SOURCE: Gannett, Lewis. “Villard and His Nation.” Nation 171, no. 4 (22 July 1950): 79-82.

Oswald Garrison Villard liked to think of himself as the simple product of two simple currents: the high-principled idealism of his Abolitionist grandfather, William Lloyd Garrison, and the high-principled realism of his railroad-building father, Henry Villard. He never understood the contradictions within the characters of both those stalwart Americans, or in himself. But it was those contradictions which made Villard the great editor that he was, and Villard's Nation the great paper that it was and is.

To understand Oswald Villard you must remember both the defiant masthead of Garrison's Liberator and the brownstone mansions which Stanford White built for Henry Villard behind St. Patrick's Cathedral—which Henry Villard lost in one of his swift changes of fortune. Oswald Villard grew up in a world full of stubborn principles, and of restless millions.

Garrison's immortal masthead, which Oswald Villard liked to recall several times a week, read, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard!” Garrison was heard, and he didn't retreat a single inch, even to spare a friend. Anyone who has ever scanned a file of his Liberator knows that he was probably the most high-principled, uncompromising, and intolerant editor in American history. For anti-slavery men who didn't see exactly his light he had no sympathy whatever. People who refer in gentle piety to Oswald Villard's inheritance from Garrison often forget the great Abolitionist's inchless stubbornness. Garrison was ready to burn the Constitution and sacrifice the Union for his single principle of abolition of slavery.

Henry Villard was another breed of iconoclast. Leaving Germany after the '48 days, he romantically swapped names with a friend. Arriving in America penniless, he proved himself a born reporter. He had the luck to cover the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and the skill to create a historic record of them. Shifting to the unfamiliar English tongue, he became one of the best Civil War reporters. In post-war days he had a vision of the great Northwest, and by one of the titanic miracles of those hectic days became president of the Northern Pacific Railway.

Oswald Villard was a boy of eleven when he watched his father nail the iron spike (it was “gold” only in legend) that linked the railways from two oceans; he was twelve when his father temporarily lost control of his vast enterprises. He had been only nine when his father bought the New York Evening Post, and Oswald became one of its editors at twenty-five, and was only twenty-eight when, his father dying, he inherited the property. (The Nation was then a sort of weekly digest of the Post.)

Oswald Villard, like his father, had several careers. He started out as a college teacher, and his first and fattest book is still, after forty years, the classic biography of that fantastic tissue of contradictions, John Brown. It was characteristic of Villard, who staunchly stuck to his Garrisonian inheritance of the doctrine of non-resistance, that he devoted years to a study of the violent resister of Osawatomie and Harper's Ferry. He knew the story of every hedgerow at Gettysburg and Manassas; he loved military history; a staunch pacifist, he could discuss strategy and tactics with staff generals. He might have been happy—for a time—as a professor of military history at West Point.

But Villard turned early from history to journalism. Journalism to him was always a combination of his grandfather's idealistic crusading and his father's desire to get things done. Oswald Villard served his newspaper apprenticeship on the Philadelphia Press in its great days, but when Lincoln Steffens took most of the staff of his father's Evening Post to the old Globe, Oswald returned from Philadelphia to take charge of the family's New York property.

The old Evening Post was a great newspaper, unique in modern journalistic history. It was a paper for the élite, with the best financial and editorial columns of the day. It was a nickel newspaper in a penny-newspaper world; it ignored the low worlds of sport and crime, and again and again deliberately sacrificed revenue to principle. The soundest citizens of New York and Washington read it attentively; with its 25,000 circulation, its crusades were often more effective than the mass-circulation crusades of Hearst and Pulitzer. It was a Mugwump paper, politically independent, fanatically in favor of Honesty, Temperance, Peace, Free Trade, and Goodness. It staunchly favored civil-service reform, anti-imperialism, women's rights, and the Negro. But when in the 1890's Henry George ran for mayor of New York City on a Labor Party ticket, it was outraged at Goerge's radicalism. As its editor, Oswald Villard was close first to Theodore Roosevelt, later to Woodrow Wilson. He was mentioned for posts in both Presidents' Cabinets, but he broke with both, denouncing them as betrayers of principles.

His willingness to be in a minority, his faithfulness to his inherited doctrine of pacifism, led him to sell the Evening Post in 1918. He had opposed America's entry into the First World War; he had dared to send Robert Bruère to follow the trail of the I. W. W., and to print Bruère's articles exposing the fact that the “Wobblies,” although anti-war, were not pro-German, and that their persecution sprang from class conflict rather than patriotism. Villard found himself ostracized by lifelong friends. When America entered the war, advertisers boycotted the pacifist Post and circulation dropped disastrously. Villard sold it.

He kept The Nation, and he made it what it is today. In the history of American journalism Villard will be remembered less for his twenty years' ownership and editorship of a “good” newspaper than for his fifteen years at the helm of the rambunctious little weekly which challenged a hundred-million country with a circulation of 30,000.

It didn't have even 30,000 when Villard took it over. It never had 50,000 under his editorship, but it refused to equivocate and it made itself heard. The late Frank P. Walsh called The Nation the greatest mystery in American journalism. Walsh had contributed an article about the railroads to The Nation (circulation at that time, 27,000). Walsh had also signed a series of articles which were syndicated in the Hearst newspapers (circulation, more than ten million). He never, he said, met a man who had read his articles in the Hearst press. But the day The Nation went on the Washington newsstands, Walsh's telephone began ringing. People who counted—editors, Senators, assorted reformers and lobbyists, pro or con—read The Nation, and reacted to it. They had to, to keep up.

