Leo Marx, an Appreciation of a Pioneering Eco-Critic

 

Leo Marx, at Amherst College

      In college I studied American literature with Leo Marx (1919-2022), who died last week, aged 102. He also became my senior year honors thesis advisor. More than any of my other professors, he influenced my choice to go to graduate school. Leo had, in my junior year, published a book, The Machine in the Garden, which gained him a reputation among his peers as one of the foremost literary critics of his generation. The book’s thesis was original: that canonical American authors and painters, particularly in the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, responded both positively and negatively to the growing dominance of industrial technology and the desire for material wealth by creating, through their arts, fictional alternatives, literary or visual portraits of American culture that drew on the pastoral literary tradition in a metaphorical way. Or, in the case of Henry David Thoreau, here was someone who didn't just write pastoral but for two years lived it, at Walden Pond, before returning to civilized life in Concord to write his masterpiece, Walden. American environmentalism may also be viewed through this lens of nature as American pastoral, and as a result Leo is now considered an early eco-critic. I might not have thought about Thoreau and sound had I not read, in Leo’s literature class, about the shrieking, belching train that became a symbol of the industrial transformation of pastoral America, in the “Sounds” chapter of Walden. Leo's mind and his way with literary, social, and political ideas is well illustrated in a video made in the early 2000s (amazingly, when he was near to 90 years old) of a lecture he gave at MIT on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the American Myth, and the invasion of Iraq.
       I graduated from Amherst College in 1965. Leo and I stayed in touch for about twenty years thereafter. In 1972, when I'd just begun teaching at Tufts University, Leo was briefly in the public eye (and on the front page of the New York Times) when he was joined by many others from the College, including its president, John William Ward, to block the entrance at Westover (Massachusetts) Air Force Base, protesting the Vietnam War. Leo, Bill Ward, and hundreds of faculty and students were arrested for doing so. In 1977 Leo left Amherst for MIT, to become a professor in their newly-formed interdisciplinary program in science, technology, and culture. One of my classmates who also knew him at Amherst said that Leo told him he was feeling that the town and College were too far away from the cultural and political mainstream. The move to MIT would bring him closer to where he decided that he wanted to be. He had spent 20 years living in a pastoral New England town, teaching in an idyllic liberal arts college where we, the students, having left our familiar homes, lived in a pastoral retreat ourselves, in a privileged educational and social, rural college community, before we entered the real world (as it then was called). Leo finally left Amherst's pastoral for the city of Boston. In so doing he showed, literally, what he had claimed in his book, that the pastoral worked better as a symbolic field than as a permanent habitation; yet his interest in the idea of American pastoral never departed. He retired in 1990 but continued teaching in the MIT program as a senior lecturer, until stopping at last in 2015 at the age of 94. Whether he felt that he had a better perch there than at Amherst I never knew.   
       Leo had, also, been a pioneering scholar in the field of American Studies. Although he was not among the field's very founders, he was one of the founders' first students; and he soon became their friend and colleague. Their project, undertaken chiefly in the period from the latter part of the New Deal to the Vietnam War, was to examine the supposedly unique character and history of the United States as a democratic society and nation. They often did so by analyzing the cultural and historical meanings of themes like “the American dream,” or the Westward expansion of the frontier, or slavery and emancipation, women’s suffrage, the meaning of free speech, or immigration and the “melting pot.” They examined historical and contemporary responses to facts of importance to the development of American culture—New England Puritanism, for example, or cotton plantations and textile mills—and found in them symbols expressing both affirmation and despair over the past, present and future of the United States. However, the post-Vietnam War generation of American Studies scholars—my generation—did not think that Leo’s generation had gone far enough in exposing the violence and suppression in American history and culture: genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants of the United States; colonialist exploitation and transformation of the continent; continuing, institutionalized racial, ethnic, class, and gender discrimination; an increasingly imperialist foreign policy; and so on. Indeed, Leo’s generation was (wrongly, I think) attacked as believers in and therefore defenders of the American experiment as a whole. They did believe in the possibility of America, but they were critics of American society and well aware that its promise had yet to come close to being realized.  

American pastoral: The Lackawanna Valley (George Innes, c 1855).

 

      Leo spent some time fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of his generation’s “myth-symbol school” of American Studies, as it had come to be called (after Henry Nash Smith’s 1950 book, Virgin Land, on the American West as myth and symbol). Although he summed up his defense in a 2003 article in the Boston Review, he had also been busy as an eco-critic, following the path he charted in The Machine in the Garden into further studies in literature, technology, and the environment. He found like-minded scholar-activist colleagues in the environmental movement. Today ecomusicologists and environmental humanists recognize him more for his eco-criticism and pioneering work in studying the impact of technology on American culture, than for his participation in the development of the American Studies movement.
       Recently I watched an oral history interview that an Amherst professor and former colleague did with Leo, as part of the Friends of the Amherst College Library series. Leo was then in his early 90s and seemed a little bored on that occasion, but now and again he revealed some things that I hadn’t realized about him. I had known that he taught at the University of Minnesota during the heyday of its American Studies program; in fact, he steered me there for my graduate studies. But I hadn’t known that Minnesota denied him tenure. He did not say why, nor did it seem to trouble him. Fortunately for him, and for Amherst College, he found a home there directly after leaving Minnesota. Leo also spoke about his role as a catalyst in the College’s anti-Vietnam War protests. He said some of the more conservative faculty members thought of him as a troublemaker.

Leo Marx in 1985; photo by Jerome Liebling

       We also had a few other things in common besides Minnesota, I realized, when he spoke in the interview about the transition he had to make when he went from Amherst, a liberal arts college where he taught undergraduates exclusively, to MIT, where he was suddenly responsible for the professional training and future careers of graduate students. I made a similar transition about ten years later, moving from teaching (mainly) undergraduates at Tufts, to directing the PhD program in ethnomusicology at Brown. I don’t know if Leo made the transition easily. I know I didn’t. Leo did speak about the difficulties he had teaching undergraduates at MIT who were already well into their scientific specialties. I didn’t have that problem at Brown; I had a different one. I didn’t like the ways in which the professional concerns of the PhD students in our ethnomusicology program often made it inadvisable for them to follow the paths where their intellectual curiosities were taking them, to explore avenues of learning that were exciting but probably would not have a career payoff. It took me some time to reconcile to that, and to realize more completely my own responsibilities to the students’ careers.
       Although it has continued as an interdisciplinary field, American Studies fragmented in the 1980s and 1990s into a series of subjects: studies in social history, labor history, American minorities, race and gender studies, and so forth, effectively abandoning the idea that there was anything unique or unifying about American culture. In today’s even more polarized America, the belief that there is, or was, such a thing as a process of Americanization that resulted in, or was moving towards, a common culture, appears quaint—or, possibly, the kind of nostalgia that a segment of the population feels for a once-great America, but as Leo and his generation of scholars showed, its myths and symbols revealed it to be much more of a complex mixture of hope and despair, than a land of liberty and justice for all.