The death of Oswald Garrison Villard at the age of
77 takes me back to a dinner with him and Ramsay MacDonald, then something of a political outcast, in a restaurant in the Rue Daunou in Paris in 1919. Villard and I were following the Peace Conference in different capacities ; MacDonald was on his way to or from the Balkans ; German in origin and Left by conviction, Villard was then much more sympathetic with what he would call the victims of the Treaty of Versailles than with its authors. He became a journalist through succeeding his father as editor and owner of both the New York Evening Post (which must hold the record for the brevity of its successive ownerships) and the Nation, the well-known Left-wing weekly. Both, I fancy, lost money. A London editor once asked Villard what the circulation of the Nation was. He replied "Fifty thousand—and a loss on every copy." But he was a man of means, and he could well afford to subsidise any paper he cared about.
* * * *
Previous page
