Technology: The Machine in the Garden, 50th Anniversary

 After the American Century

Remarks made at MIT celebrating the fiftieth anniversary 

of the publication of

Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden

 

I first heard about The Machine in the Garden when a freshman at Amherst College in 1964. I saw it reviewed in the local newspaper, and I went out and bought a copy in hard cover, as a Christmas present for my father. He was interested in the history of technology, but I was not, or so I thought. I did not consider reading it myself, until I had a course with Leo Marx the following year. 

Amherst prides itself on a low student-faculty ratio and small classes. But Professor Marx’s survey of American literature was so popular that he taught in the largest lecture room on campus. About 150 students took the course every year, which meant that about half of all the Amherst student body chose to take it. He lectured on the Puritans, natural depravity, attempts to define "what is an American" from Crévecoeur onwards, the pastoral dream of America, the madness of Ahab in Moby Dick, Thoreau's theory of civil disobedience, and Whitman's barbaric yawp heard over the rooftops of the world. For those of us taking the course, this literature often seemed to be a meta-commentary on our times. The generals in the Pentagon were our Ahabs, the leaders of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements our Thoreaus, and Bob Dylan was our version of Whitman’s barbaric yawp. Our best hope, it seemed, was to survive the coming apocalypse as the Ishmaels of our generation. This was not the thrust of Professor Marx's course, I hasten to add, which was a most inspiring and coherent set of lectures on nineteenth century literature.  I then bought a second copy of The Machine in the Garden, by then in paperback. Reading it, I could hear Leo’s wonderfully engaging voice, which at times has an almost hypnotic quality when he reads from and explicates literature. The survey course made such an impression that his seminars were oversubscribed, and I was one of the lucky 20 who managed to get into one of them.

When each Amherst class graduated, the custom was to select a faculty member as an honorary member of the class. Shortly before graduation the faculty member selected gave a final lecture to the entire class in the College chapel. My class of 1968 selected Leo Marx, and he lectured on technology in American society, with considerable reference to Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Human Development, which had appeared the previous year. I cannot claim to recall his argument in detail, but it linked the themes of  The Machine in the Garden with sociology and philosophy, notably Martin Heidigger’s understanding that the essence of technology lies in the mind not the machine. The tensions analyzed in The Machine and the Garden were not new, but had emerged in antiquity, as with Mumford’s example was the building of the pyramids. Classical references were also in Leo’s book, notably his discussion of the emergence of the pastoral genre in ancient Greece and Rome and its re-emergence in early modern Britain.

Let me draw a few conclusions based on these Amherst years. Before its publication, Leo’s book developed to some degree through his teaching. Many close readings of particular authors were presented and no doubt refined in front of his students before the volume itself appeared. Through the process of teaching, it seems, Leo found compelling ways to make his argument. The ideas themselves had first been nurtured at Harvard in the 1940s, where he studied with F O Matthiessen and Perry Miller, and where he was Henry Nash Smith’s TA. But he reworked his dissertation for over a decade. He was not forced to rush into print in order to gain tenure, as is the unhappy practice today. This is a great book partly because it was closely linked to teaching and because its author was able to give it time. 

My copy of The Machine in the Garden went with me to the University of Minnesota, where Leo had once taught, and where Alan Trachtenberg [who spoke just before I did] was one of his students. His former colleagues recalled him fondly, particularly Barney Bowron, who taught me much about late nineteenth century American literature. The Machine in the Garden was highly regarded at the Center for American Studies, and I found it useful not only in courses but also in framing my PhD thesis. Only in graduate school did I fully understand that this book was quite interdisciplinary. At Amherst the combination of history, literature, fine art, and the social sciences had seemed quite natural, but at Minnesota the faculty at these departments did not always share a commitment to interdisciplinarity. Notably, the New Criticism was still strong in the English Department, and I found that I had to defend the “myth and symbol” approach and to find arguments for the practice of American Studies itself.  To my surprise, I discovered many arguments along these lines in The Machine in the Garden, in paragraphs that had not seemed so important when I was an undergraduate. I more fully understood its importance in shaping the development of the field of American Studies. It offered a model for how to combine sweeping analysis with close readings of texts, including literature, political speeches, government reports, and much more. It was genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on classics, history, psychology, philosophy, popular culture, and  fine art, even as it kept the main focus on literature.

