·COPYRIGHT 1944 BY THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION Manufactured in the United States of America ·ΤΟ DEIRDRE

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·PREFACE It is not easy to write a biography of Melvil Dewey for one thing he was a genius And whether we like to admit it or not geniuses cannot in fairness be judged by the standards we apply to ordinary foll It is not easy because we are as yet too close to him to gain ade quate perspective The lives of most librarians present no problems of interpretation Most of them lead rela fively placed existences rew spread themselves far out side their chosen field and like the happy nation their annals may be brief But Dewey was different in his day he was often called a dynamo of energy today it would be more apt to liken him to a fifty ton tank riding roughshod over all sorts of obstacles toward its chosen objective IVhen tanks move things get broken and peo ple get hurt And so although Deweys friends and admirers were legion and fervently devoted he made many enemies during the course of his eighty years of fighting-and he was always fighting for something Happly for the writer it did not seem wrthn the province of such a little book as this to attempt to sit in judgment or to apportion blame This is no defini tive biography But it is I hope an interpretative one V11 ·Because I count myself fortunate to have worked for nearly two years in close daily association with Dcwcy, and because it also happens that I married Mrs Dewey's niece, I had an acquaintance with his family and friends that went beyond professional association Intimacy did not shrink Dewey's stature One might realize his weaknesses and still see the sincerity of his idealism and appreciate more than ever the magnitude of his work He remains the greatest man with whom I ever came into long-continued personal contact Except for him I would never have entered the library profession Eacept for him there would have been no library profession (in the form that we now know it) for me to enter! Such facts as are herein cited are, it is hoped, correct For the comments, or deductions, or estimations-call them what you will-hung on these facts, I alone am responsible Ther only excuse is that they may give, to those of a new library generation who never knew Dewey personally, a rounder and juster-and perhaps a more humanized-picture of the man This is the harder to do in a few pages, not merely because his interests were so many and varied, but also because he was personally so paradoxical In quoting from Dewey's letters and writings the exotic spelling and "breves” of the original are in a few cases retained to give the reader something of the characteristic Dewey-esque flavor Generally, however, in order not to divent attention from content to form, they have been translated into our conventional spelling Vill ·It would be impossible to write any life of Melvil Dewey without giving credit to the comprehensive bro graphuc compilation issued by the family in 1932 Melvil Dewey Seer Inspirer Doer by Grosvenor Dawe To it I am indebted for such basic facts as dates and names To my wife-who was for four years at the Lake Placid Club, and who lived with the Dcwcy family for a while at Albany-I am indebted for much personal information and for searching criticism James Tyer and rrant & Walter particularly both long personally associated with Mr Dewey and with the New Yorl Slate Library School gave me invaluable advice To Aliss Bertha E Blakely librarian emeritus of the Mount Holyoke College library who read my manuscript to Miss Flora Belle Ludington present librarian of Mount Holyole to R IV G l'ail present librarian of the New York State Library and to Joseph Gavit librarian who lent me copies of early Dewey memora bilia to Professor Alexander Cowie of our own IVes leyan faculty who was good enough to give me the Teactions of a nonlibrarian reader and to numerous others who gave reminiscences information and advice I desire to express my very sincere appreciation It is my hope that I may have shown why every librarian isand forever will be-unescapably indebted to Afelvil Dewey I REVONT RIDER Wesleyan University January 1944 associate IX ·"MD" OF THE "DO" Some men can throw across a thwarting stream A web of steel for humbler feet to tread Some men can play Some men hear words unsaid Some men, through points whirled in a cunning scheme, Can light a city, or direct a beam Of thought through infinite space What some have read Can teach one how to better earn his bread, One how to kindle an ennobling dream Some men can certain living lines rehearse- And then make teriors live that shake the soul Some men, at even, when our world is still, Can watch the birth-throes of a universe Some men can peer into a crystal bowl And dictate life or death there at their will

·Some men can tal ca patient mass of clay
And mold it into beaut; Some can weave
A gossamer of moonbeams Some deceive
The eye with flowers that will nc er decay
Because their brush has made them Onc rare day
Some poel sings a spell of magic words
Pouring a rapture that outhills the birds
Some men can solacc hearts loo sore lo pray
But what of him u lo grasps u hat all men do
And blends it into order? How of right
Give praise to him who knows the final norm
Of all man ind scndeavor? 13 ho sces truc
In all disorders dari ness onc clear light
And
gives man s chaos of thought a reasoned form?!
-TREMONT RIDER
*The double sonnet was sent Air Dewey as a contribution to his
eightieth birthday volume

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·VUI Beginning a Lifewort Bushen CONTENTS Preface MD of the DC V Boyhood and louth Ils At Amherst 3 13 41 V The Contributions—The Decimal Classification - 7 The Contributions-The Library School VI The Contributions-As the Evangel of Librarianship 57 The Contributions - The Library Associations 67 Vi The Contributions-Library Periodicals 72 IX The Contributions-Iomen in Library II orl 78 х The Diversionss-The Regents 83 1 The Diversions - The Club 107 XII The Diversions - The Reforms 116 VIII The Personality of the Alan XIV The End 141

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·ILLUSTRATIONS
Melvil Dewcy
Trontispiccc
Dcu ey at Amherst
16
Faculty of the New loil State Library School 1895
50

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·MELVIL DEWEY

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·I
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
MELVILLE LOUIS KOSSUTH DEWEY (he successively
dropped first the Louis then the Kossuth then the
le of Melville -and finally for a while tried to
shorten the Dewey to Du ) was born December 10
1851 at Adams Center, New York, the youngest child
of Joel Dewey and Eliza Green Both parents were of
typical pioneer stock sturdy and thrifty and religious
to the point of austerity]Melvil s maternal grandmother
when she was only seventeen walked two hundred miles
into what was then the wilderness of northern New
York carrying one of her children in her arms and
leading another
The Dewey family is supposedly of Welsh origin Both
Melvil Dewey and Admiral George Dewey traced their
ancestry to the common forebear of nearly all American
Deweys Thomas Dewey who settled in Massachusetts
in 1630 Melvil Dewey s immediate ancestors were undis
tinguished the plain honest hard working foll who
have been the backbone of the nation-as they are the
backbone of all nations Mostly they were farmers but
when occasion demanded they became soldiers In fact
Joel Dewey rose to the colonelcy of a New York regiment
3

·Melvil's father was a man of some property and with a variety of business interests He owned scveral small farms, conducted a general store, and made boots and shoes Melvıl himself states proudly in his diary that, when a boy, he learned enough of the latter trade lo make himself a pair of boots, "doing every bit of the work, from crimping to the final finish"-all by hand, or course, Unfortunately, Joel Dcwcy was not callous enough to be thoroughly successful as a business man, like Abraham Lincoln, he could never refuse a customer credit, and his store collected more unpaid promissory notes than cash Of the notes Melvil wrole later, when he sold the store, "There were 155 of them in father's long leather roll, 133 were outlawed, and I doubt if he ever collected the other 22 From the time he was fifteen, through college days, young Dewey Lept a more or less consecutive diarycomplete enough to furnish an intimate and revealing picture of a lad who was, to an unusual degree, the father of the man That he worked, and worked hard, is clearly shown by entries in his diary "bent off through the swamp and sugared off”, “to work in the garden this morning, and this afternoon setting up a leach and helping mother clean house", "working the road", "dug postholes", "washed windows", "cleaned sewing machine", "spread ashes on the meadow", "drew gravel to the cemetery", "split and piled wood all day", "drawing goods from the depot But his days weren't all work There was recreation, LA w ܠܢ ·too of the entirely inexpensive homely country sort went to North Branch and caught a mess of suckers the sleighing is good we amused ourselves playing chess played ball went a-ducking this morning down to Moulton s pond and had a host of sport went to singing school mny Lusita mo Recreation though was intermittent What formed the steady refrain of Melvil s diary all through his youth ful years were study and reading working and studying at the house today and this evening (even though outdoors the song birds are holding a festival I thinkl ) at school then at store studying reading Macaulays History of England-I like it very much I stand with Wayne last night reading poetry When Melvil was about twelve having saved up ten dollars by long hours of errand running and odd jobs he walked eleven miles to Watertown to buy a great and long yearned for treasure-a Webster s unabridged dic tionary, (The book was so heavy that much to his distress he had to spend some of his precious money to enable him to get it home) Sixty years later the memory of this epochal event in his life was still fresh and he made this comment upon it At last I had the most essential book It wasnt his only book however for he records in 1869 the proud possession of eighty five of them Very early he showed not only intellectual ability but the particular bent of it Mrs Eva A Bates of Water town New York says this about the little private school 5 ·which her mothei, Melvil Dewcy's "Aunt Cind," con. ducted for primary pupils Cousin Melvil was onc of her pupils, and slic used to relate how he could worh a problem in arithmctic in Iris head quicker than the others could on paper He was like lightning in huis calculations Another characteristic was his mania for system and classification It was lus delight to arrange his mother's pantry, systematiſing and classifying its contents On his fifteenth birthday, December 19, 1866, lus chaty records this characteristic self-appraisal I have been weighing and mcasuring, myself this aftcrnoon and find that I weigh one hundicd twenty-five pounds and am Sive {ccl and five and a fourth inches in height In looking oici my small sloch of worldly goods I find that I have fifty dollars' worth of clothing, fifty dollars' wortholbooks, and it enty-five dollars' worth of miscellaneous traps. And for ten years, on successive birthdays, wc find him making a similar statistical record of physical and financial growth In this same fifteenth year thic lad who was later to become the executive head of the educational system of the greatest state in the Union, wrote in his diary "I attended a Teacher's Examination today I had no idca of teaching, but entered the class to Icarn what I could" Despite this lach of clear intent, it appeared, two years later, that he had somehow imbibed a sufficient cducational bachground to win for himself a third-grade teach- 6 ·ing certificate and with it the job of teaching for a trelicueck tcrm the school at Toad Hollow Thc compensation was $1 50 a day (which wasnt it all bid beginning schooltcacher sages for those days) And cui dently he made good as a tcacher for the nc cir_10 find him moving on to 1 more importint post Bernhard s Bay at double the salary The account in his diary of the closing day of his Bern hards Bay schoolteaching is so res caling of the personal ity of the gangling cighteen year-old youngster that it deserves quotation As a country schoolicacher le must have been very much sui generis it is cuident that cien at this early age he was pouring lumsell out seching to inspire hus young charges with something of that dy namic urge for Inowledge that forced him on He wroic We had a short general cxcrcise comparing life to the rivers on the Rocky mountains sluch starting within a short distance of cach other reach respectively the Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic occans I then gave them a short account of myself my intentions and the circumstance which sent me to them After urging them all to bc chicftains and giving them my reasons we all inceled and closed school with a heartfelt prayer I was unable to controll my feelings I haven e been so much affected at parting before in all my short life One little girl Emma Cook kcpt near me when school was out and I saw slic wanted to hiss me goodbye so I stooped down and kissed her This was what the rest were waiting for Some of my boys 14 years of age came with tears roll ing down their cheeks and kissed me and tho it seems 7 ·almost foolish, I returned their marks of affection from a full heart I suggested on Tuesday that I should like to have those who wished to do so, write me a letter to remember them by They answered the next morning by giving me 42 and as I read them all over at home it makes me feel sad. In view of the devotion with which he endeavored to inculcate a passion for learning in his little Bernhard's Bay charges, it is not surprising, despite its prescience, to find the following entry in his diary (dated November 15, 1869, when he was only seventeen years old) I have now about fully decided to devote my life to cducation I wish to inaugurate a_higher education for the masses The more I think of it the more I am convinced that our present system of educational institutions, especially the district and academic schools, are more than half failures This should not be so This shall not be so If my life is spared and God permits, the people shall have this subject brought home to their conscience I say "conscience" for I believe it to be a great sin for those who have controll of youth to allow or rather indirectly compell them to waste so much time in acquiring so little knowledge May the allwise Creator see fit to make me a willing instrument in his hands to advance this cause, the companion of religion Three days later he adds "I am anxiously waiting for the day when I shall take my destined place, for it seems that destiny impels me to undertake this as a lifework On his following birthday there appears in his diary co ·a paragraph that forecasts by implication his whole lifework and every one of those time saving educational reform movements that for sixty years he was to cham> pion so ardently Tomorrow I complete my eighteenth year and have ac complished during these eighteen years what I hope my children if I ever have any, (and not only hope but expect) will accomplish better in fifteen or even less I started to write "twelve but stopped because I feared it might be extravagant As far as education or discipline and development of the mind are concerned I am very sure fourteen years might accomplish it all Returned home again from Bernhards Bay Melvil for a short while took over a quite different role Having for no reason except his insatiable intellectual curiosity studied bookkeeping, he tried to improve his father s store keeping methods I finally made a complete inven tory he writes to get rid of the guesswork and my figures were conclusive that the store was a loss rather than a gain so I devoted my energy for months to per suadıng father that it ought to be sold In this effort the youngster was finally successful The store was sold and the family moved to Oneida New York This move gave him a chance to piece out what had really been largely self taught education by attendance at Oneida Seminary from there he went on to Alfred University for the definite purpose of preparing himself for college Self taught? Perhaps But intellectual curiosity driven by burning zeal can carry one far What did he study? 