economies. Rivalry among the capitalist powers intensifies and brings on conflict. Both world wars were conceived by American statesmen as wars for free trade. The United States entered these conflicts in order to prevent the Germans and Japanese from closing off vast areas of the world to our entrepreneurs and to dismantle the British Empire. It also acted to prevent the world's peoples from controlling their own markets and raw materials.

The correspondence that Villard makes between peace and free trade makes sense only if all countries of the world agree. Such concert can only be achieved when economies are fully developed and socialized. Villard never came to terms with the question of socialism. Although he considered himself almost a socialist, he didn't understand socialism very well:¹⁹

I considered Socialism to be inevitable and that we are all more or less Socialists, even the conservatives.²⁰

He did not grasp how the energies expended in class conflict could be redirected into “the nationalization of the masses” through war as was the case with fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan.²¹ The coming of the First World War entailed such nationalization, as one social democratic party after another followed the lead of its nation's capitalists and bankers in supporting increased military expenditures and centralization of power in the federal government.

Villard wrote a series of articles for the Evening Post, later published in a pamphlet entitled Preparedness, in which he probed the crucial precedent that would be set if the United States were to involve itself in a European conflict of this magnitude.

The European war will probably induce the coming Congress, under Mr. Wilson's guidance, to reverse our historic policy of a small army without reserves and to provide a still larger fleet. If this is the possibility … the tax-payers, who will have an enormous annual bill to pay, and the masses of our people generally, upon whose welfare the new departure will have such a far-reaching effect, should insist upon the laying down of certain national policies after the most careful debate and discussion. …

But when … all the matters of military policy have been settled one way or the other, the great question still remains: Should the United States, in the fevered disquiet of a world-crisis, alter the policy of its national life, and go in for large armaments?²²

Villard had been one of President Wilson's three closest advisors and supported him warmly in the editorial columns of his newspaper. When Wilson ran for president a second time in 1916, war had been raging in Europe for over two years, and Wilson's campaign slogan became “He kept us out of war.” Villard felt that his arguments had carried weight with the president. Yet, a month after Wilson's inauguration ceremony American soldiers were fighting and dying on the European battlefield.

It had long been inevitable but the blow was terrific none the less. It came nearer to unmanning me than anything in my life. For I knew, as I knew that I lived, that this ended the republic as we had known it; that henceforth we Americans were to be part and parcel of world politics, rivalries, jealousies, and militarism.

From the moment war began the whole current of American life was changed and Mr. Wilson's great advances toward the New Freedom checked and finally stopped.²³

Villard never had the grim satisfaction of knowing that the cruise ship Lusitania had a false bottom to carry arms when it was sunk with the loss of over eleven hundred lives²⁴ nor that the notorious Zimmerman Note, which revealed German plans for the takeover of Mexico, was a forgery concocted by British intelligence. More than any other pretexts these incidents acted as the Pearl Harbor for America's entry into World War I against Germany. These deceptions were not revealed to the American public until fifty years later, when the pressure of events no longer prevented their disclosure.

When I arrived in Washington the day after the sinking of the Lusitania I found the capital in a state of excitement such as it has not known since the blowing up of the Maine.²⁵

Villard was outraged by what he regarded as a personal betrayal by Wilson and used the Post to vent his anger. His staff protested, and Villard resigned to take over The Nation. From 1918 until 1933 as owner and editor-in-chief he transformed that periodical from a staid literary journal with a circulation of about eight thousand to a crusading liberal force in American letters with many times that readership. This was accomplished at a time when the forces of reaction were on the rampage; the Ku Klux Klan grew to five million members in 1925 while intolerance against Catholics and Jews was openly displayed by such public figures as Henry Ford. In the meantime, The Nation came to stand for social progress and human rights, especially with regard to Afro-Americans and women.

