Hypocrisy Against the Devil

Corliss Lamont accepts dialectical materialism. He supports the Soviet Union: “these [Soviet] Russians have had the strength and initiative to build a new form of society which constitutes a challenge to the rest of mankind.” But to a congressional committee: “I volunteered the information that I was not and never had been a member of the Communist Party. This I did in order to throw McCarthy off balance.”

Is Lamont himself perhaps off balance? What is the price of being a Communist manqué? Victorian Browning condemned the Duke and the lady for not consummating their purposed adultery. On the other hand, the great and good Dr. Johnson used to take prostitutes to dinner in order to hear their life stories. The common man will take Othello’s word: “They that mean virtuously and yet do so, / The devil their virtue tempts and they tempt heaven.” Though Corliss Lamont is not of the Communists, his latest book (Freedom Is as Freedom Does, Horizon Press, $3.95), like the others, is with them and for them.

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Medford Evans

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Corliss Lamont accepts dialectical materialism. He supports the Soviet Union: “these [Soviet] Russians have had the strength and initiative to build a new form of society which constitutes a challenge to the rest of mankind.” But to a congressional committee: “I volunteered the information that I was not and never had been a member of the Communist Party. This I did in order to throw McCarthy off balance.”

Is Lamont himself perhaps off balance? What is the price of being a Communist manqué? Victorian Browning condemned the Duke and the lady for not consummating their purposed adultery. On the other hand, the great and good Dr. Johnson used to take prostitutes to dinner in order to hear their life stories. The common man will take Othello’s word: “They that mean virtuously and yet do so, / The devil their virtue tempts and they tempt heaven.” Though Corliss Lamont is not of the Communists, his latest book (Freedom Is as Freedom Does, Horizon Press, $3.95), like the others, is with them and for them.