Ambassadors, Attorneys, Accountants, Democratic and Republican Party Officials (1950s Interviews)
Interviewees:
Sir Percy C. Spender, ambassador from Australia to the United States
Stephen A. Mitchell, American attorney and Democratic Party official. He served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1952 to 1956, and was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Illinois in 1958.
W. Sterling Cole, Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from New York.
T. Coleman Andrews, accountant and an independent candidate for President of the United States.
T. Lamar Caudle, Justice Department official
Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, Polish military leader. Komorowski was born in Lwów (now L'viv in Ukraine), in the Austrian partition of Poland. In the First World War he served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and after the war became an officer in the Polish Army, rising to command the Grudziądz Cavalry School.
Thomas Coleman Andrews (February 19, 1899 -- October 15, 1983) was an accountant and an independent candidate for President of the United States.
Andrews was born in Richmond, Virginia. After high school, he worked at a meat packing company in Richmond. He then worked with a public accounting firm and he was certified as a CPA in 1921. Andrews formed his own public accounting firm in 1922. He went on leave from his firm in 1931 to become the Auditor of Public Accounts for the Commonwealth of Virginia, a position he held until 1933. He also took leave in 1938 to serve as controller and director of finance in Richmond. Andrews served in the office of the Under-Secretary of War as a fiscal director. He joined the United States Marine Corps in 1943, working as an accountant in North Africa and in the Fourth Marine Aircraft Wing.
Andrews retired from his firms in 1953 to become the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. He left the position in 1955 stating his opposition to the income tax. Andrews ran for President as the States' Rights Party candidate in 1956; his running mate was former Congressman Thomas H. Werdel. Andrews won 107,929 votes (0.17% of the vote) running strongest in the state of Virginia (6.16% of the vote), winning Fayette County, Tennessee and Prince Edward County, Virginia.
Senators, Governors, Businessmen, Socialist Philosopher (1950s Interviews)
Interviewees:
Joseph McCarthy, American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957
Corliss Lamont, 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.
Fuller Warren, 30th Governor of Florida
T. Lamar Caudle, Assistant Attorney General
Owen Brewster, American politician from Maine. Brewster, a Republican, was solidly conservative. Brewster was a close confidant of Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and an antagonist of Howard Hughes.
Robert S. Kerr, American businessman from Oklahoma. Kerr formed a petroleum company before turning to politics. He served as the 12th Governor of Oklahoma and was elected three times to the United States Senate. Kerr worked natural resources, and his legacy includes water projects that link the Arkansas River via the Gulf of Mexico.
Lamont was born in Englewood, New Jersey. His father, Thomas W. Lamont, was a Partner and later Chairman at J.P. Morgan & Co.. Lamont graduated as valedictorian of Phillips Exeter Academy in 1920, and magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1924. In 1924 he did graduate work at New College University of Oxford while he resided with Julian Huxley. The next year Lamont matriculated at Columbia University, where he studied under John Dewey. In 1928 he became a philosophy instructor at Columbia and married Margaret Hayes Irish. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1932 from Columbia University.[2] Lamont taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and the New School for Social Research . In 1962 he married Helen Elizabeth Boyden.[3]
Lamont served as a director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1932--1954, and chairman until his death, of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which successfully challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy's senate subcommittee and other government agencies. In the process Lamont was cited for contempt of Congress, but in 1956 an appeals court overturned his indictment. From 1951 until 1958, he was denied a passport by the State Department.
In 1965 he secured a Supreme Court ruling against censorship of incoming mail by the U.S. Postmaster General. In 1973 he discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests that the FBI had been tapping his phone, and scrutinizing his tax returns and cancelled checks for 30 years. His subsequent successful lawsuit set a precedent in upholding citizens' privacy rights. He also filed and won a suit against the Central Intelligence Agency for opening his mail.
Following the deaths of his parents, Lamont became a philanthropist. He funded the collection and preservation of manuscripts of American philosophers, particularly George Santayana. He became a substantial donor to both Harvard and Columbia, endowing the latter's Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties, currently held by Vincent A. Blasi. During the 1960s he and Margaret had divorced, and he married author Helen Boyden, who died of cancer in 1975. Lamont married Beth Keehner in 1986.
Lamont was president emeritus of the American Humanist Association, and in 1977 was named Humanist of the Year. In 1981, he received the Gandhi Peace Award. In 1998 Lamont received a posthumous Distinguished Humanist Service Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
Still an activist at the age of 88, he protested U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War in 1991. He died at home in Ossining, New York.