Corliss Lamont

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Corliss Lamont (March 28, 1902–April 26, 1995), was a humanist and Marxist philosopher, and advocate of various left-wing and civil liberties causes. He is the great-uncle of 2006 Democratic Party nominee for the United States Senate from Connecticut, Ned Lamont[1].

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[edit] Biography

Lamont was born in Englewood, New Jersey. His father, Thomas W. Lamont, was a Partner and later Chairman at J.P. Morgan & Co.. Lamont graduated as valedictorian of Phillips Exeter Academy in 1920, and magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1924. In 1924 he did graduate work at New College University of Oxford while he resided with Julian Huxley. The next year Lamont matriculated at Columbia University, where he studied under John Dewey. In 1928 he became a philosophy instructor at Columbia and married Margaret Hayes Irish. He received his Ph.D. in 1932. Lamont taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and the New School for Social Research .

[edit] Political views

Lamont's political views were Marxist and socialist for much of his life. During the 1930s he was openly Marxist. In 1934, Corliss Lamont identified himself to former communist Max Eastman as a 'Truth Communist', saying according to Eastman, that he “did not accept the policy of political lying to the masses practiced by the official communist parties under Stalin.” Later, Eastman would openly challenge Lamont on his avowed loyalties, charging that:

You continued to run with the Stalinist chiefs. You never exposed their political lies, or said publicly what you said to me in private. For a very long time you played friends with both 'Lie Communists' and 'Truth Communists', and gave your money with one hand to the Stalinists and with the other to independent revolutionary papers…Anybody who plays both sides in quiet times will be found in a crisis on the side of power...(referring to Stalin).[2]

In 1936, Lamont helped found and subsidized the magazine Marxist Quarterly. After the Dewey Commission exposed the truth behind Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and the phoney Show Trials, including the trial in absentia of Leon Trotsky and executions of prominent Soviet citizens and government officials in Moscow, Lamont, along with other left-wing intellectuals refused to accept their published findings. In 1937, under the spell of the Popular Front, Lamont and 150 other left-wing writers affirmed Stalin's actions and that “the preservation of progressive democracy” demanded that Stalin’s actions be ratified.[3]

Lamont remained sympathetic to the Soviet Union well after World War II and the Stalin's establishment of satellite Communist puppet governments in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and East Germany, even authoring a pamphlet entitled The Myth of Soviet Aggression in 1952. In “The Myth of Soviet Aggression”, Lamont wrote:

The fact is, of course, that both the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, in order to push their enormous armaments programs through Congress and to justify the continuation of the Cold War, have felt compelled to resort to the device of keeping the American people in a state of alarm over some alleged menace of Soviet or Communist origin.

Only a year later, in 1953, Lamont penned Why I Am Not a Communist. Despite his allegiance to Marxism, he never joined the Communist Party USA. He ran two losing campaigns for the U.S. Senate from New York, in 1952 with the American Labor Party, and again in 1958 as an Independent-Socialist. Upon Fidel Castro's victory in Cuba in 1959, Lamont became an enthusiastic supporter of Castro and his communist revolutionary government.[4]

[edit] Activism

He served as a director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1932–1954, and chairman until his death, of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which successfully challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy's senate subcommittee and other government agencies. In the process Lamont was cited for contempt of Congress, but in 1956 an appeals court overturned his indictment. From 1951 until 1958, he was denied a passport by the State Department.

In 1965 he secured a Supreme Court ruling against censorship of incoming mail by the U.S. Postmaster General. In 1973 he discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests that the FBI had been tapping his phone, and scrutinizing his tax returns and cancelled checks for 30 years. His subsequent successful lawsuit set a precedent in upholding citizens' privacy rights. He also filed and won a suit against the Central Intelligence Agency for opening his mail.

[edit] Author

Lamont was a prolific author. He wrote sixteen books, hundreds of pamphlets and thousands of letters to newspapers on significant social issues during his life-long campaign for peace and civil rights. In 1935 he published The Illusion of Immortality, which was a revised version of his Ph.D. dissertation. His most famous work is the 1949 book, The Philosophy of Humanism, now in its eighth edition. He also published intimate portraits of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell.

[edit] Later life

Following the deaths of his parents, Lamont became a philanthropist. He funded the collection and preservation of manuscripts of American philosophers, particularly George Santayana. He became a substantial donor to both Harvard and Columbia, endowing the latter's Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties, currently held by Vincent A. Blasi. During the 1960s he and Margaret had divorced, and he married author Helen Boyden, who died of cancer in 1975. Lamont married Beth Keehner in 1986.

Lamont was president emeritus of the American Humanist Association and received the Gandhi Peace Award in 1981. In 1998 Lamont received a posthumous Distinguished Humanist Service Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

Still an activist at the age of 88, he protested U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War in 1991. He died at home in Ossining, New York.

[edit] See also

[edit] Books and publications

[edit] References

  1. ^ Patrick Healy. "Lieberman Rival Seeks Support Beyond Iraq Issue", The New York Times, July 19, 2006. Retrieved on 2006-08-10.
  2. ^ Eastman, Max, Letter to Corliss Lamont, April 1938
  3. ^ Lamont, Corliss, et al.,An Open Letter to American Liberals, Soviet Russia Today, March 1937 issue
  4. ^ Lamont, Corliss, A Lifetime of Dissent, New York: Prometheus Books (1988)

[edit] External links

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