Corliss Lamont


Corliss Lamont was an American socialist philosopher and advocate of various left-wing and civil liberties causes. As a part of his political activities he was the Chairman of National Council of American-Soviet Friendship starting from the early 1940s.

Career

Early years

Lamont was born in Englewood, New Jersey on March 28, 1902. He was the son of Florence Haskell and Thomas W. Lamont, 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. The principles that animated his life were first evidenced at Harvard, where he attacked university clubs as snobbery. In 1924, he did graduate work at New College University of Oxford, where he roomed with Julian Huxley. The next year Lamont began graduate studies at Columbia University, where he studied under John Dewey. In 1928, he became a philosophy instructor there. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1932 from Columbia. Lamont taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and the New School for Social Research.

1930s

Lamont became a radical in the 1930s, moved by the Great Depression. He wrote a book about the Soviet Union and praised what he saw there: "The people are better dressed, food is good and plentiful, everyone seems confident, happy and full of spirit". He became critical of the Soviets over time, but always thought their achievement in transforming a feudal society remarkable, even as he attacked its treatment of political dissent and lack of civil liberties. Lamont's political views were Marxist and socialist for much of his life.
Lamont was one-time chairman of the Friends of the Soviet Union.
Lamont began his 30 years as a director of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1932. In 1934, he was arrested while on a picket line in Jersey City, New Jersey, part of a long battle between labor and civil rights activists and Frank Hague, the city's mayor. Lamont later wrote that he "learned more about the American legal system in one day.. than in one year at Harvard Law School".
In 1936, Lamont helped found and subsidized the magazine Marxist Quarterly. When the Dewey Commission reported in 1937 that the Moscow trials of Leon Trotsky and others were fraudulent, Lamont, along with other left-wing intellectuals, refused to accept the Commission's findings. Under the influence of the Popular Front, Lamont and 150 other left-wing writers endorsed Josef Stalin's actions as necessary for "the preservation of progressive democracy". Their letter warned that Dewey's work was itself politically motivated and charged Dewey with supporting reactionary views and "Red-baiting". Lamont wrote an introduction to an anti-Polish pamphlet Behind the Polish-Soviet Break by Alter Brody.

1940s

Lamont was a key founder of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship . He served as its first chairman from 1943 to 1947.
Lamont remained sympathetic to the Soviet Union well after World War II and the establishment of satellite Communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe. He authored a pamphlet entitled The Myth of Soviet Aggression in which he wrote:

1950s

Lamont ran for the U.S. Senate from New York, in 1952 on the American Labor ticket. He received 104,702 votes and lost to Republican Irving M. Ives.
When called to testify in front of Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, he denied ever having been a Communist, but refused to discuss his beliefs or those of others, citing not the Fifth Amendment as so many others did but the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. The committee cited Lamont for contempt of Congress by a vote of 71 to 3 in August 1954. Some senators questioned McCarthy's authority and wanted a federal court to rule on it. In November Lamont donated $50,000 to create a $1,000,000 Bill of Rights Fund to support civil rights advocates, citing anti-Communist legislation, travel restrictions, and blacklisting in the entertainment industry. That same month he challenged the subcommittee's authority in court.
The same year, he penned Why I Am Not a Communist. Despite his allegiance to Marxism, he never joined the Communist Party USA, and supported the Korean War.
In April 1955, Lamont withdrew from his role as a philosophy lecturer at Columbia University pending the outcome of these legal proceedings, and the university said it was Lamont's decision, made "without prior suggestion by any officer of the university". Judge Edward Weinfeld of the U.S. District Court found the indictment against Lamont was faulty, but the government, rather than seek a new indictment, appealed that ruling. A unanimous panel of the Court of Appeals agreed in 1955 and in 1956 the government chose not to appeal to the Supreme Court.
As a director of the ACLU, Lamont had resisted attempts to purge the organization of Communists and, in 1954, he resigned his position because he felt the ACLU had not supported him in the face of McCarthy charges. The complete record of the legal proceedings in Lamont's case against the McCarthy subcommittee was published in 1957.
In 1951 and 1957, he was denied a passport by the State Department, which considered his application incomplete because he refused to answer a question about membership in the Communist Party. He sued the State Department in June 1957 seeking a hearing on its action. He obtained his passport in June 1958 following a Supreme Court decision in another case, Kent v. Dulles, and left the U.S. for a world tour in March 1959.
He ran again for the U.S. Senate from New York in 1958 on the Independent-Socialist ticket. He received more than 49,000 votes out of more than 5,500,000 cast and lost to Republican Kenneth B. Keating.
In 1959, Lamont became an enthusiastic supporter of Fidel Castro and his revolutionary government in Cuba.

