I like 10 [hours of sleep a night]. Perhaps because I believe so firmly in decimals, of which I have been a life-long advocate and active missionary. I was born December 10, 1851, the anniversary of the deposit of the prototype meter in the Palace of the Archives in Paris. In 1872 I devised my decimal classification.…I am so loyal to decimals as our great labor saver that I even like to sleep decimally.
—Melvil Dewey, 1926
On the morning of Wednesday, January 5, 1887, Columbia College’s new library school was set to open. But the trustees of the college, then an all-male bastion located in midtown Manhattan, wanted to shut it down before its founder, the thirty-five-year-old Melvil Dewey, Columbia’s Librarian-in-Chief for the past four years, ever met the first class. As the handsome six-footer with the jet-black hair and bushy beard later recalled, he was suddenly immersed in “one of the sharpest battles of my life, for what I knew to be right.”
The previous day, the chairman of Columbia’s committee on buildings, Charles Silliman, had informed Dewey that he would not have access to any classrooms. The reason for the fracas? The entering class of twenty—Dewey’s initial hope for ten, his favorite number, had to be scrapped—included seventeen women, and the trustees, whom Silliman represented, were reluctant to allow any “petticoats” on campus. However, this champion of women’s education wasn’t going to let Silliman or anyone else come between him and his lofty goals. As Dewey later wrote, he considered himself a “Moses” who was about to “lead those particular children to the promised land.”
Dewey had been consumed by the idea of starting a library school for more than a decade. In an essay, “Apprenticeship of Librarians,” published in 1879 in Library Journal, Dewey lamented, “Physicians, lawyers, preachers, yes even our cooks have special schools for special training.” An admirer of Dewey’s various writings on librarianship as a profession, Columbia’s president, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, was firmly on board. “The librarian,” Barnard wrote upon hiring Dewey in 1883, “is ceasing to be a mere jailer of the books, and is becoming an aggressive force in the community.” That same year, in a speech at the annual American Library Association (ALA) conference in Buffalo, Dewey suggested that the school’s curriculum should pivot around cataloging, bibliography, and literary methods, by which he meant classifying, arranging, and indexing. From the get-go, he envisioned training more women than men. “In much of library work,” Dewey noted, “woman’s quick mind and deft fingers do many things with a neatness and dispatch seldom equaled by her brothers.”
In the spring of 1884, Dewey, with the help of his close friend Barnard, who dropped by his office most afternoons, got Columbia’s trustees to authorize a library school; according to the original plan, the new institution was to be up and running by the fall of 1886. The one catch was that Dewey’s training program had to be “self-sustaining,” meaning that fees would have to cover expenses. After encountering a set of bureaucratic roadblocks, Dewey was forced to postpone its opening until the beginning of 1887.
But when Dewey publicly announced that he planned to admit women, the trustees started to push back. And as much as Dr. Barnard supported the new library school, he was losing the will to fight. In December 1886, he cautioned Dewey that Silliman’s “new phase of opposition” was likely to spell doom. On January 4, after learning of Silliman’s latest rebuke, the seventy-seven-year-old Columbia president tried to enlist several college officials to help Dewey. But late that afternoon, Barnard gave up, believing that the battle had been lost. Feeling faint, he called for his physician. Dewey, however, then immediately sprang into action. He sent for the janitors, whom he asked to fix up an unused storeroom over the chapel. They quickly scraped the walls and patched up the rickety furniture. Dewey also hired a truck to bring some additional chairs from his West Fifty-Sixth Street apartment.
And so opened more or less on schedule the world’s first library school, Columbia’s School of Library Economy (thus named, Dewey later quipped, because it forced him to get “the most possible out of the appropriations not available”). Proud of his victory over “the enemies of women,” Dewey would always remember January 5, 1887, as the day that he had “kindled a fire whose light will surely be seen down through the generations.”
That first year, the school’s twenty students, who hailed from all over America—one even came from England—paid $50 each for four months of instruction. With his limited budget, the well-connected Dewey relied heavily on the services of twenty volunteer lecturers from around the country, including Ainsworth Spofford, the Librarian of Congress, who addressed “What to Read and When to Read and How to Read.” Dewey and his assistant librarians at Columbia also taught courses for which they received no additional remuneration. Dewey emphasized technical and practical matters. In a talk entitled “Light, Heat and Ventilation,” he expressed his concern that electric lights might put “freckles” on books. “Pure air” for libraries became a personal crusade. Dewey’s wife, Annie, whom he had married a decade earlier, pitched in by lecturing on indexing. Despite the “super-annuated building” and the often dry subject matter, students listened with “the ferment of enthusiasm.” They essentially lived in the library from early in the morning until its 10 p.m. closing time, when they still could be found combing over their lecture notes. Dewey had succeeded in imparting his missionarylike zeal to a new generation. Library work, he insisted, was not just about “shoveling” dusty books; it was really about giving every American the opportunity to pursue a lifelong education. At the end of the first term, eleven of the twenty students signed up for a second academic year during which they would attend classes for a total of seven months.
Dewey was soon flooded with a steady stream of new applicants. And in his excitement, he got a bit carried away. On the application form that he designed, he requested some curious pieces of information. Now, he didn’t actually require females to submit their bust size, as generations of incredulous indexers have snickered about (such as the 1971 Library Journal editorial writer who, in referring to this urban legend, wondered, “Like what did you really have in mind, Mel baby?”). But he did ask for a few telling measurements—namely, height and weight—as well as a description of hair and eye color along with a photo. Regarding his discriminating taste in future librarians, he once remarked, “You can’t polish a pumpkin.”
Unbeknownst to most Americans, who are familiar with his name largely through the use of his signature achievement, the ingenious Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system, America’s pioneering librarian had a dark side. Dewey’s desire to bring more women into the library business was rooted in part in his own out-of-control sexual desire. As one historian has noted, the library school may well have been “a Trojan horse” designed to smuggle babes onto the Columbia campus. While hard evidence for each and every one of Dewey’s alleged extracurricular activities is not available, a pattern is clear and undeniable. Throughout his adult life, Dewey sought out inappropriate relationships with women. In fact, in 1906, this serial sexual harasser was forced to resign from the American Library Association, the organization that he had helped to found a generation earlier, because of his scandalous behavior. A year earlier, as four “prominent women” in the ALA charged, during a ten-day ALA-sponsored trip to Alaska following the organization’s annual convention, Dewey had made unwelcome advances on several librarians. As a highly respected female member of the guild summed up the matter in 1924, “For many years women librarians have been the special prey of Mr. Dewey in a series of outrages upon decency.”
Like Heinz, Dewey started out as a hyperobedient boy; as a youth, he was constantly trying to please his demanding and chronically stressed-out mother. But as an adult, Dewey would seek to turn the tables. Once he discovered that he could exercise power over women, he would insist that they do his bidding. The man who couldn’t connect first charmed before attempting to dominate.
Dewey’s career as an organizer extraordinaire began early. By age five, Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey—his name paid homage both to the novelist Herman Melville and to the Hungarian freedom fighter Louis Kossuth—was already arranging and classifying the contents of his mother’s pantry in order to improve the efficiency of the household.
The adult’s abiding love of order was a direct response to his chaotic boyhood in Adams Center, a small town in western New York, located in the so-called burned-over district, the part of the state known for its Protestant fervor. “It [my home],” he wrote in his diary early in his undergraduate career at Amherst College, “was hurly-burly, scolding, etc. too much, and neither of my parents ever practiced any confidences with me.” Convinced of his “own unworthiness,” Melville (as he was called until he dropped the final le at the age of twenty-five) felt little anger about his difficult circumstances; instead he blamed himself. Straightening up his environment could help him ward off these deeply rooted feelings of shame. He spent many an afternoon cleaning up the yard, the cellar, and the woodshed as well as picking up stones, plowing the garden, and polishing his mother’s sewing machine. As Melville also recorded in his diary, his early years were “as monotonous as the roar of the Niagara.” Dull routines would become a lifelong addiction.
His mother, Eliza Dewey, was an imposing figure “who never feared anything.” “She was,” Melville later recalled, “famous as was father for being the hardest worker in town.” This industrious Seventh Day Baptist handed off the bulk of the care for her fifth child and second son—whom she would refer to as “her baby” well into his thirties—to her eldest daughter, Mate, then in late adolescence. Her neglect would have long-lasting effects, as would the torrent of austere maxims and scary injunctions that flowed from her lips. “Praise to the face,” she insisted, “is an open disgrace.” “Don’t waste” was oft repeated. Her thrift knew no bounds. After Melville became a successful adult, she would ask him to send back his old shirts, which she would then fix up for her husband, Joel Dewey, a perpetually struggling merchant.
