Oswald Garrison Villard

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Oswald Garrison Villard (March 13, 1872 – October 1, 1949) was a U.S. journalist.

Osward Garrison Villard provided a rare direct link between the classical liberal anti-imperialism of the late nineteenth century and the conservative Old Right of the 1940s.

Born in Wiesbaden, Germany, his early surroundings were steeped in the Yankee folkways of antislavery, free trade, and business enterprise. He was the son of Henry Villard, a wealthy railroad magnate, who owned The Nation and the New York Evening Post. His grandfather was William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist.

He graduated at Harvard in 1893. In 1894, Villard began to write regularly for the New York Evening Post and The Nation. The editor of both publications was E.L. Godkin, a tireless advocate of free trade, the gold standard, and anti-imperialism.

Villard said that he and his fellow staff members at the Evening Post and the Nation were "radical on peace and war and on the Negro question; radical in our insistence that the United States stay at home and not go to war abroad and impose its imperialistic will upon Latin-American republics, often with great slaughter. We were radical in our demand for free trade and our complete opposition to the whole protective system.” Upon the death of his father, he not only wrote for both publications but owned them.

Villard was also a founder of the American Anti-Imperialist League which favored independence for the territories captured in the Spanish-American War. To further the cause, he worked to organize "a third ticket" in 1900 to challenge William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley. His was joined in this effort by several key veterans of the National Democratic Party (United States) in 1896. Not surprisingly, Villard made a personal appeal to Grover Cleveland, a hero of the gold Democrats, to be the candidate. Cleveland demurred asserting that voters no longer cared what he had to say.

Villard was a pioneer, and today largely unsung, civil rights leader. In 1910, he donated space in the New York Evening Post for the “call” to the meeting which formerly organized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. For many years, Villard served as the NAACP’s disbursing treasurer while Moorfield Storey, another Cleveland Democrat, was its president. In 1916 he was elected president of the Symphony Society of New York. In 1910 he published John Brown 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After, a biography about John Brown. He wrote Germany Embattled (1915); and monographs on the early history of Wall Street and on the German Imperial court.

While Villard continued to champion civil liberties, civil rights, and anti-imperialism after World War I, he had largely abandoned his previous belief in laissez faire economics. During the 1930s, he welcomed the advent of New Deal and called for nationalization of major industries.

Always independent-minded, however, he bitterly dissented from the foreign policy of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the late 1930s. He was an early member of the America First Committee which opposed U.S. entry into World War II. He broke completely with The Nation, which he had sold in 1935, because it supported American intervention. At the same time, he became increasingly repelled by the New Deal bureaucratic state which he condemned a precursor to American fascism.

He deplored the air raids carried out by the allies in the later years of World War II, saying

'What was criminal in Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw and London has now become heroic in Dresden and now Tokyo.'^[1]

After 1945, Villard made common cause with "old right" conservatives, such as Senator Robert A. Taft, Felix Morley, and John T. Flynn, against the Cold War policies of Harry S. Truman. He died in 1949.

His son was Oswald Garrison Villard, Jr., who was a professor at Standford University in Electrical Engineering.

[edit] References

David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, "Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896-1900,"Independent Review 4 (Spring 2000), 555-75.
Ronald Radosh. Prophets on the right: Profiles of conservative critics of American globalism (1978)