9 ·" His What books did he read? His diary records "reviewing my mathematics", "reading Abercrombie's Intellectual Philosophy”, his determination to read Caesar in the original, “though poorly prepared to do so", nights outdoors with his great boyhood friend, Charlie Phalen, "identifying the stars”, visits to factories to learn about manufacturing processes at firsthand "Be not afraid of hard study," he wrote in one of his first published utterances, “it is the price of learning" But young Melvil was acquiring in these formative years more education than that which he got from books He was learning thrift-and all his life it stayed with hım His father constantly preached "don't waste mother wrote to him many years later "My chuldren all work too hard I am very much worried about you I want you always to try to benefit the world, but you are working hard enough to command good wages When he was six teen he wrote an essay on the evils of smoking, almost exhaustive in its scope Characteristically, of all its evils, the financial waste of the habit seemed to young Melvıl the worst "You call a man a moderate smoker," he writes, “who uses but one cigar in twenty-four hours, but, followed up for fifty years, your moderate smoker has blown away in smoke what, with its interest, would have amounted to $14,794 50 Whatever the reason for it, an almost fanatical hatred of smoking (and of drinking) stayed with Dewey all his life "Certainly God never made an animal,” he commented, "with a natural desire to conveit his mouth into IO ·(But a smokestack He made his father give up one of the most lucrative departments in his retail store He writes I told him Yu hav no ryt to sel tobako & cigars in yur store as yu hav for so many years & I am going to clean out the whole store I went to the other store & told them if they wd take our stok off our hands at cost we wd never sel tobako agen & they cd hav the entyr bızı ness They did so & father didn t veto my hy handed proceeding so that put us morally ryt these were details The outstanding development of his adolescence was the decision arrived at long be fore he went to college that life deserved to be ap proached with high seriousness This decision was neither pose nor veneer it was an unquenchable belief innate in his character in his diary-obviously intended for no eyes but his own-he records lying in the dark on the calf skins in the rear of his father s store vaguely enjoying the pungent smell of the tanned leather and thinking the long thoughts of boyhood Only his thoughts were unusual ones for a lad of fifteen He had recently been caught up in the temperance movement then sweeping the country and had signed the pledge Many boys did that and when the momentary hysteria passed forgot all about it Dewey didnt He records that he went to Adams and bought some bone cuff buttons inscribed with an R Why R ? That was his very own secret The R stood for Reformer He sought a visible sign for he believed that he had def initely enlisted in his battle of life And he had II ·That is why, making every allowance for its obviously sophomoric quality, there is yet something prophetic about his last public "oration" at Alfred Life-a very narrow isthmus between the boundless eternities of the past and future If we have a work to do, and for what other purpose could we have been created, we must do it while the day lasts From cvery wall of the broad carth comes up an carnest cry for laborers If life is so short and cternity so long, nothing but earnest, persistent endeavors will enable us to look back on a finished work Three years before he had been valcdictorian at the Adams Center high school. Even_thon_his topic had been an ultia-serious one, “Our Future" He had concluded with a prophetic phrase "From Adams Center there may go forth another Lincoln, a Clay, a Webster or a Washington who shall be an honor and an ornament to his native country” Of course the boy who went from Adams Center to Amheist was neither a Lincoln nor a Webster, but he did turn out to be, if to a much less degree, one of the "movers and shahers” of this world of ours 12 ·II AT AMHERST As wrri Dewey s boyhood so with his life at Amherst College where he graduated in 1874 It appears to hasc been on the whole a pretty serious affair Being lumself he worked hard at his studies Thc paucity of his finan cial resources required that lic Worl equally hard to carn his college expenses a natural shyness would have made the usual social contacts of college life difficult for hum in any event and beforc he cntercd Amherst his diary records this characteristic resolution I shall mingle in society very little during the next four ycars in term time almost none I shall take the course which I think will give me the most thoro culture and the greatest ability to do good Later he writes My social expenses are less than other boss because I Lecp clcar of nearly all of them and am satisfied College did ncs crtheless malc some impression in a letter home a little later he writes I am quite a citizen of Amherst and enjoy it immensely Dont misunder stand me by any means that I accept all or half my invitations out for I have no time for party going only occasionally In his later life Dewey said that hic. had chosen Amherst as a college because of its pioneer 13 ·efforts to provide physical cxcrcise for all its students If this indeed directed hus choice, he seems to havc availed lumself little of the facilities it offercd, for his sole exercise during his college days, and long thercaſter, was horseback riding This followed the solitary pattern of so much else of his life In a letter, he says I shall spend all this vacation in harder work than during the term I bragged, you will icmember when in Ohio, that I should take life casier this year but I find myself crowded more than ever before I don't overwork I think, for my house saves me I go out to hci trec times a day and feed and care for her in an affectionate, leisurcly way and then I spend quite a little time in the saddle I go out nearly every morning cicept Sunday and am generally out from four, or half past, till six when I have lea This is twilight, too dark to work and too light for a lamp, so I use the time for my cicrcise. I ude some fifteen miles or tucnty at oncc-somcumes only three or four I think it is all that heeps me up so well as I am foi I am very well indeed this Winter Intimate friends he never made casily Even in huis college days, WITEIT Imate friendsiíips develop almost automatically, he made only one, Walter Stanley Biscoe, who became his lifelong aidc and Achates (Charles Phalen, Dewey's friend from boyhood, died a year after his graduation) Noi did he interest himself in public affairs The country was at the time scething with the problems of reconstruction, but his diary's only reference to them was "Town meeting today, did not attend, 14 ·have no time for such things Nor so far as the record shows did he take any part in college functions and although he maintained in after years a reasonable in terest in his classmates the conventional frivolities of class reunions had no appeal for him Indeed on one occasion he was characteristically and emphatically crit ical of the smoking at his class banquet If his men friends in college were few his women friends appear to have been numerous This too was characteristic All through his life women were more congenial intimates to him than men he was more at ease with them he worked to more purpose with them he played with them with greater zest All through the entries of the Amherst years of his diary womens names --some girls some married women-are scattered thickly This for example is the sort of entry that recurs again and again Working in the library taught my class in tachigraphy corrected papers went to a party took Anna home then ran around and spent the rest of the evening with Mary E Frequently he would call on two or three different girls in a single evening These fem inine acquaintanceships cost him only his time but to one with his extrenie notions of the value of time this was a very serious cost indeed On the other hand al though he bemoaned the time his feminine friends took he seemed unwilling to deny himself their society After all when one is twenty three one cannot be completely Spartan What took the curse of priggishness from him was his 15 km od ·sincere unselfishness That enthusiastic willingness to give of himself to others that he had shown at Bernhard's Bay marhed him all through college In fact, it brought him a rebuff-what was to be the first of many - from a constituted authority that felt itself cither outraged or ignored The cause this time developed innocently enough Dewey, scching always to sarc that precious time of his, had become interested in sliorthand, and, entirely by himself, had become proficient in the use of Lindsley's tachygraphy As always, having discovered what seemed to him a good thing, he had wanted to spread the gospel of it and had proceeded to organize regular classes in tachygraphy among the students Indeed, such was his zeal and persuasiveness that he had signed up fifty-two students from the class of 1878 alonc Such a wholesale and entirely unauthorized addition to the college's curriculum, however worthy its motive, was too much for the Amheist faculty to overlook They objected to his classes Eventually, this "compromise" was arrived at he was permitted to continue them, provided he did so without compensation iſ the faculty thought this proviso would quash the venture they did not know Dewey Not a whit deterred, he for months devoted four hours every day to gratuitous shorthand instruction to large groups of Amherst undergraduates What else did he do at Amherst? First of all he did his college work-adequately, if not brilliantly He continued to read widely His fellow students thought him a bit queer but respected his ability and sincerity One 16

·DETET
IT
IVHERST

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·Was of his professors John Bates Clark wrote Melul Deney as I Inew him during his college course full of enthusiasm for a number of good causes and fluent and convincing in advocating them But Dewey did much more than his conventional curricular work For one thing he worked in the library While working there and still an undergraduate he drafted that great scheme for book classification with which his name will be forever linked He began to work in the college library during his junior year Just why or when his interest turned in this particular direction is not cuident It was probably a gradual de clopment beginning simply because it of fered him a congenial method of carning hus college expenses It began also without definite financial prcar rangement for his monthly compensations as an under graduate student assistant ran all the way from nothing to twenty five dollars After graduation when he was appointed assistant libruin his compensation was considerably increased but even the it seems to have been extremely irregular It did cnable him however to repay a substantial portion of the advances that his father had made lum for luis college expenses Despite his already quoted eighteenth birthday resolu tion it was not until near the close of his Amherst career that Dewey seems definitely to have decided to devote himself to educational work for a time he had seriously considered becoming a foreign missionary But after several discussions of this problem with Professor 17 ·Julius Seelye (later piesident of Amhcist), on whose advice he leaned heavily, Melvil once morc rcachcd lus first decision, and again he put it down in black and white The imaginative insight which its phrases slow, and their revelation of Dewcy's own plulosophy of cdu. cation, mahe them deseiving of quotation in full In them, wiittcn while he was an undergraduatc at Am. herst, is planted the seed of Dcwcy's second great con tribution to librarianshup, the Library School I thought I would like to icach mathematics, study, practice and tcach architecture where onc could build his ideas into permanent form, bul I always rcalized that out of a score of things that had greatly attracted mc, I could do only one with one lifc and so I dctcrmined that my highest usefulness would be not to do anyone of these things, but to stimulare others to take up the work I thought I might on an average cach ycar induce one person to do some important work that he would not have done except for my influence Thus in fifty years I would ically have accomplished fifty things instead of one by raising myself to the sccond power, seeking out and inspiring and guiding others to do the work for which my one life did not give time So far as the record shows, the Amhcıst authoritics were entirely satisfied with his sei vices as librarian of the college, and he might have stayed on indefinitely in the post But he felt that for him larger fields of usefulness lay outside He was already decply interested in metric reform and spelling reform His new Decimal Classification was developing apace He had, during his 18 ·apprentice librarianship been visiting other librariesa dozen or more all over the country-and in person or by correspondence had become acquainted with scores of the country s leading librarians and educators He had developed new ideas in library practice in a dozen different directions and was eager to propagandize them Making the break from Amherst however, was not easy On April 9 1876 he called on many college friends talked libraries with Professor Montague admitted that his emotions were too much for him and that he had several big cries That night he records in his diary It was to me a sad day So with an earnest prayer that God will do with me what seems to Him best I closed the book for it is written and no cntry can be altered 19 ·III BEGINNING A LIFEWORK MELVIL Dcwcy's move to Boston that spring day in 1876 was a momentous one, not only for him but for thc wholc library world The Amcucan Library Association, the first library organization, was just about to bc born, with Dewey as its secretary and chic moving spirit, the Library Journal, the first library periodical, was about to appear for the first time, and with Dowcy as its cditor, the Dewey Decimal Classification, the first practicable library classification, lutherlo solcly an Amherst affair, was about to be spiead abroad to the outside library world, the Library Bureau, initiator of all sorts of new library devices and cquipment, was, under Dewey's leadership and impetus, about to be cstablished and take its first fumbling stcps Into all of this crushing mass of detail connected with library development Dewey was starting to plunge lumself that April moining And, as if these various library developments were not a sufficient burden, he insisted on spending a further portion of hus time and strength on two other of the great interests of his life, metric reform and spelling reform"Within six months," he says, “I had organized three national cducational soci- 20 ·eties utilizing the Centennial to hold three national conventions and thus start the work : Here is the masthead under which from 1876 to 1883–the years that may well be called his formative years-Dewey conducted his office in Boston on rol omoos O 76 No 32 II 1 yetroot Do ton. Desides th Eco XY CO ( Commercial para lo ma Ist glaho sarf derkes for The des rening for Aclam 1/DOI לסז the lost me k cann T ON 1 Dewey J til Dewg Tbom thon TEE Orthogo y SPELLING REFORM ASSOCIATION Dewcy Prouident, AMR LLD La vett CA Srrruar Each sockty Aas SUPPLY DIT TEXT This luw rekes, thif form nos, everythin I recomm ad prani to the Library Sietric pelling Reform mor ment wupport ly by flito nd members' fees, the matter and re grate by rec ivec. That nearly all of these various interests wcre entirely unremunerative was a fact which he apparently never even considered As with all else in his life if he thought he could do a ng that needed to be done no other excuse for his taking it on seemed to be necessary Small wonder then that after a few months in Boston he was more deeply in debt than ever before in his life in fact he was at a loss as to where to turn even for the slender funds he needed for daily living Reformers today where they do not conduct an outright racket at least ever cock a weather eye toward their supporting finances Dewey plunged ahead trusting entirely to the ravens * The Chronicles of 74 Since Graduation from Amherst