MarrDavid_20160830_Transcript pt1.pdf

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Part of David Marr Oral History Interview

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David Marr
Interviewed by Eirik Steinhoff
The Evergreen State College Oral History Project
Interview 1, August 30, 2016

Steinhoff: Today is August 30, and I’m sitting with David Marr and we are going to get under way with
the first chapter of our oral history. The project is to record stories from Evergreen’s history. I’ve just
read your brief, but very useful manual, “What exactly is a project?” One of the beautiful things you say
there is that there is a relationship between questions and inquiries. But I think the way we should begin
is by establishing the topic, which is you, in this case. And then as the topic becomes clearer for both of
us, but particularly for me, then perhaps some questions could emerge that would shape that inquiry.
Marr: All right.
Steinhoff: I think the place to begin is with your beginning. You were born, and then you went to
school, your parents—anything that feels pertinent in that direction.
Marr: Good. Down to about here [points to list of questions given narrators], maybe, before college?
Steinhoff: Sounds great.
Marr: Okay. I was born on September 27, 1943 in Clinton, Iowa, an industrial town on the Mississippi
River. The industrial part is important for a number of reasons. I won’t waste our time with a detailed
history of Clinton, Iowa which is magnificently boring. But the town was a product of the mid-19th
Century. By the 1890s it had become a mill town because at that time the forests of Minnesota were
being logged off. And the logs were strapped together and sent down the Mississippi as log rafts, and
then picked off at the various river towns and milled into boards, and then in our case wooden toys,
sash for windows and things of that kind. And at the same time in the 1890s a different kind of industry
was growing up which bore directly, eventually, on my life. It was a corn processing factory, Clinton

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Foods. Trainloads of field corn would come into this plant where the corn would be processed into grain
for hogs and cattle, sugar, syrup, corn starch, and corn oil. This is the factory where my father worked
after he left the farm in the 1920s. He worked in the feed house, where temperatures rose above 100
degrees in the summer, shoveling feed. He was born in Jackson County, which borders on Clinton
County to the north, to a very poor dirt farmer family in 1909. He finished school through the sixth
grade and all his life was a functional illiterate: he could write his name and he could read the
newspaper, though it was hard for him; he read word by word, it seemed, his finger moving across the
page. My mother was born in Clinton, in 1911, worked as a housemaid when she was a teenager, and
finished school through the eleventh grade. They were married in 1929. Their first child, my brother
Stephen, died at six or eight months of age in 1930. I have three sisters, born in 1932, 1935 and 1949.
The corn processing plant, as I said, my father was a laborer. And then, as you may know, with
factory jobs if you’re in a union you can bid on other jobs. And he bid on a rigging job during the late
’30s, early ’40s, and got it, he became a rigger. Which in this place meant, it wasn’t like an oil rigger, if
you were a rigger in this kind of a factory you were semiskilled, that is you were below millwrights,
machinists and electricians, but you were above common laborers. And your job was to move
equipment around. He was very good at this. And by the ’50s he became a foreman, sharing in the
affluence, relative affluence that is, post-war affluence of the ’50s. He actually was able to buy a new car
in 1949, a Pontiac, and build a house in the middle-’50s. Now the big family he came from included one
brother who was a carpenter and another who was a pipefitter , and so the carpenter brother, whose
life he had once saved when they were kids, he and my father and I—I was about 14—and my brotherin-law, an electrician, built this place, built this little house in Clinton, Iowa. So he goes from nothing to
something, even though it’s not much.
And during that time, of course, I’m going to school. I went to kindergarten year in the Lutheran
church school. I went there at the age of four because you couldn’t get into public school until you were

