SOURCE: Gannett, Lewis. “Villard and His Nation.” Nation 171, no. 4 (22 July 1950): 79-82.

In the following essay, Gannett discusses the place of Villard and The Nation in journalistic history.

Oswald Garrison Villard liked to think of himself as the simple product of two simple currents: the high-principled idealism of his Abolitionist grandfather, William Lloyd Garrison, and the high-principled realism of his railroad-building father, Henry Villard. He never understood the contradictions within the characters of both those stalwart Americans, or in himself. But it was those contradictions which made Villard the great editor that he was, and Villard's Nation the great paper that it was and is.

To understand Oswald Villard you must remember both the defiant masthead of Garrison's Liberator and the brownstone mansions which Stanford White built for Henry Villard behind St. Patrick's Cathedral—which Henry Villard lost in one of his swift changes of fortune. Oswald Villard grew...