Angoff, Charles. “Oswald Garrison Villard and The Nation: A Memoir. Antioch Review 23, no. 2 (summer 1963): 232-40.

I was editor of the Nation for less than a year, only about eight months, in 1935, and was unhappy there. That is twenty-eight years ago, and whatever personal ill-feeling I may have had, I believe, has disappeared. I was unhappy largely because I was disappointed. I had for years had a large respect, nay, an awe of that magazine and its editors. In Harvard, it, along with the New Republic, was my way-shower in the realms of politics and economics and the arts, especially literature. Carl Van Doren and Ludwig Lewisohn and “The Drifter” and Oswald Garrison Villard—these and others told me pretty much what I thought and what I argued for. I took them on faith. Even when I was on the Mercury I had respect for the Nation, despite Mencken's sneers at it.

Almost the first day I was on the Nation—I went there immediately after I left the Mercury—I was depressed by the tired feeling that seemed to pervade the office. I had expected a tenseness of concern for the problems of the world. Instead, I encountered a certain Gemütlichkeit that seemed to me more appropriate to the offices of the Atlantic or Harper's or some other such “capitalistic” magazine. Further, the editors appeared to be keeping “banker's hours.” On the Mercury I had been accustomed to coming to the office at 9:00 a.m. That generally was the hour that Mencken arrived. I arrived at nine on my first day at the Nation and found present only the woman proofreader. I asked her where the staff was and she smiled. “Freda [Kirchwey],” she said, “usually comes in about eleven, maybe a bit earlier. Joe Krutch probably won't be in at all today. He seldom comes in. Peggy [Marshall] is out of town. Ordinarily she comes in half past ten. And …”

“So I guess I'm the early bird,” I said.

“Earlier than that,” she said.

“I don't suppose Raymond Gram Swing will be in much earlier,” I said.

“Well, yes and no. He comes in once a week or maybe once in ten days from Washington. He comes in about ten-thirty, except when he returns to Washington; on those days he sometimes comes in earlier. I think he'll be in today. There's an editorial conference, or haven't they told you?”

“No, they haven't,” I said. “I know there's one every week, but I thought it takes place in the middle of the week, or am I wrong?”

She smiled. “I know, I know. That's how it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I've been here a great many years, and … well, that's how it is. You get accustomed to it. The magazine comes out every week … so that's how it is. That's what really matters.”

The editorial conferences were also tired and depressed me almost from the beginning. I had thought that they were prolonged and thoughtful and well-informed affairs, but it became clear quickly that they were nothing of the sort. The general question of India, for example, came up at one of the first conferences, and there was some banter—it was little more than that—between Dorothy Van Doren and Freda Kirchwey and Raymond Gram Swing. I got the impression that none of them had any special knowledge of the subject. Nevertheless, it was decided to have Dorothy Van Doren—or so I believe, after all these years—write the editorial, and all she said, in puffy, oatmealy phrases, was that the Indian people had a right to self-determination, that Gandhi was a great spiritual leader, and that England should realize once and for all that the day of colonialism was at an end.

Oswald Garrison Villard dropped in now and then, merely to say hello or to exchange a few remarks. He reminded me of New England worthies of the mid-nineteenth century whose portraits I used to see at the Harvard Union or at the homes of Beacon Hill folk. At first he elicited great respect from me. He seemed so rugged of character. He was the personification of the Nation. The Nation was the oldest major liberal weekly in the United States, founded in 1865 by the great editor E. L. Godkin. It was the mouthpiece of great thinkers of the late nineteenth century. It was, for a while, one of the chief, if not the chief, spokesmen for Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom. During the 1920's it was a haven for nearly every progressive idea in the land—literary, economic, political, psychological. During a brief period it also gave space to proponents of “greater sexual freedom.” Oswald Garrison Villard, who was the Nation's editor from 1918 to 1932 thus was a molder and shaker of opinion. The average circulation was only about 25,000, but it was an influential circulation. By 1935 he had relinquished his control of the magazine, but he still came to editorial conferences, and he had considerable moral force among the editors.