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5. And the reason I went there was so my mother could take a job in a garment factory for a short
period of time, it was kind of built-in babysitting. And then when I was about to turn 5 since my birthday
is in September, after school starts, it’s a rule, they made me go to kindergarten all over again. Now, I
didn’t really feel any disgrace in that, but I didn’t want to do it, and neither did my parents. So I had to
test out of kindergarten. I did. [laughing] It was my only big academic accomplishment until I was in
about ninth grade. But, I tested out of kindergarten, went to first grade.
Steinhoff: Do you remember the terms of the test at all?
Marr: No actually I don’t. That’s a very good question. Kindergarten then was nothing like it is now.
Now you’re expected to know your ABC’s by the time you start, but you’re also going to be 5 or 6 when
you start. I don’t remember the test, but I guess I was able enough.
Steinhoff: You also mentioned it was a Lutheran church school, so were there doctrinal inflections that
a 4-year-old was able to pick up? Were you going to church?
Marr: Not a single one. I was just in kindergarten and screwing around with the little girl in front of me.
No, nothing like that, thank goodness because the synod was Missouri so it was one of these no holds
barred, it was the most conservative Lutheran synod.1 Had there been anything doctrinal it would have
been of the worst kind, I mean from my point of view now.
Steinhoff: Exactly. So it sounds like there was an element of convenience, which is what you mentioned
with your mother being able to go to work so that you were occupied.
Marr: I was occupied because I remember it was all day so it was very convenient.
Steinhoff: Sure. And did your family go to a Lutheran church?

1

Clinton was a town divided down the middle by the historical legacy of the Protestant Reformation: Lutherans vs.
Catholics, who together made up around three-quarters of the population (36,000) when I was growing up. My
minister routinely condemned the Pope as the Anti-Christ, and my Catholic friends said their priests just as
routinely denounced the heretic Martin Luther.

3

Marr: Yeah. My mother’s side of the family were the church-going ones. My father’s parents were not
as much but he came along and became church-going. My mother’s parents and relatives all went to
the same church.
Steinhoff: For you, did that continue through high school with the family?
Marr: Well, I went to church and I was confirmed, somewhat miraculously, so to speak, because I was
not very, I could not make myself memorize the catechism. But somehow I got through it and I was
confirmed. And after that, I think I was 12 or 13 maybe, I gradually drifted away from the church and I
never went back. It became a sore point for my mother especially. She wanted our children baptized.
Could not understand how we could not do that.
Steinhoff: We’re jumping ahead a little bit, and I’m prying because my grandfather, my father’s father
was a Lutheran minister.
Marr: What synod?
Steinhoff: I’m not absolutely sure, but I do remember legendary discussions about the Missouri Synod.
He ended up being a missionary in south India. Anyway, not to deviate entirely, it’s just to identify
another point in common.
Marr: No, that’s very interesting.
Steinhoff: So, we’ve gotten you into, well, you’ve skipped kindergarten so now you’re in first grade?
Marr: I mean, I did kindergarten in Lutheran school.
Steinhoff: You skipped the public school’s.
Marr: I skipped and I’m in first grade. Would you be interested in memories from first grade?
Steinhoff: I would be.
Marr: Well, when I was in the Writers’ Workshop for a while at the University of Iowa many years later I
was assigned to write a story. And the story I wrote was called “From Kindergarten to First Grade.” And
it’s the story of a little boy who enters the first grade classroom, a day or two late. So all the kids are

4

there and they all look at me and the teacher made a, you know: “This is little Davey, he’s going to join
us,” and all that kind of stuff. But I remember distinctly one little girl going like this. [makes an ugly face
and gestures with his hands to suggest clawing or scratching, or a spider crawling.] So, that was my
welcome to first grade. Another memory is that we would sit around in little half-moon arrangements of
kids to have reading sessions, or music lessons. And I always got seated next to a girl by the name of
Myrtle Green. Myrtle Green was from an even poorer family than I was, from the other side of the
tracks. And she didn’t bathe, and she always stank. And not only that, maybe she belonged to the
proper name club or something, but in the winter she apparently had a cold all the time and there was a
little bit of green snot that would bubble from her nose when she spoke. I won’t forget that. Poor
Myrtle.
Steinhoff: I’m sure.
Marr: Yeah. But, my first grade teacher, by the way— Well, my kindergarten teacher for just a couple,
three days was Miss Devoe, and she was a lovely young woman. My first grade teacher was Miss
Schlecht who was 50, and dour and severe. By the time I got to third grade, though, there was a teacher
that liked me and kind of doted on me, Mrs. Rock. And so she encouraged me. I had her again in fifth
grade. I was lucky to pass fourth grade because I was such a bad kid, screwing around in class and
driving Mrs. Danielson crazy. It was all Ronnie Herd’s fault, of course, not mine.
Steinhoff: Mmmhhh. I’m sure. But, Mrs. Rock who in third and fifth grade was able to recognize
something, draw something out, encourage something?
Marr: She was, yeah. She did exactly all of that, and not just with me. She was a very vibrant woman.
She got us to do plays. I don’t know, she was the kind of teacher you should have, at least a lot of kids
should have. She wasn’t fluffy, you learned, but it was a lively place.
Steinhoff: Yeah. So, were your siblings in the same school?

