Mrs. Villard

Liberalism is not so plentiful in the U. S. but that three generations of it in one family are noteworthy. A white-haired lady who died suddenly last week at Dobbs Ferry, N. Y., aged 83, was the only daughter of William Lloyd Garrison, the Boston man by whose eloquence and persistence the Abolition movement attained national proportions before the Civil War. Today her son, Oswald Garrison Villard, is editor of the Nation, liberal weekly.

Small Fanny Garrison helped her father correct proofs for many an issue of The Liberator. She was with him when he conferred about freeing the slaves with John Brown, Wendell Phillips, Samuel J. May et al.

She was a young girl when the Civil War came. A hero of the day was a young German named Henry Villard, war correspondent for the New York Tribune. After the war she married him. Chance made him the representative of some bondholders in Western railroads. Brains and force made him president of the Northern Pacific Railroad and a rich man.

Mrs. Villard acquired the New York Evening Post, then a great liberal organ, in 1881. She also owned the Nation, which was edited by Wendell Phillips Garrison, her brother, from 1865 to 1906. In 1900, her husband died. Thereafter, her sons and daughter having grown up, she devoted herself thoroughly to the sort of causes it was in her blood to champion.

She joined Anna Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt to fight for women's suffrage. She founded the Woman's Peace Society, on nonresistance doctrine formulated by her father and perfected by Russia's Tolstoy. But vote-seeking and international peace gatherings consumed only part of her time and energy. For nearly a half-century she managed the New York Diet Kitchen Association and was active in many another social service body in and about Manhattan. Tireless, vivid, she mounted many a platform in her last years, a majestic old gentlewoman in the kind of hats Queen Victoria liked, voicing the kind of ideas with which Queen Victoria's great-great-grandchildren will grow up.

To carry on his mother's and grandfather's tradition, the Nation's editor has two sons, Henry Hilgard Villard, 17, entering Yale this autumn and another, Oswald Garrison Villard, 11. Two other grandsons, sons of Harold Garrison Villard, a onetime editor of the Nautical Gazette have already departed the usual paths of liberals. One, Henry Villard, is in the U. S. Diplomatic Corps; the other, Vincent Villard is a white-collar man in a Manhattan bank.