The New York Times reports:
His great-grandfather was J. P. Morgan’s right-hand man and partner. His great-uncle ran the American Civil Liberties Union. The main undergraduate library at Harvard bears the family’s name. So does an earth science observatory at Columbia University and a dormitory at Smith College.
Now, as Ned Lamont campaigns to unseat United States Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in next week’s Democratic primary, his wealth and family pedigree have become an issue in one of this year’s most closely watched election campaigns.
The Lamont family is quite interesting.There's Thomas Lamont who ran the House of Morgan.
Thomas Lamont helped finance the Bolshevik Revolution and the U.S. Communist Party.Thomas Lamont has this interesting fact about his
background:
The 1930 membership list of the American Eugenics Society included Vincent Astor, Bernard Baruch, George Eastman, Thomas Lamont, John D. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Margaret Sanger.
Probably no one has described the Lamont family better than the late
Carroll Quigley of Georgetown:
The associations between Wall Street and the Left, of which Mike Straight is a fair example, are really survivals of the associations between the Morgan Bank and the Left. To Morgan all political parties were simply organizations to be used, and the firm always was careful to keep a foot in all camps. Morgan himself, Dwight Morrow, and other partners were allied with Republicans; Russell C. Leffingwell was allied with the Democrats; Grayson Murphy was allied with the extreme Right; and Thomas W. Lamont was allied with the Left. Like the Morgan interest in libraries, museums, and art, its inability to distinguish between loyalty to the United States and loyalty to England, its recognition of the need for social work among the poor, the multipartisan political views of the Morgan firm in domestic politics went back to the original founder of the firm, George Peabody (1795-1869). To this same seminal figure may be attributed the use of tax-exempt foundations for controlling these activities, as may be observed in many parts of America to this day, in the use of Peabody foundations to support Peabody libraries and museums. Unfortunately, we do not have space here for this great and untold story, but it must be remembered that what we do say is part of a much larger picture.
Our concern at the moment is with the links between Wall Street and the Left, especially the Communists. Here the chief link was the Thomas W. Lamont family. This family was in many ways parallel to the Straight family. Tom Lamont had been brought into the Morgan firm, as Straight was several years later, by Henry P. Davison, a Morgan partner from 1909. Lamont became a partner in 1910, as Straight did in 1913. Each had a wife who became a patroness of Leftish causes, and two sons, of which the elder was a conventional banker, and the younger was a Left-wing sympathizer and sponsor. In fact, all the evidence would indicate that Tom Lamont was simply Morgan's apostle to the Left in succession to Straight, a change made necessary by the latter's premature death in 1918. Both were financial supporters of liberal publications, in Lamont's caseThe Saturday Review of Literature, which he supported throughout the 1920's and 1930's, and the New York Post, which he owned from 1918 to 1924.
The chief evidence, however, can be found in the files of the HUAC which show Tom Lamont, his wife Flora, and his son Corliss as sponsors and financial angels to almost a score of extreme Left organizations, including the Communist Party itself.
Hopefully,Ned Lamont will not have the political views of Thomas Lamont.