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Marr: No, not at the same time. By the time I came along the next oldest sister was eight years old, and
the oldest was eleven. My youngest is six years younger, so I’m kind of a middle child in some ways. Not
strictly, I suppose.
Steinhoff: But because of that distance you weren’t on their coattails.
Marr: No, not at all. And nobody ever said, “Are you the brother of so-and-so?” Maybe once or twice. I
was more likely to be asked if I was Marshall Marr’s son.
Steinhoff: And so then, do I have the sequence right? There would be elementary school, middle
school, high school?
Marr: Well, it was, yeah, elementary school and then junior high school—seven, eight, nine—and then
10, 11, 12 for high school. The biggest development in my life during the years leading into junior high
school was when I was 12 two things happened. My Aunt Lorena, who was the wife of one of my
father’s brothers, she didn’t have any children by choice because she carried the hemophiliac gene. And
so she had two nephews, I was one of them and the other was a little hemophiliac kid by the same name
actually. And she gave us presents at Christmas time and birthdays and so on, nothing lavish. But the
thing that made a difference that I’m talking about was for Christmas when I was 12 she gave me a
chemistry set, one of those that’s in a box like so, a thin box. I didn’t just throw it in a corner and let it
gather dust, I became an amateur chemist. So by the time I was 16 I had probably the fifth largest
chemistry laboratory in my basement in Clinton, Iowa.
Steinhoff: Oh my.
Marr: I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it was quite a project, I spent all my time down there. It
was built in the new house I was telling you about. So by the time I went to college, I applied to college, I
was planning to be a chemist and so that’s why I applied to Iowa State, and got in.
The other big thing that happened when I was 12 is that I went to work in the summer for
money. And in those days if you were a kid that wanted to work for money you might get paid 50 cents

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an hour, if you were lucky. I got paid a dollar an hour because I was working for this guy across the
street who was a brick layer and a carpenter. And so in two or three summers from that time on I
worked for him and then for another carpenter later on so that by the time we built our house I was
more than just a teenage boy with a strong back, I actually knew how to use some tools. So that was
good for my parents, getting the house built where I could actually do things. I used the money I made
in summer jobs to buy chemicals and laboratory equipment and to buy jazz records through the
Columbia Record Club.
Steinhoff: So, it sounds like the chemistry thing, well it came from outside of school and it allowed you
to cultivate a practice that was extracurricular but then also intersected with scholastic priorities.
Marr: That’s exactly what happened. In our high school the sequence was physics when you’re a junior
and chemistry when you’re a senior. I was a B student in everything [but only occasionally studied]. We
had over 400 students in our sophomore class. Something like 50 of them got pregnant by the time
graduation rolled around. But out of my class I came to be known as the guy who knew chemistry. When
all the other kids were coming up they didn’t know anything about chemistry. Some proved to be really
good in physics and I was okay, or a little bit better than okay in physics, and then came chemistry. Of
course I flew through chemistry. Got to college and we could take two quarters in one and I did that, I
got an A. Then the second quarter came around, which would be the third quarter, and I got a B. And
then the third quarter came around and I got a C. By that time I was disillusioned with science, in a
sense, more lazy than anything else because I had developed a friendship with a guy by the name of
Tom Schuppe who was a fifth year student in the fraternity I was living in. And he was, of all things, an
English major at this engineering and ag. university. And he gave me a book to read called The Catcher in
the Rye. He said, “Read this book and we’ll talk.” So I did. We never talked much but I had the distinct
impression upon reading the book that this was simultaneously absolutely gripping and completely
unfathomable to me. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I thought of it, or how to think about anything

