Lamont, Corliss

(b. 28 March 1902 in Englewood, New Jersey; d. 26 April 1995 in Ossining, New York), socialist author, teacher, humanist philosopher, and civil rights advocate.

Lamont was born into wealth. His father, Thomas William Lamont, was chairman of J. P. Morgan and Company, and in 1915 his parents rented the New York City residence of Franklin D. Roosevelt while the latter served as assistant secretary of the navy. Florence Haskell Corliss, Lamont’s mother, donated the Lamont 125-acre estate in Palisades, New York, for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Lamont graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1920 and received his B.A. degree from Harvard University in 1924 with high honors. He attended Oxford University in England for one year and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1932.

As a lifelong rebel, Lamont’s initial cause was an attack on university clubs at Harvard. Then, at the start of his career at Columbia as a philosophy instructor, Lamont initiated help for Harvard women fired in a dispute over a new minimum-wage law. Lamont’s leftward leanings continued in the 1930s, when he researched the Great Depression and coauthored a book on the Soviet Union, Russia Day by Day, with his first wife Margaret Hayes Irish. Although he initially praised the material progress achieved by the Soviet Union, which he observed firsthand during a visit to that country, eventually he became critical of Josef Stalin’s repressive dictatorship. Lamont did not, however, lose faith in the communist system and believed that the Soviet Union needed time to develop democratic institutions similar to those in the West.

In 1953 Lamont’s leftist views and activism led to a subpoena to appear before Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. He testified that he was not and had never been a communist, and, though he did not invoke a Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, he would not discuss his political philosophy and associations. He claimed that as a private citizen, he was protected under First Amendment freedoms. Because of his testimony, Lamont was cited for contempt of Congress in federal court. A district court eventually dismissed the charge. The decision was unanimously upheld in 1955 by a circuit court, which effectively ended the case. The case was not decided on First Amendment rights but on the authority of McCarthy. It was a major victory in Lamont’s career as a civil libertarian.

Another civil rights victory occurred in the late 1950s, when the U.S. State Department was ordered to issue a passport to Lamont after refusing to do so for nearly a decade. The reason he was given was that his travel abroad “would be contrary to the best interests of the United States.” Lamont also won a suit against the U.S. Postmaster General in 1965. He charged that his First Amendment rights were violated when his mail, which included propaganda from the Chinese communist regime in Peking, was opened and withheld. The U.S. Supreme Court held that an anti-propaganda mail law was unconstitutional. Also in 1965, he won a lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency. The agency opened many letters that were mailed or received by him, including from his wife. A federal court held that “illegal prying into shared intimacies of husband and wife is despicable.”

Lamont’s connection of militancy and philosophy was on humanist principles and “not Christian service to an Improbable God, but service here and now to our fellow human beings.” Lamont indicated that humanism is “a philosophy which works for the welfare and progress and happiness of all mankind.” As a leading humanist and president of the American Humanist Association for many years, Lamont maintained that the humanist uses intelligence and the scientific method to solve problems. He wrote a standard text on the subject, The Philosophy of Humanism, in 1949.

Lamont was married to Margaret Hayes Irish in 1928. They divorced in 1962, and he married Helen Lamb. Lamb died in 1975, and Lamont married Beth Keehner on 24 July 1986.

During his career, Lamont taught philosophy at Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia universities and the New School for Social Research. Lamont endowed a chair in civil liberties at the Columbia University Law School and contributed to the construction of the Corliss Lamont Reading Room at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia.

Lamont was a member of the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union for twenty-two years, as well as chairman of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which he helped found, for thirty years. He also served on the board of directors of the National Urban League, and he received the Gandhi Peace Award in 1981. He twice ran for the U.S. Senate, first on the American Labor Party ticket in 1952, receiving 10,000 votes, and then on the Independent Socialist ticket in 1958, receiving 49,000 votes.

Lamont was brown-haired and brown-eyed, weighed 145 pounds, and stood five feet eight and a half inches tall.

Lamont wrote pamphlets and letters on a variety of civil rights and humanist subjects, including his opposition to nuclear testing, the war in Vietnam, and the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for atomic spying. The sixteen books written by Lamont include Lover’s Credo: Poems of Love; The Illusion of Immortality; Freedom of Choice Affirmed; Remembering John Masefield; A Lifetime of Dissent; A Humanist Funeral Service; A Humanist Wedding Service; Soviet Civilization; The Independent Mind; The Peoples of the Soviet Union; and You Might Like Socialism: A Way of Life f or Modern Man. He edited Dear Corliss; Letters from Eminent Persons; Collected Poems of John Reed; Dialogue with John Dewey; Dialogue with George Santayana; The Trial of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn by the American Civil Liberties Union; and Man Answers Death. He died of heart failure and is buried in Brookside Cemetery in Englewood, New Jersey.

As a humanist, author, civil libertarian, and fighter for causes he believed just, Lamont contributed to American principles of humanism, fairness, equality and justice, stating in Yes to Life, “My final word is… to keep on fighting for our fundamental principles and ideals.”

Major autobiographical works by Lamont include Yes to Life —Memoirs of Corliss Lamont (1981) and A Lifetime of Dissent (1988). Appreciative articles after his death include Frederick Ed-words, “Requiem for a Freedom Fighter,” Humanist (July 1995). Obituaries are in the New York Times (28 Apr. 1995) and Manchester Guardian (19 May 1995).

Martin Jay Stahl