Word: lamonts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...