At one conference he said he was disappointed in Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I asked why. He said, in effect, “He isn't taking advantage of the times. We are living in a period of great moral bewilderment. The country is ready for bold steps, and he isn't being bold enough.”

This puzzled me, and I asked him to be more specific. He said, “Roosevelt should nationalize all the public utilities, or most of them—the railroads and the telephones and the telegraph and the water works. What is needed now is boldness.”

“OGV,” said Freda Kirchwey, “you are expecting too much at this time. The logic of history doesn't permit this.”

“What is the logic of history?” asked Villard. “I know only history.”

No one seemed to know precisely what the logic of history was. I didn't, either, but suggested that perhaps it was a concept invented by German philosophers to justify their imperialistic ideas and their basic convictions of superiority to all other peoples: Deutschland Über Alles.

Villard, who had some German blood, jumped on me: “You mustn't say that. We've had enough hatred of German people in this country. We mustn't hate anybody. If we didn't have all this hate, we wouldn't have had that abominable Versailles Treaty, and we wouldn't have Hitler, and maybe we wouldn't have Stalin.”

This was the same meeting at which I prevailed upon the others to let me write an editorial taking Mayor LaGuardia gently to task for taking away the licenses from the street vendors of flowers. Some of my fellow editors thought I was silly to want to write such an editorial. But Freda Kirchwey and Villard, to my pleasant surprise, were for the editorial. Swing said nothing at all.

After a while I hardly participated in the editorial conferences, so disappointed was I. It was a weekly miracle that things did get written and did fill up the two or three pages generally allotted to the editorials.

My chief interest centered on Villard more and more. I don't know exactly why. He was sometimes so fuzzy, so ridden with political morals (he couldn't see why one nation should want to “steal” land from another, and he couldn't see how a diplomat could “lie without feeling moral compunctions”) that at the beginning I was at times ill at ease in his presence. Occasionally he reminded me of an elementary school teacher who read to us, every Friday afternoon at exactly two o'clock, Kipling's poem “If.” And always she told us, after reading the poem, “Guide your life by this poem and you'll come out a good and honorable person.”

But I learned that there was much more to Villard than a certain innocence in the political realm. As a matter of fact, he was extremely well informed about Realpolitik. He knew about economic forces and religious forces and geographic forces in world politics; he knew the difference between personal morality and international morality; and he also knew American history. Actually, his inclination toward the moral interpretation of history stood him in good stead on several occasions, especially in one. He objected to the Russian dictatorship from the very beginning. He was a guiding figure on the Nation when the Czar was overthrown, and he was one of the first editors to welcome the Kerensky government. But he was one of the first editors to warn the world against the machinations of Stalin and Trotsky. To him they were both evil, except that one was more unscrupulous than the other; but, as he often said, “If Trotsky were in power he would be as abominable as Stalin. Trotsky is better educated, but he is no less immoral and cruel.” Villard's major objection to the Soviets was a simple one. He said, “I am against every government anywhere any time that violates the Bill of Rights. A government that does not permit free speech and a free press and free assembly and genuine democratic government is my enemy.”

Villard never fell for any form of fellow-traveling. He objected violently when his successors on the Nation—or some of them—in one way or another joined the United Front, as speakers, as article writers, as letterhead disciples. This took courage. These same editors called him an old fogey and “unrealistic,” and he told them that if he was an old fogey, then they were juveniles.

Villard's regard for journalistic morality was profound and adamant. Perhaps nobody has done so much as he, as an individual, to wake up the American daily press to its professional responsibilities. His many articles and books on the subject are truly magnificent. Yet he had strange aberrations, even in the realm of morality. One morning I picked up my copy of the New York Times, and there I found a large advertisement telling the world that Oswald Garrison Villard found a certain cab company a mighty fine firm to do business with. I gasped. Surely this was a glaring example of “being taken in” by what Villard himself had called “the cunning pressures of American capitalism.” I assumed that Villard was being paid for this shameful thing, and that made it still worse. I asked Villard directly to explain himself. He was not at all offended, and as I remember it he said the following: “First of all, I did not get paid for my endorsement. In fact, I sought out the company's advertising firm and asked them to permit me to say something nice about them. Because, well, because I think this company is really good. I use taxi cabs a good deal, and so many of the companies are so bad, their cabs are so dirty and the drivers so impolite, that it is a pleasure to use the cab of this company. I think I owe it to business morality to come out in public and say my say.” I was surprised by this display of naiveté, but I said nothing more.

