Mrs. Vlllard

Mrs. Villard

To do homage to an octogenarienne, the Women's Peace Society of the Western Hemisphere summoned the representatives of half a dozen organizations to luncheon in Manhattan. The luncheon was in honor of the 80th birthday of the Chairman of the Women's Peace Society, Mrs. Henry Villard, nee Fanny Garrison.

Distinction comes to her naturally, not only in her own person but as a daughter and a wife. For her father was William Lloyd Garrison, the famed abolitionist, who at 22 was editing the first prohibition paper in the country (the National Philanthropist), who at 24 (in 1829) was joint editor of The Genius of Universal Emancipation, published weekly in Baltimore. He went to prison for failure to pay a fine of $50 for libel when he had referred to a ship carrying a cargo of slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans as engaged in "domestic piracy." Poet Whittier appealed to Henry Clay (slaveholder) to pay the fine for Garrison's release; but Clay was forestalled by a Manhattan philanthropist after Garrison had been in jail for seven weeks.

Afterwards, he considered establishing an anti-slavery paper at Washington but finally decided on Boston instead. At Boston, no church would lend him a place to lecture, so he lectured in the meeting place of a body of "infidels" and there, in 1831 (at 26), established the Liberator. He went twice to England on behalf of the cause, founded the American Anti-Slavery Society, was mobbed in the streets of Boston and put in a cell to preserve his life--but he continued to publish the Liberator.

He allowed women to join in his cause, denounced the Constitution and those who took oath to support it--because it supported slavery. He opposed all government as based on force and bloodshed and became an advocate of nonresistance. The Constitution, he declared, was "a covenant with Death and an agreement with Hell."

This attitude split the abolitionists into two groups--a Garrison or "moral" wing and a political wing which supported the Constitution. But, when the Civil War came, Garrison supported the Government. He saw at 60 the achievement of the cause which he had championed since he was 24. In 1867, he gave up publishing the Liberator but lived on in an honored old age till 1879. Such was the father of Mrs. Villard.

Her husband had a less stormy but even more eventful career. He was born at Speyer in Bavaria in 1835 and baptized Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard. At 18, he had a disagreement with his father, who was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Bavaria. Young Hilgard ran away to the U. S--and changed his name to Villard. He knocked around in Ohio and Illinois for a time, attempted to start a German "free soil" colony in Kansas. At 21, he became editor of a German paper in Racine, Wis., and afterward was associated with other papers. He became a War correspondent for The New York Herald and The New York Tribune during the Civil War, then started his own news agency. At 31, he was correspondent for The Chicago Tribune in the Prusso-Austrian War. After that he undertook railroad financing, progressing from President of the Oregon & California in 1876 to President of the Northern Pacific (which he finished building) five years later. At this time he bought The New York Evening Post and The Nation, of which his brother-in-law, Wendell Phillips Garrison, was Literary Editor. Such was Mrs. Villard's husband. Her son, Oswald Garrison Villard, is at present Editor of the Nation, now a pinko-political weekly.

And Mrs. Villard herself? A leader of the Women's Peace Society of the Western Hemisphere, ardent supporter of woman suffrage, philanthropist, grown to the ripe age of 80, she faced a gathering of her admirers, last week. The Peace Society presented her with a silver vase with the wish that "all battleships might be turned into vases for flowers." A speaker for the Society said : "This family has, for generations, stood for emancipation. With the abolishment of slavery for which her father worked for years, Mrs. Villard passed the first milestone of her life. With the gain of woman's suffrage, for which she fought from the beginning of the movement, Mrs. Villard passed the second. With the approach of peace, for which she, her father and her son have so long worked, she is nearing the third."

Mrs. Villard countered with a saying of her father's: "No man in his lifetime can expect to see the result of his labors."