This new image of courageous and responsible opposition to congressional and presidential militarism gave The Nation a newfound prominence in national affairs. It also led to the confiscation of one issue by federal postal authorities for containing the observation that “the opinion of a Cornish miner or a Lancashire overlooker would help us more to an understanding of labor than any number of observations from Mr. Gompers [president of the American Federation of Labor].”²⁶

In marked contrast the socialist press was systematically harassed, suppressed, and destroyed. It had dared to organize mass opposition to government policies and had millions of supporters, while The Nation aimed its appeal at a narrow, albeit significant, spectrum of the progressive intelligentsia.²⁷ To accomplish this objective Villard surrounded himself with a talented staff of writers and editors who contributed scorching probes of domestic injustice as well as American imperialism in Latin America²⁸ and Europe. His position on the First World War was generally shared by those who read and wrote for The Nation:

We held firm not because we were egoists but because we knew that the great wave of national emotion was largely artificial: deliberately cultivated by the government propaganda; that it was an appeal to base human traits; that it could not … evoke great literary and artistic creations, and could only impoverish American promise.²⁹

Thus did Villard attack Wilson's connivance with the European victors at Versailles:

Great territories involving the lives of millions of black men were to be turned over to new masters, yet there was hardly a dark skin visible. Worst of all, for the first time in modern history, a great peace was to be written without a single representative of the defeated peoples in the council chamber.

The calm way they go on carving up Europe without consulting the Russians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, etc. is beyond words.³⁰

Villard welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Its former leaders had sent millions of citizens to their deaths in order to sustain a bankrupt and cruel regime. Though the seizure of political power by the Russian communists resulted in the loss of six lives, the foreign-inspired civil war and invasions by European, Japanese, and American forces killed over one million Russians.³¹ Villard criticized American intervention because its soldiers “… had no personal quarrel with the Soviets or their subjects … [and were merely] … pawns of Woodrow Wilson in his illegal and unconstitutional war on Russia.”³²

To prevent future invasions Soviet leaders emphasized military preparedness. Unilateral disarmament would have meant national suicide as Hitler planned to murder or enslave all Slavic peoples and did manage to kill over forty million of them in the Second World War.

Villard did not accept this Soviet concern.³³ He found the Soviet war minister's military preparedness speeches “… as hateful to me … as when they come at home from talking generals of our own army, or from officials of the National Security League and the American Defense Society.”³⁴ He did not appreciate the Soviet argument that war as an active instrument of foreign policy cannot be abolished until the class responsible is removed from power.

Villard's opposition to American involvement in the two world wars and his early support for the Russian Revolution led to accusations that he was a German agent. The same charge had been leveled against Lenin in the capitalist press as every effort to stop the slaughter short of total victory was labeled pro-German. Unfortunately, in his case some of Villard's sentiments lent credence to this charge:

… the proudest and most powerful structure in all Europe lay in ashes, and the soldiers came marching home to moral and spiritual ruins more appalling than all the destruction in France … Those who had had such faith in their Kultur, their Germanic Manneskraft, their unequaled intellectual achievements, their extraordinary industrial successes had failed just where they expected to win—at the top. …

How could God so have veiled his face to his chosen people?³⁵

Although the final question is presented in the context of German self-appraisal, we cannot be absolutely sure that Villard does not accept this assessment, since nowhere in his other writings does he present a different analysis.

He wrote three books on Germany, the most on any one subject, placing its people's aspirations and accomplishments in the most sympathetic light. The important role that militarism and racism played in German life in the twentieth century is minimized. Yet when dealing with France, Villard cannot bring himself to say anything kind about that country or its people's achievements. In fact, his journalistic attacks on France persist past the official start of the Second World War:

Plainly, it will be extremely difficult to hold the French in line for anything else than a peace which they trust will make forever impossible the domination of Europe by German armies. They have learned nothing and forgotten much.³⁶

