Harvard Heretic

Twenty Widener Library scrubwomen had to quit their jobs in 1929 because for nine years, contrary to a State law, they had been working at two cents under the 35 cent hourly wage minimum. The following spring, however, a champion enlisted their cause. He was Corliss Lamont '24. At the head of an indignant alumni group he offered personally to solicit from other alumni the scrubwomen's back pay," amounting to $280 each, if the University did not reimburse hem, which it promptly did. This militant defense of the underdog is characteristic of Lamont. From the moment he found himself in a position of power, as the son of Thomas W. Lamont '92, I. P. Morgan's partner, he has always been a rebel against vested power.

His defiant attitude has also brought political repercussions, culminating in his recent tangle with Senator McCarthy. When Lamont refused to answer him during one hearing last winter the Senator fired a new kind of question at him--it was in Russian. This antagonized Lamont; instead of replying to McCarthy, he read him a prepared statement challenging his authority as a Senator to challenge him at all.

Flustered McCarthy cited Lamont for contempt of Congress, and he was later indicted. The Senator had not expected this challenge, for the Lamont he had been grilling was the indifferent Lamont, who had written two years earlier, in connection with charges of Communism, "I was getting very bored with it all. I swore to myself that I was not going to spend the rest of my life denying silly stories that I was a Communist. Such accusations have always seemed so fantastic that I tended to laugh them off, to deny them intermittently, or to take refuge in the well-known lines:

Breathes there a man with soul so dead

That he was never called a Red!"

But the Senator had not reckoned with Lamont's rebellious attitude, which had roots deep in his boyhood.

Courting Controversy

While at Harvard, he attacked the College's clubs as "snobbish." The seeds for his political views also bloomed. He bucked considerable University pressure to gain permission for well-known radicals to address undergraduates.

after graduating, Lamont was co-author in 1936 of an article intended for he Alumni Bulletin, listing and discussing radicals who had attended the College. "Harvard long ago learned," hem wrote, "that the rebels and heretics of today are the leaders accepted by tomorrow. The stamp of the New England Puritan aristocracy is all over it--its economic conservatism along with its tolerance of dissent." The Bulletin refused to print his article, fearing it would prevent conservative alumni from contributing to the Tercentenary Fund. But later it appeared in the Advocate and in the Nation.

Twice during the Thirties Lamont visited Soviet Russia. Among the books he has written is one entitled: You Might Like socialism. "I dedicated this volume to my friends of the Harvard Class of 1924," Lamont says, "but have yet to hear that I made any converts among them." But he sees his own brand of socialism as being widely different from Communism. In fact, he has published a pamphlet listing 53 reasons "Why I am not a Communist." His own program Lamont describes as "socialism in economics, democracy in politics, and Humanism in philosophy." Elected as a Director of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1932, he was arrested two years later for picketing factories on strike. Nonetheless, some Harvard alumni nominated him for the Board of Overseers in 1937. The University, however, judged their petition "inadequate."

Courting the Court

Although Lamont usually terms himself an "independent radical, "Senator McCarthy would not withdraw the charge of "Communist." In the investigation which ultimately led to Lamont's indictment, the Senator used as evidence against him the Army's reference in a so-called "Communist" instruction manual to Lamont's book, The Peoples of the Soviet Union. The condemned military manual, he reasoned, infected Lamont vicariously. the latter declined to testify on the ground that McCarthy had no authority as a Senator to question a private author's right to freedom of the press.

Lamont hereby took his stand on the First Amendment. Yet the Supreme Court has already upheld refusals to answer based on the Fifth Amendment, while Lamont holds that it has "scrapped the First Amendment--as a poor security risk." But just as when he picketed strikes 20 years ago, Lamont's concern is not for his personal safety. "I am glad to risk a year in jail in attempting to win a judicial decision properly limited the scope of Congressional committees." the Court has not yet given a ruling on contempt of Congress has not yet given a ruling on contempt of congress caused by reliance on the First Amendment. Lamont hopes his case will produce this ruling.

Whatever the consequences of his indictment, however, he no longer laughs off the charge of "Communist" although in the newly-convened Congress the Wisconsin Senator is not chairman of the Investigations subcommittee, Lamont considers McCarthyism an uninterrupted threat to personal freedom. "It is a great responsibility," he says, "to find oneself suddenly in the front lines of the continuing battle of McCarthy versus the American people." But always the freewheeling rebel, Lamont could not refrain from adding: "It is a privilege, too."