By the middle 1970s when I was out of graduate school, academic fashions were changing rapidly. The field of American Studies was going through a transformation that emphasized social history more than literature and that focused on racial injustice, class tensions, and gender inequality.  These matters were not excluded from the American Studies I had known at Amherst, and it has always seemed to me that they were very much part of the tradition of American Studies that Leo represented. Nevertheless, each academic generation seems to establish itself by attacking those who went before. The so-called “myth and symbol school,” which in fact never formally existed or identified itself by that name, came under attack. This is not the place to rehearse the debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Suffice it to say that while it is true that the book might have included such writers as Willa Cather or Ralph Ellison, their addition would not have undermined or compromised the argument, but rather showed its strengths. There is an enormous difference between leaving someting out because it does not fit a line of argument and leaving something out because not all of American literature can be discussed in a single book. In any case, The Machine in the Garden has outlasted its critics, most of whom  are little remembered today except by specialists. It remains in pint, and people continue to cite it today. It is so well-known that other books refer to it in their very titles. In 1994 appeared, The Garden in the Machine (Princeton), in 2004 The Machine in Neptune’s Garden (Watson Science), and in 2001 The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place.  The journalist Joel Garreau has written an essay, "The Machine, the Garden, and Paradise" (1991). There is also a gothic/darkwave musical duo who call themselves “The Machine in the Garden”. No doubt there are more examples.

Throughout my academic life both Leo and his book have preceded me. When I went to Spain on a Fulbright, I found that Leo had been there lecturing the year before, and The Machine in the Garden  was a celebrated work. When I went for a year to The Netherlands, I found that he was friends with several people there, and that he had apparently lectured at all their universities. He had also spent a Fulbright himself in Britain, and he was well-known in Germany. Furthermore, Leo spent enough of his childhood in France to speak that language. It is difficult to find a European professor of American literature who has not read The Machine in the Garden. I could give many more examples, but one final one. A month ago I sat down at a random table in an airport restaurant waiting for my flight. At the next table a Finnish woman was talking about a lecture she was going to give in Stockholm about ecology and literature. It turned out that one of the first books cited in her paper was The Machine in the Garden.

When I bought that first edition for my father fifty years ago, I could never have imagined how much it would come to mean for me, for American Studies, and for the history of technology. As environmental concerns become more urgent, it is also being rediscovered by a new generation of scholars in other fields. It remains useful in my research and teaching. A colleague at the University of Texas told me that the new graduate students are quite interested in it. One of my classmates from Amherst, Gordon Radley who has a high position at Lucas Films, tells me that The Machine in the Garden has been influential in the formation of some of their motion pictures. If a comprehensive study were done of this book's influence, many more such stories would come to light.

After half a century of prominence, The Machine in the Garden has become an important part of  American culture. It is one of those rare books that is, at the same time, a primary source and a secondary source.  We read it both as one of the highest achievements of American Studies in its first two decades, and as a compelling meditation on the place of technology in American society. 

Technology: America as Second Creation

After the American Century

 

Some years ago an American magazine interviewed me about America as Second Creation (MIT Press, 2003), but in the end decided not to publish the interview. Here it is with only slight revisions to hide the identity of the magazine.

Tell me about your background, and what led you to write about technology.

I had a good education, first at Amherst and then Minnesota for my Ph.D.  I was lucky that my father is an engineer, who never tired of explaining to me how things worked. Because of him, even as a kid I knew that there’s nothing inevitable about any technology. Most history books suggest that certain machines are inevitable. Readers get the impression that the canal system, the electric light or the airplane just had to come when they did. But these technologies, or the railroad or the automobile, could have been made earlier or later, or in many different ways, shapes, and sizes, and they might never have become as central to American life as they did. Someone makes each one, designers try to improve it, and someone tries to market it. Technologies are all contingent on the human element, and there is nothing inevitable about the architecture or the timing of a Microsoft program or the Internet. 

Does living abroad make you more aware of this?