7

but I was swept up in it. And again, you know, not because I could identify in any social or economic way
with Holden Caulfield, of course, given where he came from and where I came from, but something
about the teenage years and being maybe too self-conscious for my own good, somewhat like Holden,
perhaps, I don’t know.
Steinhoff: Interesting. Can we time stamp the Tom Schuppe recommendation?
Marr: Yeah, it would have been the spring of 1962 because my first year in college was 1961-62.
Steinhoff: Okay.
Marr: In Ames, Iowa.
Steinhoff: Yeah, Iowa State.
Marr: Iowa State. And so I read the book, decided that English was for me, and applied to the University
of Iowa and transferred there and started there in the following fall.
Steinhoff: Interesting.
Marr: And at the same time got married.
Steinhoff: Okay.
Marr: Got married that summer.
Steinhoff: Yes.
Marr: Which was also when I was working at the factory where my father worked.
Steinhoff: And so, tell me a little bit about that, the encounter, the marriage.
Marr: Oh, well, Susan. We were in the same high school, she was from the south end of town, I was
from the north. And there were two big factories in that town, one was the corn processing factory
where my father worked, the other one was a DuPont cellophane factory, and her father worked there.
So we got to know each other when we were sophomores. She had a very inferior boyfriend, in my
opinion, at that time. Finally got rid of him and we got together when we were seniors, and got married
that July. July 7, 1962.

8

Steinhoff: Yeah, okay.
Marr: So, without any money we went— By that time, oh I should say, she was, during my freshman
year she was a college student in Clinton at a Catholic community college. And then [in the winter] she
transferred to Iowa City and took up x-ray training and was in that when we got married, and stayed in it
until, oh, maybe, I don’t know, early spring of ’63 when she got a job as an electroencephalographic
technician at the University of Iowa hospital, which was a big research hospital. She spent most of her
work life in that field.
Steinhoff: Okay. And so it seems like The Catcher in the Rye conversion narrative is significant because
the earlier turning point was Aunt Lorena giving you the chemistry set. So, I guess I’m curious to know
whether there was much in the way of reading in high school, or whether this was something that really
did come to you in college?
Marr: Excellent question, excellent question, really critical question. I was not a reader when I was
young, I read some. But once I started in chemistry what I read was chemistry and tried to figure it out.
But, I did read a few [other] things. But to give you an example of how I wasn’t much of a reader, when I
was in senior English class with Susan, actually, we had the same class, I was already showing signs of
being a fairly good writer. But, because when I was in junior high school—oh, I’ve got to tell you this
one!
When I was in junior high school, in eighth grade, we met the most extraordinary man, my
friends and I in eighth grade English. He had the improbable name of Oakley Ethington, Oakley
Ethington, and he was an ordained minister in one of the reformed sects who had, as he put it, shocking
us, “I dropped that racket to become an English teacher.”
Steinhoff: Uh-huh.
Marr: And he taught us, and I was his best pupil, how to diagram sentences. And it absolutely got under
my skin. It got to the point where he would give us sentences that were just, they were 300 words long, I