Villard's Nation constantly scooped the dailies. It denounced “the madness at Versailles” before Keynes's name was known in America. It welcomed the burgeoning British Labor Party. It printed the early Soviet labor laws and treaties. (A pink-cheeked enthusiast then on the Sunday staff of the New York Tribune used to sneak out a side door to bring his translations to The Nation's office; his name was William Henry Chamberlain, but on The Nation he used a pseudonym.)

It fought government by injunction. It made the military subjugation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic a national issue. It sent Carleton Beals to interview Sandino, the Nicaraguan rebel fighting the American marines in his country. It defended Mexico's revolutionary effort to establish sovereignty over its own economics. It brought Muriel and Mary McSweeney over from Ireland to expose the Black and Tan terror there. It defended the Chinese Revolution, led in the late 1920's by a young man named Chiang Kai-shek, whom the Treaty-porters then called a Bolshevik. When Mussolini was still a respectable “savior” of Italy from Bolshevism it denounced Mussolini. It foresaw the Hitler menace. At home it denounced the Palmer raids and helped expose the Harding corruptions; it stood behind George Norris when the Nebraska Senator was almost alone in dreaming of the TVA. It was usually right, and cocky and combative, whether right or wrong.

Villard's staff, in the fifteen years of his editorship of The Nation, included an amazing variety of youngsters: Freda Kirchwey, the present editor; the literary Van Doren tribe—Carl, Mark, Irita, and Dorothy; Ludwig Lewisohn and Joseph Wood Krutch, literary and dramatic critics; Raymond Gram Swing in pre-radio days; Norman Thomas, before he became the perennial Socialist candidate for President; Ernest Gruening, today the fighting Governor of Alaska; Paul Blanshard, Stuart Chase, and George Soule; and John Macy, William Macdonald, Henry Raymond Mussey, Lincoln Colcord, Arthur Gleason, and Arthur Warner, who are now gone.

Often this staff was convinced that it made The Nation what it was; it quarreled with “the Boss” and thought it persuaded him to do things which his gentlemanly instincts told him were deplorable. The point is that alone among American editors of the period he permitted his rambunctious youngsters to persuade him. The daily newspapers of the period were shying away from crusades. The New Republic was at its Lippmannic solemnest. The Nation was newsy, irritating, fighting. Villard's journalistic instinct picked topics and picked associate editors—and he cheerfully accepted the consequences.

Villard didn't really enjoy being in a minority of two or three, for he was sunny and sociable even in his indignations, and if his letters are some day published they will reveal amazingly diverse friendships. He never gave up hoping to find stalwart liberals among the nice people who had been with him to the best schools. He was comfortable in a frock coat; probably he never wore a pair of overalls in his life. Fate, and his loyalty to principle, kept pitching him into uncreased company.

The Nation, under Villard, never made a cent, and never paid Villard a salary. In his first year as editor he poured more than ＄150,000 of his own money into it; after that, he cut costs drastically and passed the hat. For a time it almost broke even. But it was always a strain, and in 1935 Villard sold the paper—for virtually nothing—to friends who, he felt sure, would carry on in his tradition. He continued, into 1940, as a Contributing Editor, writing a weekly column, Issues and Men.

But what was the true tradition for The Nation? In the late 1930's the shadow of Hitler darkened the world. Villard remained faithful to his Garrisonian doctrine of non-resistance; he believed that somehow, even though Hitler won the war, Hitlerism could be conquered by moral force alone. His thought repeated his pattern of 1914-18, and he saw only black reaction as the consequence of America's growing involvement in the war. Most of his former colleagues were led step by step to abandon their erstwhile pacifism. Hitlerism, they believed, and argued in The Nation, could be stopped only by a combination of moral and military force. To Villard that seemed a betrayal of principle.

In The Nation for June 29, 1940, he printed his “Valedictory,” closing his forty-seven years' association with the periodical. The chief glory of The Nation, he wrote, had been its “steadfast opposition to all war; to universal military service, to a great navy and to all war”; its new policies would inevitably turn America into a totalitarian state. To Freda Kirchwey he wrote privately that she had “struck hands with all the forces of reaction”; she had “prostituted The Nation”; he hoped the paper would “die very soon or fall into other hands.”

That was written in the month of Hitler's sweep across France, and the charge that The Nation, committing itself to military resistance, had “struck hands with reaction,” seemed to its editors and to most of Villard's old friends a fantastic misconception of realities. Villard was lonelier than ever before. He deplored America's entry into the war; sometimes he even seemed to be striking hands with the Chicago Tribune, a curious alliance of pacifist and imperialistic isolationisms. They were bitter years that followed; Villard walked through them armed with the consciousness of rectitude. He often repeated to friends his hope that The Nation would die, and at his funeral, perhaps at his insistence, no word of his long association with it was spoken.

But history—and life and death—plays strange tricks. Oswald Garrison Villard could no more disassociate himself from The Nation than he could from his names “Garrison” and “Villard.” They were parts of him, he of them; Villard's character is inextricably a part of The Nation, and The Nation is his contribution to American history. Its lonely courage and its quick indignations are inevitably described as Villardian. They are a part of the living American tradition, and The Nation is Villard's claim to permanent fame.