William F. Marina as teacher and historian some early impressions.

• Author: Stromberg, Joseph R.
• Position: PREDECESSORS - Biography

A Historian in a Time of Troubles

When I set off for Florida Atlantic University (FAU) at Boca Raton in late August 1968, it was a time of divisive political and social issues--a systemic crisis of legitimacy--symbolized by the Vietnam War, the civil rights revolution, the New Left, Students for a Democratic Society, the counterculture, and much else. It was, in other words, the '60s. FAU (informally known to its first few classes as "Find Another University") was a new school, not fully formed, although showing some signs of wishing to settle into the bureaucratic Cold War liberal mode of Clark Kerr's "multiversity." Its early lack of rigid form made the place interesting for a while. Unimpressed by the behaviorist political scientists with whom I had spoken, I settled on history as a major. Once in classes, I found Dr. William F. Marina by far the most interesting teacher.

As we gradually learned, Bill was local--a native of Miami who had earned his B.A. at the University of Miami. His Ph.D. (just completed) was in American studies at the University of Denver (1968). He had taught at the University of Texas at Arlington from 1962 to 1964 before coming to FAU, where he remained until his retirement in 2003. While teaching in Texas, he had witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For many years, Bill gave an occasional seminar on historical method that centered on the Kennedy assassination as an historical problem. (On this matter, Bill was never a revisionist.)

Bill's dissertation, "Opponents of Empire: An Interpretation of American Anti-Imperialism, 1898-1921," was based on archival research in the papers of the Anti-Imperialist League and dealt with the Antis' limitations as well as their insights and strengths. Had it been published, the dissertation would have been a worthy addition to the historical literature on turn-of-the-twentieth-century American empire building as well as a useful corrective to such contemporary treatments as Robert L. Beisner's Twelve Against Empire (1968) and E. Berkeley Tompkins's Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890-1920 (1970). (1) Indeed, it still ought to be published.

Left and Right

As of the late 1960s, Bill was generally committed to the interpretive framework provided by the New Left (Wisconsin school) of American diplomatic history and opposed the Cold War as a front for American empire. At this time, he seemed to question private ownership of large-scale means of production. Given such views, certain Cold War liberals on the faculty tried to get him fired. Interestingly, Bill was capable of reaching across the political spectrum to the John Birchers, for example, or indeed to anyone who might see that empire was the main issue confronting Americans in Vietnam and elsewhere. He reminded the local Birchers of their own links to the right-wing anti-imperial critique of Garet Garrett, whose little book on empire, The People's Pottage ([1953] 1965), the Birch Society kept in print.

In class, we found that this New Leftist had some surprisingly conservative tendencies. The names "Oswald Spengler," "Jacob Burckhardt," and "Robert Nisbet" came up fairly often. Bill appreciated Spengler's ([1926] 1979/1980) insights into comparative history and differing world outlooks (weltanschauungen), obscured though they were by Spengler's Prussian bombast. And Bill expressed great interest in a reworking of natural law, perhaps on the basis of modern biology. Here he recommended Robots, Men, and Minds (1967) by general systems theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy as well as the work of Gandhian philosopher Raghavan Iyer (1979). (This reworking of natural law was part of a trend away from Cold War liberal reliance on Big Science and, more remotely, away from John Dewey's notion of an evolving truth periodically renewed by two processes: democracy and science.) With Bill, there was a touch of elite theory as well, centering on his long-running dialogue with his friend Nathaniel Weyl, former Communist and Cold War conservative (who eventually mellowed enough to support the nuclear freeze proposal of the early 1980s). Between Bill's reliance on the writings of William Appleman Williams ("dean" of the Wisconsin school) and insurgent sociologist C. Wright Mills and his willingness nonetheless to question certain left-wing assumptions, what we were seeing was an emergent Left/ Right synthesis similar to what Norman Mailer had already begun to call "Left conservatism" in 1968.

At the podium, Bill could stick to the assigned readings but often did not. His classroom method consisted of what looked at first like very creative free association--an apparently formless presentation punctuated by Socratic questions. Behind the facade of stream of historical consciousness, however, was an organized historical mind, as those of us who kept up soon realized. In his particular areas, Bill was a walking bibliography. "Oh, that's on page 51 of So-and-So," he would say. Students thought he was showing off, but he simply had a good memory for sources he frequently consulted. He could encourage students to focus on the heart of an historical...