Tireless Liberal

FIGHTING YEARS -- Oswald Garrison Villard--Harcourt, Brace ($3.75).

So many biographies of reformers have recently appeared that it may become an open question whether their work was ever as important as their books about it. But for Oswald Garrison Villard, owner for 15 years of The Nation, and tireless champion of civil liberties, no such question is possible. Son of the builder of the Northern Pacific, grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, friend of liberals big and little, Villard has more than most of the autobiographers to write about, if the criterion were staying power, number of fights, and refusal to admit defeat.

Biggest event of Villard's boyhood took place on September 8, 1883, near Helena, Mont., when in the presence of Indians, Civil War generals, Cabinet officers, editors, barons, ambassadors and financiers, his father drove the spike that completed the Northern Pacific. Three months later his father was bankrupt. Biggest event of Villard's manhood was the collapse of Wilsonian liberalism. Between these two catastrophes he studied in Germany, took over his father's paper, the New York Evening Post, when he was 25, fought for woman suffrage and good government, backed Wilson so ardently that disillusion was twice as bitter when it came.

Not all Villard's fights were on paper. He saw revolution in Munich and Berlin. He was held up when reactionaries broke into a Bavarian legislative session, kidnapped radical delegates. There are enough such climaxes in the 543 forthright, unsparing pages of Fighting Years to make it a valuable record. But Author Villard writes of revolution and shifts in The Nation's policy in the same steady way--for him, obviously, the battles are more important than his book.

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