This nineteenth-century Tiger Mother could also hold her own in mano a mano combat with feral creatures. At the age of two, Melville was grabbed by a huge dog that proceeded to rip out chunks of skin near his left eye. Hearing the screams, the local doctor hopped off his horse and tried to intercede, but to no avail. In contrast, as soon as Eliza put down her sewing and spotted the fight, she immediately wrested the toddler out of the dog’s jaws.
Melville’s father also deferred to the domineering woman of the house. A devout Baptist like his wife, Joel Dewey was a boot maker who ran a general store that sold everything from groceries to farm supplies. The timid shopkeeper never could refuse to let his customers—even ne’er-do-wells—buy on credit. The elder Dewey routinely accepted old cows and pigs as a substitute for cash. At thirteen, Melville began waiting on his father’s customers after school. Not long after that, the avid reader—as an adolescent, he devoured all five volumes of Lord Macaulay’s History of England—first went into the library business. (Like Jefferson, he was no fan of the novel; he called fiction the “deadly enemy of mental power.”) In a corner of the store, he maintained a small collection of books, which he would rent for two cents a day. After taking a bookkeeping course, this whiz with figures, who would later win Amherst College’s prestigious Walker Math Prize, did a complete inventory of his father’s wares. Melville initially hoped simply to improve the store’s methods. But his digging around led to the discovery of a staggering 155 promissory notes, of which 133 were no longer valid. Melville’s calculations revealed that his father was actually losing money. In 1869, at the urging of his youngest child, a reluctant Joel Dewey sold the store. Melville and his parents then moved into the home of his elder brother, Manfred, a well-to-do piano salesman, in the neighboring town of Oneida.
Having attempted to fix his family’s precarious finances, the grandiose seventeen-year-old turned his attention to reforming the world. Though he would soon shed his rigid Baptist beliefs, for the rest of his life he would infuse his work with evangelical zeal. The late adolescent, who never openly rebelled against his parents, began railing against “old fogies who are continually croaking ‘let well enough alone.’” A technology lover, enthralled by the “elegance and speed of the steamboat and railroad,” Melville sought to liberate the engines of progress. In November 1869, he settled on a cause that would occupy (and preoccupy) him for the rest of his life: “I wish to inaugurate a higher education for the masses.… If the time and talent now expended at the shrine of mammon could be devoted to education what a mighty revolution would result.” His work as a librarian, devoted to providing “the best reading for the largest number, at the least cost,” as he later put it in the famous ALA motto, would fulfill this pledge, but in his precollege days, he had mostly tens on his mind. Given that America’s haphazard system of weights and measures resulted in untold waste and confusion, the adoption of the metric system, Melville believed, could help jump-start the entire economy. “But certainly the [metric] system,” he wrote in 1869, “can never be used by the people until it be learned by the people.” Thus he saw it as his mission to right this wrong from the bottom up.
The very act of measuring was also dear to the young man’s heart. Melville loved translating everything into numbers, including himself. On his fifteenth birthday, he began keeping a chart in which he tracked his height and weight as well as the value of all his possessions, divided into categories such as clothes, cash, and books. He updated these figures on every birthday for the next decade. In 1866, his books—including “his most essential,” Webster’s Dictionary, for which the twelve-year-old had shelled out $10 in 1864, nearly his entire life savings at the time—were worth $50; this amount dipped to $45 in 1870 before spiking up to $142 in 1875. In his sophomore year at Amherst, thanks to Professor Edward Hitchcock Jr., who ran the college’s physical education program, he was delighted to have access to a whole new set of data. “My expiratory capacity is 273 cubic inches,” he wrote in a diary entry dated December 10, 1871, “chest 38 in passive, full 39 in, arm 12.75 in, fore arm 11.25 in (all as taken by Dr. H).” (As he also noted, he actually compiled these “birthday statistics” the night before; that year, he resorted to this “Irishy way” of keeping his diary because the tenth fell on a Sunday.) Numerical measurements, even those that weren’t expressed metrically, had a remarkable power to induce feelings of calm. “I feel well repaid for the time spent,” he observed at the end of that birthday entry, “since these results…make me feel more safe and certain.”
“The 900 of 020 [was]…dark before 1873.”
So wrote Mary Krome, a student at the Florida State College for Women, to Dewey in a congratulatory letter upon his eightieth birthday. Translated from the lingo of the DDC back into English, Ms. Krome’s numbers allude to Dewey’s pivotal role in moving “the history of library science” out of the dark ages.
At Amherst College, where the small-town boy began his studies in September 1870, he found his true calling. The inspiration came not from any professor or course, but from the $12-a-month part-time job that he landed in the fall of 1872. Soon after the heavily indebted junior began keeping the account books at the college library, he could think of little else but how to organize its thirty thousand volumes. “My heart,” he wrote in March 1873, “is open to anything that is either decimal or about libraries.” That May, he cranked out a preliminary draft of his classification scheme—a system that is used to organize libraries to this day and was the starting point for many research projects in the PG (Pre-Google) Era. After earning his bachelor’s degree a year later, Dewey eagerly accepted a post as the chief assistant to the college’s librarian, William Montague, a foreign language professor. By May 1875, Dewey had put the entire collection in “proper order”; by the end of that year, he had completed his forty-two-page A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library. The following spring, Dewey shelled out a dollar to obtain copyright protection for his forthcoming book, first published later that year.
Until the Amherst junior got on the case, America’s printed matter—its books and pamphlets—were in a state of total disorder. Each of the country’s roughly one thousand libraries, whether public or academic, relied on its own idiosyncratic classification system. The books at the Amherst library were arranged according to the shelf system, then the most common approach. Catalogers would give each volume a number identifying the particular shelf on which it was to be placed. This method, Dewey quipped, had one advantage—librarians who already knew where a book was located could easily find it in the dark. The disadvantages were many. As the number of books grew, every few years, staff members had to spend countless hours reclassifying and rearranging the entire collection. And empty spaces on the shelves that resulted from lost or damaged books were everywhere to be seen.
In early 1873, to clean up the mess at his place of employment—he wasn’t yet concerned with organizing all of America’s books—Dewey embarked on a tour of fifty libraries in the northeastern United States. The protocols used elsewhere were little better. Albany’s New York State Library, he was disappointed to learn, “arrange[d] the books alphabetically paying no attention to subjects.” Other systems that organized books by the color of their bindings or by their size struck him as equally ridiculous. Dewey also read widely about the fledgling science of classification. He was particularly impressed with an essay by William Torrey Harris, the director of the St. Louis Public Library, which suggested arranging material alphabetically by subject. Under a relative rather than fixed location system, rather than being assigned a specific place in the library, books would be organized in relation to one another. “Of this,” noted the man, who bonded more readily to abstract concepts than to other people, on February 22, 1873, “I am inclined to be a friend.” But the all-consuming quest went on. “For months,” he later wrote, “I dreamed day and night that there must be somewhere a satisfactory solution.” One Sunday that spring, while supposedly listening to a sermon by the college’s seventy-something president, the pastor William Stearns, he had his eureka moment. He would use “the simplest known symbols, the Arabic numerals as decimals…to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.”
Surprisingly, the 1876 masterpiece that would turn Dewey into a household name the world over did not list him (or anyone else) as its author. The only place his name appears in the first edition of his scheme is on the copyright page. In the preface, dated June 10 (his half birthday), Dewey lays out his framework. He divides books into ten classes, which are, in turn, subdivided into ten sections and into ten divisions. As a result, all knowledge falls under one thousand headings (one thousand was also the total of the print run). For example, a geometry book was to be numbered 513—as Natural Science is Class 500, Mathematics is Section 510, and Geometry is Division 513. The main difference between this first go-round and the DDC in use today was the absence of the decimal point per se; this addition has allowed for an infinite number of categories. In the second part of the book, Dewey lists the full contents of all ten classes, devoting one page to each. And in the final third, he provides an alphabetical subject index; under G, the reader can find “Geometry, 513” right above “Geometry analytical, 516.”
Dewey’s work, as he concedes in the preface, wasn’t entirely original: “In his varied reading, correspondence, and conversation on the subject, the author doubtless received suggestions and gained ideas which it is now impossible for him to acknowledge.” But due to its inherent simplicity and logic, his system caught on immediately. The timing couldn’t have been better. The public library, whose origins date back to only about 1850, was about to come into its own. In 1875, the whole country had just 257 branches, and small collections with as few as three hundred books were not uncommon. A huge time and space saver, Dewey’s decimals helped to spark a spectacular growth spurt over the next quarter century; by 1900, America would be festooned with some five thousand public libraries containing more than forty million volumes.
