Renegade Patrician

IN 1974, two of the most famous, and in some quarters, most infamous, scions of two of America's most famous and infamous patrician clans have bared it all. Or at least, all they feel like baring. By fate, coincidence, or contingency Nelson Rockefeller and Corliss Lamont, nabobs of Standard Oil and the House of Morgan, respectively, have hung heaps of autobiographical linen out to dry at the same time. Modern detergents and public relations notwithstanding, only one man comes out clean in the wash.

Rockefeller and Lamont both come from up-town, East Coast, forever philanthropic, library-building families that take great stock in printing private genealogies and producing model citizens. Rockefeller and Lamont are both closing in on that age when reminiscing becomes more than attending the occasional Ivy League alumni gathering. One is 66, the other 72. And, as their initial golden-days forays into reminiscence and self-accounting reveal, Rockefeller's in 72 pages and four days before the white-hot television lights of the Senate Rules Committee, Lamont's in a little-noticed collection of essays entitled Voice in the Wilderness, it's harder than the average communist thinks to bite the trust fund that feeds you.

Still, if Lamont hasn't bitten too brazenly (and it goes without saying that patrician parents demand oral gratification) Rockefeller nonetheless exceeded all previously known limits for filial sucking-up. The vice-presidential nominee delivered a maudlin soliloquy on the "Influence of My Mother." By contrast, Lamont's introductory, right-up-front candor is inviting indeed:

Various people, especially newspaper columnists, have habitually tried to make a mystery out of my beliefs and actions owing to the fact that my father, Thomas W. Lamont, was a successful banker. But both my father and mother were warm, sympathetic, generous individuals who were liberals on most issues of importance and shared with me the aim of seeking the greatest good for the greatest number...In a real sense, I have carried on in the spirit of my parents, though thinking their goals would be more likely achieved through leftist solutions.

Lamont goes on to deny that an Oedipal complex, arising from hate of a father who hobnobbed with J.P. Morgan and James J. Hill, was "operative" in his decision to become a socialist, Humanist, civil libertarian and world pacifist. True to form, just as throughout this compendium of essays Lamont attacks determinism in any name, shape and form (Christian theistic, Marxist economic, Skinnerian behaviorist, even shades he sights in Dewey's naturalistic), he dismisses Freudian psychology as the explanation for his very un-patrician life choices. Rather, Lamont places a premium on just such choices--life choice, free will, individual accountability. From there, he spins a personal philosophy of "naturalistic humanism," scientific, rational, ethical, democratic, and internationalist, in order of presentation.

The 44 essays in Voice in the Wilderness are divided into three parts, detailing the chronological framework of Lamont's three weightiest concerns: humanist philosophy, civil liberties, and world peace and socialism. Although it was as an undergraduate at Harvard, Lamont ('24) says in the essay "It All Began in the Yard," that he fought his first skirmishes for the First Amendment and the League of Nations, his philosophic studies at Oxford and at Columbia under Dewey and F.J.E. Woodbridge pointed to his consuming passion.

Unlike his Rockefeller counterpart, who metamorphosed unnoticeably from the strict Baptist faith of his grandfather to the tepid, gently-theistic civil religion so at home recently in the White House, Lamont turned into a shrill, at times evangelical Humanist. Not just a fly in the smooth ointment of his family's liberal Protestantism, but a gadfly among the "New Philosophers," correcting Dewey's semantics and grammar here, rescuing George Santayana from an ignominious Vatican tomb-marker there, always, always proselytizing for the American Humanist Association, the Ethical Union of America, and other similar religious-philosophical organizations.

To his credit, Lamont spurned the narrowly academic tendencies of his own personality and the universities where he taught in favor of an activist role in healing U.S.-Soviet relations, in fighting the red-baiters of both post-war eras, in protesting the Hiroshimas, the Bays of Pigs, the Vietnams. And, as certain of his essays in Voice in the Wilderness drive home, the reader should be grateful. For Lamont, had he written the books requisite to obtain a tenured position more revered than the "lecturer in philosophy" job he worked at intermittently for almost two decades at Columbia, Cornell, the New School and Harvard's Graduate School of Education, would surely have wallowed in the nitpicking pedantry that some of the lesser essays in Voice in the Wilderness border on.

THE BEST pieces in this collection are good not because they are "relevant," though they hit upon every solid issue the American left has argued in the 20th century. They are worth reading because Lamont is authentic--he is there on the courtroom floor, on the picket line, at the teach-in sessions when his colleagues of the cloister are silent. Lamont fought Harding and isolationism from his typewriter as an editor of The Crimson, fought for the right to bring dissenting speakers such as Eugene V. Debs, William Z. Foster and Scott Nearing to Harvard as chairman of the Union Undergraduate Committee. And Lamont continued to take on the Goliaths of reaction--Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Joe McCarthy.

In fact, Corliss Lamont has taken such admirable stances for half a century it is hard to be rough with him. A biography might have established the distance needed between the man and his actions to evaluate his philosophical and ideological stances. Yet one does wonder whether such a work on such an untenured maverick would sell with the committees that parcel out tenure to the sort of people who would write such a book. Despite such problems of point of view, Lamont emerges as "warm and agreeable" as the Humanism he dotes upon. And most of all, he comes clean.

Reading Lamont's essays grates against all the modern sensibilities. Samples from one year, 1973, range from an interview with Chile's president Salvador Allende to a humanist pamphlet titled "How to Be Happy--Though Married." Who is this latter-day Ben Franklin, anyway? Why is he trying to take a stance on every conceivable aspect of life in this world? How can anyone be "conversant," "critical," and "definitive" in more than the appointed intellectual niche? Corliss Lamont, yea even a Corliss Widener, who does he think he is?

The questions still stand after finishing Voice in the Wilderness. Perhaps Lamont's chronicling of his quiet, underexposed work for humanism, civil liberties and socialism is a desperate attempt for recognition from a retired fellow-traveler standing a half-skip, jump or foot away from the grave. Lamont wrote obsessively on the subject of death as a young man--philosophic studies, poetry anthologies, scientific debates on reincarnation and psychic phenomena. His thanatology concluded in a "higher hedonism" doctrine, which stressed living vitally, though ethically, since man is always a heartbeat away from nonentity.

Lamont's autobiographical venture came at a time when he saw Dartmouth's "Most Likely to Succeed" of 1930, Nelson Rockefeller, a heartbeat away from the temporal world's highest office. Maybe the inherent injustice in an ordering of the world in which Nelson Rockefeller can be president prodded Lamont to grab, finally, at immortality. If so, Voice in the Wilderness represents his most thoroughly human act to date.