ABSTRACT
This is best seen in his lengthy correspondence with Corliss Lamont, perhaps the leading American apologist for Stalinism during the 1940s and 1950s. Lamont had, among other things, defended the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, praised Stalin, and accused anti-communists such as John Dewey and Norman Thomas of "red-baiting." Hook never gave up hope of reforming Lamont. As late as November 16, 1966 (see page 292), nearly three decades after he had fIrst condemned Lamont for being pro-Stalin, Hook wrote:
Hook's passionate, time-consuming efforts to convince Lamont to repudiate his past were doomed to fail. If Hook had been less the rationalist, he would have realized that Lamont was no more able to repudiate that which gave his life meaning than an archbishop was able to disavow faith in the truths of Christianity. There was simply nothing that Hook could have done to convince Lamont to recant, but still he persisted in this touching but doomed effort. As his relationship with Lamont demonstrates, Hook never fully appreciated the extent to which politics during the twentieth century had become for some a quasi-religion immune to rational refutation.
