A Tribute to Leo Marx (1919-2022)

Professor Leo Marx died in March at the age of 102, thus severing the last tie to the founding generation of American Studies scholars. After serving in WWII, Marx took his PhD from Harvard’s new History of American Civilization program. There, he studied with and befriended many of the major figures in the new field, including Perry Miller (his dissertation adviser), F.O. Matthiessen, Bernard Bowron, and Henry Nash Smith. He went on to teach at the University of Minnesota and Amherst College, before settling at MIT, where he spent the last four decades of his career. He taught his last graduate seminar at age ninety.

His research focused on technology and that “region of culture where literature, general ideas, and certain products of the collective imagination…meet.”[1] In addition to his iconic Machine in the Garden (1964), his scholarship included The Pilot and The Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in The United States (1988), edited volumes on technology in American culture and history, introductions to classic works of American literature, and countless essays on science, technology, landscape, and literature.

In addition to that work, Marx was a vigorous commentator on the history and state of American Studies. In a 2005 essay, he related a conversation from the 1950s in which a young Americanist, attempting to justify the then-new field, had exclaimed, “But you don’t understand, I believe in America!”  Marx called this the “representative anecdote” of the early field, a story that clarified its animating impulse. This “belief” represented the tension between American Studies scholars’ simultaneous left-liberal criticism and their confidence in the nation’s founding ideals; it represented their desire to understand American culture in order to pave the way for something better. Machine in the Garden concludes, “By incorporating in their work the root conflict of our culture, they [“our writers”] have clarified our situation. They have served us well. To change the situation we require new symbols of possibility, and although the creation of those symbols is in some measure the responsibility of artists, it is in greater measure the responsibility of society.”[2]

In addressing the “responsibility of society,” Marx was to the left of many, perhaps most, of his peers. At a 1975 event on the Harvard atmosphere in the 1930s, he said, “When I was a student I came to the conclusion, which I still hold, that there is some deep incompatibility between the system of minority ownership and the distribution of wealth it produces in this country (which we call capitalism), and democracy. And I am committed to the effort to recreate American society so that it will be more compatible with democracy.” He saw the recreation of America as a political project, but he also hoped that academics could play a role. He went on, “We still need, in Matty’s [Matthiessen’s] or in Emerson’s terms, some way of putting what we learn in the academy into a vision of possibilities for whole communities and whole societies.”[3]

Marx has been both celebrated and condemned as a prominent practitioner of what Bruce Kuklick named the “myth and symbol” school of American Studies. Developed by Matthiessen and Smith, this approach focused on the recurrent images in American culture, images that shaped the “collective imagination” of Americans and thus influenced everything from literature to politics. It grew out of early scholars’ effort to join a broader conversation in the 1920s and ‘30s about the nature of “American civilization” and its distinguishing features.

Though influential as an approach to a wide range of cultural forms, this method has come under fire for implying American exceptionalism and for eliding diverse experiences into one “American Culture.” Later in his life, Marx acknowledged the myopic quality of much early scholarship. In their “concern with the distinctiveness of American culture and society,” he recognized, early American Studies scholars had “overlooked salient differences of gender, ethnicity, sexual preference and—though to a lesser extent—differences of race and class.” The “turn toward difference” in post-Sixties scholarship was, he emphasized, both “long overdue and … salutary.”[4]

Long before I started studying American Studies—first as an undergraduate and now for my dissertation—much of the myth-and-symbol approach had already gone out of fashion. The idea of one “American culture” or of a cohesive “popular imagination” seemed (and seems) absurd, impossible. But even in this climate, Leo Marx’s work continues to receive attention and respect from students in the field. He was unusual in his ability to balance “belief” in the field’s founding mission with a sensitive understanding of the criticism it had received in recent decades. That balance made him both trustworthy as a writer and useful as a model. And—at a time when the impulse to flee to nature is strong and when technology is both our primary source of danger (guns, nuclear weapons, carbon emissions) and our only saving hope (alternative energy sources, digital communication, vaccines)—his lessons on the contradictions of the pastoral design in Machine in the Garden are especially relevant.

[1] Leo Marx, The Machine In the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal In America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 4.

[2] Ibid., 365.

[3] Leo Marx in ed. John Lydenberg, A Symposium on Political Activism and the Academic Conscience: The Harvard Experience, 1936 – 1941 (Hobart & William Smith Colleges, 1977), 85-6.

[4]  Leo Marx, “On Recovering the” Ur” Theory of American Studies,” American Literary History v. 17, n. 1 (Spring 2005), 124.