College (Warren Mass 1885) p 16 21 ·But his Boston move was to turn out to be important for him in a much more personal way. Immcdiatcly after his arrival there his diary records. "Camc in on the 740 and went at once out to Harvard University Library to see Jolin Fishe and talk with lum about the Classification etc He was grcally interested, as was Mr Sıbley, the librarian They made me give a lccturc, as they called it, to their first assistants, and to the librarian of Wellesley College, who chanced to be there." Tivo years later, on October 19, 1878, Annic Roberts Godfrey, the librarian of Wellesley College (who chanced to be there")) mairied him Miss Godfrey, twenty-five when hc first met hcr, had been appointed to the Wellesley post only the year before Born in Milford, Massachuscits, slie had lcft Vassar in hier junior year to share in the opening of the new Massachusetts college that had just been cstablished by Mr Durant She had heard of Dewcy's new Amherst classification She wanted to know more about it The chance mecting at Cambridge was followed up On July 7, 1876, Dewey wrote her "At last I am able to send you a proof of the library scheme I shall be glad to anser any questions that may arise and more glad to receive any corrections or criticisms that may occur to you She was one of ten women to attend the Philadelphia conference, and all through 1876 and 1877 she and Melvıl corresponded about their common library problems In the latter year, she was one of the small group of 1) 22 ·American librarians who went to England to help in the inauguration there of the new Library Association of the United Kingdom and in her letters home during this trip there are constant references to Mr Dewey but only as the life of the party (a phrase by the way which she actually uses) They evidently got well acquainted however-as people do on shipboard One paragraph from these letters is revealing both of him at that period and of herself Mr Winsor was of course prepared as our representa tive but both Mr Poole of Chicago and Mr Dewey were called on at half a minutes notice and made the two best specches of the evening it was said so we are naturally proud of our countrymen I have yet to sce Mr Dewey in any position where he is not equal to the Poor Mr Dewey is I fear almost used up and will get very little rest out of this trip It makes me thoroughly provoked to see how these eight or ten able bodied men lct him do all the work make all the ar rangements and keep all the accounts I think they might at least take a share but he is so good natured and willing that they just wait round and let him do the whole When we go to Paris I think we shall have a smaller party and hope he will get some relief occasion Although Melvil was a frequent visitor and cor respondent after their return to the United States in November 1877 Annie hesitated for some time before permitting their relationship to become one of more than sympathetic comradeship Like him she took the responsibilities of life seriously She felt that he was 23 ·called upon to do a great work and asked herself, with true Victorian conscientiousness, whether she, as his wife, would be a help or a hindrance to him In one letter she wrote "If there be between man and woman, earnest in the work of life, a calm strong friendship, may it not be ours?" And in a birthday letter to him the same year, she wrote "I am glad that another year is added to your unselfish life, glad that it is a power for good, glad that you are my friend, that I may be yours Your crowded busy life is one to be envied in comparison with mine, only you are doing very wrong to put on more steam than any human machine is warranted to run under." There was the further difficulty that her family was not entirely happy in her proposed marriage to this penniless young enthusiast from the wilds of northern New York—this notwithstanding the fact that the Godfreys were themselves a family of idealists, putting first the doing of good in the world, and the making of money far, far down in their scale of relative values Despite all doubts, however, when the inevitable occurred (at Mılford, Massachusetts, October 19, 1858), the well-wishers to the newly married pair were many and most cordial, for the Godfrey family was widely known and respected, and Melvil had already acquired a nationwide reputation as a young man both of ideas and of indefatigable industry Annie Dewey need not have hesitated, she proved in many respects an ideal wife for him If ever a man did, 24 ·hc nccded a balance wheel and so far is any nomin could supply hum with one shic did She sympathned with his aspirations 871c lum sound aduce fricd hard to look after his hicalth and to shield Ium from petty annoyinccs She gave up most of her praic life throu ing their house open frecly to their fellos sorkers in many auses and to luis library school students Rcal izing that hic was working harder than any man should she tried cien bcfore their marriage in somc degree to curb his irrepressiblc cncrgy Onc of lier letters written wlule she was still 71 Wellesley concludes with this playſul but solicitous admonition I am going to livunt you Licry night when the clock surikes tcn I shall come to you in imagination put my hand on your forchead sinooth your tcmples-? moment and ashespor goodnight If you durc disobcy you sliall hcar a liuc oicc sing softly good night good night good night oser and over again lccping (sme with the monotonous tiching of the clock. Jou may think its consacncc but its mc Immcdiatcly thcy were married lier influcncc began to show itself Shc forced lum to accept the hard truthparticularly hard for onc of lus temperament 10 acceptthat cicn ile most utterly right of ideas is not auto matically self-establishing All reform demands hard work work talcs time and costs money both must bc antiapatcd and provided for She hclped lum to extrı cate himself from the financial tangic into which lus unrestraincd enthusiasms had gotten lum Although 25 ·i she chided him for overworking she caught from him some of his own bad habits Early in their married life they drew up “time budgets” for each other so as "never to waste a minute.” They set up other rigid rules of self-discipline "to be more patient," "to think twice before speaking," "to rise early and eat slowly," "to dress with more care," "to behave with dignity," etc, etc They tried to improve each other's spelling and diction Surely life was a very real and carnest thing in the early days of the Dewey ménage Today-according to one's point of view—their conscientious efforts may have either a pathetic or a humorous aspect They saw neither His decisions were always hers To her he was always right All her life this faith never wavered-even when, as was later to be the case, it was attacked at a particularly vulnerable point She had “causes" of her own, interests to which, as the years passed, she increasingly devoted herself, but always his work and cares came first If she saw things always through his eyes-well, perhaps that is what good wives are for! 26 ·IV THE CONTRIBUTIONS- THE DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION To TEW MEN comes the opportunity to complete practically ones personal contribution to a great life work while still a college undergraduate not yet twenty two yeyrs old. That the Decimal Classification was one of Dewey s most important contributions to librarian ship hardly needs argument One needs only to try to visualize a library world that had never received its clarifying influence It is evident from notes in Dewey s diary that the problem was one over which he had been puzzling for several years before he arrived at his solution for in his many library visits book classification was onc of the first subjects he discussed in his comments for example on a visit to that library (New York State) that he was destined later to head he says They arrange the books alphabetically paying no attention to subjects But the actual solution of the problem finally came to him as an intuitive flash In an article in the Library Journal' he says In visiting over fifty librarıcs I was astounded to find the lack of efficiency and waste of time and money 1 Decimal Classification Beginnings Library Journal Feb 15 1920 P 152 27 - ·in constant rccataloging and rcclassifying made ncccssary by the almost universally used fixd system where a book was numbered according to the particular room, licr and shelf where it chanced to stand on that day, insted of by the class, lo which it belonged yesterday, today and forcvcr For months I dicamd night and day that there must be somcwhcrc a satisfactory solution In the futurc wcrc thousands of libiarics, most of them in charge of thosc with lililc skil ou laining Thic surst essential of the solution must be the greatest possiblc simplicity The provcıb) said "simple as a, b, c," but stil simpler than that was 1, 2, 3 Aftci months of study, onc Sunday during a long seimon by Pics Sicains, while I lookt stedfastly at him without hicaring a word, my mind absorbed in the vilal problem, thic solution flashit over mc so that I jumpe in my scat and came very ncar shouting "Euchal" It was to get absolute simplicity by using the simplest known symbols, thc arabic numerals as decimals with the ordinary significance of nought, to number a classification of all human knowledge in print The basic idca came thus quickly, and was Dewey's But its development was a long slow process, in which, from thc first, many minds coopciated The first printed cdition, a slender pamphlet, bcaring an Amherst imprint and the title, A Classification and Subject Inder for Cataloguing and Arranging thc Books and Pamphlets of a Library, did not appear until 1876 Dcwcy's cagcı mind had not, however, waited thice ycais to inake a trial of his new discovery He saw chaos around him in the Amhicist library and wanted to bring order into 28 ·it. To preach the classification gospel to the outside library world was a development that appearcd much later Back in the year of its birth on May 8 1873 Dewey presented to the Library Committee of Amherst a memo randum-a document still preserved in the Amherst archives-outlining his proposed new classification Too long to be reprinted in full this first presentation of the Decimal Classification summarizing hus arguments for it does deserc extended quotation Select the main classes not to excccd ninc and repre sent cach class by one of the (ten digits) nine significant figures Subdivide cach of these main heads into not more than nine subordinate classes and represent each sub class by a digit in the first or tens decimal place Sub-classify cach or any of these eighty-one (hundred) classes into not more than nine subclasses and assign to cach one of the digits in the second decimal place Thus the sub-classes may be increased in any part of the library without limit cach additional decimal place increasing the minuteness of classification ten fold Bools of a general character embracing more than one topic or subject would remun in the general class A Dictionary of Science would receive no sub. classification but remain simply with main class number The cipher has its regular zero power ie indicates no classification eg o would be the class number of a general cyclopedia which covers all the ninc classes A somewhat extended personal examination of the various systems of classification in use by the large libraries of this country and such facts as were accessible concerning library economy abroad lead me to think 29 ·the proposed system better than any single one now in use for the following reasons It allows of any and all changes in building, shelving, &c without any change whatever in the press marks as first catalogued Each book being located relatively to the other books according to its subject, and not according to a wooden shelf, it is clear that so long as the book is by the same author and on the same subject there is nothing to be changed in any removal or recataloguing Books on the same subject are found all together (as far as it is possible to make close classification of books) and no growth of special subjects, or limitation of space, or changes of any kind every separate them This is of the greatest utility to the library staff and such persons as have access to the shelves since they find in one place all the resources of the library on the subject they came to investigate The system is easily understood doo applies equally well to a library of a hundred vols or of a million, it being capable of indefinite do accurate growth This memorandum of its student library assistant convinced the Library Committee They gave his new classification their blessing, and he proceeded to reclassify the Amherst Library according to it As has already been said, from the first many minds cooperated in its development Young Dewey's fellow student and devoted friend, Walter Stanley Biscoe, did much of the work on the first amplification of the schedules, and several Amherst professors gave advice in the working out of the classifications of their respective fields That 30 ·the classification had the advantage of this three year tryout in the Amherst Library before it was crystallized into printed form was of course all to the good The basic concept of 1873 survived but meanwhile there was probably considerable change in schedule details The preface to the first edition (1876) retains much of the phraseology that had been used in the memo of 1873 Today a good deal of it sounds pretty bromıdıc but that is simply because it is hard for us to realizeso profound has been the Dewey impress-how much that we now tale for granted was to the librarians of 1876 the danning of a new day The history of thc Decimal Classification since 1876 has been one of a book that has made its way through edition after edition has grown from forty two pages to nearly two thousand solely in answer to persistent professional demand Without as its author once wrote "adi crtyzing or agents By 1927 it was in use in 96 per cent of all public libraries of the United States 1189 per cent of college and university libraries and in many thousands of other libraries in every corner of the civilized world No other classification system has ever even remotely approached the general acceptance that Deneys Decimal Classification has won for itself the majority of libraries not using Dewey are following a home made classification of their own Here is the record of the successive editions ,American Library Association A Survey of Libraries in the United States 74 P7 31 ·2 10 11 12 Edition Dalc Editorial Assistant Copucs 1 1876 WS Biscoc 1,000 1885 500 3 1888 500 4 1891 May Seymoui 1,000 5 1894 2,000 6 1899 7,600 7 1911 2,000 8 1913 2,000 9 1915 3,000 1919 0,000 1922 Dorkas Follows 5,000 1927 9,840 13 1932 Fellows & Gotchell 8,000 14 194? Mazncy & Getchell 10,000 Beside these regular editions, an Outline of the Decimal Classification was published in 1921, and an Abridged Decimal Classification in 1929 Although, over a period of scventy years, the growth of the Decimal Classification secms amazing, at first it spread slowly But this is easily understandable The reclassification of any library is not something to be entered into with insouciance No matter how good a new classification may appear to be, icclassification is tremendously expensive Wellesley, for cxample, did not introduce it until several years after Mis Dewey's lcaving there Columbia adopted it in 1883, and then probably only at the insistence of its now libiauan Even in 1890 the Decimal Classification was spoken of as the "new" classification-one that had gained wide, but by no means the general, acceptance it was to receive later 32 ·Although actual adoption was gradual there was however from the start the most cordial appreciation of its merits At the centennial year meeting of librarians in Philadelphia-of which more later-their youthful secretary s new Classification was one of the chief topics of conversation The following condensed record of a portion of this meetings proceedings is pertinent not only as a part of the history of the Classification but as evidence of Deweys personal attitude toward his own work Mr Smith (Lloyd P Smith) said he had carried away from the Convention of 1853 but onc idea of special value-that of Mr Folsom s card catalogue He felt that the most valuable idea which he should carry away from this Conference would be the system of cataloguing and classification devised by Mr Dewey Would Mr Dewey