Absolutely. Because I ended up teaching US history in Denmark, lots of things that seemed natural to me as an American suddenly seemed artificial. The Danes made different choices, for example using bicycles a lot more, rejecting skyscraper architecture, heating their homes and offices centrally rather than putting a furnace in each one, and so on. All the talk about globalization can mislead. Technological systems are not the same everywhere, because cultures shape them.

The idea of America rewriting its history and eliminating the devastation brought upon those before them has been explored before, (Howard Zinn, for example) And the idea of technology not being inherently positive, of course, has also been a theme before. Describe the new angle, argument, or message that is at the center of your America as Second Creation.

Good questions. Every generation rewrites history, emphasizing the stories that seem most important to it. For the last generation, most American history writing has not been about technology. It has focused on race, gender, ethnicity, and class. This is a good thing, in the sense that it is no longer a story dominated by generals and politicians who mostly were white males. Meanwhile, a sub-field, the history of technology has grown up on the margins, but most historians still pretty much ignore it. My book seeks to wake people up to the centrality of technology in American history, not by pointing once again at a list of great machines, the cotton gin, the steam engine, and so on. Instead, I argue that technologies are a central part of the stories long used to explain America’s growth and development. Not only that, but there have always been competing stories about even something as apparently simple as the American axe.

But two chapters on the American axe?

Certainly, one devoted to the heroic stories of the pioneers wielding the axe to clear the forests and build log cabins, and one chapter about environmental destruction. One about the axe as an individualistic symbol, and one about fears that overuse of the axe would destroy watershed areas, eliminate wildlife habitat, and undermine Native American culture. And please note, there is some truth to both of these stories. You cannot understand American history through just one of them. So the whole book is built up in alternating chapters, exploring both the heroic stories about railroads, factories, irrigation systems and other things, and the counter-narratives that speak for what was lost or damaged or compromised.  I see my work as a way to link the history of machines to the history of ordinary people.

Can you tell me how this work expands on, or is different from your previous works?

I see the new book as the end of a trilogy on technology in the US. American Technological Sublime (1994) looked at the excitement surrounding new machines, without examining the longer-term consequences. Consuming Power (1998), in contrast, was about the long-term, as it looked at how and why the US became far and away the world’s largest energy consumer. And the new book is about how Americans weave machines into their sense of the nation, through telling stories. So, for example, the first book looked at how the railroad, the first skyscrapers or Apollo XI seemed just utterly amazing when they were new, and shows that Americans saw technologies to be as sublime as the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. The second book also included a section on the railroad, but it focused on how Americans used the steam engine to reorganize social and economic life.  The third book barely touches on either of these topics, because it is about the foundation stories that Americans told – literally stories about how the country came into being. The pioneer with the axe or the new railroad built into the wilderness were conceived as remaking the world. People believed they were transforming America into a second creation.

Which contemporary technologies strike you as most likely to be at the center of American historical narratives of our era?

The Internet. So many different stories and ideas were floating around in the 1990s about what it meant. The whole concept of cyberspace exemplifies the idea of second creation, of building a new community or new economy in a new realm. Just look at John Perry Barlow’s "Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace" or at any number of things that were predicted about it. It was a  utopian moment. And, of course, there were dystopian fears, too, that cyberspace would bring not liberation or community or a redefinition of gender but government surveillance or corporate tyranny or massive invasion of privacy. And please note that anyone who wants to understand the Internet’s potential and meaning has to take account of both kinds of stories. The cultural moment of the last decade contains both, and they continue to shape the technology, which, remember, is not inevitable but can be made to develop in several possible directions. 

The only other narrative with a similar scope and importance now, it seems to me, is not that of space exploration, which briefly seemed central during the space race of the Cold War. Rather, it is genetic engineering, where again a host of competing stories are trying to convince us about what it means. Americans have bought genetically modified foods, but Europeans mostly have not – because they embed genetic engineering in quite different stories than Americans do.

These stories are not something added on later by historians. They are lived. People have to believe in something to pull up stakes and pioneer or to plunge all their assets into an Internet stock. People act in this life according to narratives. They believe a story before they act, or react.

 

Early in your book you explain that this American narrative is distinct from Europe’s because of America’s need to create history from scratch, to construct stories that emphasized self-conscious movement into new space. Why is America different in this regard?

