America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  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 ra
ther 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 sto
ck 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:

  the physical plant consisted of 10 square miles of woods, farms, and lakes

  annual fee = $10 (Dewey initially sought 100 members)

  lifetime membership = $1,000

  no music, dancing, or other amusements after 10 p.m.; this period of “entire quiet” lasted 10 hours, until 8 a.m.

  its 3 libraries each contained “over 1000 carefully chosen volumes”

  while the club was open from June 1 to November 1, the prime summer season ran from July 10 to September 10, during which room rates went up by 100 percent

  discount tickets offered by the club for 500 miles of travel on the New York Central Railroad sold for $10

  in its first 5 years, “the club grew tenfold”

  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.”