There was another time when Villard got into quite a state, at an editorial conference, over the “injustice of the tax structure.” I thought he meant the injustice of the income tax structure on the lower levels, but he quickly disillusioned me. He objected to certain provisions of the income tax structure on the upper level, which was his level. Liberal that he claimed to be, he said that it was becoming pointless for him to study his investments, manipulating them here and there to increase his profits, “because Washington is taking away my profits more and more. And that is hurting business, keeping back money from the investment market; also it is hindering private enterprise.” Shocked as I was by this, I was even more shocked by what he said shortly thereafter. At the time there was a movement in Washington to tax the income from Federal government bonds and also from certain state and municipal bonds, which had been tax exempt. Here, too, his argument was a moral one: “I have quite a number of government bonds. I get very little interest on them, less than 4 per cent. When I bought them I did so with the understanding, given by the United States—and the states and cities, of course, in the cases of state and municipal bonds—that these bonds would be tax free. If the government now taxes me, it will be breaking its word. That's immoral.”

I would often come to the Nation office before nine in the morning, because I liked the quiet and could do some of my personal writing there. Several times Villard came down from his office on a higher floor in the Vesey Street building where the Nation was to look for some back issue of the magazine, where he wanted to check a reference. Slowly we became friendly, and he and I had lunch several times in a small restaurant on Church Street, not far from the Nation office. He was a very polite man, and also, in some respects, a humble man. He asked me what I thought of his articles on the Boston newspapers, which had appeared in the Nation. “You know Boston so much better than I do,” he said. I assured him that while I probably knew the geographical city better than he did, he knew its newspapers and its general cultural picture phenomenally well. He was glad to hear me say that. He wondered whether he hadn't been a bit unjust to the Boston Herald-Traveler. “They're quite reactionary, as I said; that I don't take back. But they're otherwise quite good. I mean their news is often fair, on the international scene at least. Their editorials are stupid most of the time, but they're well written. Of course, there's no excuse for their kowtowing to the Catholic Church and the unspeakable Cardinal O'Connell, but they don't disgrace themselves quite as much as the Boston Post.”

Several times he spoke about Woodrow Wilson. He apparently had known him very well and for long admired him. Villard was one of the first champions of the New Freedom, but he had grave doubts about our entering the First World War, and he had even greater doubts about the Versailles Treaty. “A stubborn man,” Villard often said, “a very stubborn man, even though most of the time he had a fine moral sense. He allowed himself to be hoodwinked by Clemenceau and Lloyd George, and once hoodwinked, so stubborn was he and so jealous of his own righteousness, he insisted on remaining hoodwinked. A tragedy, a great tragedy, that's what he was. He could be very sweet, friendly, courteous, but he carried grudges to his dying day. I saw him often when he ran for the presidency in 1912, and later, but then I differed with him and said so in print, and he would not answer my letters. After he left the presidency, when he was living in Washington, I tried to see him a few times. He was receiving visitors, but every time his wife would write me a note saying that the President was not receiving visitors. No, he never forgot, and he never could forgive criticism. But he was a great man, of that there is no doubt, and, I suppose, great men make big mistakes and have petty faults. I would love to write a biography of him, but I would first have to wait fifteen years or so in order to get a good perspective, and that's more than I can afford.” He smiled. “I'm afraid I won't be here by then.”