And since the publication of the original version, twenty-two editions of the DDC system have followed. The most recent, released in 2011, which comes to more than four thousand pages, governs the arrangement of books in more than two hundred thousand libraries across nearly 150 countries. Owned by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), based in Dublin, Ohio, since 1988, the DDC system is not in the public domain, as is commonly assumed. It is still a major revenue engine, as the OCLC charges libraries that use it at least $500 a year. Manhattan’s Library Hotel, which was inspired by the DDC—each of its ten floors corresponds to one of Dewey’s categories (for example, room 800.001 features erotic literature on its shelves)—learned this lesson the hard way; in 2003, OCLC’s lawyers sued the swanky rest stop for book lovers, located across the street from the New York Public Library, for triple its profits, alleging copyright infringement. The two sides subsequently reached an agreement.
It was just after 5 a.m. on April 10, 1876, and Melvil Dewey was already on the go. He had to catch the 6:15 a.m. train to Boston. After six years in sleepy Amherst, the rapid-fire talker with the high-pitched voice, who had recently deleted the le from his given name because he considered it “Frenchy,” was off to the big city to seek fame and fortune.
While Dewey was excited to be entering the “busy world,” he was also sad to be leaving “college seclusion.” In Amherst, Dewey had enjoyed some relief from the loneliness and alienation that had plagued his childhood. After graduation, he boarded with Mrs. S. F. Pratt, a wealthy widow of a Turkish missionary, with whom he formed a close relationship. This mother of three young children asked him both to manage her investments and to help her with budgeting. Dewey, whose own parents had shown him little affection, referred to his landlady as “Mother.” And for the first time in his life, Dewey was popular with members of the fair sex—to make their acquaintance, he rarely missed services at the local Congregational church. With dating as with decimals, Dewey could never get his fill; the peripatetic bachelor would sometimes escort home two or three different women in the same evening. In January 1875, as he noted in his characteristic shorthand, he was courting both Mary E. and “the 34-year-old girl that I lykt so much… [I]… 1/2 thot of wedding.” (Ever since high school, he had griped about the messiness of his native tongue—“English spelling,” he once quipped, “is the wurst there is”—and he would be a lifelong advocate of simplified or phonetic spelling.) But the other 1/2 of Dewey would not budge, and no proposal was ever made to the woman more than a full decade his senior. By March 1875, Mary E. was also out of the picture—though she would pop back in a couple of years later—and Dewey was “having a good time” with both Mrs. H. and Hatty D. All told, between 1872 and 1876, Dewey romanced about twenty different women, including three Marys, three Mays, and three already-marrieds. Attachment to one woman at a time would be something to which he never could quite acclimate himself.
In an interview in Boston in early 1876, Dewey had finalized his new business venture. It was a dream come true. The publisher Edwin Ginn had signed Dewey on as a junior partner, appointing him manager of the company’s new American Metric Bureau. Dewey’s chief responsibility would be selling educational tools such as scales and charts designed to persuade the entire country to adopt the metric system. Dewey had long fantasized about doing away with America’s “inconsistent system” of weights and measures. In a high school essay, he had argued that the metric system’s “great superiority over all others consists in the fact that all its scales are purely decimal.”
Dewey’s last day at the Amherst library was Friday, March 31, 1876. He could have left town then, but his fervent worship of decimals led him to delay his journey until a week from the following Monday—April 10. The man, who hated vacations as a matter of principle, spent a few days engaging in his favorite hobbies such as horseback riding and hunting. Saturday the eighth turned out to be a disaster. That evening, he and “Mother had a misunderstanding.” “She of course,” he wrote in his diary, “had a big cry and I of course had to pacify her, all of which was less restful than sleep would have been.” Though tired, Dewey felt better on Sunday: “We had several little crys among the family during the day but got on very happily otherwise.” That afternoon, he boosted his sagging spirits by “talking library” at the home of his former boss, Professor Montague. But he still couldn’t shake the existential anxiety that had engulfed him. “It was a sad day,” he wrote in his diary shortly after retiring to bed at 9, “for I feared it would be my last.”
On moving day, Dewey squeezed in a four-hour stopover in Worcester, where he thoroughly examined the wares of the new Wesson and Harrington firearms store. Everything about guns and their construction had long fascinated Dewey, and he posed a series of probing questions to the owner, Frank Wesson. After an extended discussion, Dewey became convinced “he [Wesson] had the best pocket and long range rifles on the market.” As with other obsessives such as Jefferson and Lindbergh, new gadgets could leave him feeling spellbound. That evening, the new sales rep found some temporary lodgings in Malden, a short commute from his office at 13 Tremont Place in downtown Boston. On the morning of the eleventh, he met with the librarian Charles Cutter of the Boston Athenaeum—Beantown was then a library mecca, and this elegant venue was just one of its prominent shrines—to get some feedback on his new “skeme.” The meteoric rise of an American icon was now under way.
Eighteen seventy-six was to be an annus mirabilis for Dewey. Within a few weeks, Ginn agreed to expand his job description to include both selling library supplies and editing a new journal for librarians. As the managing editor of the American Library Journal—to reflect its international aspirations, the adjective was soon dropped from the title—Dewey suddenly had a huge platform. “Born with a disposition to run things whenever I could get a chance,” as Dewey noted five decades later in his unpublished memoir, “3/4 of a Century,” he immediately made the most of the opportunity. That spring, he became the prime mover behind a national gathering of librarians at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, thus organizing the conference that would, in turn, create the American Library Association. Unknown to some and dismissed by others—in a line that circulated widely, an Amherst philosophy professor described Dewey to the Librarian of Congress as “a tremendous talker, and a little bit of an old maid”—he initially faced stiff opposition. Wary of the newcomer, the head of the Chicago Public Library wrote to his counterpart in Boston on May 31: “It won’t pay for you and me to attend that barbecue.” But Dewey was not to be deterred, promising his colleagues that they would experience “the most profitable three days of their library life.” Thanks largely to Dewey’s infectious enthusiasm, 103 librarians from around the country—including those head honchos from Boston and Chicago who were to become the ALA’s first president and vice president, respectively—showed up at the Pennsylvania State Historical Society on October 4, 1876. Two days later, Dewey signed on as the ALA’s first member and was elected both its secretary and treasurer. Librarianship, as Dewey stressed, was officially a “profession.” And with his classification text now required reading for his colleagues around the country, the ALA’s youngest member would soon forever change how America both organized and disseminated information.
This flurry of activity would, however, leave Dewey close to a nervous breakdown by the time he hit the quarter century mark on December 10, 1876.
Dewey’s classification text also turned out to be the magnet that would attract his first wife. On April 18, 1876, he crossed the Charles River into Cambridge to give a lecture at Harvard “on locating books by numbers and subjects and not by numbering shelves,” as the college’s librarian recorded in his diary. Annie Godfrey, then the twenty-five-year-old librarian at the newly established Wellesley College, just happened to be in attendance. Three months later, Dewey sent her a proof of his book, offering “to answer any questions that may arise and…to receive any corrections or criticisms that may occur to you.” They picked up the dialogue about decimals a few months later at the librarians’ powwow in Philadelphia, where Annie became ALA Member No. 29. Admiring his “devotion to…[his] life work,” the frumpy and slightly overweight librarian, who shared his passion for horseback riding, became the pursuer. For the next year and a half, Dewey kept her at arm’s length. He cited overwork, a claim that was partly true. In late 1876, after his string of successes, Dewey felt drained and confused about what to do for an encore. He also began having trouble carrying out daily tasks. That November, a despairing and humbled Dewey, who had endured considerable criticism from his parents as a boy, begged Richard Bowker, his editor at Library Journal, to give him “a blowing up for my weaknesses.… It makes me shiver, but I know the final effect is good.” He rebounded, but slowly. At the first annual meeting of the ALA in the fall of 1877, the overtaxed workaholic achieved little besides standardizing the size of a catalog card at 7.5 × 12.5 centimeters.