favor the Conference with a descrip tion of his method? Mr Dewey While I acknowledge the compliment which has been paid to the Amherst method I must beg to be excused from presenting its claims before this meeting--not that I lack faith in its merits for the more we use it the more we are convinced of its great value but the prominent part which I have had in calling this Conference makes me unwilling to use any of its time for a matter in which I have so much personal interest Those interested will find explanations in the Gov crnment Report and I shall gladly furnish any addi tional information at any time Mr Capen (Edward Capen Librarian Public Library Haverhill Massachusetts) On several occasions since the opening of this Convention we have heard the plan 33 ·. of our Secretary alluded to as one of great valuc, as the discovery of the age, in fact, in regard to library management But every attempt, thus far, to draw it from him has resulted in postponement It now seems that we may adjourn without having our curiosity gratified For one, I must express myself in terms of great disappointment, and hope that our friend will suffer our many entreaties to pievail over his modesty" Mr Dewey said he was willing to answer any questions or give any explanations that the Conference might require, and being again called upon, briefly described his method In answer to inquiries he further said "We do not claim that our scheme solves all the difficulty of cataloguing and administering a library "Our system won't make folios and sixteens fit the same shelf without undue waste of space, it won't secure a perfect regularity in the scquence of the different colored bindings at the same time that the books are minutely classed by subjects “There is one objection to our system which does not apply to the common method of numbering shelves and books In the common system this book which we find to-day at the end of this shelf ncarest this window, will (may) be found just there ten years from to-day, and, knowing its place, we might in this special case come in here and get the book in the dark Mr Smith " The number of people who visit our libraries in the dark is not large enough to make this objection very formidable” Mr Dewey “This was the only point on which we had any doubt in adopting our plan some three years ago After actual trial we found that the difficulties were mostly imaginary Mr Smith later commented "I am inclined to think 34 ·that the system of our brilliant and indefatigable Searc tary Mr Dency is the one we shall all have to come to in the end As Dewey had remarled the new Classification had been deemed important enough to be reprinted as a part of the great milestone the 1876 Report of the United States Bureau of Education on The Public Libraries of the United States Charles A Cuticle whosc Expansile Classification threatened for a while a little later to become a rul to thc Dcamal Classification wrotc to Annic GodIrcy on Junc 28 1876 Mr Dency has explained lus system to me and we have talled it over scicral times I linic brought against it all the objections I could think of and he has answered ncarly all I think it is plain that the defects of the system are dcfccts that it sharcs with all other systems and that it has somc mcrits which no other system has Of course it is possible that use may des clop some incon 1cnicnccs which I cannot forcscc but those that I do sce arc balanced by greater conveniences If I could start a library I should use this system. Later Cutter tried to join forces with Dency and to gether the two friends actually worked out the outlines of_a_now classification on a 35-character base (the arabic numerals plus the alphabct_omituing the O) It was never published however and Dewey returned to his faith in the outstanding simplicity of a purely numerical base 35 ·At no time did the Decimal Classification suffer from lack of adherents in fact there is more than half truth in the assertion that it has suffered from their cicessive enthusiasm Numbers are fascinating things, and there have been, over the years, many would-bc experts in classification who have not realized that, because a certain amount of classification is a good thing, an indefinitely larger amount of it is not necessarily better It should have been obvious that the moic dctailed a classification is made, the more quickly it tends to become obsolete, that the more complex it is made, the morc its original casily grasped simplicity becomes lost But neither of these axioms was realized The result has been a succession of editions of the Classification padded out with minute, little used, and often poorly done, amplifications of isolated sections, ill-advised amplifications that have thrown the basic decimal schemc all out of focus And finally, we have had Dewey's original Classification capped by the ingenious, but not altogether practical, elaborations of the Classification décimale--a monument, if there ever was one, of patient but somewhat self-defeating erudition It is difficult to overestimate what the widespicad adoption of a uniform, efficient, easily understood, and unusually logical library classification meant to the library world during its developing period As the Classification gradually -won general acceptance by the rank and file of libraries, its users found that they were receiving several sorts of surplus value The Decimal 36 ·Classification became a sort of international biblio graphical language it made the teaching of classifica tion in library schools a relatively simple problem it rendered easily possible all sorts of cooperative cata loging ventures In a very real sense it also developed library esprit de corps and professional solidarity during those formative years when they were most needed Just what is the essential quality of the Decimal Classification that has made it so great a contribution to librarianship? To answer this question it is necessary to distinguish carefully between the underlying and the superficial to realize that the Dewey Decimal Classifica tion despite its present very widespread use is in the long view a thing of evanescent value to see that it was Dewey s basic classificational concept and not the details of the schedules in which he embodied that concept persuasively ingenious and convincingly logical though these schedules were that was his great contribution What is this basic and revolutionary concept? He implied it clearly in his memo to the Amherst facultya progressively and indefinitely more minute classifica tional subordination expressed by means of decimally placed nomenclative characters How revolutionary this concept was is the more apparent if we attach to deci mally as we have just used the word an acquired meaning broader than its dictionary one making it in clusive of all numerical bases instead of merely the ten digit one Our base might perfectly well be duo decimal for example and the basic Dewey concept 37 ·his casting would still hold The second classificational concept that Dewey emphasized, and one only a little less revolutionary than the first, was what he termed a "relative location," in contradistinction to the then almost universal "fixed location," as between book and shelf "Fixed location" is, of course, not a "classification" at all, but simply a shorthand method of numbering stackdecks, ranges, shelves, etc Dewey's “relative-location" idea was perhaps not entirely new-although his dcscriptive phrase for it was (A search through the dusty bibliographical past might even dig up forecasts of his basic decimal concept, for very few idcas in this world are absolutely new) But Dewey's merging of these two classificational concepts, of them in an amazingly practical and persuasively logical synthesis, huis straightforward adoption of an arabic-numeral nomenclature with its clever and consistent use of the value of zero-all these were new Finally, because they were new, they needed an evangel, and Dewey was an evangel par excellence Cutter's Classification, although it uses a different nomenclature and a 35-character base instead of a 10 character one, is, in the broader sense of the word, just as "decimal" as is Dewey's And the main nomenclative weakness of the splendidly proportioned, much more scholarly, and much more up-to-date Library of Congress Classification is that it departs from the basic Dewey concept, and uses a serial instead of a decimal nomenclature It is noteworthy that, with this last single excep- 38 ·tion no new classification it has ignored Dewey s basic concepts has achieved other than the most limited sort of acceptance As for relative location we now take it so much for granted that many a present day librarian does not even know what the phrase means Only in Europe does fixed location survive We have already remarked that irregular schedule expansion has distorted the originally clear cut Decimal Classification picture just as the passage of time has rendered parts of it obsolete has forced circumlocutions and intercalations to permit the inclusion of new ma terial and has put much of the detailed subordination out of balance But even though the original Dewey Decimal Classification may some day be completely out moded to be superseded by some new decimal classifi cation conforming with greater practicality to the eternal flux of printed human expression there seems little or no likelihood that any new classification will ever be developed that will not pay homage to the two basic Dewey contributions The original Decimal Classification has been referred to as amazingly logical So it appeared to its first users Many of us can remember feeling when we pored over it for the first time not that it was at all Procrustean but rather how happy a chance it was for librarians that all human knowledge had come into being neatly wrapped up in ten pound packagesOf course as the Decimal Classification grew-and as we ourselves grew bibliographically-we came to see more clearly that it 39 ·had its biases, its arbitiary consolidations and separations Yet, despite these, it was, as a whole, such a vast improvement over any other library classification cver devised that it was natural for its first devotees-including Dewey himself-to think that it had forcvci solved the book classificatory problem Now we know that all classifications are tools of transitory cffcctiveness, that, of all chimeras, the perfect and final book classification is the most fleeting 4u ·THE CONTRIBUTIONS- THE LIBRARY SCHOOL IT IS TYPICAL of the paradoxes that marked all of Melvil Dewey s life that the world s first library school-his con ception and creation-began where it was not wanted was conducted from its very first day in direct violation of the explicit orders of the trustees of the college was initiated without funds without faculty_without equip ment-in fact without anything but students and en thusiasm Although from the larger viewpoint it proved to be one of Columbia University s most important ven tures in the educational field it hung on almost by an eyelash for three years and was then ignominiously kiched out to make the paradox complete the school was triumphantly re instated at Columbia nearly forty years later If ever the log plus Hopkins theory of a college was exemplified in practice_it was the Columbia Library School in its opening days It had nothing-not even the right to exist in the form that Dewey himself very definitely intended that it should exist It will be seen at once that the initiation of the school that was to transform-if not actually to create-the library profession was Dewey esque to the last degree Although the school was not opened until 1887 the idea 41 ·of it had been germinating in Dewey's mind for ycars As for himself, he realized fully what it might cventually lead to, and it abundantly rcalized lus far-sighted intent But it is obvious that when, on May 7th, 1883 and May 5th, 1884, respectively, the trustees of Columbia College passed two resolutions, the first appointing Melvil Dewey college librarian, the other sctting up the Columbia College School of Library Economy, they did not dream of the indefinitely expanding ripples of causation and cffcct which they were setting in motion A few months before their permissive resolution wc find Dewey applying to the American Library Association, at the Buffalo conference of that year, for its endorsement of his newest undertaking, the proposed school It was to teach, according to the memorandum that he read 1 Practical Bibliography To tcach what author and treatise is wanted 2 Book To teach what edition is best to buy or borrow, whenever there is a choice of editions 3 Readıng To teach how to get from the book what is wanted, and no more, most quichly and easily 4 Literary Methods (for want of a better name) To teach how to remember, record, classify, arrange, index, and in every way make most available for future use, what has been gotten from the books The American Library Association was already a progressive body, but even for this group the idea of establishing a school to teach librarianship was a little 42 ·novel Indeed some of the elder statesmen were minded to give his plan short shrift Mrs Henry A Carr has left us a record of the discussion that ensued and of the action taken Messrs Smith Mann Cutter Merrill Carr Green and Crunden spoke in favor of the proposed school Messrs Poole Chamberlain and Billings spole emphatically against it Dr Billings moved that a com mittee be appointed to draft a resolution expressing the feelings of the Association in regard to the proposed school and the motion being passed President Winsor pointed Cutter Chamberlain Mann Carr and Mer rill On the final day of the conference this committee reported Resolved -That this Association desires to express their gratification that the trustees of Columbia College are considering the propriety of giving instruction in library work and hopes that the experiment may be tried This report was signed by Cutter Mann Carr and Merrill Judge Chamberlain in a minority report asked that the matter be referred to a committee to report more definitely at the next meeting of the Association With characteristic caution Mr Bowker spoke in favor of the minority report They were outvoted however and the majority report adopted by the Association The slightly less than unanimous approval of the Library Association was the least discouraging of the circumstances in which the new school began its career There were so many difficulties placed in its way that 43 ·any othci man lan Dewey would have thrown up his hands and quit before it started Toi one thing, although the u ustces liad grudgingly granıcd ilien 1903. librarian permission-subject to CCU ycry diclmc restrictions- 10 open the new school, thcy liad cyplicitly shonlum nothing whatc cr with which to open 11 Toitlus, and Otlicr reasons, although permission to establish it was volcd in 1881, il l'as not opened unul January, 1887 In a lcttci willen many years latci, Deucy thus desaibes that momentous opening Theic were suong icasons for remembering January 5, 1887, foi it mailed one of the sharpest batcics of my liſe for what I know to be right lvcnity four hours ben ſore I was to mect the first class 1 1.5 formally notified by the chairinan of the committee on buildings, icprc. senting the uusiccs, that I would not be allowed any 100m in Columbia foi my new school because the first class, like all that lave succeeded it, proved, as I always expected, to have more women than men. The crisis scnt President Barnard homc ill, for hc say no escape from what secmcd a final wicching of my plans It took the faith, not of a mustard sccd, but of a wholc mustard plaster, but I nccr for a moment filicic in my faith that the Library School would bc born and Inc and grow They assured me that I could not and should not Dr Bai naid uued all the afternoon, with all his powers as president, and finally gave it up as impossible and, ill with mortification, scnt for his playscian I sent for the janitois, told them, as I did thc fust class when they arrived, that there were in enty when I only hoped for tcn, and that I could find no 100m large enough and so must utilize the store 100m over 44 m ·the chapel thus inspiring them with a little enthusiasm for meeting emergencies They moved out the paching boxes cleaned and scraped ran in temporary wires got some broken down tables and nailed on missing legs picked up odd chairs where we could get them without encountering the police sent a truck