SOURCE: Thernstrom, Stephan A. “Oswald Garrison Villard and the Politics of Pacifism.” Harvard Library Bulletin 14, no. 1 (winter 1960): 126-52.

In the following essay, Thernstrom discusses Villard's pacifist beliefs and the effect they had on his editorship of The Nation.

‘History, if honest history continues to be written, will have one question to ask of our generation,’ Archibald MacLeish wrote in the Nation in May of 1940. Why, he wondered, had America's intellectuals failed to rise to the challenge of Fascism with ‘the arms of scholarship and writing? It is a question the historians will ask with interest—the gentle, detached, not altogether loving interest with which historians have always questioned the impotent spirits of the dead.’¹

Less than a month after MacLeish's indictment of ‘The Irresponsibles’ met the eyes of American liberal intellectuals, the Nation quietly announced the resignation of one of its weekly columnists, an angry crusading old man...