A Chair

The endowment of any professorship bespeaks grace in the donor. Few bespeak also an interest equal to that recognized by Harvard men in the Theodore William Richards chair in Chemistry just established in his alma mater by Thomas W. Lamont, Harvard, '92, in memory of an elder brother, Hammond Lamont.

Theodore William Richards, Harvard '86, "foremost chemist in the U. S. university world," Nobel Laureate (1914), Davy medalist (1910), Faraday medalist (1911), Franklin, Gibbs and LeBlanc medalist, is still active at Harvard. Hammond Lamont was a classmate of Richards, himself distinguished in scholarship and undergraduate journalism.

After graduation, this elder Lamont continued with journalism, at Albany, N. Y., at Seattle, Wash. There was an interim of teaching English at Harvard and Brown, and then he became, in 1900, an editor of the Saturday Evening Post. Six years later, upon the retirement of the late Wendell Phillips Garrison, Lamont took his original, ironic, extremely vigorous pen over to The Nation, editing that magazine with conspicuous ability until his death in 1909.

By 1909, Thomas W. Lamont was well up in the financial profession. Two years later, he became a partner of J. P. Morgan. But the gulf that yawns today between Wall Street and Vesey Street, where the now pinko Nation is published, was narrower in those days. The Nation was still a "little American," a Mugwump, a champion of "intellectual minorities" rather than an assailant of "the predatory interests." Thomas W. Lamont, banker, and Hammond Lamont, editor, were not the poles apart that "Wall Street" and The Nation have since become.

What influence the brilliant, energetic journalist exerted upon a brother six years younger may be guessed at from the fact that Thomas, the year after his graduation, got a job as reporter on Whitelaw Reid's New York Tribune. Since then, there has been, in addition to Thomas W. Lamont, internationally-known banker: Thomas W. Lamont, chief figure in the syndicate that owned The New York Evening Post; Thomas W. Lamont, a director in the Crowell Publishing Co. (Woman's Home Companion, American Magazine, Collier's) ; Thomas W. Lamont, part owner of an ephemeral three-cent Evcrywcek.