9

mean big paragraph-length sentences with all kinds of dependent clauses and all kinds of other
structures. He’d say, “Well, try that one.” He’d put it on the board, or we would, mainly I did it, and I
diagramed the damn thing and I found it fascinating. I just loved it! I still do it. And because of that, I
think, that tapped into whatever ability I might have when it comes to words.
Steinhoff: Yes. Also, not unrelated, maybe I’m speculating a bit much here, but it’s not unrelated to
chemistry in so far as understanding the relationship between the parts, what happens when you
combine, etc.
Marr: Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s just that I came to discover I had more of knack for doing it
with words than I did with equations.
Steinhoff: Yes.
Marr: I just did. But, upon reflection many years later I realized what was in common there was
basically a little, what we would call informal logic, that was the bond. If you do this, then you get that.
And all the related elements of informal logic. Not formal logic.
Steinhoff: Right.
Marr: Strictly informal logic, but sophisticated actually.
Steinhoff: Indeed. And so what grade were you in when you built the house with your family?
Marr: It was in the spring and summer, it was the spring of ninth grade.
Steinhoff: Okay.
Marr: And the summer following. I told my father when we were about to begin the work, “The track
coach wants me to be on the track team.” And he said, “Well, if you do that, I’m not going to build a lab
in the house.”
Steinhoff: Wow!
Marr: Well, that was a deal breaker. It was no contest there. I was okay in track, but I wasn’t about to
sacrifice a brand new laboratory for, you know. (laughing)

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Steinhoff: And that’s a formal logic.
Marr: (laughing)
Steinhoff: There’s an if/then.
Marr: Is there ever!
Steinhoff: I’m thinking about what you were describing as an informal logic and that early encounter as
an adolescent, whether it’s in the chemistry lab or at the board diagramming a sentence, but then to
also understand how craftsmanship also is organized by logic of that sort, with definite consequences
for getting it wrong.
Marr: That’s very shrewd, yes, I think that’s exactly so. That’s right. When you build something—you
know, Marx said, “The carpenter erects his house in his imagination before he does it in reality.” He
knew that, even though he was the son of a lawyer and probably never lifted a hammer in his life, but
you see the tangible result of whether the damn thing was built square and plumb or not. If it’s
supposed to be square and plumb and level, it either is or it isn’t. And usually isn’t in a perfect sense. So
then you make the judgement of, “Well, can I live with this?”
Steinhoff: Mmmhhh
Marr: Because that judgment is being made all the time by people who build things. I mean it’s an
illusion to think that something that looks square is square, or is this or is that.
Steinhoff: Yeah.
Marr: But, yes, there’s a procedural logic to this kind of, to the fabrication process. And your decisions
along the way, as you say, have more or less immediate, but always describable consequences.
Steinhoff: Yes.
Marr: Actual outcomes.
Steinhoff: Yes. So I’m trying to braid these three pieces. So, you’re at the board diagramming. That
sounds collaborative, actually. So, there’s Mr. Ethington, and your classmates too.

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Marr: Yeah.
Steinhoff: So, you’re ganging up on a sentence, and getting the diagram is your objective. Chemistry it
sounds like was by and large a solitary affair.
Marr: That’s right.
Steinhoff: Maybe you would impress people with this or that thing, but with the reading and the lab
practice you’re mainly on your own.
Marr: Yes, that’s true.
Steinhoff: And then actually when you participate in composing the house, that again is a collaborative
affair, which I imagine was different from the diagramming of the sentence, where you were sort of the
scribe, possibly even the navigator.
Marr: Mmmhhh.
Steinhoff: With the composition of the house, you were probably the junior partner in the large—
Marr: Oh, definitely. And as junior partner you just did a lot of repetitive work.
Steinhoff: Right.
Marr: So the carpenter [my uncle] will cut a piece of sub flooring , and my cousin and I would then it
down: nail, nail, nail, nail. Nail, nail, nail, nail. Just like that. We even had these idiotic work songs we’d
do, as used to happen in the cotton fields because that’s what it is, it’s repetitive, there were no nail
guns. Yes.
Steinhoff: Do you remember any of those work songs?
Marr: I only remember one, and it’s a little bit embarrassing. It didn’t actually have anything to do with
easing the work, it was the Alka-Seltzer jingle. I can’t remember exactly how it goes. Something, “down,
down, down,” something like that.
Steinhoff: Yeah.
Marr: I hated it actually, I’d rather just hear the hammering.

