Corliss Lamont

Corliss Lamont (March 28, 1902 – April 26, 1995) was an American socialist and humanist philosopher and advocate of various left-wing and civil liberties causes.

Lamont was born in Englewood, New Jersey, on March 28, 1902.

He was the son of Florence Haskell (Corliss) 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.

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 a onetime chairman of the Friends of the Soviet Union.

He received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1932 from Columbia.

Lamont taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and the New School for Social Research.

Lamont began his 30 years as a director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 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 the anti-Polish pamphlet Behind the Polish-Soviet Break by Alter Brody.

Lamont was a key founder of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship (NCASF) (originally National Council on Soviet Relations or NCSR).

Other founders included Professor Ralph Barton Perry of Harvard University and Edwin Seymour Smith.

As a part of his political activities, he was the Chairman of National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, starting from the early 1940s.

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: "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."In 1944 Lamont wrote a preface to a book by Alter Brody that popularized the Soviet falsification of the Katyn massacre in the West.

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 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.

The same month, he challenged the subcommittee's authority in court.

The same year, he wrote 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.