Corliss Lamont - Political Views

Political Views

Corliss Lamont's political views were Marxist and socialist for much of his life. During the 1930s he was openly Marxist. In 1934, Corliss Lamont identified himself to former communist Max Eastman as a 'Truth Communist', saying according to Eastman, that he "did not accept the policy of political lying to the masses practiced by the official communist parties under Stalin." Later, Eastman would openly challenge Lamont on his avowed loyalties, charging that:

You continued to run with the Stalinist chiefs. You never exposed their political lies, or said publicly what you said to me in private. For a very long time you played friends with both 'Lie Communists' and 'Truth Communists', and gave your money with one hand to the Stalinists and with the other to independent revolutionary papers…Anybody who plays both sides in quiet times will be found in a crisis on the side of power...

In 1936, Lamont helped found and subsidized the magazine Marxist Quarterly. After the Dewey Commission exposed the truth behind Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and the phoney Show Trials, including the trial in absentia of Leon Trotsky and executions of prominent Soviet citizens and government officials in Moscow, Lamont, along with other left-wing intellectuals refused to accept their published findings. In 1937, under the influence of the Popular Front, Lamont and 150 other left-wing writers affirmed Stalin's actions and that "the preservation of progressive democracy" demanded that Stalin's actions be ratified.

Lamont remained sympathetic to the Soviet Union well after World War II and the establishment of satellite Communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe, even authoring a pamphlet entitled The Myth of Soviet Aggression in 1952. In it, 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.

Only a year later, in 1953, Lamont penned Why I Am Not a Communist. Despite his allegiance to Marxism, he never joined the Communist Party USA, and even supported the Korean War. He ran two losing campaigns for the U.S. Senate from New York, in 1952 on the American Labor ticket, and again in 1958 on the Independent-Socialist ticket. Upon Fidel Castro's victory in Cuba in 1959, Lamont became an enthusiastic supporter of Castro and his revolutionary government.