1960s

In 1964, Lamont sued the Postmaster General for reading and, at times, refusing to deliver his mail under the anti-propaganda mail law of 1962, passed over the objections of the Department of Justice and the Post Office, that allowed the Postmaster General to destroy "communist political propaganda" sent from outside the United States unless the addressee says he wants to receive such mail. The statute did not apply to sealed correspondence, but was aimed at published materials. He lost a 2 to 1 decision in U.S. District Court, after the Post Office delivered one such item of mail, and he appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the single delivery was a subterfuge designed to moot his lawsuit while continue to interrupt his mail service. On May 24, 1965, he won in the Supreme Court, which held unanimously in a decision in Lamont v. Postmaster General written by Justice William O. Douglas, that the law was unconstitutional.
It was the first time the Supreme Court invalidated a statute as a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. Lamont' attorney was Leonard B. Boudin, who worked on many civil liberties cases. He won a similar lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency in federal court the same year.
In the mid-1960s, he became chairman of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, a position that he held until his death 30 years later.

Later life

In 1971, after a congressman called him an "identified member of the Communist Party, U.S.A.", Lamont issued a statement that "although it is no disgrace to belong to the Communist party, I have never even dreamed of joining it." That same year, he financed Dorothy Day's visit to the Soviet Union and several other countries in Eastern Europe.
In 1979, Lamont founded Half-Moon Foundation, Inc. Half-Moon Foundation was a 501 non-profit organization and was incorporated in the state of New York. The Foundation was formed "to promote enduring international peace, support for the United Nations, the conservation of our country's natural environment, and to safeguard and extend civil liberties as guaranteed under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."
Lamont was president emeritus of the American Humanist Association and in 1977 was named Humanist of the Year.
In 1981, he received the Gandhi Peace Award.
In 1998, Lamont received a posthumous Distinguished Humanist Service Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union and he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.

Personal life and death

In 1928, Lamont married Margaret Hayes Irish. They divorced in the early 1960s. In 1962, he married Helen Boyden Lamb; she died of cancer in 1975. In 1986, Lamont married Beth Keehner; she survived his death. He died at home in Ossining, New York, on April 26, 1995.

Legacy

Following the deaths of his parents, Lamont became a philanthropist. He funded the collection and preservation of manuscripts of American philosophers, particularly George Santayana, as well as Rockwell Kent and John Masefield.
He became a substantial donor to both Harvard and Columbia, endowing the latter's "Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties."
He was the great-uncle of Ned Lamont, a 2006 Democratic Party nominee for Connecticut to the United States Senate, and current Governor of Connecticut.

Writings

Lamont was a prolific author. He wrote, co-wrote, edited, or co-edited more than two dozen books and dozens of pamphlets, and wrote thousands of letters to newspapers, magazines, and journals on significant social issues during his lifelong campaign for peace and civil rights.
In 1935, he published The Illusion of Immortality, which was a revised version of his doctoral dissertation. According to James Leuba the book is considered to remain the standard work on the subject and shows conclusively that the arguments for immortality are totally insufficient. Lamont argued that people can live satisfactory lives without belief in life after death and that human life may be recognized to be more precious if it is realized that it only comes once to each man.
His most famous work is The Philosophy of Humanism, now in its eighth edition. He also published intimate portraits of John Dewey, John Masefield, and George Santayana.

Books authored or co-authored by Corliss Lamont

Aside from books, over the course of more than a half-century, Corliss Lamont authored, co-authored, or edited approximately three dozen pamphlets on a variety of subjects. Prominent among these was the Basic Pamphlets series, privately published by Dr. Lamont and sold directly by him through mail order via a local post office box in New York. There were 29 numbered titles in the Basic Pamphlets series, listed below by pamphlet number.
  1. Are We Being Talked Into War?
  2. The Civil Liberties Crisis
  3. The Humanist Tradition
  4. Effects of American Foreign Policy
  5. Back to the Bill of Rights
  6. The Myth of Soviet Aggression
  7. Challenge to McCarthy
  8. The Congressional Inquisition
  9. The Assault on Academic Freedom
  10. The Right to Travel
  11. To End Nuclear Bomb Tests
  12. A Peace Program for the U.S.A.
  13. My Trip Around The World
  14. The Crime Against Cuba
  15. My First Sixty Years
  16. The Enduring Impact of George Santayana
  17. The Tragedy of Vietnam: Where Do We Go from Here?
  18. Vietnam: Corliss Lamont vs. Ambassador Lodge
  19. How To Be Happy — Though Married
  20. The Meaning of Vietnam and Cambodia
  21. Trip to Communist China — An Informal Report
  22. Adventures In Civil Liberties
  23. Immortality: Myth Or Reality?
  24. Resolute Radical At 83 - later published as Steadfast Activist at 84
  25. The Right to Know: The Civil Liberties Campaign Against Secrecy in Government
  26. Jesus As A Free Speech Victim: Trial by Terror 2000 Years Ago
  27. The Assurance Of Free Choice
  28. Panama—Operation Injustice
  29. Persian Gulf Crisis—UN Peace Negotiations; No To War!

    Other pamphlets

In addition to the Basic Pamphlets series, Corliss Lamont also wrote a number of other pamphlets, a partial list of which appears below.