Europeans have lived in their nations so long that the land seems to belong to them as a birthright. But white Americans in 1776 could not feel like that. They did not want to define themselves as Europeans after the Revolution, but by what right did these recent immigrants, as a people, take and hold their country? They had not just to imagine themselves to be in a “virgin land” – as though Native Americans had no real claims – they also had to create and believe in stories of expanding into this land and recreating it. These stories are foundation narratives, and they are about technology. They had to believe that the new world, however beautiful, was incomplete and empty, waiting to be transformed. They would earn the right to the land by improving it, making it into a second creation.  Europeans don’t think like that. They embrace their land and their past, including their ruins. Europeans do not see the land as a blank slate to be carved up into squares according to the national grid. But as you can see when flying over the US in a plane, Americans imposed just such a grid, starting in the 1780s. The grid in effect erased the past and said the land was a commodity, ready for sale and development. It became almost like virtual space, waiting for the settler to make it real.

Danish Institute for Advanced Studies Launched

The Rektor of SDU, Jens Oddershede, at the opening ceremony for DIAS

After the American Century       

On Friday September 30, 2011 the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies was officially launched at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). This ambitious project builds on the international recognition already gained by three Institutes at the University of Southern Denmark, in physics, management, and American Studies. DIAS will foster and reward  excellence. Its three divisions already have forged links with leading universities in the US, UK, and EU. The mission of DIAS is to stimulate intellectual creativity by crossing boundaries between disciplines within:

• natural sciences
• social sciences
• humanities

At the end of 2012 DIAS will move into mew offices occupying one floor of a new building on the main campus of SDU

DIAS consists of:

ONE 

Origins and evolution of the universe at the Centre for Particle Physics Phenomenology – CP³-Origins which has been established by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) and opened on the 1st of September 2009 at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. CP3-Origins is the leading centre of excellence for theoretical particle physics phenomenology in Denmark. CP3-Origins aims to exploit experimental results, supercomputers and our theoretical expertise to make the next big leap in particle physics: Uncovering the origin of bright and dark matter in the universe. It will also contribute in other equally relevant quests: understanding the phase diagram of strongly interacting theories and their potential impact on understanding the dynamics behind the rapid expansion of the universe soon after the Big-Bang, known as inflation.

TWO

Origins and evolution of the social organization, is identified with the Strategic Organization Design Unit (SOD), which builds on a long research tradition associated with the evolutionary and behavioral program in economics and organizational science. In 2008 SOD was established as the first FSE research unit by The Danish Council for Independent Research in the Social Sciences (FSE), and in 2011 received the status of an elite unit at the Faculty of Social Sciences, SDU. This group of scholars examines how the organization of individual actions jointly generates organizational performance. Progress in this area is essential in order to develop a robust normative theory of organization design - and to understand how decisions regarding organization design shape performance in private and public organizations.

THREE

Origins and evolution of culture, is identified with the Center for American Studies (CAS). It was established as an SDU research unit in 1992, with additional support during its first decade from the Danish-American Fulbright Commission. CAS is the largest center of its kind in the Nordic countries, and the only one in Denmark to offer both the BA and MA degrees in American Studies. The field has always been concerned with the origins and development of culture, both in the sense of a shared (often contested) national culture and in the more specific sense of new racial, ethnic, and regional identity formations. These have come about through immigration, cultural exchange, and innovation, in a dynamic relation with historical events. Fundamental to American Studies is the realization that cultures are in constant ferment and evolution.　

DIAS is inspired by similar institutions at world’s leading universities such as Princeton, Harvard and Stanford and by advanced research centers in the Netherlands and Germany. It shares the recognition that mankind's greatest achievements have come from inner curiosity, giving rise to new ways of thinking and changes in perception. The directors already collaborate with faculty at IAS, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, CERN and MIT.

DIAS is a center for theoretical research. Initially, it unites outstanding research groups that will foster synergy between the sciences and humanities allowing new ideas to emerge. The union and rapid communication of ideas among research groups allows for the construction of a novel fellowship among the DIAS faculty and increases the competitiveness and global recognition of Danish research.