Lloyd Morain, the last surviving member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s founding generation, died yesterday, July 13, at the age of 93.
Lloyd Morain played a leading role in the American Humanist Association (AHA) from its earliest days, and served as its president as well as editor of The Humanist magazine. With his wife Mary Morain, he wrote the popular book Humanism as the Next Step. A successful businessman, Morain brought his business and marketing acumen to the development of Humanism, and, with Mary, was a generous donor to the AHA and other Humanist organizations. Speaking of his numerous contributions to American Humanism, Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the AHA, recently said, “without Lloyd Morain’s leadership, the American Humanist Association would not exist today, and the entire organized movement might have faded away.”
Lloyd Morain’s contributions to international Humanism were as significant as his role in the American movement. While serving in the US Air Corps in Britain during the Second World War, he was a field representative of the AHA, and met with British Humanist leaders, including Harold J. Blackham. They all hoped for increased international contacts between Humanists after the war, and Morain played a key role in connecting Humanist leaders from the US, UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and elsewhere in the late 1940s. These connections led to the creation of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in 1952.
Morain was the only participant of the founding IHEU Congress in 1952 to attend IHEU’s most recent World Congress in Washington, DC, in 2008. On that occasion he shared some of his memories of IHEU’s early days with participants at the General Assembly and gave an interview about IHEU’s history to Jim Herrick. His interview can be read at: https://humanists.international/node/3247
–Matt Cherry