Lloyd Morain, the last of the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s founding generation, died Tuesday, July 13, 2010, near his home in Carmel, California. Lloyd was 93 years old.

Lloyd Morain played a leading role in the American Humanist Association (AHA) from its earliest days. From 1951 to 1955, he was president of the AHA, a position he again held from 1969 to 1972. He also served as editor of The Humanist magazine for more than a decade. With his wife Mary Morain, he wrote the popular book Humanism as the Next Step.The American Humanist Association presented Lloyd with the Humanist of the Year award in 1994, as well as the Humanist Heritage Award in 2007.

A successful businessman, Lloyd, 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’s contributions to international Humanism were as significant as his role in the American movement. He was a field representative of the AHA while serving in the US Air Corps in Britain during the Second World War, and met with British Humanist leaders including Harold J. Blackham. They all hoped for increased international contact 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.

After initially hoping that the World Union of Freethinkers would embrace the new Humanist organizations in the US and Northern Europe, Morain and Blackham realized that a new and explicitly Humanist international union was needed. After years of planning by Morain, Blackham, the Dutch Humanist leader Jaap van Praag and others, IHEU was officially launched in 1952 at the First World Humanist Congress in Amsterdam.

IHEU was headquartered in the Netherlands but was incorporated in New York State with Lloyd as one of its four directors. With the Dutch Humanist leader Jaap van Praag serving as IHEU president, and Britain’s Harold J. Blackham as secretary, Lloyd was the most prominent American leader of IHEU in its early years. He served on IHEU’s executive committee in the 1950s and ‘60s and continued to take part in its board and general assembly meetings right up until 2008.

The Morains travelled extensively, touring Asia and Africa as well as Europe. They often met with Humanist activists and emerging groups. In 1960, Lloyd met Humanist leaders in India and was impressed by their grassroots activism and potential as agents of social change. He visited Africa repeatedly from the 1950s until the 1990s. Leo Igwe, IHEU’s representative in West Africa said, “Lloyd Morain and his wife pioneered efforts to grow and support Humanist groups in Africa. I never met Lloyd and Mary but I will always remember them with a lot of appreciation.”

Lloyd Morain was born in Pomona, California, April 2, 1917. He managed the Illinois Gas Company from 1950-1988, serving as President from 1971 through 1988. A person of many talents, he also worked as an associate producer in Hollywood, and founded an Oregon school for boys with special needs. He was married for 53 years to Mary Dewing Morain. Mary, who worked closely with Lloyd in promoting Humanism, died in 1999.

Morain was the only participant of the founding IHEU Congress in 1952 to attend IHEU’s most recent World Congress in 2008 in Washington, DC. 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: http://www.iheu.org/node/3247

--Matt Cherry