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Robert V. Bruce, with "The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876." (upi/file 1988) |
Robert Bruce, 84; BU professor won Pulitzer for history
Startling news arrived by phone one day in 1988 when Robert V. Bruce, then a professor emeritus at Boston University, learned he had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history for his account of how science began to flourish in the United States in the mid-1800s.
"It was like getting an invigorating electric shock," he told the Globe. "It came totally out of the blue. My editor told me to sit down - that wasn't necessary, I'm pretty sturdy on my feet - and it was a delightful flash, perhaps the street term was 'a rush.' "
A decade later he was staggered anew, albeit less pleasantly, when he read a biography of Alexander Graham Bell that had been published a quarter century after Dr. Bruce's own biography of Bell. The author, he realized, had plagiarized Dr. Bruce's work on 285 of the new book's 297 pages. "I was flabbergasted," Dr. Bruce wrote in 2002.
At 84, he had lived long enough to be vindicated when the American Historical Association published in 2001 what he called "the official verdict, a crushing condemnation" of the plagiarism. Dr. Bruce wrote that "against the odds, I had lived to see the day of deliverance and could now die moderately content."
He died of pneumonia on Jan. 15 in Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, Wash.
"He was really the scholar's scholar," said William Keylor, a professor of international relations and history at BU who was chairman of the history department when Dr. Bruce was awarded the Pulitzer for "The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876."
The academic discipline that was Dr. Bruce's life work almost became an abandoned path while he was growing up in Malden. After graduating from Malden High School in 1941, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I had always been interested in history," he told the Globe in 1988, "but I figured engineers made more money."
Two years after beginning college, he entered the US Army, which sent him to the University of New Hampshire. He graduated in 1945 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and served during World War II as a combat engineer. He used the GI Bill to attend BU, from which he received a master's in history in 1947 and doctorate in history in 1953. By 1955 he was back at BU, where he spent the rest of his career.
"He got his degrees from Boston University; he taught at Boston University; he was BU through and through," Keylor said.
Growing up near Boston, which Dr. Bruce thought of as a 19th century city, fueled his interest in history from that period, he told the Globe in 1988.
Admiration for the writings of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain also drew him to the 1800s, as did conversations with his grandmother. She was born in 1871 and told a young Robert Vance Bruce about his great-grandfather, who had fought in the Civil War.
"Lincoln and the Tools of War," Dr. Bruce's first book, was published in 1956.
"During the summer of 1952, as a graduate student working on my dissertation, I discovered the treasure cave known as the National Archives Building," he wrote in a preface to a 1989 edition of the book. "There in its cool immensity I could free a bundle of letters from the red tape that had bound them since the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln would speak to me from a long-buried endorsement.
"Crusty old General Ripley would snap back; Captain Dahlgren, the lean, earnest embodiment of technical expertise, would chime in; and a picturesque and picaresque crowd of inventors would have their fervid say. I was captivated by the drama of their dreams and disappointments, triumphs and fiascoes. . . . I should like to think that something of my youthful excitement can still be savored in the book that resulted."
Some critics saw similar enthusiasm in the book that earned him a Pulitzer. Reviewing "The Launching of Modern American Science" for the Los Angeles Times in 1987, Lee Dembart praised the book as "a tour de force in the history of science and in American intellectual history."
The book, Dembart wrote, "is a pleasure to read because it is a marvelous social history that weaves the story of science into the stories of many other things."
Dr. Bruce could be just as entertaining while teaching, Keylor said, recalling that his colleague "interspersed his very carefully crafted lectures with humorous asides."
"He never laughed, but you laughed in his presence because what he had to say was quite amusing," Keylor said.
That dry sense of humor was restrained, but not absent, when Dr. Bruce wrote about learning that his book "Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude" had been plagiarized by the Scottish writer James Mackey, whose own Bell biography was subsequently pulled from bookstore shelves and destroyed by Mackey's publisher.
"Plagiarism is a unique offense, in that the perpetrator publishes and signs the evidence against himself," Dr. Bruce wrote In "Scotching Plagiarism," an essay that can be found on the website of George Mason University's History News Network. Hundreds of passages in Mackey's book were nearly identical to Dr. Bruce's work, "often transparently disguised by substituting synonyms for some verbs and adjectives."
In a 1998 interview with The
Dr. Bruce moved to Colville, Wash., in late 1999, and four years later to Olympia, where his niece Constance Fenner lives. At Dr. Bruce's request, Fenner and her sister, Deborah Talaba of Bay Village, Ohio, do not plan to hold a memorial service.
Retired from academia, he walked a few miles with his dog each day, read, and watched old movies from a large personal library.
"After the Pulitzer, he felt that he had accomplished what he wanted to accomplish," Fenner said of her uncle's writing. As for the movies, she said, "every five or six years he would cycle through his collection. He didn't want to watch them too often, but he did want to watch them over again, so he had it all charted out."
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