for some more to my house in New York and sith smiling face without giving a hint of the volcano on which we all stood I welcomed the first class and launched the first library school Later the cnemies of women in Columbia planned my Waterloo and appointed 2 committee with Mayor Seth Low of Brooklyn as chairman to report whether I should be expelled from the University for admitting women to its instruction But he added triumphantly Wc kindled a fire whose light will surely be seen down thru the generations I am always profoundly grateful that the Lord let me be the particular Moses to lead those particular children of Israel into the promised land Deweys memory of the School s first hectic day is fully corroborated by one of the students in that first class Frank C Patten later of the Rosenberg Library Galveston Texas I remember that we were a little surprised when we appeared in Mr Dewey s office late in December 1886 supposing that all was in readiness for the school to proceed This was not the case however and we waited with patience and confidence in Mr Dewey with his magnetic personality and great enthusiasm I don t re member how long it was We students did not know much about what the real difficulty was and did not 45 ·learn, as I remember, unul quite a long time afterwards For lectures, etc, we met in the open space in the north end of the room The building was an old one and the floor we occupied was roughly furnished But our class was imbued with a pioneer spirit and did not mind any of the inconveniences or the cxtcmporized facilities The paragraphs just quoted afford the key to the opposition of the trustees to the new School Columbia was not then coeducational, and they were determined that it should not be-anywhcic Dcwcy was cqually detei mincd that women should be admitted to his new school On this entirely quixotic platform-a platform without a shied of legal right to support it-he rished the future of the school, his job and his professional rcputation It is, however, evident from other records that, although this was his outstanding issue so far as the trustees were concerned, Dewey, with his peculiar ability lo do so, had managed to tread on a numbei of other toes He had stubbornly insisted, foi instance, that rules were rules, and that professors should pay fines on overdue books like everyone else (How familiar this sounds!) He was accused of being boastſul and vigorous in his library reports to a degree "not in accordance with academic propriety and the dignity of the College" (Probably true) He was accused of being “impatient, and unwilling to follow accepted precedents (Undoubtedly true) Whatever the cause, and 46 ·regardless of whoever was at fault it was a fact that lic was not overpopular with his faculty colleagues Presi dent Barnard, however defended him warmly In three years the American Library Association had turned from lukewarm acceptance of the School to enthusiastic support In a resolution passed in 1888 it said Let us with the utmost cordiality and gratefully ex press our thanks to Mr Deney for taking this additional step in advance for inaugurating and carrying to a successful issue 1 movement that is of the greatest im portance in raising the standard of librarianship As for his students they were as they have always been the most devoted and enthusiastic of partisans In an issue of Library Notes in the same year 1888 Mary Wright Plummer who was soon after to go out and start the second library school-and a new sequence of ripples--wrote Perhaps no body of instructors cver had a more ex pectant class or one more ignorant of the subject to be entered upon than were most of the members of the School of Library Economy on the 5th of January 11st It is almost a wonder that the ferment of cnergy and enthusiasm with which we listened to and attempted to follow our instructions did not burst out the walls of the superannuated building Despite its handicaps the School from the start did a well coordinated and thoroughly effective job In huis first annual report dated June 20 1887 its director notes that 108 lectures were given by the regular library 47 ·staff (72 by Dewey humself, 26 by WV S Biscoc, and 10 by G H Bahcı), and 75 by outside volunice Iccturers The list of these laticr is ically imposing and worth icprinting as indicative of thc quality of the School's insti uction Dewey cvidcntly had no intention that it was to be a cloistcrcd rcticat Dr JS Billings-National Nicdical Library, Washington, RR Bowlcı-Publishers Wechly and Library Journal, Hon Mellen Chambcrlain-Boston Public Library, Ellen M Coc-New York Ficc Cuculating Library, F M Crunden-St Louis Public Library, CA Cutier-Boston Athenacum, ) Edmands-Phuladelphia Mercantile Library, W E Toster--Providence Public Library, WI Flctchcı-Amherst College Library, Albert R Frcy- Astor Library, New Yorh, C R Gillete-Union Thcological Seminary Library, S S Groen-Worcester Ficc Pub. lic Libiary, Dr Reuben A Guld-Brown Unicrsity Library, G Hannah-Long Island Historical Society, Brooklyn, Caroline M Howins-Hartford Library, WC Lanc-Harvard College, 1 N Laincd-Buffalo Public Library, Applcton Morgan-Prcs New York Shakespeare Society, C Alcı Nelson-Astor Library, New York, WT Peoples-New York Mercantile Library, R B Poole- Librarian, YMCA, New Yorh, Dr W F Poole-Chicago Public Libiary, G H Putnam-GP Putnam's Sons, EC Richardson-Hartford Theological Seminary, F Saunders--Astoi Library, New Yorh, J Schwartz-Appicntices Library, New Yorh, A R Spoſſord-Librarian of Congress, F Vinton-Princeton College Library, J L Whitney-Boston Public Library But, from the beginning, Melvıl Dewcy was the School, his personality was its inspiration and driving 48 ·force It was his continual preachment that library pork was not a job but at once a sacred trust and a great opportunity for service He said We count a chicf gain of their course that each shall go out not in the spirit of repose but in that of a great an zlcning that none shall fall back into that partial lethurgy which curses so many libraries today When our every pupil is each in his own spliere doing his all and his best according to the strength that has been given him then we shall feel that our first skırmısh line has begun the march At this time in library history as never before since the first book was written the fields are white already to harvest and the air is full of hope Whatever else it may accomplish or fail in this School will not send out a race of dawdlers It did not Most of the students who hcard his personal lectures have over the years probably forgotten what he said about the details of classification and cataloging but the one thing that he meant to remun with them does remain-his enthusiasm for library service Dewey Jasa directing a school, he was preaching a crusade Books were for him the tools-and the essential tools-with which man might build for himself a better world He was much more than 7 teacher He was a prophet point ing forward to a glorious promised land He invited you to enlist under a marching banner And you did' Deweys success an cducator the prc eminent quality of his service to his School are abundantly attested by a letter that President Barnard wrote on December 15 1888 to Seth Low Excerpts from this 75 49 ·letter are later quoted at length in another connection It is sufficient here to note that in it Barnard particularly commended the work of the new School and was evidently anxious that his trustees should be fully cognizant of it In his annual report for 1887, he says "The number of applicants was three times as many as had been looked for” And he comments upon the enthusiasm of the students A fact exceedingly encouraging to those with whom this scheme originated has been the intense interest manifested by the students of the school in their worh, and the untiring industry with which they have followed it up, many of them often remaining at the library to a late hour of the night, engaged in writing up their leclure notes or in practising the methods taught in class A well-qualified librarian is of as much importance as the library itself and the libi arian's office has risen to the rank of a profession But, within three weeks of Barnard's letter to Low, the pot that had been bubbling so long and so furiously boiled over On December 20, 1888, Dewey's resignation as Columbia's librarian had been presented to the trustees of the college and, on January 7, 1889, it had been accepted Had he been guilty of "gross insubordination,” as charged? Unquestionably His ietention of women students in his lībrary-school classes was in direct violation of the trustees' express piohibition Had he any justification? Clearly, legally, not a whit Someone has to be responsible foi the conduct of an educational in- 50

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·stitution Iliese poners and duties acre at Columbia as at most collect ested in the trustees In thus CNC the trustees licre estimable ind on the wholc imabic alle and sell inicntioned gentlemen One could sell imagine hos puzle ind innoyed they were ly thic utterly unprecedented antics of their librarnın 1117 arc you gomg to do with 1 min u ho just wont 17 pul a man who is you are told one of the best men you an get in fuis profesyonal field a man who is doing for you whore is in most respccta an unpreceicnicdly satisfacion job but who blandhs and fully ignores and delics your repcred and cxplicit commands on one particular point? Dency nosod tlic School with dum in illany but that did not mean that ils troubles were in any sense mer Ilthough their rci ons uicrc different soine of the Mos Jork Sonic Board of Regents acre just as much oppxwed to its continuance is thic Columina trustees Ind lccn In 1 dillerent way its position was about as inomous at llliini 70 it load been at \ck Jork it was just 15 inadequately financcar as cser It Columbi all of its still liad lid 10 8.50 tlıcır services and 11 Albany c find the Regents resolving Ihat the director of the library be uuthorized to employ such assist ints 75 rc found best fitta for the work and are willing, 10 guc their services for sausricton time without other com pensation than thiensirucuon and supervision ſur mislied by the librın A Refents muutc of Varch 19 1896 defensisely cupluns thin the churc rcccpts of the 51 ·school are from the tuition of students" From these the School paid all its own expenses of every sort, except "the salary of one junior clerk” and $50 a month paid Dewey himself "for expenses incurred because of the library school” Dewey iealized the situation He had taken the Libiary School along with him to Albany, not because he thought it an ideal movc, but because he saw no alternative It was obvious that the Columbia trustees would not continue the School if he left it in their custody But he was clearsighted enough to realize that the state capitol building at Albany was also not the proper location for it He pointed out himself the very obvious arguments to the contiary Sooner or later the school will be a target for those impatient to inherit the space it occupies Its opponents' question "why a school is hept in the capitol any more for one profession than for another" sounds very plausible The atmosphere of the capitol is quite the reverse of what should be chosen for a school The state ought to support the training of professional librarians just as surely as it does that of professional teachers, but what school man would consent to have his normal school carried on in the office of the superintendent of public instruction in the capitol building? In later years Dewey tried repeatedly to secure baching for the School from Andrew Carnegie so that its independent establishment might be assured, but never succeeded in convincing him that libiary schools perform any essential educational function To the very 52 ·end of his term 71 Albiny the administration of thic Library School remained on a precarious and temporary footing its support nicicr fully regulirual in the budget of thic Regents? Irom January lang wien lic mood to Albrito 1 lemmel con both scelerinde he lo no al regentes and Staic Iturrian Ihc School moved to Albany 111 April 18hg and cientually became well known as the cu York State Library School As Stitc librının DCncy wis also Director of the School During these clesen years when lic was almost su imixcil with the detul of the multiplice and micel_currict_that fic de cloped Tor imell 11 *75 tlic Library School in was closest to fus licut Ior it he gre lus lxst thou he lic brought with fum from Calumint 1 dcrotel stoup of assistants llc ddod olliers I would not exc far miss to say that slicy-1 locnice Hoodluorih Adi Alice Jonos Silomc Cutler Fairchuld I S Biscoe I rank Walter Vay Scymour Edna Sanderson-conducial the school wlulc lic inspiroi 11 ficn alter Ius resignation as Secretar of the lord of Regents in righ he con tinted to act 75 Sun Ilırırın and Director of the Library School until 190, and lus 75Sociitions with it ucrc chmel little during this sity contum rus men lic to scc ilicir (uh in anything so well justified as Viclul Dancys 175 in the School that lic founded in 19 G Columlıa Umscrsity made landsome amends to lum by taking back unier its wing thic Scliool One of the fnt acts of Commi tioner Draper 125 for cser to contact this situation Minutes of Reard of Refents Icccinler 11 1go, 53 ·that, forty years before, it had ui eated so ignominiously In the meantime what a record that School had made! Tiue to his prophetic vision, its graduates had vitalized library service, not only in this country but in a lialf dozen countries abioad Everywhere they were in the foreliont of then chosen profession Light subsequent libiary schools were founded by New York State giaduates, and, of all the other library schools, half have been headed or staffed by graduates of Albany This book is not a history of a school, but the life of a man, but never was it more true that a school was a man Who can ever calculate the total professional influence of the hundieds of pioneer libi arians whom he and his faculty trained and inspired and sent out? For most present-day librarians not trained directly by the School were trained by those whom it had trained In accordance with his boyish self-dedication, Dewey did, indeed, through his School, multiply himself exceedingly He planted the first seed of trained librarianshup, and he lived to see that seed increase many thousandtold No one today needs to argue that his Tittle Columbia Library School was a brilliant success The living proof of that success is present wherever librarians happen to meet together today James I Wyer once recorded that, of all the things that Dewey attempted, none gave him "seienei satisfaction" than the School Was the fact that the School was in difficulties of one sort oi another from its very start Dewey's fault alone? Here, as in many similar cases in Dewey's life, it is not 54 ·111 casy to appoition relatie shares of blame 'Ilic plain fact was that he was alcad of luis time and was tinwill ing or unable to show the patience that the situation demanded from the records wailable it is pretty car that the Columbia u ustces were courely COITCCT the position thcy took no permission 10 open any Columbia College classcs to women hid cier licen granted by thein On the other hand it also appeits that Dency find acted with thic ſull knowledge and cien with the approval of lus immediate administrative superior President Barnard Like Dewcy Birnard was ahead of his cducational contemporaries Hc undoubt cdly hoped that Deucy s 75gressive courage on thus point would arry the day kicntually time fully just fied both men but in thic mcanshule Deucy s position at Columbia was made at first unpleasant and a lase intolerable The wisdorn of Dencys insistence that women bu admisicd into library work is now about as self cudent as the success of the School itself On the other hand It must be said for the trustees that cocduction t Columbia insolied a great deal more than merely the Library School It is also true that inost of tlic trustces appreciated neither the worth nor the purpose of the new venture It is further true that the cpisode involved a clash of personalities as well as clash of policies Dewcy sold his ideas cierywhere c«cept to that onc set of customers to whom a successful salc was most im portant of all huis trustees 55

·Yet was his judgment wrong? One thinks of his
students and their enthusiasm perhaps, after all, he
knew best where to lavish his vitality!
