Oswald Garrison Villard (1872–1949)
Co-Founder of NAACP
Founder of the American Anti-Imperialist
Journalist and Civil Rights Activist
Oswald Garrison Villard was a publisher of the New York Evening Post and the Nation was the son of railroad tycoon Henry Villard and grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. He used his fortune to promote liberal causes, including women’s suffrage, anti-imperialism, and Negro uplift. Villard originally supported Booker T. Washington, believing education was the solution to the “Negro problem,” but the Brownsville affair and Atlanta riot convinced him of the need for a more militant strategy. The “Committee for the Advancement of the Negro Race” (1906) he envisioned became the blueprint for the NAACP. Villard funded the NAACP’s budget and provided free office space in the Evening Post building.
Oswald Garrison Villard was born on March 13, 1972 in Wiesbaden, Germany, while his parents were living there. He was the son of Henry Villard, an American newspaper correspondent who was an immigrant from Germany, and Fanny Garrison Villard, daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Fanny Villard was a suffragist and one of the founders of the Women’s Peace Movement. His father later invested in railroads, and bought The Nation and the New York Evening Post. The family returned to America soon after Villard’s birth, and moved to New York City in 1876.
Villard graduated from Harvard University in 1893, and after touring Europe with his father for a year, returned to Harvard to earn his graduate degree in American History. He served as a teaching assistant. Villard joined the staff of the Philadelphia Press in 1896, but disliked the paper’s soliciting to companies to advertise to keep the paper running financially. He left and joined the family business of his father news paper the New York Evening Post, serving as the editor of the Saturday features page.
Villard was also a co-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. He was joined in this effort by several key veterans of the 1896 National Democratic Party. Not surprisingly, He made a personal appeal to ex-president Grover Cleveland, a hero of the gold Democrats, urging him to be the candidate. Cleveland demurred, asserting that voters no longer cared what he had to say. He also consistently used the editorial page of the Evening Post to argue against imperialism and expansionism In 1910 Villard published John Brown 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After, a biography of John Brown, portrayed Brown as an inspiring American hero and was praised by reviewers for its unbiased tone and use of new information. He also wrote Germany Embattled (1915), in which he urged readers to acknowledge German contributions to American life and described the political divide in Germany. He reminded readers that the Germans believed in their cause, and advocated for continued neutrality in the conflict.
Oswald 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 formally organized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Villard became a co-founder of the organization, along with W.E.B. Du Bois and other imperative pioneer civil rights activist leaders of that period. For many years, Villard served as the NAACP’s disbursing treasurer while Moorefield Storey, another Cleveland Democrat, was its president.
He helped and supported Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election, and during an interview with the president convinced Wilson to work to improve conditions for African Americans. However Wilson succumbed to Senate pressure and did very little to help blacks. Consequentially, He spoke up against the president due to his lack of addressing the issues Oswald informed him about, endorsing his opponents and editorializing against him in the Evening Post and the Nation .Oswald resigned as NAACP chairman in 1914 due to irreconcilable differences with W. E. B. Du Bois, but remained a board member.
He 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 the New Deal and called for nationalization of major industries. In 1943, Villard engaged in a debate with philosopher Ayn Rand on the topic of collectivism versus individualism, sponsored by the American Economic Association, which was published in a number of newspapers.
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, and used the editorial page of The Nation to express his views:
“No, the truth is that if reason and logic, and not sentiment, hysteria, and self-interest, were applied to this question, the American army and navy would take the lead in advocating disarmament—always provided that we are not going to be so insane as to go to war in Europe again. I am even hoping that my friends the editors of The Nation will now turn about and join me in exposing the needless waste of the terrific military expenditures we are now making, to say nothing of the steady militarization of the country.”
He sold The Nation editorial news paper in 1935. Being an activist he became increasingly repelled by the New Deal bureaucratic state, which he condemned as a precursor to American fascism. Also, 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”.
He wrote two more papers The German Phoenix: The Story of the Republic (1933) and Inside Germany; with an Epilogue, England at War (1939; as Within Germany, 1940). Villard used the former to examine postwar German contributions to art, politics, journalism, education and morality, while the latter discussed Adolf Hitler’s brutal policies and the plight of German civilians.
With all his pioneering and fighting a good cause t for the suffrages o f others his health deteriorated. Villard suffered a heart attack in 1944 and sustained a stroke five years later. He died on October 1, 1949 in New York City. After his passing his oldest son was Henry Hilgard Villard who was head of the economics department at the City College of New York and the first male president of Planned Parenthood of New York City. His youngest son was Oswald Garrison Villard, Jr., who was a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. His daughter, Dorothy Villard Hammond, was a member of the American University at Cairo. On February 21, 2009 the US Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Villard’s civil rights work.
.