But the more likely reason why he put Annie on hold was that he had taken up with his former Amherst flame, Mary E. Much of the future couple’s correspondence from 1877 has been burned, so the truth is hard to come by. Annie, who had an ardent suitor of her own—a hard-driving steamboat captain—didn’t give up easily. She also understood her man. While she supported his grandiose ambitions, she made him promise not to work after ten. “I am going to haunt you,” she wrote Dewey on December 5, 1877. “Every night when the clock strikes ten,” she added, “I shall come to you in imagination…and whisper ‘good-night.’” (Dewey would take to the idea; several years later, when he became director of Columbia College’s library, he would close the building at the decimal hour.) In a birthday letter posted five days later, Annie wished Dewey “many years of usefulness.” They were married the following October.
In the socially prominent Annie Godfrey—her cousin was Mary Bucklin, wife of Bay State governor William Claflin, and her contacts in Cambridge included the legendary poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—the twenty-seven-year-old Melvil found a spouse who matched him eccentricity for eccentricity. They got to work right away on their shared goal of improving both themselves as well as the rest of humanity. Beginning in 1878—and for at least a decade after that—each month, they compiled a detailed list of “time-budgets” and “resolutions”; the latter came with a set of fines that they slapped on themselves whenever they missed the mark. Both partners were often penalized for the use of slang. Much to Dewey’s delight, Annie’s side of the ledger featured the following admonition, “Don’t waste a minute.” Dewey swore to seek “accuracy in print,” but he had difficulty staying true to his word; one week, his self-rating on this scale came to a measly 48 percent. Like her husband, Annie rarely passed up the chance to turn the human experience into a number. She tracked every penny that ever left the house, every jar of fruit she ever canned, and every button she ever purchased. On the matter of writing implements, however, they didn’t quite see eye to eye. While Dewey was never without five fountain pens in his vest pocket, each containing a different color of ink, Annie preferred toting pencils, color-coordinated with both her notebooks and the pockets in her customary white dresses. Perhaps as a tribute to “the lady in white,” after Annie’s death, the still-in-a-hurry septuagenarian would make the switch to a custom-made pencil with different colored leads on each end.
The marriage—which would produce a son, Godfrey, born in 1887—worked splendidly for Dewey; he got everything he wanted, including the freedom to come and go as he pleased. Besides the loneliness, Annie had to put up with her husband’s roving eye. This penchant was perilous, because Dewey was constantly surrounded by temptation, particularly after he started the library school at Columbia. Despite mountains of incriminating evidence, Annie repeatedly stood by her man. During the 1906 sex scandal, Annie wrote a confidential letter to an ALA official declaring, “Women who have keen intuitions know by instinct that they can trust Mr. Dewey implicitly.” Annie’s misplaced faith in her husband may well have contributed to her ill health. She suffered from both frayed nerves and hardened arteries, for which she received all sorts of medical care, including residential treatment at Michigan’s Battle Creek Sanitarium. Dewey wasn’t at home when Annie—by then both exceedingly frail and totally blind—died in 1922.
During the first few years of their marriage, Dewey’s career hit a snag. The core contradictions in his character were creating constant chaos. Like other obsessives, Dewey was more in love with the semblance of order—the illusion that everything was under control—than with order itself. And the man who preached patience and discipline had trouble regulating his own impulses. As Dewey acknowledged, his tendency to overextend himself was “infinitely silly”; nevertheless, he kept trying “to undertake to do 5 things at once.” Likewise, despite his fierce advocacy of organizational efficiency, he was never a team player; in fact, he often alienated colleagues with his stubbornness and arrogance. A procrastinator, he couldn’t pass on his copy to the Library Journal’s Richard Bowker on time. What’s more, even his own memoranda and missives to his editor, as he admitted, were also “wholly without organization.” When Bowker and publisher Frederick Leypoldt told him that some belt tightening would be needed to cope with spotty revenue, he threatened to jump ship and start a rival outlet. Startled by Dewey’s wayward ways, Leypoldt’s wife characterized him as “as miserable a specimen of a gabbling idiot as I ever beheld.” By the end of 1880, Dewey would be dropped from the journal. In the late 1870s, he faced another setback when the business opportunity that had lured him to Boston fizzled out; he was not able to create a market for metric goods, as he had hoped. Upon his twenty-eighth birthday, seeking a fresh start, the struggling entrepreneur turned to a name change, settling on what he perceived to be the more efficient Dui.
Dui’s first venture was to become the president and secretary of the Readers and Writers Economy Company, a library supply outfit. But after only a matter of months, that company was also veering toward bankruptcy, its shareholders charging him with fraud and mismanagement. As it turned out, the man who had a way with figures couldn’t be counted on to keep the books; he repeatedly mixed up personal and corporate accounts. Dui claimed that the lapses were unintentional, but he was still forced to resign in late 1880. He became an emotional and physical wreck. “Hay fever took me down this year, and I suffered terrible,” he wrote to Bowker, with whom he continued to work on various ALA matters, in October 1880. “For 12 hours at a time for two or three days I could not open my eyelids.” While he would later proudly assert that he “never worried,” he was the king of the psychosomatic symptom. Throughout his life, in addition to hay fever, he was also susceptible to colds, coughs, and “bad stomachs” as well as bronchitis, laryngitis, and asthma.
Suddenly an unemployed pariah, Dui continued to feel depressed, humiliated, and, according to one colleague, suicidal. Overwork, he conceded to a friend toward the end of 1880, “has nearly cost me my life.” For the next couple of years, he scraped by as a freelance consultant for local libraries. Though down and out, Dui kept thinking big. “I feel my fingers tingle often,” he told Bowker in June 1881, “to get hold of some large enterprise.” His fingers worked fast. Several months later, Dui started a new company, the Library Bureau, which would sell business equipment of all sorts, including the hanging vertical file, which he invented. Over the next decade, his shares in this rapidly expanding venture, which would be folded into the Sperry Rand Corporation a century later, would make him a rich man.
The following year, Dui was visited by more good fortune. Columbia College was building a new library at the center of its Madison Avenue campus and needed a new director to organize its half-dozen independent book collections. The college’s president, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, figured that Dui was just the man for the job. The two men had formed a bromantic bond years before, based on their shared love of tens. An important figure in the ALA—he had also been there at its creation in 1876—Barnard had known Dui for nearly a decade. The reigning president of the research group, the American Metrological Society—Dui was its secretary—Barnard was the author of the five-hundred-page magnum opus The Metric System of Weights and Measures, then in its third edition. This rhapsody to the metre, litre, and gramme addressed the beauty and efficiency of “units that have decimal multiples and submultiples.” And if Barnard harbored any doubts about what Dui could do to spiff up Columbia’s scattered and scanty collection, then ranked forty-ninth in the country and just sixth in New York City, Columbia professor John Burgess quickly put them to rest. Recently recruited from Amherst College, the political scientist showered praise on his former colleague’s “fine genius for classification and convenient arrangement.” Barnard had only one concern; trustees were dumbfounded by the ridiculous spelling of the job candidate’s last name. (So, too, was William Poole, head of the Chicago Public Library, who joked that “Dewy” might be better, given his naïveté.) To keep his hat in the ring, Dui quickly reverted to being Dewey and promised to eschew simplified spelling in his official correspondence.
On May 7, 1883, trustees offered Dewey the job as the school’s Librarian-in-Chief at a salary of $3,500 (about $80,000 today) a year. They also set aside $10,000 for the recataloging and reclassifying of Columbia’s books.
Three weeks later, Dewey began work at the spanking-new English Gothic facility, built for $400,000, then a staggering sum, on Madison Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street. When he arrived, the director had only one employee—an assistant, who doubled as a janitor—and the library was open only three hours a day. For help with the pressing task of assigning decimals to its fifty thousand volumes, Dewey immediately hired six seniors from Wellesley College. This move was radical, as at the time nearly all librarians were male and Columbia was “almost as hermetically sealed to women as a monastery.” Within a year, Dewey presided over a team of twenty-one employees, including five department heads and “the Wellesley Half Dozen,” as his comely coterie of assistants were dubbed. Thanks to his industrious staff, Dewey soon cataloged the library’s fifty thousand volumes; this massive undertaking, in turn, served as the basis for an expanded second edition of his scheme published in 1885, which officially introduced the decimal point and two new decimal places. Dewey also began beefing up the now carefully arranged collection at the hefty rate of ten thousand volumes a year.
