INTERVIEW: Historian Robert W. Snyder Details New Book On Essential Workers
Photo by Erica Lansner
“Snyder’s work as an oral historian is a reminder—necessary now more than ever—about how the simple act of listening carefully to our individual, ordinary, and absolutely essential stories can foster empathy and solidarity.”
Have you ever wanted to talk to the Manhattan Borough Historian? Well, I have and I was fortunate to get the chance recently.
On March 29th, Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University, visited the New York State Museum here in Albany to talk about his new book, When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers. This new book, following the tradition of Studs Terkel and the Federal Writers Project, offers an exceptional and moving example of the power of collaborative oral history. In the book, you’ll read about how people from all over the city interviewed people from all over the city in order to capture and preserve what happened just a few short years ago, when New York was at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic. Snyder’s work as an oral historian is a reminder—necessary now more than ever—about how the simple act of listening carefully to our individual, ordinary, and absolutely essential stories can foster empathy and solidarity.
Here is a series of highlights, lightly edited for length and clarity, from a conversation with Snyder prior to his recent talk at the New York State Museum.
ON BECOMING AN ORAL HISTORIAN:
From the time I was a kid, I loved history. I was born in New York, but I grew up in North Jersey and the history of the American Revolution was all around. There were battlefields you could visit, scenes where things took place. It became even more clear to me when we went down to Virginia on a family vacation and we drove by Civil War battlefields. I remember making my parents stop at every historical marker. They got a little tired of it, but they also said my interest was contagious and they started to get an increased enthusiasm for history too.
When I was in high school, I started to work on my student newspaper. I discovered that, for me, there was nothing more interesting than going out to interview somebody. Especially for features. Hard news was different because of the time pressure. You couldn't follow every angle that you wanted to follow. But a searching interview with somebody was so interesting because you got to get inside somebody else's life. You could explore experiences that were very different from your own.
I loved it. To this day, there's nothing that excites me more than going off to do an interview. I still vividly remember some of the earliest interviews I did, in high school and college.
In some ways, my high school was pretty conservative politically. I graduated in 1973. The war in Vietnam was an issue in the air and it divided people. There were pro-war people, anti-war people. Once, we had an assembly where an incredibly cool band came to play for us. They had long hair and guitars and they were touring all around the country and they somehow got booked into the auditorium at my high school in Dumont, New Jersey. My job was to interview them for the student newspaper. They were living the coolest lives and I thought the best possible thing would be to run away and join them. It'd be like running away to the circus when you're a kid.
Well, I couldn't do that, because in the end I was too responsible to run away and join the circus. But I could talk to people who did that. I could come as close as possible to living their lives by talking to them.
ON THE RULES OF ORAL HISTORY:
Believe it or not, I am a fairly shy person. If you drop me at a cocktail party, I don't really talk to people. I find an excuse to help with the dishes. But I'm not going to raise my own voice very often, you know?
I've taught oral history and I've taught journalism courses. The key thing I always say is: A good interviewer is a good listener. You don't have to be an extrovert. Anybody can ask questions. It's really hard to be a good listener.
The trick is to ask follow-up questions. Follow-up questions, let them talk, and don't cut them off before they're done talking. Let them say what they’ve got to say.
ON WHAT IT MEANS TO BE THE MANHATTAN BOROUGH HISTORIAN:
I always wanted my last job to be something of service to New York City. And when I was approaching retirement at Rutgers, Gale Brewer (who was the Manhattan Borough President at the time), approached my wife at a public event and said, “Put me in touch with your husband. I want to talk to him about making him the Manhattan Borough Historian.”
I confess when I found out it was a voluntary position some of my interest declined. There's no substitute for a full-time job. But I accepted it and I'm glad I accepted it.
Borough Historians are charged with preserving public records, advocating for historic preservation, and broadly working to educate the public about history. I get asked a lot of questions and sometimes the questions are so narrow that they're really hard for me to answer. I know a lot, but I don't know everything. I think there's a mistaken impression sometimes that historians are like file cabinets stuffed with facts, but we're not that. So, when I don’t know an answer, I try to get the reporter or the researcher to a source that is more informed than I am.
I started my term in late 2019, just before COVID and, very quickly, I learned I was going to get questions about epidemics and viruses, and I really didn't know that much about them. So, I found two historians, Janet Golden at Rutgers and David Rosner at Columbia, who said they would be happy to field questions from reporters.
Out of that grew a larger network of people who helped each other. COVID was going to be the biggest thing that happened on my watch. I would do a lot of things as the Manhattan Borough Historian, but making sure we got a good record of COVID was the most important thing I could do. I'm glad I did this book (When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers) and I’m glad to let this book be the statement of my work as borough historian.
ON THE NEW BOOK, COLLABORATION, AND THEMES:
When COVID broke, I helped assemble a network of historians, folklorists, oral historians, archivists. How are we going to get through this thing? And how are we going to document it adequately? It seemed very clear in the spring of 2020 that the pandemic was a big deal already and it was going to be a big deal in New York City. One of my colleagues said, “This is going to be as big as the Great Depression.” He was right. I still think he's right.
We were meeting on Zoom, sharing information with each other, wondering what to do. We thought about trying to create a big digital repository for all the interviews and archival work that was being done in New York City. But that just seemed too big to accomplish. Something like that had been done after 9-11, but it would take too much fundraising and too much tech work. So, I got to work looking at about 400 interviews. I had help from some interns and we all looked for common themes.
The most interesting interviews were the ones where the people talking had multiple layers to their lives. I'm thinking of a particular woman – she was a bus driver. She came from a family of bus drivers. She was African-American. There was a lot to her and she brought all of that to her interview when she talked about her experience driving a bus during COVID.
People talked a lot about coping and suffering. Some people coped by going to their country house. Other people (like me) coped by working in the back room of their apartment, isolating. Other people coped by going out and working, despite all the perils of working.
Lots of people suffered because they were lonely. Lots of people were socially disoriented in ways that we have yet to fully understand. Some people suffered because they got sick and almost died. Some people suffered because they lost loved ones.
Look, this is not a book that was going to have a really sharp academic argument, but it needed a frame. There had to be some principle about why some interviews are in the book and others aren’t. After all, you've got hundreds of interviews. 90% of them are going to go by the wayside. So, what makes these 10% relevant? As I made that final selection, two things became really clear to me. One was the important role of essential workers. Again and again, their interviews to me were the most interesting and the most important. And then the interviews where people talked about coping and suffering losses.
One of my grad school advisors, a historian named Tom Bender, said something about this that I found really helpful. He said there were so many different ways of experiencing COVID in New York City. Nobody knows what their neighbor was really going through. So, if we're ever going to build some kind of common response to this ordeal, we've got to have a deeper appreciation for each other's circumstances. And that's what I thought the book could help do. It could increase the stock of empathy between New Yorkers and introduce people to folks whose experiences were very different from their own.
What people seem quickest to remember about COVID is stuff that was irritating. Should you wear a mask? How far is six feet in social distancing? These were irritations that were treated as major political issues.
On the other hand, people seem to forget that in those early weeks and months, certainly in New York City, people more or less had each other's backs. Not perfectly, not completely. And that shouldn't be used to excuse some of the terrible working conditions that some people labored under, but there was a time when people looked out for each other more and worked on behalf of the public good. And I think that's important to remember.
To pick up a copy of Robert’s latest book, visit https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501780387/when-the-city-stopped/