Emphasis on the treatment of German war victims far exceeds what little sympathy Villard is able to muster for the Russian, Yugoslav, Jewish, Polish, Gypsy, French, English, Belgian, and other victims of German aggression. No allusion is made to the over thirty million Russians killed in the two world wars—by far the worst civilian and military casualties in human history. In addition, World War II concentration camp horrors are scarcely mentioned except in such contexts as criticism of the American press for exaggerating American casualties in those camps.³⁷

Villard was allowed to enter Germany to report on conditions there after its savage invasion of Poland in September 1939.³⁸ Though he condemned the Nazis, President Franklin Roosevelt's interior secretary, Harold Ickes, felt moved to characterize Villard as a “fellow traveler with Hitler.”³⁹ His policy of turning the other cheek to the savior of the German industrialist alienated many progressives. They argued that pacifism was precisely what the führer desired of the big powers at that historical moment, since this would give him needed time to conquer smaller countries and integrate them into Germany's war machine in preparation for a massive attack upon the Soviet Union.

In the foreword to Our Military Chaos, written in 1939, Villard argued that if Germany were to wage war and win, it would not therefore become the automatic enemy of the United States, for “a conquered Europe would be too dangerous to it to warrant another war.”⁴⁰ But since he also consistently maintained that the United States functioned best in a freetrade world, one that obviously could not survive in “a conquered Europe,” a logical contradiction like this one gives rise to suspicions on the order of Ickes's.

Villard was also opposed to organizing to fight the Nazis: “Here again is the threat of civil war, of violence against violence which bodes no good to the German nation.”⁴¹ He warned American Jews who desired to fight Hitler that “they feel that if we do not get into the war Hitler will get over here and put them in concentration camps, so they are taking the direct road to anti-Semitism and militarism.”⁴²

Yet he proposed no realistic alternative course of action that would involve the organization of progressive elements within German or American society.

Villard also never fully accepted the notion that the roots of fascism lay in big business.⁴³ This greatly limited his ability to generate a politics relevant to the people's needs. However, his skills as a journalist did allow him to find the truth even if he wasn't able to follow through on his discovery: “For his [Hitler's] part he is not willing to apply nationalization to the heavy industries … [which], curiously enough, appear to have contributed to the Hitler treasury.”⁴⁴

After World War II Villard was politically isolated. His pro-German bias⁴⁵ was scorned by the left, and his failure to support American cold war policies led to his ostracism from the right. He interpreted the rush to transform the United States into a garrison state using the best of all possible reasons—fascist Germany and Japan—as leading to the economic ruin of the republic and the destruction of American idealism. The potential for nuclear holocaust led him to want to “save Jesus from Joseph,”⁴⁶ and he continued to write in opposition to this new imposed mass hysteria: “I could not put the signing of the North Atlantic Pact on my television last evening, for to me it marks the final blow to our beloved Republic, and the establishment of a complete military State.”⁴⁷

Ironically, Villard passed from the world scene just as German republican and socialist values were granted the historical opportunity to contribute to human progress. This possibility arose only after Germany had been soundly beaten in two world wars and was denied the national right to develop an independent military.

Villard was never able to make the connection in his writings between a beleaguered capitalism and militarism. He therefore declared the Second World War to be:

… the result of a contest between idiocy on one hand and insanity on the other … 40 per cent of the blame for it rested squarely upon the last three British Prime Ministers.⁴⁸

Although he recognized immorality and opportunism among capitalists, it was hard for him to analyze critically his own class position. He spent too much energy railing at individuals rather then fashioning concrete alternatives to the system that bred war:

… forty-one years of responsible journalism have given me little respect for most of the men in high office in any country. Often I have said to myself: “Would that mine enemy could become President or Prime Minister.” Nothing in my life has been more disheartening …

… what most of us teach to our children, namely, that the highest honors in our national life go to men who have earned them by conspicuous service, is the veriest nonsense.⁴⁹

Not able to bring himself to support mass organizations independent of the control of the nation's policymakers, he depended upon the power of moral persuasion to dislodge the war profiteers from power.