Columbia’s state-of-the-art facility became a model for academic and public libraries around the world. No other libraries—not even those at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, or anywhere in Germany—were in its class. As the New York Tribune reported, it was “the ideal of a university library…in equipment and organization.” With three hundred Edison lamps allowing for evening use, Dewey could increase operating hours by a factor of ten. Patrons enjoyed a slew of modern conveniences, including trays of ice water and mail delivery. The elegant main reading room, with its fifty-eight-foot-high ceiling, could seat 160 visitors, to whom assistants could bring any volume on demand. After just one year, circulation jumped by a staggering 500 percent. Staff members were also prepared to answer queries at a reasonable fraction—1/1200—of their annual salary per hour. The transformation of the library didn’t escape the notice of students. “Suddenly the place seemed to have come alive,” one later recalled. “Something had happened, too, to the attendants. Brashness, alertness, service became the order of the day.” Order also reigned supreme in every nook and cranny. Rubber tips placed on the oak chairs and rubber wheels affixed to book trucks eliminated noise. And Dewey managed to keep the premises spotless. To littering students, he passed out cards that read: “I picked up these pieces in the hall and infer that you threw them on the floor. My time and that of my assistants is too valuable for this work. Still we prefer to do it rather than have the building so disfigured.” Eager to tidy up other libraries as well, he circulated these cards among his colleagues across the country.
Thrilled with his new hire, in May 1884 President Barnard remarked that Dewey “has been of more important service to the college than that of any other officer.” That spring, the trustees bumped up his salary to $5,000—the amount doled out to full professors—and conferred upon him a new title, professor of library economy.
While the library school got off to a successful start in 1887, Dewey’s conflict with the trustees persisted. In fact, the animosity only increased. Dewey got flak for plowing funds initially appropriated for reclassifying books back into salaries—a move he tried in order to appease his overworked staff. Trustees also objected to his annual reports touting the library school’s achievements, which clocked in at fifty pages, twice the heft of those published by its already well-established law school. The Special Committee on Printing considered such marketing efforts “not in accordance with academic propriety” and a waste of precious dollars. Likewise, most of Columbia’s professors, irked by the tenacity with which he collected fines for overdue books, viewed him as an arrogant nuisance. And the presence of women on campus continued to bother the trustees as well as a considerable segment of both the faculty and the alumni. Dewey’s fate was sealed when his most influential and steadfast ally, President Barnard, resigned in May 1888. By the end of the year, Dewey, too, decided to step down.
But by then, Dewey had already landed a cushy new job in Albany, where he would serve as both director of the New York State Library and as secretary of the Board of Regents at the University of the State of New York.
“My whole five years at Columbia,” Dewey later recalled, “were a constant struggle against the anti-Women element.” While he would remain clueless about the “anti-Women element” in his own personality, he still deserves considerable credit for being a trailblazer in female education. During his Manhattan sojourn, Dewey befriended Annie Nathan Meyer, a twenty-something autodidact who bemoaned Columbia’s exclusion of women. Inspired by Dewey’s “vision and idealism” as well as his “purposeful punch,” Meyer went on to found Barnard College, New York’s first women’s college, in 1889. As Dewey observed that year, Barnard “in its pre-natal days was probably discussed more in my private office in the Columbia library than anywhere else.” In 1926, under President Nicholas Butler, Columbia would acknowledge its harsh treatment of Dewey, agreeing to take back the library school, which had accompanied him to Albany in 1889. As Butler noted, Dewey’s “offense of having admitted women to the University without authority, was, in view of all that has happened since, ludicrous in the extreme.” Dewey is also directly responsible for the sprouting of library schools—which, in the late nineteenth century, constituted a significant new avenue for professional advancement for women—all over the country. By 1893, five disciples—alumni of his programs at Columbia and Albany—had already founded similar schools in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Amherst, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Over the next couple of decades, another ten Deweyites would also strike out on their own.
Except for the decimal system, no other achievement gave Dewey “serener satisfaction” than the invention of the modern library school. The strengths and weaknesses of this cultural institution directly reflect the two poles of his oversized personality—both the eccentricity and the genius. The persnickety pedagogue clearly loved to parade his hard-won pseudoknowledge about how to organize and take care of books, particularly in front of attentive (and attractive) women, who, as he once estimated, comprised about “nine-tenths” of his students. No detail was too minor for Dewey’s “scientific” scrutiny. He even provided instruction in how to design, print, and physically apply bookplates. Such pedantry led critics to challenge the legitimacy of the enterprise from the very beginning. “A school to learn to be a librarian!” one of his contemporaries wrote. “How very odd! There’ll be schools for dry goods clerks next.” Over the years, many academics would continue to question whether there was, in fact, a body of serious scholarship that librarians in training needed to master; this lack of a natural research base turned out to be the major reason why fifteen library schools closed between 1978 and 1992—including the Columbia School of Library Service, as the second incarnation of Dewey’s brain child was called.
But Dewey’s legacy has also powered the revival of his pet idea in the form of the I-School—those graduate programs in Information Science, which have either been appended to previously existing library schools or been built from scratch in the last two decades. Since the end of the twentieth century, the field of library science, which Dewey invented in the last quarter of the nineteenth, has officially evolved into library and information studies. A forward-thinking visionary, Dewey would have approved. He was acutely aware that libraries are essentially repositories of information. A fan of new technology, he constantly tried to expand the scope of collections beyond printed matter. At the New York State Library, he began an extensive picture archive; soon he was thinking about how to include rolls for the player piano. In the 1890s, he also embraced the long-distance telephone, realizing that it would enable reference desks to respond to queries from faraway patrons. “Radio, movies and various devices,” he stated in 1926, “are making short cuts to what books have been doing. Our great function… is to give to the public in the quickest and cheapest way information, inspiration and recreation on the highest plane. If a better way than the books be found, we should use it.” Dewey would also have been thrilled by the development of both the online database and the e-book. After all, his decimal system was the search engine par excellence—the Google—of its day. For Dewey, faster was always better. “Mani can make muni,” he once philosophized in his tweet-like prose, “but no one can make tym.”
In 1889, as Dewey made the transition from an elegant Madison Avenue office in New York City to a capacious home on Albany’s Madison Avenue, located just a couple of blocks from the Capitol, he was thirty-seven and balding, and his formerly thin frame was starting to fill out, as he now weighed nearly two hundred pounds. He would be busier than ever. “It was like watching a fine machine, an electric machine,” observed a fellow Albany resident, who added that Dewey “worked away with a kind of furious quiet.” According to a running joke, he was wont to dictate notes to two different stenographers at the same time. Heading the State Library, then in the process of being transferred to twenty rooms on the third and fourth floors on the western side of the capitol building, would prove to be the less taxing of his two demanding jobs. As secretary of the Board of Regents, the nineteen volunteers appointed by the New York State legislature to monitor the state’s schools, academies, and colleges, Dewey would be jumping headfirst into the political arena. To the Albany politicos, the hard-driving pedagogue would be as welcome as “a thorn would be in a sore thumb.” Unwittingly creating conflict whenever possible, the cantankerous Dewey would steadily amass a long list of enemies. As a public figure, he was now subject to constant press coverage, and the airing of his habitual shenanigans would eventually prove to be his undoing.
Dewey had landed the influential dual position on the basis of an extensive memo that he had submitted to the chairman of the search committee the previous November. His roughly ten-thousand-word missive took the form of a numbered “check list of ‘things to be done,’” which featured a total of twenty bullet points (uncharacteristically, he came up with eleven for the State Library and nine for the Board of Regents rather than a perfect ten for each). The ambitious Dewey aimed high. He envisioned turning the library into a “People’s University” where “any person may find information on any subject.” His master plan for the Board of Regents involved greatly expanding its purview. Though some of his ideas went nowhere, he would knock off several of his key goals. “Dewey has as many crank notions as anybody outside of an asylum,” the chancellor of the State University once observed, but he is “zealous, inventive and in many ways useful.” As an Albany power broker, Dewey would improve the quality of both the state’s public high schools (by creating higher standards for the annual Regents exams) and its professional schools (by increasing state supervision of their curricula). At the same time as he focused on the big picture, Dewey didn’t neglect to get bogged down in the details. In his decade at the Board of Regents, he personally signed all the 279,444 certificates of achievement given out to high school students. This was a bureaucrat who, as much as he preached efficiency, couldn’t bear to permit the rubber stamp used by his predecessors to lighten his load.
In contrast, over at the New York State Library, Dewey turned into an expert delegator. He leaned heavily on the five members of his Columbia team whom he brought with him, particularly three nubile former students, Florence Woodworth, May Seymour, and Mary Salome Cutler. Both Woodworth, who doubled as a caretaker for his son Godfrey, and Seymour, who became his personal secretary, would move into his home. Seymour, who started out in classification at the library, would emerge as the de facto editor for every new edition of the DDC. She had the right stuff to be Dewey’s right-hand woman; when unable to speak to a coworker right away, Seymour would respond decimally (“I shall be there in six and three-eighths minutes” was her stock phrase). According to eyewitnesses, both of these 24/7 acolytes were subjected to Dewey’s surprise squeezes and kisses, about which they never complained. Cutler, who, unlike Woodworth and Seymour, would marry rather than remain a lifelong Dewey doter, would oversee the daily running of the library school.
