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.