The faith that his ideas might win out also rested upon an unrealistic assessment of the potential political constituency for his views in the United States. At one point he quotes Montaigne to the effect that he was:

“very fond of peasants—they are not educated enough to reason incorrectly.” I have recorded my belief that I would rather trust the innate good sense and the judgments of five hundred Americans of the farms and villages than a similar number of more or less class-conscious college graduates.⁵⁰

But certainly by the time Villard was writing these words American society had transformed itself economically and socially to the point where the kind of values generated by the rural American environment no longer had impact as so few Americans belonged to that sector of society. Yet the Jeffersonian ideal as embodied in the yeoman farmer was precisely what had yielded the unbounded optimism of Villard and other progressive interpreters of the American dream. Historically, even the political system had been constituted on this assumption, though the Civil War demonstrated the failure of the political system to resolve economic differences peaceably. It also destroyed once and for all the notion that the Jeffersonian ideal could ever triumph. In any case, this ideal had allowed itself to become monstrously perverted through plantation slavery and was therefore ripe for destruction.

Villard did not comprehend how completely the values of Hamilton had triumphed over those of Jefferson. He did not realize that his heroes of the 1920's—La Follette and Norris—political spokesmen for those who valued butter over guns—represented the last hurrah of the yeoman farmer. The Great Depression would become their grapes of wrath and would drive many of these midwesterners to California, where they would ironically secure jobs in World War II defense plants and unwittingly become defenders of the garrison state. The corporate capitalist system had broken their will and sense of independence and integrated them into the system through war-guaranteed economic rewards and media blitz. Those who remained outside the system stagnated or joined organizations like the Ku Klux Klan out of frustration.

Thus, though Villard's priorities were sensible and highminded, his reliance on personal appeal rather than intense economic and political analysis and mass organization to stop war prevented him from developing a body of original theoretical work. Steeped as he was in liberal republican values of the German and American variety, he could not get beyond the concept of nationhood. His notions of brotherhood rested on outmoded and unconsciously self-serving economic notions like free trade in a capitalist world, though his strategic sense was sound.

The whole nation has a profound interest in the question of whether we shall play a leading part in directing the trend of events towards disarmament, upon it may depend our own freedom from the crushing burden of military expenditure, which, largely by act of Mr. Wilson himself, this country began to assume in the panic and hysteria of last winter.⁵¹

His own assessment of John Brown can be applied to him, except instead of slavery Villard fought war:

As inexorable a fate as ever dominated a Greek tragedy guided this life. He walked always as one blindfolded. Something compelled him to attack … and to that impulse he yielded, reckoning not at all as to the outcome, and making not the slightest effort to plan beyond the first blow.⁵²

Notes

1. A term that originated in President Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address to the American people.

2. Sydney Strong, ed., What I Owe My Father (New York, 1931), p. 157. Oswald Garrison Villard, Fighting Years (New York, 1939), pp. 17, 30.

3. Villard himself considered it “to be the only first-class job I have ever done.” Villard, Fighting Years, p. 99.

4. Ibid., pp. 21, 23.

5. Ibid., p. 35.

6. Ibid., p. 4.

7. Villard, John Brown (New York, 1910), pp. 586, 588, 589.

8. Villard, Fighting Years, p. 100. This intolerant, often savage treatment of minority peoples, a disturbing recurrent theme in American history, is best summarized in “American Justifications for Military Massacres from the Pequot War to Mylai,” Blanche Cook, Peace and Change, III, nos. 2 & 3 (Summer-Fall 1975). Long before Vietnam the United States military managed to exterminate 700,000 Philippine natives in the Spanish-American War.