But the autocratic and inflexible Dewey was tough on his employees, even those he liked. While he paid generous salaries to Woodworth and Seymour, he worked others to the bone for little more than factory wages. To finance the doubling of his staff to about a hundred employees, he ended up reducing salaries by a total of 50 percent. Dewey could also be mean-spirited. Employees were fined a half-day’s pay for arriving just one-twelfth of an hour late—that is, five minutes late. Likewise, he once docked the exceedingly hardworking and loyal Woodworth—she helped Dewey plot his defense during the 1906 sex scandal—one-twelfth of her annual salary for an alleged act of “insubordination.” His harsh labor practices would lead to an investigation by the state legislature in 1895. As the committee headed by Assemblyman Henry Abell was “bewildered with the astonishing rapidity with which Mr. Dewey unfurled his knowledge of the work and details” of his various departments during seven hours of testimony, as the New York Tribune reported, he was never officially charged with any wrongdoing. A decade later, Mary Salome Cutler Fairchild—as the library school’s vice director was known after her marriage to Edwin Fairchild, a prominent pastor—would have a nasty falling-out with Dewey. Critiquing the curriculum as “smack[ing] of arithmetic and commerce,” she promoted a deeper engagement with “culture” through broad reading. When students agreed with her and kept complaining about having to learn “minute details,” Dewey hit back hard. Partly due to the stress of this confrontation, Fairchild suffered a nervous breakdown and abruptly left the library business for good.
Though Dewey’s mercurial temperament often rubbed his staff and students the wrong way, he would succeed in transforming both the State Library and its affiliated library school into preeminent national institutions. By 1895, with its collection reaching half a million volumes—about four times as many as a decade earlier—the New York State Library was the fifth biggest in the nation. “The library, as the result of Mr. Dewey’s work,” raved the New York Tribune, “is one of the most scientifically arranged in the world.” An average of one thousand visitors a day dropped by, including many sightseers who marveled at the exquisite Main Reading Room, with its fifty-six-foot-high ceiling and its pillars made of polished red granite. To minimize the noise caused by all the foot traffic, Dewey would put carpet on the oak parquet in the central corridors. He was an innovator who devised both the first library for the blind, which relied on raised printing rather than Braille, and the first interlibrary loan program. Dewey’s traveling library system operated decimally; one thousand books deemed informative were subdivided into ten lots of one hundred each and then transported to communities all over the state in oak bookcases. In “nine cases out of ten,” Dewey argued, this transient library turned out to be the first step in the building of a new branch. He also created a Children’s Library by sectioning off several tables in the Main Reading Room for “little people.” “Any child that is clean and orderly,” Dewey noted proudly, “is treated exactly like an adult.” His first decade in the state capital didn’t escape the notice of New York’s young governor, Theodore Roosevelt. “The New York State Library,” Roosevelt observed upon taking office in 1899, “has more than doubled its efficiency within the past ten years and is an inspiration to intellectual life throughout the State.” Librarians from across the country would make pilgrimages to Albany, hoping to transport some of Dewey’s innovations to their home state.
Dewey prided himself on running his office at the library with a military precision. On top of his desk sat an elaborate web of tubes and electric bells along with 120 pigeonholes into which he would insert “P-slips” (notes written in shorthand on the back of catalog cards). Employees would communicate with him mostly by transmitting messages using their assigned pigeonholes. Whenever they did talk to him, they were instructed to use the “fewest possible words.” While productivity often did result—he managed to handle a staggering 555 pieces of mail every day—many of the policies and procedures didn’t make sense to anyone but Dewey. Though he preached to his staff the need to tote around a memorandum pad of a prescribed size, he was known to jot things down on the backs of envelopes. Dewey would also take up valuable time trying to teach subjanitors the proper way to dust books. Likewise, he insisted that Pliny Sexton, who as a Regent was essentially one of his employers, write rather than visit him in the office, noting that they “waste 2 hours in talk over matters that could be disposed of in 2 minutes.” The genial Sexton didn’t protest, but he did remind Dewey in his written response that the secretary of the Board of Regents was usually the one doing all the gabbing.
The lonely and alienated boy from Adams Center set up a workplace that minimized interpersonal contact in the name of efficiency. His employees grumbled, accusing him of “stirring up things and making changes all the while.” But there was little they could do to protest. The Regents, with the notable exception of Sexton, also began to resent him, and they, in contrast, had some clout. In 1899, after numerous skirmishes, Dewey resigned from his position as secretary to the University of the State of New York, agreeing to devote himself full-time to the library for the same salary. That year, the Brooklyn Eagle captured both the good and the bad wrought by his eccentricities, describing him as “a bright man of singular energy, marvelous intellectual fecundity” who nevertheless had a “queering personality” that often put him “on the defensive with many state officers.”
The frantic pace at which Dewey worked throughout his Albany years—whether manning two jobs or one—exacerbated his chronic stress-related symptoms. To maintain his mental equilibrium, this fitness enthusiast latched on to the bicycle. Upon his arrival in the capital, Dewey was eager to switch from the saddle horse, which he considered too expensive. He first experimented with the high-wheel bicycle then in vogue, but quickly gave up, concluding “that my neck was too valuable to risk.” After giving the tricycle a try, he moved on to the “safety” bicycle, which had just come on the market. It was love at first sight. Basking in “the priceless value of the new exercise,” he became consumed with buying “the latest and best pattern whenever improvements are made.” Since the new invention was consistent with his favorite motto, “save time and helth,” he arranged for bulk purchases; he began selling “the librarian’s horse” to his staff and students on the installment plan. He would later deny the rumors swirling around the state capital that he made a hefty profit from these transactions.
With hay fever bothering both him and his wife more than ever, the couple stepped up their efforts to find a permanent summer getaway. The aim wasn’t to build just a cozy summer cottage for the family of three, but to create a model community, an aspiration that both had long shared. After completing the requisite ten-year search, in 1893 the Deweys settled on a small town in the Adirondacks that they renamed Lake Placid (the other two finalists were situated in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont). That spring, Dewey bought a ten-acre plot near the village’s Main Street, upon which he intended to build a clubhouse. But he soon changed course. Instead he acquired an already built fifteen-bedroom house named Bonnie Blink. Several months later, he scooped up several smaller houses spread out over one hundred acres adjacent to his main clubhouse.
By 1895, the Lake Placid Club, as the Deweys’ “cooperativ summer home” became known, was up and running. The couple sought to sign up members with needs similar to their own, noting that the club was designed primarily for “the overworkt or convalescent needing special building up for the coming year’s work.” This resort for the very, very nervous—to borrow a line from comic Mel Brooks, who called the asylum in his 1977 film High Anxiety “the Institute for the Very, Very Nervous”—featured numerous golf courses and tennis courts as well as inviting hiking trails; however, it lacked some standard amenities found in most hotels. While the club housed three unabridged dictionaries, it had no bar, cigar stand, or stock ticker. To ensure the equanimity of its guests, Dewey also forbade gambling and “partizan politics.” As explained in the 250-page handbook published in 1901, which described its operations and customs, tens were everywhere:
Like Jefferson, he was also constantly thinking about building new additions to his home, though he was just a would-be architect. As one biographer has put it, Dewey “haunted every structural effort with his personal presence day or night, equipt with his perpetual companion, a six-foot measuring stick, each foot divided into tenths.”
His stewardship of the Lake Placid Club, however, would jeopardize his position as the state’s top librarian. Once the press got wind that he was away from Albany for five months a year, he was vilified. That charge he could fend off with the following testimonial from Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress: “Mr. Dewey eats, drinks, sleeps and talks library and library work throughout the 24 hours, the week, the month and the year.” But another scandal—involving race, not sex—that emerged at about the same time provoked outrage that he could not contain. In January 1905, upon discovering that the club excluded Jews from membership, influential Jewish leaders circulated a petition to Andrew Draper, state commissioner of education, demanding Dewey’s ouster. As the dozens of signers maintained, what Dewey chose to do on club grounds was his business, but money from the state’s coffers shouldn’t be used to pay a state official who held such prejudice. Dewey countered that he “despised it [prejudice]” and wasn’t directly involved in formulating this particular club policy. This defense didn’t wash with the public. The comments by one Manhattan rabbi, published in the New York Tribune that month, captured the sentiments of many: “Such a distinction will not do. One cannot play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.…The fact remains that the State Librarian…has been the manager of an organization which puts the gravest affront possible on the entire Jewish community.”
