Томас Уильям Ламонт младший: Американский банкир и дипломат

American banker

Thomas William Lamont Jr. (September 30, 1870 – February 2, 1948) was an American banker.

Lamont was born in Claverack, New York. His parents were Thomas Lamont, a Methodist minister, and Caroline Deuel Jayne. Since his father was a minister, they moved around Upstate New York a lot and they were not very wealthy.

At Harvard, he became first freshman editor of The Harvard Crimson, which helped him pay off some of his tuition. He graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1892. He met his wife, Florence Haskell Corliss, at the 1890 Harvard commencement. He started working under the city editor for the New York Tribune two days after he graduated from Harvard in 1892. He married Florence on October 31, 1895 in Englewood, New Jersey. He also worked for the Albany Evening Journal, Boston Advertiser, Boston Herald, and New York Tribune, which paid only $25, while he was at Harvard. At the Tribune, he received many promotions, including night editor and helping the financial editor, which gave him his first taste of the financial world. He left journalism because of the low pay and went into business. Lamont not only advised the other countries but also went to them. Right before he was going to go to Europe, the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. He and the head of the American Red Cross, William B. Thompson, along with the approval of the British prime minister, Lloyd George, tried to convince America to aid the Bolsheviks so that Russia would stay in the war. However, they were unsuccessful.

Both he and Norman H. Davis were appointed as representatives of the Treasury Department to the Paris Peace Conference and had to determine what Germany had to pay in reparations. He participated in the committees that drew up the 1924 Dawes Plan and the 1929 Young Plan to reduce the amount paid by Germany.

In the interwar period, he was a spokesman for J. P. Morgan because J. P. Morgan Jr. was retiring. He handled the press and defended the firm during hearings like those of Arsene Pujo that investigated powerful Wall Street bankers. Lamont was elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1932.

Lamont later undertook a semiofficial mission to Japan in 1920 to protect American financial issues in Asia. However, he did not aggressively challenge Japanese efforts to build a sphere of influence in Manchuria; indeed, he supported Japan's non militaristic politics until late into the 1930s. Ron Chernow won the National Book Award for his book The House of Morgan in which he claimed that Lamont had authored the infamous Japanese response to deceive the world about the Mukden incident, which was used as a pretext for Japan's invasion of Manchuria. That defied the expressed position of US government and the League of Nations that Japan, not China, was the aggressor.

Lamont was the chairman of the International Committee of Bankers on Mexico for which he successfully negotiated the De la Huerta Lamont Treaty. He continued to chair the committee into the 1940s by a series of renegotiations of Mexico's foreign debt.

In 1926, Lamont, self described as "something like a missionary" for Italian fascism, secured a $100 million loan for Benito Mussolini. The market crashed the following Thursday. In an attempt to stop the panic, Lamont organized Wall Street firms to inject confidence back into the stock market through massive purchases of blue chip stocks. The effort failed, and stocks ultimately lost a quarter of their value that week. After the crash unfolded, the Senate Banking Committee found that J. P. Morgan (headed by Lamont), had maintained a "preferential stock list", to allow for liquidation of stocks during the crash at prices premium to actual market value. Politicians, including Calvin Coolidge, and family members of prominent bankers, were on the list.

Following the reorganization of J. P. Morgan & Co. in 1943, Lamont was elected chairman of the board of directors, after Morgan Jr. died, becoming the first non Morgan after George Peabody to chair the bank.

Lamont became a generous benefactor of Harvard and Exeter once he had amassed a fortune, notably by funding the building of Lamont Library. At the end of World War II, Lamont made a very substantial donation toward restoring Canterbury Cathedral in England. His widow, Florence Haskell Corliss donated Torrey Cliff, their weekend residence overlooking the Hudson River in Palisades, New York, to Columbia University. It is now the site of the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory. Upon Florence's death, a bequest established the Lamont Poetry Prize.

Lamont died in Boca Grande, Florida, in 1948.

In 1895, Lamont married Florence Haskell Corliss. Born Englewood, NJ in 1873, Florence graduated from Smith College in 1893 and received an M. A. in Philosophy from Columbia University. Thomas and Florence had 4 children. Their son, Corliss, was a philosophy professor at Columbia University and an avowed socialist. Another son, Thomas Stilwell Lamont, was later vice chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust and a fellow of the Harvard Corporation. One of his grandsons, Lansing Lamont, was a reporter with Time from 1961 to 1974. He published several books, including You Must Remember This: A Reporter’s Odyssey from Camelot to Glasnost about his experiences covering the important events of the time, including the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Another grandson, Thomas William Lamont II, served in the submarine service on the Snook and died when the submarine sank in April 1945. One of his great grandsons, Ned Lamont, was elected governor of Connecticut in 2018.

Lamont is a major character in Nomi Prins' novel Black Tuesday (2011) and in Kit Holland's Soul Slip Peak (2013).

Henry P. Davison; the record of a useful life Harper & Brothers, New York and London, 1933. My boyhood in a parsonage, some brief sketches of American life toward the close of the last century Harper & Brothers, New York and London, 1946. Across world frontiers, Harcort Brace & Co., New York, 1951.

Thomas W. Lamont papers at Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School. Lamont Corliss Family Papers, , Smith College.