56

·VI THE CONTRIBUTIONS- AS THE EVANGEL or LIBRIRIANSHIP TROY THE TIME Dcucy leſt Amherst unul luis death he was continually working to create not only a library profession but a library cconomy To gne librarians, as a body--unity solidarily cooperativeness the desire to make common approach to their common problems he devoted for sixty ycars in enormous amount of his timc and energy But he also sought to perfect tools with wiuch they might work more cffccuncly It is to this lesser but sell extremely important librıry activity of hıs that this chapter is devoted To speak of it is lesser is to usc words relaticly for had any other librarıın done what Dewcy did in any single one of the various ficlds grouped together in this chapter he would for that onc contribution alonc forever descric well of his colleagues Dewcy did them all-ind yet we term them collectively lus lesser contributions! Dency is so much better remembered for other of his interests that it is easy to forget that before anything else he was himself a librarian-and if we are to believe those whom he served an unusually effective one When he left Amherst it was felt to be very much Amherst s loss As for his work as librarian of Columbia wc harc 57 ·the following cyplıcıt testimony of President Bainaid in the letter to Seth Low alrcady mentioncd My dear Mi Low Coitain incidents of iccent occurence make it scem to me a duty to make a written accord of my appicciation of thic valuc of the work donc hcic by Mr Dcwcy, as chic libianan of the college lo understand this it is necessary to rcfci to the low condition 10 which the library had sunk during the grcatcr part of this century 'Ihc books, such as they were, ucic lililo used, and not appreciated by cuther students or officers, visitors to the library were low and scarcely any one i esorted to it for reading Your own iccollection will tell you that the library was practically of no usc to you during your student life On the occurrence of a vacancy of thic oflice, and when the library was about to be icmoved into the new buld. ing, the commilice icsolved 10 insuluic a icform By consent of the committcc I invited Mi Mclul Doucy, then directoi of the Library Burcau in Boston, and recent librarian of Amlierst College, whom I had known foi 10 years preceding, and whom I believe to be the most accomplished librarian in the country, to bc picsent at a meeting of the Committee Air Dewcy accepted the invitation He was so evidently a mastci of the subject, and proposed so many and so novel views in iegard to library management, that he greatly impicssed the minds of the members It had not occurred to me to nominate him as our libraian here I he committee, however, manifested a strong desire that he should under tale for us the work which he evidently so well understood He met their advances reluctantly, but after much pressure consented that his name should be placed before the board In doing so, how- 58 ·ever he was obliged to make considerable pecuniary sacrifices to which he was willing to submit in consid eration of the assurances given him by the committee that they would give him hearty support in carrying out his vies Mr Dewey was therefore nominated and elected in 1883 taking office at the same time at which the library was removed into the new building His first task was to assemble together all the books belong ing to the college scattered in the different departments and belonging to the literary societies and make a complete catalogue of the whole This was a heavy undertaking which occupied about three years before its completion By a remarkable system of economy in the purchase of books he made available the annual appropriation of funds for the rapid increase of the number of volumes and by the interest awakened among friends of the library on the subject he increased the number of volumes at a rate which in the last five years has increased the number three fold By the creation of a large rending room and the introduction of reading tables for 200 visitors at a time and by the introduction of assistants to bring volumes on demand to all the readers at their places and to assist in looking up yuthorities he has encouraged the use of books to such an extent as to make the library a favorite place of resort for students and officers alike This has done more than iny other measure to encourage the spirit of investig? tion in our college and to make this system of University wstructyon a success It was also a part of Mr Deweys plan to ineet the entering classes every year at the beginning of the ses sion in order to give them instruction in the use of books and the consultation of authorities a plan which is pursued with excellent results 59 ·But the principal service which Mo Dewey has tendered has been the inspiration which his fervent zcal and cnthusiasm has infused into the whole body of students, whereby they have become warmly intercsted in the subjects which are taught in thc classes, and stimulated to cndcavor to produce something original of their own In this respect luis influence has been 111- valuable and has been of more important service to the college than that of any othci officer I am convcrsant with the details of his man. agement to an client wluch is truc of no other officer, and I am very confident that he has not cicccded the bounds of his authority in any particulai His ardent enthusiasm, however, has caused lum somctimes to be in advance of public opinion, and hic has scemcd therefore to be sometimes over positive Should he lo us, I should esteem his loss a very serious one It is no difficult to fill the vacancy by a man icputed to be compctent, but I do not know where you will find a man whose whole soul is so entuely filled up with devotion to his profession He has been a constant stimulus to intellectual eſfoit in the college, and an inspiration which has reached to cvey member of the institution No man could ask for warmcı oi moic appicciative suppoit from his superior It is cvident that Dewey had been pouring new wine into old bottles faster than they would stand it, but it is also evident that it was now wine, a heady and exhilarating beverage That, indeed, was what marked Dewey as a libi arian, his continual insistence upon trying out new ways of doing things Some technical details of libiary practice are today so unshakably fundamental, so absolutely taken for 60 ·causes granted that it is difficult for the present generation of librarians to realize that they were once unknown that they were once that had to be developed and propagandızed for Some of them indeed were the sub ject matter of protracted argument and had to be ar dently and persistently fought for over a long period With mıny of these fundamental concepts-particularly with those that involved fighting-Dewey had a great deal if not most to do We forget for instance that all our now accepted library standardizitions were not revelations from some Sınai they did not come into being of themselves Originally somebody had to have the vision to see the greater efficiency that they would make poss and then that someone had to persuade and cajole and nag his colleagues into giving up all their chaotic individualities of size and form and custom to accept the new and common standards offered in the early days of librarianship the man who hnd most of the vision and who did most of this persuading ind nagging for standardization was unquestionably Melvil Dewey Take for example our standard catalog card the 77 x 121/2 centimeter card with which we are all so familiar We forget that this very simple thing this standardization of size that makes possibic all our I ibrary of Congress card distribution all our union catalogs all our ability to buy mass produced-and so reasonably priced-card cabinets was originally an en tirely arbitrary determination When Dewey entered 61 ·library work almost every library used a different size of catalog caid Each followed its own whum Somc had cards smaller than the 77/2 * 121/2 centimeter size, most had larger Perhaps not one used the exact 71/2 X 121/2 centimeter size that he proposed It tooh many years for the library world to change over completely to the new size of card (some libraries continued to use their old "blanket-size" cards up to within the current decade), now the "standard card” is in practically universal use On the subject of abbieviations-short cuts in writing of every sort,Dewey was almost fanatically partisan Some of his abbreviative short cuts have stuch, som have not Few of us now icalize then source The system of colon abbieviations for men's and women's most common first-names was widely used by librarians for many years, but now is pretty well forgotten The Dewey scheme of month name abbreviations is, on the other hand, still gener ally accepted libiary practice Apropos of these month abbieviations, the following anecdote bears repetition When Dewey dictated what he thought was his deathbed statement, the nurse who took it down headed it "Third of February, nineteen hundred and twenty seven " A few days later, Dewey, reading over the statement, and being then slightly better, slashed through this date line, and in a feeble hand substituted, “3 Feb 1927 " Years later Dorhas Fellows happened to see the amended document and commented matter-of-factly that, when he made the cor- 62 ·rection Dency must still have been ? very sick man Why? Because he should have written 3 F 271 Standardization is but one phase one angle in the development of a technology of librarianship There are others A profession has to have some method of placing qualified persons in positions and of finding persons for positions-and in its early days Dewey s Library Bureau conducted the world s first library employment agency A profession has to hue 2 journal or journals of its it has to have an association or associations of its own it has to develop equipment especially devised to meet its professional needs and a business house or houses to manufacture and supply that equipment With every one of these fundamental developments Melvıl Deney was when they were in their cmbryonic stages intimately concerned in most cases the prime own moter In connection with his work as secretary of the American Library Association Mr Dency conducted in its earliest days what he termed ? laboratory for the testing of library supplies and equipment of every sort and a sort of agency by means of which the makers of such materials and their prospective users could be brought into touch with each other At first this agency was another drater in his desh The sales in its first year were less than three hundred dollars and his account book bears this annotation Run is private investment till June 30 1877 ind then gave all with profit to date to the American Librıry Association 63 ·under the name of the Library Supplies Committee Dewey still, but now as the “ALA Libiary Supplies Committee,” continued this business in library supplies from 1877-79 Sales were still nominal It seemed clear to him that, if this was a business-and it clearly wasthe Association should not conduct at So-but still “Dewey" under a different name and setup-in December, 1879, he formed, with Cutter and six others, the Readers and Writeis Economy Company as an outright commercial fim to manufacture and deal in library supplies and equipment At the start its business was still mainly in his mind, its office was still the same di awer in the same Boston desh The Readers and Writers Economy Company had an unfortunate and hectic career In Dewey's own woids, this was its history During the year while I was sole manager its growth was very rapid Stoies were opened in Boston, New York and Chicago, and there were 120 men on the pay-rolls of the stores and the two factories the iich promise of the business had diawn into it an element caring nothing for my educational worh, which was to me the main thing In October, 1880, I resigned connection with the business, which passed into other hands, and immediately ian down in a way disci editable to all connected with it In January, 1882, it was closed entirely Dewey was not disheartened He proceeded to start IM Deney, The Chronicles of '74 Since Graduation from Amherst College (Warren, Mass 1885), p 16 7 64 ·up the same business all over again this time under the name of the Library Bureau and again at his same Boston address Then something happened Two young men Parker and H E Davidson had come into the picture as protégés of Dewey They had seen the possibilities that lay behind his little company they took it over giving Dewey a substantial stock interest in it. With its develop ment as with so many of his ideas Dewey lived long enough to see a tiny entity become enormous to watch two young men whom he had originally inspired go on to ever greater successes of their own In the case of the Library Bureau the success was spectacular Under Davidson s management it became a pioneer in revo lutionizing not merely library equipment-which as a matter of fact in a few years became only a side line in their sales-but business-office equipment and business methods generally In vertical filing for office corre spondence and in office card files and systems the Library Bureau was an initiator In due time it was operating numerous factories for various types of office equipment its sales offices circled the globe its annual income ran up into the millions And all this came from a desk-drawer business with initial sales of three hun dred dollars! For years Dewey continued to have a large and very profitable financial interest in the Library Bureau eventually he sold it to put the proceeds into the development of the Lake Placid Club In the early days of the Library Bureau Davidson and 65 ·Dewey quarreled continually over its financing and management But we must remember that Dewey quarreled with everyone, and Davidson was big enough to hold his own at the time and no rancor afterward Referring to their first days together back there in the little Boston office, Mr Davidson said of Dewey, using almost exactly the same words that were used by dozens of others who knew him The thousandth detail that Mr Dewey wrought out into almost exact completeness shows his vision These things hark back to the little offices at i Tremont Place, and to the young man fresh from college who was its dynamic force How much is owing to his zeal, to the optimism that knew no obstacles, to the vision that optimism fed upon and to the inspiration that radiated from it, we shall never measure Although they quarreled, Davidson and Dewey retained to the end, through the years in which each was taking on ever greater cares, a high regard for each other's abilities And it was Davidson who, when Dewey died, wrote to Mrs Dewey "A star has fallen, and the world is poorer indeed " 251 is MSI H4 40860 66 ·VII THE CONTRIBUTIONS- THE LIBRARY ASSOCIATIONS WE HAVE ALREADY referred from various angles to Deweys connection with the American Library Association When we say that Dewey was intimately and deeply connected with the birth of the American Li brary Association we are not asserting that he founded 1t even though he himself makes that statement and even though some of his colleagues at that famous cen tennial meeting at Philadelphia enthusiastically con ferred that honor upon their youthful but indefatigable secretary It does mean however that no other man lad a larger share in that founding than its No i mem ber As to who originally conceived the idea of calling that centennial meeting of librarians the meeting that resulted in the formation of the American Library Association a few months later there are several claimants and the probability is that it sprang into several minds quite independently What there is no question about is that Dewey took up the idea regardless of its original source and by dint of a veritable barrage of letters and conversations turned it into a reality At that meet ing so far as he could he kept himself in the back ground He a youngster just out of college was in the 67 ·piesence of the venerable deans of his profession-and he so conducted himself Indeed, as the record clearly shows, it was only after repeated urgings that he was pievailed upon even to say anything publicly about his new Classification But it is also perfectly clear, both from the comments of others present and from a reading between the lines of the official record of the proceedings, that he was omnipresent He didn't "arrange" everything, but he saw to it that those who were supposed to do the arranging-didi The original solicitations to attend, the notices of accommodations and entertainment at Philadelphia, the agenda of meetings and papers, all bear the mark of his characteristic style This general impression of the dominant part that Dewey played in launching the American Library Association is categorically stated by Charles A Cutter I suppose of late years many persons have desired a meeting of librarians, but the credit of independently conceiving the idea, of expressing it with such force as to win a hearing, of talking over those of us who were ina edulous or indifferent, and of bringing us together in this Convention from which we have received so much profit and enjoyment, is incontestably due to our energetic, enthusiastic, and persuasive Secretary And more than this, he has, I understand, defrayed all the preliminary expenses of circulars, cori espondence etc It is too much to be indebted to him for energy and us pay both as far as possible, the first by gratitude, the second in hind I move that we tender our thanks to the Secretary for all his sei vices, and I suggest that each member, on leaving, pay him one dollar Det money Let 68 ·Vand And for fifteen years he continued as secretary (with out compensation of course) to carry the Association along on the full tide of his unquenchable enthusiasm The work was done not only without compensation but the Association got it almost without expense There is extant a memorandum reading For expenses of secretary s office from Jan i 1885 to May 25 1888 $ 329 Nor did he even seek recognition for himself for his work He was quite content to see others the veterans of the profession Winsor and Poole Cutter and Crunden sit in all the posts of honor Not until 1890 did he permit his name to be urged for the presi dency He was equally content to see the various com mittees of the Association get all the credit for its detailed constructie work It is only when one reads the reports of these various early committees and finds in every other paragraph a phrase that is distinctly Dewey that one realizes of how much of this com mittee work he was the mainspring or as he puts it himself the gadfly Sixty years is in the history of the library profession a long time ago Today the enormously complex-and enormously valuable-work of the American Library Association requires for its handling a paid staff of several scores of employees In comparison we must remember how for years-and those years its critical formative ones-Melvil Dewey had to do for a strug gling little Association the same kind if not the same quantity of work and to do it with no staff no funds 69 ·no oſſicc, no compensation for its first fifteen years a drawcı in huis desk was "ALA. Iicadquarters" He may not have "lounded" thic Association, but certainly lic is largely responsible for carrying it safcly, and with conlinually stiengthened vitality, through its childhood and youth In two other phases of library-association work lic was-if we may use the icim-an associate pionccr We have already seen that Dewey played a part in tlic start. ing of thc Library Association of the United Kingdom, the British counterpart of our own ALA, he being one of the group of American librarians who journeyed to England soon after the cstablishment of the ALA 10 propagandize ſor, and to assist in the founding of, a British Association Finally, soon after coming to Columbia as librarian, he called together all of the librarians of the metropolitan area, and suggested that it would be mutually helpful for them to moct, in order to get better acquainted with each other and to discuss their common problems Shortly thercaſtei, in November, 1885, there was formed the New York Library Club, an organization still in existence, with R R Bowher as its first president, and—it would seem inevitably-Dewey as its first secretary Mr Bowher statest that he was also instrumental in founding the New York State Library Association It is certainly true that the state association met continuously IR R Bowher "A Postscript," Library Journal 1896 v 21, P 52 70 ·for many years at the Lake Placid Club so that very definitely it received the Dewey impress in its formative years National state local foreign-in each of these associations Dewey was if not the acturl originator, at least a prime mover 71 ·VIII THE CONTRIBUTIONS LIBRARY PERIODICALS ALTHOUGH DEWCY himself said categorically, “I founded the Library Journal,"l it would perhaps be more meticulously fair to say that he shared the credit for establishing the world's first library periodical with another man, perhaps with two R R Bowker and Frederick H Leypoldt That his share was the predominant one is, however, pretty clearly brought out in a careful summary of the known facts made by Beswick in his life of Frederick Leypoldt, published in pamphlet form by the office of Publishers' Weekly 2 Leypoldt was a man after Dewey's own heart, an idealist in business, who wore himself into a premature grave endeavoring to provide the American publishing trade with complete and adequate bibliographical equipment To the attainment of this objective, the Library Journal was, of course, subordinate or accessory, nevertheless it was part of the Leypoldt vision There is little doubt, in view of the record, that the idea of starting a periodical for the library profession came into his M Dewey, The Chronicles of '74 Since Graduation from Amherst College (Warren, Mass 1885), p 16 2J W Beswich, The Work of Frederich Leypoldt, Bibliographer and Publisher (New York Bowher, 1942), 102 P 72 ·mind and Dewey s at about the same time-possibly as far back as 187--and in any case quite independently There is little doubt that both-still quite independently one in Boston one in New York-developed plans for its publication Then each heard of the other s plans and they finally agreed (some time between March and May 1876) to a merger of their projects into one pub lication of which Leypoldt was to be the publisher with the publishing office in New lork and Dewey the editor with the editorial office in Boston As to further claims of priority Dewey had actually set up an editorial board for luis proposed periodical and had arranged with Ginn Brothers for its printing Leypoldt as evidence that he at least had in mind the periodical proposed pointed to a column of Li brary and Bibliographical Notes which he had begun as a department in his Publisfiers leelly just a few months before the Library Journal started Dewey claimed that even this Library Notes column was started by Leypoldt at his own suggestion This claim was later tacıtly admitted by Mr Bowker Bowhers own contribution to the Library Journal was a not unimportant one but as was always the case with ventures with which he was connected it was rather that of originator than of conservator He had on his hands two idealistic enthusiasts neither of them caring half so much about making both ends meet as of cffect ing certain worthwhile results Bonker had a banker s mind not a prophets While bankers are not generally 73 ·speaking, folk who push the world farther along toward the millennium, they do help greatly in the badly needed job of keeping it floating meanwhile on an even heel That was, essentially, Bowher's work-all his life Other people supplied him with ideas, it was his task to bring the ideas down to earth, and make them earn their own bread and butter (And eventually to return him, as they generally did, a very fair incomel) In the early days of the Library Journal, Bowker fully deserved his income, for the very good reason that driving such a runaway team as Leypoldt and Dewey was a fullsized task for any man For several years, however, the net returns of the Journal were on the red side of the ledger When Bowher went to London in 1880, to represent Harper & Brothers there, its financial difficulties reached a climax By then it showed an accumulated deficit of twenty-five hundred dollars With inadequate financing Leypoldt had plunged ahead with one new expensive bibliographical project after another, and in June, 1880, he found it necessary actually to suspend publication of the Journal This temporary suspension jolted the library world into a better realization of its obligations toward the publication Promises of increased subscription and advertising support poured in Dewey, with too much else on his hands, relinquished the general editoi ship to Cutter, while Leypoldt himself, and, upon his death shortly after, Mrs Leypoldt, took ovel the office editorship Finally it was arranged that the Journal was to 74 ·receive a subsidy for printing the annual proceedings of thc American Library Association a mutually advantage ous arrangement that was to continuc for many ycars Watun tuche months with this finananl help thc Jour nal was breaking eion for the first time Lcypoldt was at the stari ſcarſul lest the library pro ſession might not be able to supply cnough cduorial material 10 justify an entirely independent publication but Dency as cditor soon sct his mind at casc on that point With amazıng fccundity he filled its first issues | with matter that still ncirly scients scars later has sig nificance and vitality Much of it he wrote lumself but he was equally resourceful in surring up others in thic profession to wric for the new journal He was alu tys lacc with his own copy the perpetual despair of cs cry printer and cvery publisher with whom hic cicr worlcd What hc finally did send in was meaty and rcficcted the pric tical idcalism and the enthusiastic quest for cvcr-srcator efficiency and cier wider uscfulness that form the essen tals of Dewcy s character Hc sct lugh cditorial standards for the Journal they have cier since been maintained Dency and Lcypoldt werc lindred souls Thcy struck fire from cich other and admired coch other work They were also both tremendously overworked always in financial difficuluics and so always nervously over wrought Because of_this IL was only natural that at times their relationship should become strained-scri ously but their quarrels were transient and Dewgy in 1880 tool occasion to pay a glowing tribute to Leypoldt s 75 ·'noble generosity and devotion to the library interests The chief cause of all Dewey-Leypoldt friction was financial Dewey was supposed to receive one hundred dollars 1 month as salary for acting as editor of the Journal Occasionally this salary was forthcoming, but generally Leypoldt simply didn't have anything to give him Both men were idealists, but both were trying to support families, and, when a financial impasse like this developed about every other month, the situation was one that contained explosive elements Dewey's relations with Bowher also became seriously strained, and continued so for many years after he left the Library Journal But here there was a direct and fundamental conflict of temperament and viewpoint Like Dewey, Bowher had his fingers in many pies-how many, in view of the blindness with which he was foi most of his life afflicted, is remarkable Otherwisc one man was almost the exact antithesis of the other Bowher was, however, broadminded enough to give due credit to Dewey's ability He concludes his apologetic "Postscript" in the Library Journal in 1896 with these words I should be sorry, by any sin of omission oi of commission, to seem to deny to Mr Dewey any part of his large share, beyond that of any other one person, in general library development A great many good things are directly the result of his suggestion and inspiration Without his enthusiasm and energy it would have taken nearer a century, instead of half a generation, to have accomplished what has already been achieved 76 ·After he gave over the editorship of the Library Journal Dewey single handedly edited and published from 1886 to 1898 the second of library periodicals Library Notes which can only be described as the quintessence of the Dency vicu point in library cconomy It was really a continued report on progress As has already been suggested Dencys two ycars at Amherst and four years at Columbia (before the School opened) were ycars of pioneer work in library organization and practice Every detair of the methods and cquipment of his day went under his searching scrutiny to be discarded or modificd as scemed to him called for He was sifting testing try ing retrying The results are to be found in Library Notes and in innumerablc little paragraphs short arlı cles committee reports and discussions elsewhere 77 ·IX THE CONTRIBUTIONS- WOMEN IN LIBRARY WORK IF ANY ONE library group more than another should be grateful to Melvil Dewey it is-as has already been suggested-the one consisting of its feminine members If it had not been for him, it is highly probable that today most of them would not be librarians at all At the history-making first meeting of American librarians at Philadelphia in 1876, out of 156 in attendance only ten were women and one of these was the future Mrs Dewey) Compare this proportion of women with that