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Steinhoff: Uh-huh.
Marr: But when you get bored doing this kind of stuff you come up with things.
Steinhoff: Well, this is one of the liabilities of working in concert.
Marr: That’s true.
Steinhoff: You end up drifting into various things that perhaps you wouldn’t choose for yourself.
Marr: And you have to put up with people.
Steinhoff: Exactly. And yet—I mean, I don’t want to overbear with the braiding here, but I think there
might be something about that collaborative element as you’ve described it that might be one of these
turning points.
Marr: Yeah.
Steinhoff: These feel like interesting threads. You also mentioned, though, I think you said in your
senior English class you were starting to show signs of being a good writer.
Marr: Oh, I forgot to finish that thought, yes.
Steinhoff: Well, you took us to the eighth grade encounter with Mr. Ethington.
Marr: I’m glad you remembered that because coming back from that detour my point was that it had to
do with reading. And we were assigned Pride and Prejudice. I couldn’t get through three pages of Pride
and Prejudice without falling asleep. But a test was coming up. And so what I did was I hung out with my
girlfriend who was a very good reader, a very dutiful reader, and she told me the plot. And that’s
basically all I needed to know for the test. We had a very good English teacher, but you know how high
school is, you don’t get into much depth. At least mine didn’t. So I got through the test because of that. I
didn’t have much of a reading life until I got to college.
Steinhoff: Yeah. Okay. And it was on the merits of The Catcher and the Rye that you made the flip from
chemistry, maybe we could just dwell on chemistry for another moment. So this is, you’re converting

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from doing it on your own in the lab, your own lab, thriving in the high school setting because you
already knew it all.
Marr: Right.
Steinhoff: And then saying this is my ticket into college.2
Marr: Right.
Steinhoff: And then you’re in a new setting in so far that it’s college, and there’s the kind of formal
process of introducing you to this discipline.
Marr: Yes, and with the added formal requirement of mathematics.
Steinhoff: Precisely. Okay, the equations.
Marr: Well, we had to learn, obviously if you’re going to be a college chemistry major you have to have
math.
Steinhoff: Yeah.
Marr: And I only had gone through, I didn’t get to calculus in high school. I stopped at plane geometry
and trigonometry, and high school algebra.
Steinhoff: Right.
Marr: Well, that’s not enough. It was enough for a freshman chemistry student, but soon enough
you’ve got to learn everything else. And so math became the washout subject for me.
Steinhoff: Got it.
Marr: I wasn’t interested in it. I mean, many years later I developed a keen interest as a result of
working with Tom Grissom at Evergreen who is a physicist. I still, I didn’t do much with it but he and I
actually have had over the last five, ten years, interesting discussions about mathematics.
Steinhoff: Yeah.

2

In fact the “ticket into college”—into a state university— in the early 1960’s was a modest high school academic
record such as mine.

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Marr: I mean, obviously, they’re very much one sided. But since I didn’t have any formal grasp or formal
instruction in it, my questions were all naïve, and he liked those. So he and I would go back and forth
about what numbers are.
Steinhoff: Yes. And it was probably less about Avogadro’s number and probably less about
stoichiometry.
Marr: Yeah. And problems, doing calculus problems.
Steinhoff: Exactly.
Marr: To no end, really.
Steinhoff: Yeah. So, now we’re in 19, did I get this right, the fall of ’62 in Ames?
Marr: Yes.
Steinhoff: You’ve converted to English.
Marr: No, fall of ’61 and it’s the spring in Ames and the fall of ’62 is when I got to Iowa City to the
University.
Steinhoff: Sorry, okay, yes. Fall of ’62 Iowa City to the University of Iowa.
Marr: Right.
Steinhoff: And, what’s there?
Marr: Well, I was a full-fledged sophomore to start the year. I had declared already that I was going to
be an English major and so had to go to advising, English department advising. And what that was, was a
big long line of guys and gals waiting to talk to the advisers so you can get advice on courses and get
your schedule. So I learned about the departmental requirements, I learned what should come before
what, you know. I got that all taken care of.
At that time, as I said, it’s 1962. The University of Iowa English department was, I didn’t know
this, but it was a powerhouse English department. And not just because of the Writers’ Workshop,
which I actually didn’t know a thing about at the time. But all of my professors were, I mean some were

