It Happened Here--REF 025.4 DEW

Librarians from all over the world will recognize this code that would lead them to a book, that gives the guidelines for cataloging any book in most of the libraries of the world. This is the "call number" of the Dewey Decimal Classification and Relative Index, or one of its many editions or reincarnations; and the man who invented it was raised here in the tiny town of Adams Center, in Jefferson County, upstate, New York.

Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey was born  in 1851 into a lower middle class family, the youngest of five children in an area swept by the religious reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century, that became known as the "burned-over district." Secure in his position as a white. Anglo-Saxon, protestant male, Dewey  saw his calling, and that of his kind, to be the bearers of Culture and to improve the world by devising ever greater efficiencies. His attendance at and graduation from Amherst college, (then an all-male institution) did little but confirm his world view, and it enabled him to develop an agenda that focused on three objectives that would dominate much of his life.

First he saw a mission to bring education to the masses by making libraries accessible to them and by training librarians to fill these libraries with the "right sorts" of books.

During his undergraduate years Dewey devised a classification system for library books. The Dewey Decimal Classification System divided the areas of knowledge into ten areas with specific subsets of knowledge represented by whole numbers and smaller divisions of these by decimals. Books on the same subject, by different authors would be distinguished by the first letters of the author's last name. At a time when most libraries coded books by their room, bookcase and shelf location, this was a major improvement. It allowed libraries to group books together by subject enabling the public to access them and facilitating browsing.  Secondly, libraries could expand their collections, assigning new books a number and moving books to accommodate growth as needed without re-labeling everything. After graduation, in 1874 Dewey was appointed to a position of assistant Librarian at Amherst and was able to put his classification system into practice. While at Amherst Dewey helped further the image of the Librarian as a professional by helping found the American Librarian Association; by founding the Library Journal that discussed library issues and reviewed the suitability of newly published books; and by establishing the Library Bureau, a company that sold furniture and file cases and standardized supplies to libraries.

It was during this time he began to promote his two other objectives: Metric reform of American weights and measures, and Spelling reform.  Establishing an "American Metric Bureau" with himself as "manager" he began to promote the use of metric measurement. selling metric instructional aids and metric scale instruments and devices.  His organization published a quarterly "Metric Bulletin".
Similarly, since his undergraduate years he became devoted to spelling simplification, dropping his middle name and shortening his first name from Melville to Melvil.  For a while he insisted on spelling his last name as "Dui". Becoming a staunch member of the Spelling Reform Association. he insisted in using reformed spelling throughout his life.*

By 1883 his work at Amherst had come to the attention of Columbia University who recruited him. Dewey agreed to come to Columbia if he could institute an agenda of reforms. These included consolidation of the University's Law, School of Mines, six other collections and general library into one facility, an aggressive acquisitions program, and a commitment to establish a new  "School of Library Economy."

In recent decades Melvil Dewey's biographers have revealed him to be a work-a-holic, a driven, uncompromising figure who was manipulative and who used people to promote his agenda and one who often burned his own bridges. He has been described as a person with "obsessive-compulsive personality disorder"--someone who has obsessions and compulsions, but who unlike a person with OCD, instead of becoming debilitated, is energized by things he can't stop thinking about or doing.** When Columbia dragged its feet on providing for a School of Library Economy, this personality syndrome may have led him to enroll students at Columbia, find an empty storage space, equip it with borrowed furniture, hold classes and matriculate a class of six young men and sixteen young women, promising them they would receive degrees at some future time--this in an age when Columbia wasn't even admitting women!

Another dimension of Dewey's compulsions was that the great librarian seemed unable to restrain his affection for his female co-workers. Unsolicited hugs, squeezes, and pecks on the cheek were frequent and public, and though there seems to have been no documented incidents of more serious sexual liaisons such behavior upset many of his staff and it outraged Victorian sensibilities.

By the fall of 1888 he had engendered so much opposition that it was time for him to go, but fortunately, for Dewey, another institution, the New York State Library wanted him to re-catalog their collections. The position of State Librarian carried with it a salary that Dewey considered inadequate but state officials found a way around this difficulty by creating for him a second post as Secretary to the State University of New York Board of Regents. *** At that time the board of Regents was a more or less moribund collection of retired nonsalaried academics and literary types charged with  chartering New York schools and colleges--a largely pro-forma duty. They were in for a rude awakening.

Melvil Dewey proceeded with his primary duties with dispatch and vigor.  His "School for Library Economy" was re-established in Albany; the collections of the State Library were re-cataloged; the library's acquisition programs were accelerated so that the State Library's collections exceeded 500,000 volumes and the library became the fifth largest in the United States. Dewey set up extension sites in local libraries, facilities in Albany for making inter-library loans, and a traveling library system; he set up the first "children's library"; and he continued to publish bibliographies of what he considered "best books" for public libraries.

Dewey soon turned his attention to the Regents.  He promoted rigorous minimal standards for schools and educational institutions. He went after and de-certified  diploma-mills and schools training students in the use of devices of medical quackery; and he engaged in a prolonged turf war with the Department of Public Instruction which was charged with the responsibility of overseeing the physical plants of public schools. In 1901 the Regents and the DPI were finally merged into a new Department of Education but the Secretary now found his actions being scrutinized by a new Commissioner of Education.

For a long time Melvil Dewey and his wife  Annie  held the dream of creating a retreat for hardworking librarians, social workers and other public service professionals--people like themselves, where they could go to escape the conflicts of their work environment, and recharge and recommit themselves to the struggle. While working for the state, Dewey began buying property around Lake Placid and with other investors established the Lake Placid Club. Open year 'round it became known as the St. Moritz of North America and eventually became the inspiration for Lake Placid being selected as the site for the Winter Olympics in 1932, and again in 1980.

 But there was a darker side to the club. Wishing to make the club a retreat, members passed a regulation stating that "no one will be received as a member or guest against whom there is any reasonable physical, moral, social or race objection." Dewey defended the regulation, extending its implied prohibition against Jews and Negroes to 'new-rich groups' like 'many Cubans' because of 'lack of refinement.' Going beyond mere affirmation of the regulation, the inveterate classifier/systematizer categorized five classes of applicants, from A, "admirably suited applicants", through C, "common clients" to E, unsuitables "who must be excluded for protection of the rest". When several of Dewey's high ranking and respected colleagues and co-workers were turned away from club admittance  because of their "unsuitability" a cry arose for his removal from office. Their voices were combined with those of the enemies he always seemed to create after any period of employment and he was encouraged to retire before being forced out in 1906.

Melvil Dewey continued to develop his club until 1931, opening a Lake Placid Club, South in Florida in 1927.  Dewey died of a stroke in 1931.  He was a man of both prodigious accomplishments and prodigious sins.


*In later years his spelling influence was manifest in the affairs of the Lake Placid Club, from items on its restaurant menu, to the designation of the "Adirondak Loj," a name that appears on maps to this day.
** see Joshua Kendall. America's Obsessives,The Compulsive Energy that Built a Nation (2013)
***Initial discussions considered Dewey taking over directorship of the New York State Museum as well but Dewey wisely declined to go up against the aged but formidable 77 year old James Hall. --see NYSHMS: It Happened Here. Feb. 11, 2014    "Marker for a Mastadon".