Dewey’s anti-Semitism was closely tied to his love of order, the reigning social order. While he had Jewish friends, he realized that certain powerful members of the upper crust didn’t like to mingle with Jews and other minorities; and fearing their disapproval—and the attendant loss of membership in his club—he chose not to make any special exceptions. “No one shall be received,” ran the discriminatory clause in the club catalog, “as member or guest, against whom there is physical, moral, social or race objection.” In this case, Dewey’s obsessionality was fully in synch with that of his times. This is precisely the argument that Harper’s Weekly used in February 1905 in a spirited editorial defending Dewey’s exclusionary practices at Lake Placid: “Experience has taught that Jews destroy the popularity of clubs and summer hotels where their presence is conspicuous. Non-Jews don’t like the general run of Jews as companions.” In explaining this predilection, the magazine stated that “average Jewish manners are different from the average manners of non-Jews” and also alluded to the concern that more socializing between the races—it referred to Jews as “Asians”—might lead to more intermarriages, adding that an “important purpose of organized society is the promotion of marriage.” But as usual, Dewey projected his flaws onto others. To a friend, he made the case that Draper, the New York State official entrusted with deciding his fate, was emotionally unstable and in cahoots “with the Jews for my overthrow.” That fall, he was forced to submit his resignation as both the New York State librarian and the head of the library school.
The following year, Dewey suffered another body blow when he was ostracized from the American Library Association. His womanizing had finally caught up with him. In 1905, with his career on the line, the press savaging him as a bigot, and his wife sequestered at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Dewey kept propositioning women left and right. For those who, like Dewey, turn to sexual gratification largely to numb emotional pain, acute stress can often be a trigger for an increase in promiscuity. That May, he tried to put the moves on Adelaide Hasse, a New York City librarian, then beginning a massive index of government documents. Offering to help the thirty-seven-year-old bachelorette publish her work, the fifty-four-year-old Dewey invited her for an extended visit, writing that “I have horses and an auto and will give you a lot better air than you breathe in great and wicked Gotham.” Hasse did come to Albany, but didn’t stay for the weekend, as originally planned. After one long drive, she “ran away so suddenly,” as her disappointed host later put it. While Hasse was alarmed by Dewey’s “obnoxious personal traits,” she discouraged the ALA from taking any action against him. Two months later, right after the 1905 ALA convention in Portland, Oregon, Dewey went on that fateful ten-day ALA-sponsored trip to Alaska, where he apparently lost all ability to control his sexual impulses. And in contrast to Hasse, the outraged female librarians on the Alaska trip demanded that the ALA take a stand. The following June, with two librarians threatening to resign if Dewey appeared at the 1906 ALA conference set for Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, James Canfield, Columbia’s librarian, urged Dewey not to attend lest he “precipitate a crisis which none of us could control.” While Dewey reluctantly agreed, he just didn’t get it, writing Canfield that “I…had so much trust in women. Pure women would understand my ways.”
For the next couple of decades, Dewey’s relationship with the ALA remained frosty. In 1907, upon learning that a librarian had suggested erecting a statue to “M.D.,” Edwin Anderson, his successor at the New York State Library, blasted this notion as “a serious blow to decency.” In 1915, Mary Wright Plummer, the head of the library school at the New York Public Library, then also serving a term as ALA president, remarked, “There is no demand on the part of librarians for Mr. D’s presence.…I shall never, as long as I am a member of the profession, consent to meet him.” This ALA founder and two-time president—he was elected to one-year terms in both 1890 and 1892—wouldn’t be officially rehabilitated until 1926, when he gave a notable address at the fiftieth-anniversary meeting.
Leaving his Madison Avenue home in Albany, Dewey began living in Lake Placid full-time. With no mountains of books to slap decimals on for the first time in decades, he focused his attention on his club and its numbers. “We have,” he wrote to his longtime friend, the publisher Richard Bowker, in 1909, “spent $313,000 on improvements since I resigned at Albany. That means a good deal.…We try in these various things to put into the working out of this idea as much energy and skill as we would into organizing a library. We have today over 650 guests, are taking in about $3000 daily for their expenses.” He managed Lake Placid just like the State Library. The key members of his Albany staff, such as May Seymour, the editor of the DDC, moved along with him. In 1907, he hired Katharine Sharp, another former student, then directing the library school at the University of Illinois; she became the club’s “Social Organizer.” He kept expanding its activities and programs, which would eventually include concerts by top-notch musicians, conferences run by leading scholars, and a school for boys. By 1920, the club featured a forest theater with seating for one thousand people, one hundred private cottages, and ten golf courses (he was finishing up five new ones to go with the five already built). That year, he could boast that members and guests hailed from forty-six states and twenty-six nations, and that the total number of visitors exceeded a substantial multiple of ten: “Over 10,000 come.…Already sum improvements that hav had more than national influence has started here….mor and mor the Club will be a rekogniyzed center for…educating the publik.”
Dewey also took the innovative step of keeping the club open year-round. The eight members who stayed on in the one heated residence that first winter season in 1905 entertained themselves by snowshoeing, tobogganing, ice skating, and cross-country skiing. By 1921, Dewey had added a speed-skating track and a ski jump. Soon Lake Placid was stacking up well against such international hot spots as St. Moritz in the Swiss Alps. By the end of the decade, the town, which still had fewer than four thousand residents, won the right to host the III Winter Olympics and the first on American soil. Since the club never did change its discriminatory ways, Jewish groups protested to Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt about the use of state funds to build a bobsled track. The ever combative Dewey relished this battle (which ended in a compromise whereby the new facility would be built in the neighboring town of North Elba rather than on club property). “This nu Jew attak,” he wrote to his club colleagues, “will giv us much valuabl publisiti.…their attak helps to show why our members have always declined to admit them.”
While Dewey was again rationalizing his bigotry, his prediction turned out to be correct. With Lake Placid still dotted with signs reading NO JEWS OR DOGS ALLOWED, Roosevelt opened the games in February 1932. The club then went into a steady decline before closing soon after the XIII Winter Olympics held in 1980 (famous for the so-called Miracle on Ice, the surprise victory of the Americans over the Soviets in hockey). Today Lake Placid remains America’s oldest continuously operating ski resort.
On Tuesday, May 27, 1913, Dewey was in Manhattan to give a speech at the Aldine Club on Twenty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue. The Lake Placid resident was a frequent rider on the sleeper train that his club ran to New York City every night at 10 p.m. The event was the monthly dinner meeting of the Efficiency Society, a group that Dewey had helped to establish a year earlier. This collection of business leaders, engineers, and educators was dedicated to doing for the American office what Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management had done for the American factory. But that was not quite how it worked out. In the end, most of the reforms proposed by the committee of ten that ran the show would have less to do with a Marxist nightmare—Communist radicals such as Vladimir Lenin often railed against the dehumanization of the worker caused by Taylor’s mechanization—than with a Marx Brothers routine (though Dewey and his nine brethren weren’t trying to be funny).
Dinner was at 6:30, and Dewey, the first speaker of the night, began his talk before some three hundred Efficiency Society members and guests shortly after eight. “In keeping with its name,” the New York Times reported the next day, “the society ‘got down to business’ by eliminating long introductions of speakers.”
Since his ignominious exit from the library world in 1906, Dewey had rebranded himself as a management consultant focused on organizing organizations. He had the street cred. After all, Frederick Taylor himself had cited the decimal system as an early influence on his industrial system of classification. In 1912, Dewey published a forty-page book chapter, “Office Efficiency,” which began thus: “Man goes from barbarism to civilization by lerning [sic] to do things better, quicker, more easily or cheaply.” He was trying to transfer his various library innovations, which he dubbed the “spirit of 76”—a phrase also used by Jefferson to refer to the American Revolution—to the workplace. But his recommendations—such as using the decimal system for filing everyday correspondence—often bordered on the ridiculous. Dewey was a steadfast advocate of the paper clip—of the large steel spring, not the brass horseshoe variety—which he believed could eliminate “the few seconds spent in unfurling or uncreasing a paper.” He also insisted that desks should have windows at the left and that roll tops should be verboten as they “tempt to disorder.” This level of detail—along with his immersion in such mundane matters as dust management—would scare off many executives from organizing their offices à la Dewey. But his linguistic innovations held more promise. As he also argued, simplified spelling combined with tighter prose could save corporate America considerable time and labor.