9. Villard proved unable to precisely define his own political role. He was a liberal, but the closest approximation to definition is hinted at in the following excerpt:

   Before I define a liberal, let me speak of Spain. When one beholds the horrible suffering there, the wanton butchery by rank outsiders … the damnable ruin of a historic people … one wishes there were a just and omnipotent God in heaven to behold what has come over those tired democracies. They cannot move. They cannot rouse themselves. They cannot damn as one man the foreign authors of that misery.

   [Villard, “What Is a Liberal?” The Nation, 11/27/37]

10. Villard, Fighting Years, pp. 134-135, 137.

11. Ibid., p. 284.

12. Ibid., p. 153.

13. Ibid., p. 191.

14. Villard, “If I Were Dictator,” The Nation, 1/20/32.

15. “One of his indictments of protection was that it was the mother of trusts and Socialism …” (Villard, Fighting Years, p. 122).

16. “When we fought for free trade we fought for labor …” (Ibid., p. 121).

17. A path-breaking essay that integrated the entire range of Wilson's thoughts with his policies is Martin Sklar's “Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism,” Studies on the Left (1960), pp. 17-47.

18. Villard, Free Trade—Free World (New York, 1947), p. 9.

19. His confusion is demonstrated in the following passage:

    Denmark is to-day a more completely “socialized” state than Karl Marx dreamed of, and … France, Italy, and Sweden as well as Russia have practically Socialistic Governments or Socialists in control of administration.

    [Villard, “The Proper Attitude Towards Socialism,” The Nation, 12/27/17]

20. Villard to Mrs. Crouch-Hazlett, 1/5/28.

21. George Mosse makes the most recent case for this position in The Nationalization of the Masses (New York, 1974).

22. Villard, Preparedness (New York, 1915), pp. 3, 19.

23. Villard, Fighting Years, pp. 324, 244.

24. “Germany's Biggest Blunder,” The Evening Post, 5/10/15.

25. Villard, Fighting Years, p. 258.

26. The Espionage Act section prohibiting “‘interference with the President's plan for a successful termination of the war’” was utilized “to ban anything that kept alive labor discontent.” William Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, Federal Suppression of Radicals: 1909-1933 (New York, 1963), p. 147 [based on his interpretation of DJ File 9-12-677-1].

27. William Preston provides the best documentation, culled from government files, of the government's attacks on citizen and immigrant dissent just after World War I. He counts twenty-nine separate occasions when the army suppressed radicals “without resort to constitutional procedures. …” Persons were arrested and held up to two years in jail without trial. Additionally, radicals could not:

    lawfully conduct a defense. Postal office censorship excluded requests for contributions to the defense … it even prohibited the blank contribution forms themselves.

    [Ibid., p. 116, 146]

    Villard reported:

    They are sentencing men to fifteen years for passing a hand-bill urging a worker's protest against the intervention in Russia, and last week they gave six months to a man for sedition, whose sole offense was that he declared “Lenin to be the brainiest man in Europe”, which is, of course, the truth as everybody admitted when I was in Paris and Berlin.

    [Villard to J. Howard Whitehouse, 1/19/20]

    Villard also claimed that conscientious objectors were tortured by U.S. army officers (Villard, Fighting Years, p. 335).

28. “We are witnessing deliberate warfare—another case where the American Executive has usurped the power of the Congress to make war, precisely as did Wilson twice in Mexico and also in Haiti and in Santo Domingo.”

    “In the very week when our Secretary of State has published his correspondence with France urging an agreement to ‘renounce’ war between the two historic republics, we are sending the major general commanding the Marine Corps, with one thousand more marines and perhaps half a dozen warships, to Nicaragua” (Villard, “When Is a War Not a War?” The Nation, 1/18/28).

    “The atrocities are going to be glossed over and our occupation is to go on indefinitely” (Villard to Hobson, 12/29/21).

29. Villard, Fighting Years, p. 332. Villard was of the opinion that “the war making power has entirely gone out of the hands of Congress and in that way the Constitution has been nullified” (Villard to Houghton, August 22, 1927).

