Corliss lamont biography template

A debate entitled: “Must our Civil Liberties be Relinquished Under the Threat of Terrorism?”

Columbia UniversityLaw School
Jerome L. Greene Hall (JG101)
435 West 116th Street at Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027, USA
4 PM to 9 PM — Friday, April 5, 2002

These discussions were held in honor of Humanist, Patriot, and Defender of Civil Liberties, Corliss Lamont, as an observation of his Centenary. He was born March 28, 1902.

Professor Vincent A. Blasi, who occupies the endowed Corliss Lamont Civil Liberties Chair at Columbia University, delivered the keynote address. Invited speakers included the following individuals.†

• John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Mary Beaty, Electric Librarian
• Nancy Chang, Senior Litigation Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights
• Jeremiah S. Gutman, Co-chair, National Coalition Against Censorship
• Connie Hogarth, WESPAC
• C. Clark Kissinger, Refuse & Resist!
• Michael Letwin, Association of Legal Aid Lawyers
• Donna Lieberman, New York Civil Liberties Union
• Vincent Lloyd, Editor of CommonSense
• Brian McCartin, Thomas Paine National Historical Association
• Victor Navasky, Publisher of The Nation
• Michael Ratner, Attorney with and Vice President of the Center for Constitutional Rights
• Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Partnership for Civil Justice

† Affilations shown for informational/reference purposes only.

The schedule of events was as follows.

   4:00 PM to 6:00 PM - First Panel
   6:00 PM to 7:00 PM - Reception
   7:00 PM to 9:00 PM - Second Panel

This Centenary Program began with a screening of a documentary film entitled, Corliss Lamont: Renegade Patriot, created by Jonathan Heap, Corliss Lamont's grandson. A 6-minute video containing highlights from the film is available on this website.
  

Collateral materials:

Here are three downlo

Corliss Lamont, the Socialist author, teacher and humanist philosopher who battled Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the C.I.A. and other icons of authority in a lifelong fight for civil liberties and international understanding, died on Wednesday at his country home in Ossining, N.Y. He was 93 years old and lived in New York City.

Dr. Lamont died of heart failure, his family said.

Born into wealth, the scion of the chairman of J. P. Morgan & Company, Dr. Lamont grew up with privilege, attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University like his father and might have had the life of a patrician on Wall Street. Instead, he cast his lot into the arena of radical causes.

In a career that spanned much of the century, Dr. Lamont wrote 16 books and hundreds of pamphlets on subjects ranging from humanism to McCarthyism; taught at Harvard, Cornell, Columbia and other universities; campaigned for Soviet-American friendship, and weathered false accusations of Communist affiliations.

He also served as a director of the American Civil Liberties Union for 22 years, was chairman of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for 30 years, won court fights against censure by Senator McCarthy and mail censorship by the Central Intelligence Agency, ran twice for the United States Senate, opposed the Vietnam War and championed the Bill of Rights in countless forums.

"My final word is that in the battles that confront us today for America's freedom and welfare, our chief aim as public-spirited citizens must be neither to avoid trouble, nor to stay out of jail, nor even to preserve our lives, but to keep on fighting for our fundamental principals and ideals," Dr. Lamont concluded in his memoirs, "Yes to Life," published by Horizon Press in 1981.

A descendent of men who fought in the American Revolution and the son of Thomas William Lamont, the partner of J. P. Morgan, Dr. Lamont

His Issues of immortality ... c1932.

Lehman special correspondence files, via WWW, viewed Aug. 4, 2008: correspondent (Lamont, Corliss)

American national biography online, viewed Aug. 4, 2008 (Lamont, Corliss (28 Mar. 1902-26 Apr. 1995); writer and philosopher)

The New York Times, via WWW, September 20, 2013 (April 28, 1995 edition; Corliss Lamont, the Socialist author, teacher and humanist philosopher who battled Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the C.I.A. and other icons of authority in a lifelong fight for civil liberties and international understanding, died on Wednesday, April 26, 1995 in Ossining, N.Y.; he was born on Marc h 28, 1902, in Englewood, N.J., he graduated from Phillips Exeter in 1920 and from Harvard in 1924 with a bachelor's degree and high honors; after a year at Oxford University, he became a philosophy lecturer at Columbia and in 1932 earned a doctor of philosophy degree there; in a career that spanned much of the century, Dr. Lamont wrote 16 books and hundreds of pamphlets on subjects ranging from humanism to McCarthyism, taught at Harvard, Cornell, Columbia and other universities, campaigned for Soviet-American friendship, and weathered false accusations of Communist affiliations; he also served as a director of the American Civil Liberties Union for 22 years (1932-1954), was chairman of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for 30 years, won court fights against censure by Senator McCarthy and mail censorship by the Central Intelligence Agency, ran twice for the United States Senate, opposed the Vietnam War and championed the Bill of Rights in countless forums; his books include "The Philosophy of Humanism (1949), "The Illusion of Immortality," (1935) and "The Peoples of the Soviet Union" (1946))

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.