15

better than others as teachers, but they were accomplished scholars. I mean my main professor, Clark
Griffith, he taught American Literature, he was in line to take a job at Harvard. Almost all my professors
in English and history were Ivy League PhDs or had degrees from Cambridge or Oxford. But, you know,
it was…
Steinhoff: Who else was there?
Marr: Uh, John Gerber, who was a Twain scholar. Let’s see, oh, John McGalliard, who was a medieval
English scholar, he was one of the first editors of the Norton Anthology of English literature. Who else?
Well, in the Writers’ Workshop there was Paul Engle, one of the founders of the workshop in the ’30s.
He was there. Rosalie Colie, who died young, she was a 17th Century scholar, I think.3
Steinhoff: Yes. Renaissance person, sure, I know her name. And so was there somebody else that you
worked with there? Christopher Lasch?
Marr: Yeah, in the history department.
Steinhoff: History, okay.
Marr: I actually got, it wasn’t official, but I got in effect almost a double major in English and history.
Took a lot of history classes. Almost all English and American, I didn’t do any European history, except
for one course in European intellectual history with William Aydelotte. That was a great class in a lot of
ways. I could tell you a story about him, if you’re interested.
Steinhoff: Sure.
Marr: He was a Cambridge-educated, very shy, intellectual historian. He wrote on Dickens, he wrote on
Darwin, I think. He was an American but he studied at Cambridge in the 1930s. And when I and some of
my friends in the class started putting things together, so to speak, the dates and everything, we came
up with a question for him. He was the gentlest, nicest man you would ever want to meet. And we said,
“Professor Aydelotte, did you ever get over to the continent when you were at Cambridge in the ‘30s?”

3

A few others: Curt Zimansky, Karl Klaus, Joseph Baker, Warner Barnes.

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“Yes.”
“Did you ever get to Germany?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever go to a Hitler rally?”
And there’s a long pause. He said, “Yes.”
“What was that like? Were you swept up in it?”
Then there was an even longer pause. He was staring into space, like he was in a trance. He said, “Yes.”
With a sense of, “to my shame,” but with a clear message that the power of the Hitler rhetoric, and of
the technology that was used to broadcast it, and the power of the crowd, are not to be trifled with. It’s
exactly what you’ve been told and then some.
Steinhoff: Yeah. So he was teaching a class on European intellectual history?
Marr: 19th Century, mmmhhh.
Steinhoff: Okay, so there was also the potential for reflecting on, analyzing, diagnosing the very thing
you were asking him about.
Marr: And at the same time, this was I think my senior year, or junior year. But, in my sophomore year I
had a class that was extremely formative for me, a yearlong class, it was in the history of ideas, actually.
You could either take Western Civ and just get a Western Civ survey to satisfy that graduation
requirement, or you could take this one which was a history of Western thought basically from the
medieval period on. So I took that, and it was taught by the philosophy department. And I had two
outstanding teachers, Robert Turnbull taught the first half, it was a semester system, so we read
Aquinas and John Locke, Hobbes. And in the second half it was more history of science and taught by
Edwin Allaire, who was a student of Gustav Bergman’s. Bergman had been a member of the Vienna
Circle and later wrote a great book called The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism analyzing the movement

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from within. Allaire was his young American protégé. So, we read Kuhn, Russell, can’t remember what
else we read.
Steinhoff: So, what year would that have been? 1960, you said it was your sophomore year?
Marr: Mmmhhh, would be 1962-63.
Steinhoff: So the spring of ’63 you’re reading Structure of Scientific Revolutions?
Marr: No, we’re reading The Copernican Revolution.
Steinhoff: Okay, right, because Structure probably came out in ’62 or something.
Marr: I don’t remember, but I think The Copernican Revolution was the one before that.
Steinhoff: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
End of Interview 1

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