SOURCE: Wreszin, Michael. “Introduction” and “Respectable Reform.” In Oswald Garrison Villard: Pacifist at War, pp. 3-6; 25-37. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965.

In the following essays, Wreszin provides a brief overview and assessment of Villard's career and discusses the reform issues Villard advocated in The Nation.

In 1877 Henry Villard, returning to America from a business and pleasure trip abroad, moved into the new and fashionable Westmoreland Apartments at the corner of Seventeenth Street and Fifth Avenue just across from Union Square. The building, fitted out with one of the first private elevators in the city, was young Oswald Garrison Villard's home for a half dozen years of his early childhood. In the late twenties the apartments were torn down and the new edifice of the always old Tammany Hall was constructed on the spot. That fate should have placed a new Tammany Hall on the very place of William...