Happy Birthday, Oswald Garrison Villard

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

Born in 1872, 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 The Nation and The New York Evening Post. His grandfather was William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist.

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 Bryan and McKinley. His was joined in this effort by several key veterans of the National (Gold) Democratic Party 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.

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 Roosevelt administration 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.

After 1945, Villard made common cause with"old right" conservatives, such as Senator Robert A. Taft, Felix Morley, and John T. Flynn, against Harry S. Truman’s Cold War policies. He died in 1949.