GLR March-April 2026

ESSAY A Harvard Don’s Radical Roots S COTT B ANE

T HE INFLUENTIAL literary critic, writer, and ac tivist F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950) measured writers by the degree to which they could express the spirit of the times in which they lived. He lifted this idea from T. S. Eliot, about whom Matthiessen wrote an early book. But even be fore The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935), he had been moving in this direction in Sarah Orne Jewett (1929), which was the first biography of Jewett, and Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1931), which grew out of his Harvard doctoral thesis. In these books, he examined both the literary works and their connec tions to the cultures from which they sprang. Throughout Matthiessen’s life, he was politically engaged, and his activism led to expressing these central questions and concerns of his own day. In college at Yale, he became interested in organized labor issues. During the Great Depression, the cause of greater economic equality became a central animating theme in his life and work. But he also pushed for freedom of expres sion and racial equality and witnessed the foundations for the Civil Rights movement in the 1940s. Taking the full body of Matthiessen’s writing, both public and private, he was extraordinarily prolific in his short lifetime, publishing nine books that encompassed literary criticism, bi ography, and memoir. He edited five additional books and wrote roughly 75 essays, articles, and book reviews. On top of all of this, he maintained a voluminous correspondence with painter Russell Cheney (1881–1945), who was the love of his life. Matthiessen and Cheney dated their relationship to a 1924 transatlantic voyage aboard the Paris . Matthiessen was re turning to New College, Oxford, for the second year of his Rhodes Scholarship; Cheney, 21 years older and from a wealthy family of silk manufacturers, was traveling back to Europe to paint. From the time Matthiessen disembarked at Plymouth, the two men began a relationship in which 3,100 letters were exchanged. The letters were occasioned by the fact that Matthiessen spent the school year in Cambridge, at Har vard, where he began to teach in 1929, while Cheney lived full-time in Kittery, Maine, in the house they shared over weekends, holidays, and summers. Five years after Cheney’s death, when their twenty-year relationship had ended, depres sion closed in on Matthiessen, who took his own life, jumping from a twelfth-floor hotel window in Boston. § M ATTHIESSEN ’ S ACTIVISM on behalf of economic and social rights didn’t start in full until 1935, when he joined a group of activists and lawyers investigating a labor riot in Gallup, New Scott Bane is the author of A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney .

Mexico, a coal mining town, about 200 miles west of Santa Fe, where he and Cheney were on an extended visit. In labor or ganizing efforts, the Communist-affiliated National Miners’ Union successfully appealed to unemployed Mexican workers because of the union’s openness to everyone regardless of race or ethnicity. Tensions rose when union members began receiv ing federal unemployment benefits. When one of the workers, whom his fellows believed had been unjustly evicted from his home, appeared at a court hearing, a riot broke out between right-wing extremists and migrant workers. It resulted in over 100 migrant workers, many of whom did not speak English, being arrested. Fifty-five were charged with murder, 48 faced the death penalty, and many others were deported on immigra tion charges. Matthiessen’s article about the riot for The New Republic stands up well against the historical record. Not sur prisingly, he cast the events in a broader cultural context, not ing “the strong-armed frontier refusal to recognize labor unions,” and holding the mining companies to account for “their own social irresponsibility.” When Matthiessen and Cheney returned to the East Coast, Matthiessen helped organize the Harvard Teachers’ Union, whose membership grew to nearly 200 right before World War II. When Harvard dismissed two popular, left-leaning econo mists, Matthiessen joined David Prall, a philosophy professor and then president of the Harvard Teachers’ Union, and sub mitted an open letter to The New Republic protesting “how far short [Harvard] had fallen of any conception of democracy, jus tice or wise educational policy.” Then, in 1941, when the U.S. Naval Academy refused to play a lacrosse game against Har vard if they allowed a Black student to participate, Harvard ca pitulated and removed the player. Under Matthiessen’s direction, the Harvard Teachers’ Union joined the NAACP inde nouncing the Harvard Athletic Association’s complicity in racism. Advocating for freedom of expression and protesting against racial discrimination, in 1944 Matthiessen involved himself in the Strange Fruit case. Strange Fruit is a novel by Lillian Smith that depicts an interracial romance. The book was “banned in Boston” thanks to the Watch and Ward Society, a censorship or ganization. Matthiessen joined Harvard colleague Bernard De Voto in purchasing a copy of the book, leading to a summons and fine being issued to the bookseller, Abraham Isenstadt. Once again, Matthiessen used the power of his pen, writing in The Harvard Crimson : “It is thoroughly shameful for such a book to be banned in Boston at the very time when we need to examine every phase of our American race problems with some thing of Lillian Smith’s care and wisdom.” Another key event in the evolution of Matthiessen’s political activism was his support for Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace in the 1948 Presidential race. At the polls that year, Wal

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