Corliss Lamont: Renegade Patriot
Audio Segment 4 in RealAudio^® and MP3

Several years ago, Corliss Lamont's Grandson, Jonathan Heap, a Hollywood feature film director and television producer, shot a 16mm film about his grandfather called Corliss Lamont: Renegade Patriot. The film exists only in rough cut form, but presented below is the fourth of five audio segments from the sound track of the film.

The topic of discussion in this audio clip is Corliss Lamont and his law suit against the U.S. Postmaster General for refusing to deliver mail from China.

Suit Against the U.S. Postmaster General.

By Corliss Lamont.
(Running Time: 2 minutes 6 seconds)

JPEG image of Corliss Lamont.

Transcription of Dialogue

SUIT AGAINST THE U.S. POSTMASTER GENERAL.
LAMONT: I didn't receive the mail. I received a postcard from the U.S. Post Office in San Francisco saying --
Dear Mr. Lamont, Arrived for you here, apparently a magazine from Communist China and we want to know whether you want to receive it, and if you do, just write back. If you don't write back, then we'll throw it away.
Well, I did neither. I immediately started a suit against the Postmaster General for delaying and interfering with my legitimate mail. I had not ordered this magazine. I was not a subscriber, but somebody in China had sent it to me, thinking that I might be interested, and that case I lost in the lower courts. Usually, we civil libertarians lose the cases in the lower courts, but then, when this got to the Supreme Court, I had a different court ruling, and I remember going down to Washington, D.C., to hear the argument on my case in the Supreme Court building itself. And, of course, that was extremely interesting, and my lawyer was there to fight the case, and in this case it was Leonard Boudin who carried on the argument, and I didn't really expect to win in the Supreme Court but, gee whiz, only a few months later they handed down a unanimous decision saying that this was an unconstitutional law and that it violated the First Amendment.
And it was the first decision in the U.S. Supreme Court that declared a statute unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment, so that I was rather pleased at that!

Alternate file format: M3U | MP3

	Introduction
	Opening Remarks
	Senator McCarthy
	On Humanism
	Postmaster General
NEXT	Closing Remarks

This page last revised: January 6, 2012.

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Corliss Lamont: Renegade Patriot Audio Segment 4 in RealAudio® and MP3

Suit Against the U.S. Postmaster General.

Corliss Lamont: Renegade Patriot
Audio Segment 4 in RealAudio^® and MP3