Corliss Lamont

Corliss Lamont (March 28, 1902 - April 26, 1995), was a 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 early 1940s. He was the great-uncle of 2006 Democratic Party nominee for the United States Senate from Connecticut, Ned Lamont.

Dr. Lamont was born in Englewood, New Jersey and graduated first from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1920, then magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1924. He did graduate work at Oxford and at Columbia, where he received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1932.

He was a director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1932 to 1954. Then, until 1995, he was chairman of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (NECLC), formerly known as the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC). A leading proponent of individual rights under the Constitution, he won famous court decisions over Senator Joseph McCarthy and the CIA. In 1965 he secured a Supreme Court ruling against censorship of incoming mail by the U.S. Postmaster General.

Dr. Lamont has long been associated with Humanism, authoring the first edition of "The Philosophy of Humanism" in 1949. It has since become the standard text on the subject. He taught at Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard Universities, and at the New School for Social Research. Corliss Lamont was the honorary president of the American Humanist Association (AHA) at the time of his death in 1995.

The video clip shown to the right (on Amazon's Corliss Lamont Page) is of Corliss Lamont and Pete Seeger being interviewed by Jonathan Heap, filmmaker and grandson of Corliss Lamont, on the occasion of the 1992 WESPAC (Westchester People's Action Committee, now known as WESPAC Foundation) Festival, held on the Lamont Estate in Ossining, NY in 1992.