On Al Berger

Last Friday, I learned that Al Berger had passed. He was a long time colleague in the history department at the University of North Dakota where he taught and researched 20th century US history and modern military history. He retired a few years ago and the department is only now working to fill the gap that he left in our curriculum.

When I started at UND, Al was a larger than life character. His reputation for being combative, opinionated, and obstinate had proceeded him, and I was as intimidated by that reputation as I was by his sometimes gruff demeanor. I’m not sure that he ever warmed to me, but after more than a decade together in the same department, we had more than a few cordial interactions.

When I invited him to present to a graduate methods course on doing research in archives, he not only offered sage advice to the class, but also fascinating insights into his work in private archives associated with the Rockefeller family. In front of the classroom, he came alive lacing the nuts-and-bolts of archival work with personalities, witty aside, and a little well-crafted sarcasm. I also enjoyed his lectures on using pop and rock music as a source for social history. While these were mostly directed toward undergraduates who he expected to be skeptical of the value of such “low brow” sources, he talked about the messages of folk-rock artists from the 1970s with disarming sincerity. He came alive during these lectures and was entertaining, humane, and compelling. 

His cynicism toward the university as an institution was legendary. He periodically upbraided us (especially in department meetings) for not doing enough to stick up for history as a discipline and as a department. In dealings with deans and “the powers-that-be,” we rarely managed to live up to his expectations. In hindsight, he was probably right to urge us to be more pro-active. His combativeness with the administration occasionally took on an ugly turn — such as the time that he exploded at a unsympathetic dean — but despite being scandalized at the time, I’m reluctant to say it wasn’t justified. The changing culture of the institution and discipline fueled his frustration with the university. My sense is that he did not benefit from the “old boys club” that dominated the department when he was hired and felt increasingly alienated form a 21st-century faculty who had different values, habits, and goals. I wish that I had talked to him a bit more when I was writing my history of the department. Maybe I would have understood his cynicism better and been more sympathetic. 

I recognize that I had the benefit of getting to know Al when some of the more bitter and divisive conflicts in our department’s history has settled to a low simmer. There were moments when they raised their head. He once attempted to recuse a colleague from a committee meeting, which was both ungrammatical and unfortunate. There were more times, however, when he seemed (to me) to take on a conciliatory tone as a way to preserve the peace and move forward.

More formal obituaries will enumerate his scholarly and professional accomplishments: his contributions to the ND State Historical Society, the loyalty of his former students, and his serious worksof scholarship. I do recall him telling me once that a peer reviewed article was “the kind of article that I no longer write.” He took incessant pride in his efforts to make both his research and our discipline more accessible to a wider audience through public lectures, appearances in documentaries (or at least a documentary), and a willingness to offer perspectives from the past to anyone who was willing to listen patiently. 

Al’s presence in our department made my first job feel like a proper academic position where institutional memory (and trauma) mattered, personalities existed behind (and sometimes in front of!) different perspectives, and folks like Al Berger contributed to the range of professional practices present in my discipline. He was a character.

In fact, he left such an impression on me that I invoked his famously combative attitude in a faculty meeting the very week that he passed. I had long imagined that it would be possible to call Al back from retirement and launch him forth into some breach on campus. I think that Al would have appreciated this offer, but still tell us that we too needed to “stand like greyhounds in the slips.”