Roy Memorial Speech

Roy Memorial Speech, December 9, 2007


I’m Steve Brier, founding director of the American Social History Project at The City University of New York, and a friend and comrade of Roy’s for almost 30 years. The second hardest thing I did in preparing for today was finding a red shirt to buy. Let me note that Roy’s favorite color for his shirts is not a widely shared preference of either America’s shirt makers or apparently the rest of the shirt-buying public. That aside, the hardest thing about speaking today, besides the utter injustice of having to face the fact that Roy is gone, was the challenge to encapsulate in five minutes my feelings and thoughts about my dear friend.

I met Roy, as did many of us here today, while serving on the editorial board of the Radical History Review in the 1970s. Roy was the quintessential radical historian throughout his long and illustrious career: profoundly committed to broadening the subject of historical inquiry, to realizing the democratic possibilities of doing history, to minimizing the theoretical obfuscations that marred so much scholarly writing, and to finding new ways and presentational forms to convey historical ideas to a broad public audience. Most of all, Roy’s radicalism was expressed in his passionate commitment to collaboration, an approach to doing history that defied the profession’s blind faith in the requirement that scholars work alone. Roy loved to collaborate with a variety of colleagues whose skills and experiences complemented his own remarkable conceptual and creative abilities, whether he was writing books and scholarly articles, helping conceive and produce documentary films, CD-ROMS, and websites, or developing cutting edge software to help his fellow scholars be as productive and accurate in their scholarship as he always was. There are at least twenty people here today who are proud to have their name associated with Roy’s as co-authors, co-creators, and/or co-producers. Every one of us can attest to Roy’s tenacity, his tireless capacity for work, and, most importantly, his extraordinary generosity and kindness as a colleague and friend.

I guess my fondest memories of working with Roy center on the Who Built America? CD-ROMs, much of the writing for which happened at Roy and Deborah’s Jackson St. house beginning in the early 1990s. I’d move in for a week or two at a time to work closely with Roy: you got three square meals at Chez Rosenzweig-Kaplan, a chance to read the paper in the morning and discuss the news of the world, and go to a movie and eat dinner out on the weekends. Otherwise, we were chained to our computers all day and well into every evening, working with the kind of intensity and focus that defined everything that Roy did. Collaborating with Roy in those years on the WBA CDs, especially in the years before the Internet changed the way we did research, was a bit like being cloistered in a historical monastery, where you had access to a fabulous collection of history books, journals and reference sources and where the head history monk (Roy) pushed himself and his fellow monks relentlessly. Despite this pace, my only gripe from all those years of working with Roy in his Jackson St. study was that I ended up having to sit in an incredibly uncomfortable red straight chair while we pored through enormous mounds of historical materials. I finally had to convince Roy to buy himself a new desk chair just so that I could sit in his old one.

I never kept up with Roy’s output or his brilliant historical insights, though I tried damned hard to do so. I learned pretty quickly that the best thing you could do was work hard and admire (and ultimately benefit from) Roy’s incredible capacity for hard work and intellectual productivity. Working with Roy in those years reconnected me with the sheer joy of being a historian, seeking to master ideas and material far a field from my formal training, while actively engaged in a bigger collaborative project that helped transform the way we all thought about and presented history.

Much like my other dear friend and close collaborator, Herb Gutman (who, like Roy, was also 57 when he died), Roy’s influence will be felt for years to come in the profession and beyond. There will be (and there already have been) numerous books, journals, conference sessions, fellowships and prizes named in Roy’s memory. But I am confident that as much as Roy is remembered for his brilliant insights and output as a historian he will also be remembered for the endearing friendship and support that he offered to so many people, inside the profession and far beyond it. Roy was simply a lovely human being, a mensch, who had a deeply open curiosity about everything and everyone he met all over the world.

In what turned out to be the last few months of his life, Roy was very encouraging and inquisitive when I had the chance to describe to him a new family memoir project that I had just started to think about. He managed in the midst of his various medical treatments, as only Roy could, to find the time and the energy to send me a book from Amazon about doing family history that he thought I should read. And during one of our last times together in Arlington he invited me to come down to spend a week or two with him and Deb in their Lincoln St. home when I started my sabbatical, so that I could once again use the incomparable Rosenzweig history library and, far more importantly, from my perspective (and I think maybe his as well) to have the chance to talk with him about the project. Sadly, I missed the opportunity to take Roy up on his wonderfully generous offer; he died a few weeks before my sabbatical began.

Thanks, Roy, for your generosity of spirit and for your kind heart. You are and will be profoundly missed.