Thanks, Roy

Here are three things I never heard Roy Rosenzweig say:

1. "I'D LIKE TO HELP, BUT I'M TOO BUSY"

This is perhaps the most important sentence in an academic's vocabulary. As an assistant professor, I get one or two requests a week: review a book, critique a manuscript, serve on a committee, give a talk, teach a class, and so on. If I didn't turn down at least half of such requests, I'd drown in work. I can't begin to imagine the volume of requests that poured into Roy's in-box, but he never seemed to say no.

Like many, I first met Roy by making a demand on his time. In the summer of 2000 I had been hired by an engineering society to work on a website about the history of the Washington Metro, which was also the topic of my dissertation. I was supposed to collect images and write accompanying text, and the society would be in charge of designing, coding, and hosting the site itself. I did my part, but the society seemed unwilling or unable to actually post the material I had prepared. After months of delay, I got them to agree that if I could find another nonprofit institution to host the site, I could use my material there.

So, I asked myself, what university was doing the best job of posting historical material on the Web? A bit of poking around yielded the name of the Center for History and New Media, led by one Roy Rosenzweig. I knew that name from The Park and the People, and I had earlier asked him for help finding an adjunct job. Now I again asked for help.

Help came. Roy asked me out to campus, where he treated me—a humble graduate student--as a visiting dignitary, giving me a tour of the Center (then one room), introducing me to Dan Cohen and Jim Sparrow, and, if memory serves, buying me lunch. He then gave me basic training in Dreamweaver and sent me on my way. Ten days later, we launched the site.

God only knows what else Roy was up to that spring, but he did not appear rushed, then or any other time I talked with him. He was the Gene Kelly of multi-tasking, making it all look so easy.

2. “YOU’RE WRONG”

A week after Roy’s death, Mason’s president, Alan Merten, told a story about his arrival at Mason. At a gathering he reached into his stock collection of anecdotes and told a treasured one about Martin Van Buren. A day or two later, he received from Roy a detailed e-mail explaining why the anecdote was almost surely apocryphal. As Merten tells it, the message was “proper” but firm, and he retired the anecdote immediately.

I had something similar happen, but it came before my arrival at Mason. As a job candidate, I was asked to offer a guest lecture in an introductory U.S. history course. In a talk on the transportation revolution of the early nineteenth century, I repeated the oft-published tale that in the 1820s, a school board in Ohio had declared that “if God had designed that His intelligent creatures should travel at the frightful speed of 15 miles an hour by steam, He would have foretold it through His holy prophets. It is a device of Satan to lead immortal souls down to Hell.” After the lecture, Roy praised me, then digressed into a long-winded tale about some other story (Merten’s?) that couldn’t be right. So indirect was the criticism that it took me a while to realize that Roy was, in fact, doubting that any Ohio school board had ever said any such thing, and hinting that I really needed to be more critical of my sources when writing lectures.

If he was so reluctant to criticize, why bring up the point at all? I think the answer is that while he thought a university president worthy of respect, and a frightened job candidate worthy of mercy, most deserving of all were the poor souls forced to listen to ostensibly knowledgeable scholars spout fictions. Committed to courtesy, but also to truth, Roy served both by being gentle.

3. “THAT SOUNDS IMPORTANT, BUT IT’S NOT SOMETHING THAT INTERESTS ME”

Despite my blunder, I got the job, and for three years it was my honor to be counted among Roy’s colleagues. And while all of my colleagues have been tremendously supportive, none could match Roy’s expertise in seemingly everything I was doing. Urban history? Roy had won prizes for that. History of technology? He had nourished several websites in the field. Pedagogical theory? He had some brilliant ideas. I was particularly embarrassed when I failed to consult him before taking up the fight against the regulation of oral history. Somehow I thought of Roy as a historian of the nineteenth century who couldn’t be interested in the subject. As I learned, Roy was both a beloved figure among oral historians and the American Historical Association’s vice president for research, making him a major player in the debate. Yet when I dragged him into a fight he thought he had already won, he took it in stride.

I could flatter myself by fancying that Roy and I were intellectual soul-mates, perfectly aligned in our interests. But I know the truth: my interests, and my knowledge, were but a small subset of his. During job talks by candidates (including mine), Roy always seemed to know more about the candidate’s topic than did the candidate himself. And there were whole universes of his job, ranging from labor history to the punishing work of grant-writing and administration, that I could not imagine myself doing. After a year or two in his presence, I realized that all the coffee in the world was not going to turn me into Roy Rosenzweig. I could only hope to imitate a few of the things he did. And some of the things he didn’t say.