30. Villard, Fighting Years, pp. 386-387, 399-400.

31. “When the Russian revolution came along Franklin Lane calmly contemplated our spending a million lives to put it down, but that sacrifice, he said, will prove to us the value of law and order” (Villard, Fighting Years, p. 295). Villard wrote the following on the international effort to do so in “The Crime Against Russia,” The Nation, August 2, 1919.

32. Villard, Russia from a Car Window (New York, 1929), p. 30.

33. “Communists with whom I have talked here share the belief prevalent in Russia that any economic boycott will be a prelude to a united military attack upon the Soviets. The suggestion is absurd today. With Germany in the hole in which it is industrially, agriculturally, and financially, a war is utterly out of the question. You not only could not enlist Englishmen for such an armed attack upon Russia, but I have pretty good evidence that the present British government does not intend to allow itself to be led into an economic boycott …” (Villard, “The New Drive Against Russia,” The Nation, April 1, 1931).

34. Villard, Russia From A Car Window, p. 30.

35. Villard, The German Phoenix (New York, 1933), p. 4.

36. Villard, “Issues and Men: Collective Security Must Come,” The Nation, December 23, 1939.

37. Villard, “The Shame Of The American Press,” The Progressive, February 4, 1946.

38. His choice of words concerning the destruction of Poland, whose inhabitants suffered the highest wartime casualty rate of any country in human history—220 killed out of each 1000 inhabitants—is also revealing:

    Some horrible stories of the effects of the war upon Poland are naturally coming through—justified and truthful reports I believe, for you cannot wage war with the present high-powered killing weapons, airplanes, and such, without laying everything waste.

    [Villard, “Issues and Men: England, America, and the War.” The Nation, September 30, 1939]

    Somewhat earlier he had concluded that “Germany will not be able for years to wage war against Poland, if ever” (Villard, The German Phoenix, p. 62).

39. Villard to William Allen White, April 29, 1941.

40. Our Military Chaos (New York, 1939), p. 4.

41. Villard, The German Phoenix, p. 106.

42. Villard to Lincoln Colcord, January 29, 1941.

43. Villard included a testimonial in The German Phoenix from a Nazi entrepreneur who felt that his compatriots had much to learn from their American counterparts:

    America has taught us how … America's political life is dominated by organizations representing economic interests. The organizations discuss the outstanding issues and adopt new policies. In Germany these questions are decided in the Reichstag. We must mend our ways and make our influence felt on the political parties … In order to carry out the ideas of our association money is needed.

    [pp. 131-132]

    The assistance offered German big business by American companies even after the Second World War had started proved invaluable to the development of Nazi Germany's military capabilities. These close, reciprocal relationships are examined in Gabriel Kolko, “American Business and Germany, 1930-1941,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4, December 1962.

44. Villard, The German Phoenix, p. 129.

45. “In her brief existence (as a nation) she has made more positive contributions to knowledge and world-advancement than any other nation in the same period” (Villard, Germany Embattled [New York, 1915], p. 14).

    Later, in The German Phoenix, his evaluation of national character is rendered sadly inept by World War II events:

    German love of peace and order … [and] the sound German respect for the rights of individuals …

    This lack of solidarity, this inability of the Germans to subordinate any partisan motive in a grave emergency, indubitably arises from their remarkable individualism, their innate tendency to split up into endless groups of varying opinion.

    [pp. 23, 27]

46. Villard to Paul Hutchinson, June 16, 1947.

47. Villard to Irving Dilliard, April 5, 1949.

48. Villard, “Issues and Men: If This Be Treason,” The Nation, February 3, 1940.

49. Villard, Fighting Years, pp. 524, 231.

50. Ibid., p. 523.

51. Evening Post, “The Opportunity Before Woodrow Wilson,” December 28, 1916.

52. Villard, John Brown, p. 586.

Additional coverage of Villard's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 113, 162; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 25, 91; and Literature Resource Center.