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Biography of Oswald Garrison VillardName: Oswald Garrison VillardBirth Date: March 13, 1872 Death Date: October 1, 1949 Place of Birth: Wiesbaden, Germany Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: editor, journalist Oswald Garrison Villard Editor of the "Nation" magazine, Oswald Garrison Villard (1872-1949) was one of the foremost American liberals of the 20th century. He was noted for his moralistic, uncompromising commitment to pacifism and minority rights.Oswald Garrison Villard was born in Germany on March 13, 1872. His father emigrated to America and became a journalist and then a wealthy railroad magnate and financier. He embued his son with the ideas of capitalism and 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism. From his mother, the favorite daughter of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, he acquired a rigid, almost puritanical, moralism. Villard was educated at private schools and Harvard. After a brief apprenticeship on a Philadelphia paper, in 1897 he 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 owner and publisher.During his time with the Post Villard carved out …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…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. On Oct. 1, 1949, he died in New York City, a still uncompromising, but embittered, man. Associated Works New York Evening Post Further Reading The best biography of Villard is Michael Wreszin, Oswald Garrison Villard: Pacifist at War (1965), which contains a bibliography. Dollena Joy Humes, Oswald Garrison Villard: Liberal of the 1920's (1960), has useful summations of Villard's positions on various issues during the 1920's, but it is not as insightful as Wreszin's book, which covers Villard's whole career.Humes, Dollena Joy, Oswald Garrison Villard, liberal of the 1920's, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977, 1960. |