Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,755

This is the grave of Oswald Garrison Villard.

Born in 1872 in Wiesbaden, Germany, Villard grew up extremely wealthy. His father was the journalist, financier, and extremely sketchy railroad capitalist Henry Villard. His mother was the daughter of William Lloyd Garrison. They moved back to New York in 1876 and that’s where Villard grew up. He went to all the fancy schools and then was off to Harvard. He graduated from there in 1893 and had a fun year in Europe, where his father joined him. He originally wanted to get a PhD in History and returned to Harvard for that, but found the present more fun and so he went into journalism.

Villard initially tried to get a job like anyone else, or at least sort of, but in the end, he found it easier to work on dad’s papers, where he wouldn’t have to be bothered by such things as advertisers or editors. The thing about Henry’s railroad corruption is that the whole generation of abolitionists and social reformers basically became corrupt capitalists without actually losing too much of their radical past, at least on some issues. In this case, that relative radicalism was passed down to their son. So he became one of the leaders of the American Anti-Imperialist League to fight against the rise of American imperialism and the Spanish-American War. He tried to get Grover Cleveland to start a third party campaign in 1900 to protest both McKinley’s imperialism and Bryan’s silver platform (which scared so many rich people), but Cleveland rightly believed that no one wanted to hear his voice anymore. To his credit though, the one good position Cleveland did hold was disgust of imperialism.

Villard also became a big early supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. After the horrific 1908 Springfield Race Riot, so close to Lincoln’s actual home, a lot of reformers of both races believed there needed to be a strong central organization to fight against Jim Crow America. In fact, Villard was the NAACP’s treasurer for the first several years of its existence. Villard was one of these rich reformers who was initially a big Booker T. Washington guy, with all that meant, but these race riots made him more militant and willing to provide the money to change the movement. He and W.E.B. DuBois could not get along and he left the NAACP in 1914, but still supported it for the rest of his life. He also wrote an important biography of John Brown in 1910 that portrayed the anti-slavery activist as a hero.

Now, Villard was a Democrat and he supported Woodrow Wilson in 1912. But when Wilson went all-in on racism, Villard turned against very harshly. Villard, working with Booker T. Washington, directly appealed to Wilson to change his policies to segregate federal offices in 1913. Wilson refused to change. It is worth noting here that the last Republican president to really care about civil rights was Benjamin Harrison and so McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft had all allowed increasing segregation in the federal workforce, but it was indeed Wilson who finished the job. Villard had a lot of influence and he took to magazines such as The Nation (which was his rag) and The Saturday Evening Post to lambaste Wilson, but the president correctly understood that the nation was as racist in 1913 as he was. But after this, Villard opposed just about everything Wilson did, including the League of Nations. Anything coming from Wilson could only be bad.

In fact, Villard was more or less pro-German in the lead up to World War I, which wasn’t unusual at all. Many people noted that the British policies in Europe were also terrible and its history with the United States worse than that of Germany. Villard remained a pretty intense isolationist, even when World War II was coming down the pike, He did condemn the torpedoing of the Lusitania as much as anyone in 1915. But this continued long after the war. Although he loved FDR’s domestic policies, he hated his interventionist foreign policy and went so far to be actively involved in America First, hanging out with all kinds of bad sorts, including open Nazi-sympathizers. That was not Villard, but you lay down with dogs, you get fleas, etc. Villard had actually disassociated himself with The Nation in 1935, for it raising the early siren to do something about Hitler. Sigh.

We shouldn’t let this get in the way of understanding the good things Villard did though. He was a huge proponent of almost all Progressive Era politics in the 1910s and into the 20s and early 30s. He helped organizations such as the Women’s Trade Union League, was close with radicals such as Jane Addams and Crystal Eastman. He was big time for women’s suffrage and was on many committees of men to support this in the 1910s, working with such other men as John Dewey and Max Eastman. Black federal workers wrote to Villard personally to inform him and his friends of just what segregation in the federal government now meant and the humiliations Black workers had to face daily.

But in the end, Villard did destroy much of his reputation through his isolationism. Amazingly, that continued after World War II as well, where the now old man aligned himself with far-right conservatives, working with people such as Robert Taft, on both foreign and domestic policy. One thing Villard could not get his head around was the bureaucratic state of the New Deal. For him, this was just fascism. And that was true of a lot of people, to be fair. A lot of Progressives really struggled with the idea of the state. Villard honestly just lived too long and was too wealthy and disconnected with the needs of everyday people. A classic rich reformer, who ultimately had his own financial and world position in mind first and foremost.

Even during the Progressive Era battles, Villard was pretty out of touch with everyday Americans and deeply invested in his own sense of fairness that he would attempt to impose on others; ironically, as the historian Eric Yellin notes in his book, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America, Villard’s enemy Woodrow Wilson suffered from the exact same problem. For that matter, so did Theodore Roosevelt and and a lot of other leading reformers from that era. I’ve thought periodically of writing something up about this sense of “fairness” and the desire to remake society based on their individual ideas of it. Probably never will, but who can tell what the future holds.

Villard suffered a major heart attack in 1944 and died in 1949. He was 77 years old.

Oswald Garrison Villard is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other leading Progressive Era men who strongly supported women’s suffrage, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Simon Flexner is in Queens and George Foster Peabody is in Saratoga Springs, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.