Language was to be the focal point of Dewey’s after-dinner speech. He began by mentioning that he used to spell his name with an extra le before his own conversion forty years ago. According to Dewey’s estimate, 15 percent of the energy spent on typewriting machines was wasted. “Language,” he stressed, “is a machine for accomplishing results. It is meant to convey the thought of the writer to the mind of the reader and the simplest way in which this can be done is the best way. We use needless words and false motions.” Dewey gave a host of examples. He preferred “buyer” to “purchasing agent,” “many” to “a large number of,” and “invite” to “extend an invitation to.”
Over the next few years, Dewey devoted more and more energy to the efficiency movement. That fall, he hosted a meeting of the society at Lake Placid at which his wife presided over a session for the ladies on “Home Economics.” This expert on how to set a table insisted that silverware should always be placed “one inch from the edge of the table.” The following year, Dewey became chairman of a “Languaj Committee.” In January 1915, with the Efficiency Society struggling—despite the moniker, it was poorly managed, and the expense of maintaining its requisite ten clerks was creating a $200 hole every month—he was elected president. Dewey also couldn’t live up to the imposing title he now held. One afternoon during the Great War, he received word that a colleague from the Efficiency Society was about to visit him at work. Realizing that his office “was worse than a bear’s den,” he was forced to squirrel away his loose papers in a clothes basket, which was, in turn, hidden in a closet. (It would take a week for a secretary to unpack and organize the material in the basket.) In 1918, Dewey merged his outfit with the National Institute of Efficiency. But the new Washington, D.C.–based National Efficiency Society, which Dewey ran out of New York City, soon faltered. Dewey wasn’t able to collect enough $10 annual dues payments from America’s executives and engineers. By the early 1920s, this incarnation, whose motto defined efficiency as “the ratio of achievement to effort,” was, as Dewey was forced to acknowledge, “not ded, but sleeping quyt soundli.”
However, unlike Dewey the management consultant, Dewey the “languaj” maven wasn’t just waved offstage. Several of his simplified spellings have been incorporated into the lexicon; catalog, like his first name, has done well without its vestigial last two letters, and New Yorkers now have their state thruway. Moreover, his celebration of the streamlined sentence has carried the day. Dewey’s ideas about prose would soon be echoed by his fellow upstate New Yorker, Cornell English professor William Strunk Jr., who, in 1918, completed the first draft of what has since become known as The Elements of Style—in its original form, this guide to word usage was passed out just to Cornell students. In fact, the governing maxim of this classic text, “Omit needless words,” closely parallels the takeaway from Dewey’s 1913 speech at the Aldine Club. (The book was later transformed into a megaseller when rewritten by the New Yorker’s E. B. White, who had studied with Strunk at Cornell, for a fortieth-anniversary edition in 1959.)
Friday, November 25, 1927—25 N 27 in Deweyese—found the nearly seventy-eight-year-old Dewey in his office. He had an important letter to write.
Dewey was then in Florida with his second wife, Emily Beal, an administrator at the Lake Placid Club since 1916, whom he had married two years after Annie’s death. After being sidelined with the flu for six weeks in the winter of 1925, Dewey decided to spend his remaining winters down south. He later explained, “6 fizicians told me that I was taking my lyf in my hands to try…to waste the vytaliti necesari to combat our northern cold.” But once again, a modest, private escape wouldn’t be sufficient; Dewey immediately began planning another cooperative community. In early 1927, he bought three thousand acres in the town of Lake Stearns in south-central Florida, which he got the state legislature to rename Lake Placid. On November 1, 1927, he opened a southern branch of his retreat headquartered in the spruced-up former Hotel Stearns, to which he gave a new moniker, “Club Loj.”
Dewey was eager to thank Anne Colony, an assistant at the Lake Placid in the Adirondacks, for recommending his new stenographer, an attractive thirty-something redhead from Boston who had once worked as a secretary for Bishop Howard Robbins, the dean at Manhattan’s St. John the Divine Cathedral. Thus began his note of gratitude:
Dear Anne: After a 2 week trial I report on your…selection of my companion and potential boss. I…wish I had bought her by the pound instead of the piece when the dainty little flapper got off the train. I told her she was better looking than I expected and would tell her later how good I thought her.… We conclude that you did a very good job for she is certainly a great improvement on the ½ dozen other candidates we experimented with.
Without skipping a beat, Dewey continued dictating:
As she is writing this herself I don’t dare say anything too complimentary for fear I would turn her bad while still young but she really is a mighty good girl. Thank you for finding her for me.
When exposed to the decimal man’s lechery, the women in his inner circle were used to looking the other way. The following week, a reassuring Colony responded: “Your letter about DH pleased me very much and confirmed my judgment of her.”
With such an inauspicious beginning, the relationship with DH was destined to end disastrously. Dewey’s boundary violations soon moved beyond the verbal to his standard repertory of hugs and kisses. In one incident in the summer of 1929 at the other Lake Placid, he embraced her in front of his wife. Rather than insisting that Dewey stop right away, his wife became an enabler; she allowed her husband to shift the onus onto DH. Under the arrangement the couple worked out, his secretary was supposed to tell Mrs. Dewey if she was ever troubled by his “unconventional” behavior, and only then would he agree to curb his excesses. Not long afterward, DH left his employ, and the Deweys forgot about her.
But three months after her departure, DH’s lawyer sent Dewey a letter requesting $50,000 in damages for an alleged sexual “attack.” His former employee may have had character issues of her own, so it’s hard to determine whether his standard assortment of unwelcome hugs and kisses ever actually devolved into rape. Dewey claimed that DH had once confessed to him that she was prone to lashing out both verbally and physically—that she was a biter and scratcher. Dewey’s conclusion that DH was “unbalanst” and suffered from “impulses symtums” could have been true; on the other hand, he may well have been attempting yet again to blame someone else for his own out-of-control behavior. Upon learning that Dean Robbins sided with DH, he wrote his lawyer, T. Harvey Ferris, that the cleric may be “a strong Puritan and honestly somewhat shocked that a man of high ideals should kiss a secretary, but he surely knows it has been done in thousands of cases and is too big a man to distort this into criminal intent.” (It’s unclear both how Dewey came up with this particular multiple of ten and exactly how many of these other cases involved him.) With Robbins willing to testify on behalf of DH, whose dream team of three savvy lawyers included a seasoned Tammany Hall politician, Dewey was in big trouble. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Ferris informed him, “This is no gentleman’s game.” In February 1930, Ferris negotiated a settlement, which Dewey quickly accepted. While admitting no wrongdoing, Dewey agreed to fork over to DH a total of $2,147.66 for lost salary and legal fees. His bill from Ferris came to another $435.51, a third of which went to Pinkerton detectives who had been hired to dig up dirt on DH and her lawyers.
By 1930, Dewey also faced a host of financial problems. The Florida Lake Placid was not doing well. Dewey had hoped that the other Lake Placid—which by then had grown to ten thousand acres—could be counted on to bail it out, but the board of the sister club balked. As the Great Depression worsened, so did Dewey’s woes. The following year, occupancy at the original Lake Placid was down by 15 percent, and the one in Florida was barely surviving. That winter, just two guests signed up for its two hundred places, and the Deweys were having trouble meeting their payroll. Amid the stress and uncertainty, on December 10, 1931, Dewey penned a birthday letter, which he sent out to “a fu” friends across the country. “Today,” he wrote, “starts my 9th decade.” He didn’t yet feel old; old age, he believed, “has kept about 10 years ahead of me.” Calling himself an “80 year-old machine,” he declared that “I am bizi and hapi…because my mind is skoold not to wori.” He was proud that he could still throw himself into his work and “get qualiti and quantiti results.” He then went on to list some of those numbers. The DDC, he noted, was now in “96% of public libraries and 89% of collej libraries.”
Over the next few days, Dewey was feted. The former head of the alumni association of his library school sent a bound volume of letters from one hundred colleagues across the country who hailed his achievements. He received one hundred congratulatory telegrams from forty countries. The ex-president of the Florida Library Association also drove a small group of librarians over “100 myls” to pay him a visit.
Dewey felt compelled to note these various multiples of ten in a postscript to his birthday letter, in which he also expressed his hope to “retyr at 100.” Having finished jotting down his thoughts, he added: “For 60 years known as leading apostl of decimals, 10 seems to pursue me for even my 8 paje letr has grown to the mistik 10.”
Dewey died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage half a month later—just one and a half months before American skater Irving Jaffee nabbed the gold medal in the ten-thousand-meter race at the Lake Placid Olympics.