He was depressed about the future of newspapers in the United States. “They're amalgamating at a fast rate, and soon there will be big cities with only one newspaper, and that's obviously bad. I fear something else. The same chain will have single newspapers in various cities, and soon there will be a virtual monopoly in large sections of the United States. Everybody will be subjected to the same political policy, in these areas, and they will be subjected to the same columns. Actually, I assume there will be less and less local news, and that's bad, too. The local news will probably be covered by weeklies, and they, too, in time will come under some central chain. Even if they don't, they're bound to be bad. Local weeklies are less and less able to remain independent without large local advertising, and that means that the editor will kowtow to the local merchants. These merchants really won't be too much in need of the local weeklies, so they'll tell the publisher and editor of the local weekly, in effect, he runs the paper they want or they won't advertise. Of course, they won't be that crude, but they'll be saying this in another, more polite way.

“This means that there's a big chance coming for magazines, monthlies and quarterlies, especially monthlies. I don't see much chance for the liberal weeklies. The Nation and the New Republic are going to have hard times. Time and Life and Newsweek will take over the weekly market, and on a big scale. But they're silly and super-conservative magazines, more interested in income than in being great periodicals with an influence on the turn of events. The bigger their circulation will become, the less influence they will have. Collier's will die, and so will the Saturday Evening Post. The people are ready for some other form of inferior journalism. The Atlantic and Harper's have a real chance here, but I doubt they will take it up; they're edited by timid men. The radio? I don't see it as taking the place of the printed word. Nothing can take the place of it.”

After I left the Nation Villard and I exchanged a few polite letters and then we did not get in touch with each other for a long time. When I returned to the Mercury for a brief stay, Villard got in touch with me over the telephone. He asked whether we'd be interested in any articles from him. He said he had some new material on John Brown, and I said we'd be interested in that. He sent the article in, and I liked it. But Lawrence E. Spivak, who was then editor and publisher and who had liked the idea of an article on John Brown in the first place, said he didn't like the finished article. He said it was poorly written and poorly organized. I said it was well written and well organized. But he insisted he was against it. His objections made no sense to me. I pleaded with him, but he remained adamant. So I wrote to Villard and told him the whole truth. I said I was very sorry. Villard called me on the telephone. He was shocked by my letter, though he said he understood my position. I said I hoped that this experience would not keep him from sending us another article soon. He said it would not. But I did not hear from him again for a long time.

Then, out of the proverbial blue, there arrived one morning an article by him, on Calvin Coolidge, an analysis and a commentary. It wasn't too good. It was too editorial in character, it needed more documentation, and there was somewhat too much sheer vituperation in it. I wrote a polite letter to Villard, telling him that we liked the article in essence, but that it needed some repairing, and I detailed the nature of the repairing. Almost by return mail I got a letter from him that said: “I have your letter. This is the end of our relationship.” He signed the letter “Yours truly.” I was very much disturbed. I called his office and asked to talk to him. His secretary waited a moment, then said, “Mr. Villard said he has nothing to say to you.”

There was clearly nothing else for me to do except write a letter to him telling him that he was being childish, but I couldn't write such a letter to a man who was almost old enough to be my grandfather. Weeks and months passed by. I often thought of Villard—with gratitude for what he had taught me and with sorrow for the coldness that had come between us. His pride and joy, the Nation, was now but a shadow of what it had been under his editorship. Its influence had greatly declined. Few people referred to it. The intellectuals who had, in Villard's day, looked forward to it, waiting at newsstands Friday morning, were now reading the New Leader or Partisan Review or the Saturday Review. Its circulation had not dropped much. Some weeks, indeed, it had gone over 30,000, but it was a virtually dead circulation. It had lost much of its literary leadership and its political leadership. It was now a frail old lady of America's Fleet Street—and many were not sure that it was a lady, in view of its flirtations with the extreme left.

More weeks and months passed by. I was on the way to the Grand Central Station to take a train to Boston to visit my family, and I stopped off at a restaurant on Forty-second Street. Suddenly Villard appeared and asked if he might sit down at my table. I said of course. We exchanged some trivialities. I apologized to him that I had to leave soon to catch my train. Then he said, “I want to apologize, too. That last letter I wrote to you was very childish. Please forgive me.”