Editor of the "Nation" magazine, Oswald Garrison Villard (1872-1949) was one of the foremost American liberals of the 20th century. He was noted for his moralistic, uncompromising commitment to pacifism and minority rights.

Oswald Garrison Villard was born in Germany on March 13, 1872. His father emigrated to America and became a journalist and then a wealthy railroad magnate and financier. He embued his son with the ideas of capitalism and 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism. From his mother, the favorite daughter of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, he acquired a rigid, almost puritanical, moralism. Villard was educated at private schools and Harvard. After a brief apprenticeship on a Philadelphia paper, in 1897 he joined the staff of the New York Evening Post, which his father happened to own. He soon rose to editorial prominence on the paper and, after his father's death, became owner and publisher.

During his time with the Post...