Impresario of the Past
A professional before there was a profession, a self-styled "lucky pioneer" in a field that was virtually non-existent when he entered it, FREDERICK L. RATH JR. '34 has devoted nearly 40 years of his time and talent to creating "an understanding of the past in relation to the present in hope of influencing the future."
From vox clamantis in deserto for sparing the national heritage - historic, architectural, and archeological - from decayor demolition to Deputy Commissioner for Historic Preservation in New York State's Department of Parks and Recreation, Rath has been in the vanguard of a movement coming of age.
Crediting John D. Rockefeller with providing the original stimulus for the movement with the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, started in the 1920s, and Franklin Roosevelt for systematizing it by the consolidation of all nationally owned historic sites under the National Park Service in 1933, Rath finds the growing interest in the past, now accelerated by the approaching Bicentennial, intensely gratifying.
Historic preservation has come a long way, Rath points out, since the pre-war days when, fresh out of three years' graduate study at Harvard, he served - in ranger uniform - as historian at several national sites and monuments; since 1948 when he became first executive secretary of the National Council for Historic Sites and Buildings, with a staff of first one, then two, and $6,000 in the bank; since 1949, when he was named first director of the newly chartered National Trust for Historic Preservation, offspring of the council, with personnel and budget almost as inadequate. "In those days, there was no field as such," he explains. "We learned by doing."
Today Rath directs the activities of 52 historians archeologists, landscape architects, and other professionals, with a support staff of some 100, in Heritage '76, a long-range program for statewide historical resource management. This year New York State has allocated almost $2,350,000 for the program's annual operating expense and close to $5,700,000 for capital construction. The field that was no field has graduate programs like the one in Cooperstown, New York, operated by the New York State Historical Association and the State University College at Oneonta, which Rath helped establish when he was the association's vice director; it has accumulated a sufficient body of literature to warrant a bibliography, which he and a colleague compiled.
If the term "historic preservation" once evoked only images of priceless artifacts and ancient documents reverently enshrined in glass cases behind velvet ropes, the key concepts now - at least to Fred Rath - are "reconciling the past with the present" and involving the public, on both individual and community levels, in the process. "We're not just saving our historic heritage," he emphasizes. "We are reaching toward people who are seeking their roots."
Recalling President Roosevelt's immortal put-down of the DAR, he reiterates the fact that, American Indians excepted, "we are all immigrants - from the earliest settlers through waves of European refugees and Africans who became involuntary emigres to the newest Spanish-speaking citizen from Mexico or Puerto Rico," all equally in need of learning about collective and separate cultural backgrounds. "If we in historic preservation reach only the antique buffs and the stamp collectors, we have failed," he says simply.
The Heritage '76 program exemplifies Rath's theory of public participation in saving the most noteworthy of America's past. As sites are rehabilitated after years of neglect, the public is invited behind the scenes to watch - and occasionally to share in - the work. Everyone on the job doubles as interpreter; artisans are instructed to stop and explain to visitors what they're doing and why they're doing it. The 20 Historic Preservation Centers eventually to be set up at the most important of 36 state-owned historic sites will work closely with area communities, helping to identify historic, archeological, and architectural treasures, ad- vising and instructing local groups in techniques for safeguarding them.
If Rath sees himself as fundamentally an educator without the captive audience his colleagues in academia enjoy there can be little doubt of his virtuosity as impresario as well. Revitalizing the past, dramatizing its relevance to the present, has led him to seek out poets for their "evocative revelation" of the spirit of America; to set up art parks where artists and craftsmen demonstrate skills of long ago; to stage costume balls-open houses, "Sundays in the Park," and other galas at the places where New York history was made. The sights and sound; of early shipping and commerce will be recreated at the state-owned Maritime Museum adjoining the privately financed reconstruction of South Street Seaport in New York City, as village life of another day with its hand-set newspaper, shops and offices, kitchen gardens and typical crops, and bread baked daily for visitors in an authentic Dutch oven - is recreated in strictest verisimilitude at the Cooperstown Farmers' Museum which Rath directed before he assumed his current position.
With all the progress, Rath is by no means "at ease in Zion." "We are depreciated and demeaned every time a buildings historic value is demolished or an archeological site destroyed in the name of 'progress.' " But, practicing the enthusiasm preaches, the "lucky pioneer" finds "the future of the past bright especially with the Bicentennial years coming along to remind us that a great nation was born out of travail and brilliance and guts."