present at any library meeting today Of course not all of this gain is due to Dewey, but, had he not fought their cause so valiantly, women's entry into library work would have come about far more slowly, their present numerical proportions would probably have been smaller, and their acceptance into executive positions less assured We have referred to the controversy over the admission of women to the Library School, but that was not the start of this particular crusade It began, as a matter of fact, several years before the Library School opened its doors, when Dewey brought six girls-not dignified men, suitable for the place, but young snippets just out 78 ·of Wellesley-down to the Columbia Library to assist him in its reorganization Mrs Dewey helped him in se lecting and securing the six and all his life he referred to them as the Wellesley Half Dozen One of them Mrs Martha T Buckham wrote after his death As I think back upon the days in 1883 when Mr Dewey took sıx Wellesley graduates to work in Columbia Li brary I am more impressed with his amazing daring At that time Columbia College was almost as hermeti cally sealed to women as is a monastery and the advent of a group of young college women appearing in the sacred precincts must indeed have given occasion for dire forebodings Mr Dewey s courage and daring were fur ther shown in his introduction of six absolutely untrained workers to aid in putting into shape the accumulation of volumes which Columbia Library possessed Trained workers in those days there were none and long and pa tiently did Mr Dewey and his able co worker Mr Bis coe train the willing but ignorant six To one of the Wellesley Six Mr Dewey s enthusiasm courage and optimism have always been an inspiration in her life and she is glad of this opportunity to voice her gratitude that she had training under him Since the Wellesley Half Dozen were to all intents and purposes the world s first class in library science even though they came several years before the formal opening of the Library School their names deserve to be recorded They were Alice Ayers (Mrs Benjamin D Smith) Mary M Deveny (Mrs E A Wasson) Ade laide Eaton (Mrs Adelaide I Abbe) Winifred Edger ton (Mrs Winifred E Merrill) Nellie F Page (Mrs 79 ·Helen Page Bates), and Martha Tyler (Mis Niartha T Buchham) of the six, Winifred Edgerton was the first woman to receive a degree from Columbia, that of Doctor of Philosophy, in 1886, her dissertation being entitled "Multiple Integrals” That the Wellesley Half Dozen had proved a satisfactory experiment was indirectly proved by an address that Dewey delivered on March 13, 1886, before the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, for its title was “Librarianship as a Profession for College- Bred Women" COf course Dewey's great service to the American feminist movement was his stubborn and absolutcly unequivocal insistence that women could, should and would be admitted to his Columbia Library School classes-regardless of rules or orders, trustees or faculty When, about forty years later, the School returned to Columbia, President Nicholas Murray Butler, all his life a warm friend of Dewey, said n It would be quite impossible for me to give you as accur. ate and as amusing a notion of the Columbia College of my own undergraduate days and immediately thereafter as Mr Dewey gave in that address The incidents he recounted and described are from our point of view not only amusing and amazing, but quite impossible The account which he gave of his foi mal trial, charged with the offense of having admitted women to the University without authority, was, in view of all that has happened since, ludicrous in the extreme As I listened to him and realized how absolutely true to life was every word of what he said, it seemed to me that he must be talking of an- 80 ·other world and another place so far has Columbia come in onc rclatui cly short lifetime Deney insisted that women should share equally with men ciery phase of library activity and equally with men every sort of professional recognition and honor This unslacking persistence did not apply merely to the School for in 1899 we ſind him arguing with consider able warmth that Salomc Cutler Fairchild regardless of her sex should be chairman of the Committee for the International Library Exhibit at the approaching Chi cago Worlds Fair-simply because she was the best per son to do the job All through fus life he pleaded for an equal place for women with men in all the worlds work and pleaded for it with passionate and convincing sincerity Theresa West Elmendorf commented that lus attitude toward women coloriers was always large and generous To me it was onc of the signs of his real bigness He did not find it necessary to call down to us He talked as írom a level without any sense of that patronage or condescension that lesser men consciously or unconsciously cry commonly use toward One of his personal secretaries Grace (Hewitt) Toule comments I don t belicve there was cyer a member of his staff who did not feel at casc in his prcs. ence He always called each one by his gxen name and was always ready to listen to the smallest suggestion that might come from some of lus assistants Of course Dewey was not the only man in library work willing that women should enter it although a she says us 81 ·few of his older confrères were just about as violently opposed to the idea as was any Columbia u ustee But being "willing" to accept this particular innovation, and being ardently convinced of its desirability-and so ardently convinced as to be ready to fight for it, for years, against apparently insurmountable odds, and at very real personal sacrifice-obviously these are two quite different things Today, when women librarians are so completely taken for granted, it may well be doubted if they themselves realize how utterly different library conditions were for them back in 1876, and how great and fari eaching is the debt that they owe to the particular library pioneer whose life this volume records 82 ·THE DIVERSIONS- THE REGENTS - IT MAY ONCE more sound paradoxical to say that Melvil Dewey s mental fertility and physical energy were really a handicap to his main lifework but there is much more than a modicum of truth in this assertion For this fer tility and energy were so great that at times-many times -they overflowed into channels quite outside of what was his great interest and as a result it suffered How much more Dewey might have accomplished for librarı anship of his time and energy had not been diverted to any of these other things is of course entirely hypothetical But they were diversions and in this chapter and the next two they are so labeled Such labeling will be criticized by the more ardent of Dewey partisans just as Dewey himself would have criticized at For one of the most ingenious of his rationalizations was that in which he set up metric and spelling reforms as two sides of a sort of triangular synthesis of total educational endeavor Regardless of what we label them there is no question but that in terms of hours and years his educational interests his two reform movements and the Lake Placid Club occupied far more than half of Dewey s life just 83 ·as thcy occupy morc than half the pages of the authorized Dewey biography Yet, for all that, and writing here not merely as a librarian foi librarians, but as onc sccking to the best of his ability to make a sobei appraisal of Melvil Dewey's place in the development of human culture, one may venture the prophiccy that a century hence he will be remembered only as a librarian All his stubborn tilting at spelling reform and metric rcform, all his long endeavors at pleasurable resort-club development, even his cleven hectic ycars as an educational administiatoi, will alıhe be forgotten, except as incidental by-lines in a formal biographical epitome As has just been icmarhed, Dewey's ability to rationalize his own motives and acts, plus huis consuming desire lo arrange cverything into a logical classificational pattern, was never bettei ciemplified than in his own attitude toward these two reform movements When, in due time, it became necessary to add the Lake Placid Club (via the "Lahe Placid Foundation") to his original educational triangle, duly add it he did, although to turn a vacation club-hotel resort (even the most delightful of club-hotel resorts) into into an educational institution did place something of a stiain upon cven Dewey's powers of rationalization We must remember that this rationalızation was not, so far as he was concerned, in any sense forced or insincere Had prison reform, or vivisection, or a religious reintegration, happened to make the same personal appeal to him, there is little doubt that the panacea for all our educational ills would have become, 84 ·automatically and inescapably a five or six or seven sided affair Heart and soul Dewey would himself have believed that the multiple sided result was an inevitable educational pattern During the winter of 1887 88 Whitelaw Red a mem ber of the New York State Board of Regents asked the librarian of Columbia College to advise the Library Committee of the Regents regardıng certain plans that the committee had under way at the time for the reor ganization of the New York State Library this library being one of the state institutions under the Regents jurisdiction In accordance with this request Dewey went to Albany inspected the then new Capitol building and investigated the State Library situation In characteristic Dewcy fashion he went much farther The larger educational situation at Albany offered in triguing possibilities to a man of his imagination Goy ernor Hill in his 1886 Message to the Legislaturc had to all intents and purposes called the Board of Regents a fifth wheel in the State s executive economy He had proposed that its functions (which had been roughly speaking the charge of the higher education of the State) be consolidated with those of the State Department of Public Instruction (which had been responsible for the State s grade school education) He had said categori cally I think there is no necessity for the official existence of the Board of Regents Its corporate name is deceptive and misleading Its powers and duties can be entrusted 85 ·to other and appropriatc hands without detriment to the public interests, thereby saving to the state thc annual expenses of its maintenance and dispensing with the anomaly of a two headed cducational system and confusion--that of divided and sometimes conflicting superintendence in the same public school During the two ycars that had intervened the legislature had taken no action on Governor Hill's recommendation, but the Regents naturally felt themselves on the defensive For two years, with their futurc politically uncertain, they had marhed time When the cnergetic young librarian from Columbia came along and proposed for them a complete and plausible program for affirmative action, is it any wonder that they welcomed his suggestions with open arms? Having canvassed not merely the library, but the whole State educational situation, Dewcy wrote Whitclaw Reid, on November 25, 1888, a long letter, in which he outlined a program both for the State Library and for the Regents This letter is so characteristic, and reveals so fully Dewey the educator, that it deserves quotation at considerable length In reply to your query what ought to be done by the Regents I beg to give a brief outline of some of the things that seem to me practicable and highly desirable I do not say that these plans are all formulated in the best way, or that local circumstances may not modify some of them I only say that 1 think I see clearly how the right man could cariy these out to the gi eat advantage of the state and at a cost so 86 ·1 n modcrate as to arcaic no objection You will under stand that I do not expect any man who undertakes this great work to sct cicry thung in motion at once I should say that he should apply to the work all the power & push that were consistent with thesc principles – To be sure before taking any action that there was full & proper authority in the laws of the stuc so that no critic could say a progressive administration was tak ing the bits in its tech & cxcceding its proper functions & nuthority To absolutely 1101d all cntangling alliances of pol itic so that neither party could possibly lase cxcuse for partisan opposition 3 lo maintain aborc possibility of criticism the dig nity of the Regents of the University This would some times require a little paticncc Our Own Board of Trustees at Columbia me cry conscriatic & I harc Icarned this in carrying some of my work forward faster than they could digest the new ideas The following check list of things to be donc docs not profess to be cxhaustive BUILDING Make your sixth (6th) of the $ 0000 ooo Capitol into idcal statc library quarters 7 ncirly as the limitations allow RFORCANIZATION A complete reorganization of the methods as you move into these quarters is important Your library wiulc first in size & value of all the state col lections has by no meins held the same rank as to its methods extent of usc &c 3 LEGISLATIVF TUNCTIONS It should be made the very best working legislative library so that cicry officer of the state could with the least possible dely get any in formation or assistance to be had in print The smallness of the present use is astounding & only skilful work will 87 1 2 ·9 STATE lead the average legislator, whose non-scholarly habits I fully appreciate, to become a frequenter & user of the library 4 STATE REPOSITORY It should be the best existing repository of everything pertaining to NY state This side of its work has been better looked after than almost any other but much remains to be done 6 PEOPLE'S UNIVERSITY This oft quoted phrase should be made a fact in your library To every citizen of the state this splendid collection in its splendid home, all paid for by the state, should be the real university "where any person may find information on any subject' This requires practically nothing but the disposition on the part of the management Books, rooms, & facilities are already provided SUPERVISION or PUBLIC LIBRARIES the time has come when the state must recognize the work of the library, as more than a generation ago it recognized that of the schools This is the greatest work at once before you It will require time & skill but its doing will surely marh a new era in popular education One definite assistance is for you to have trained assistants on the state library staff, one of whom can be detailed for a week or a month to go to any town that may ask such help, & start a new library or reorganize an calls for such assistance are growing every month It will inevitably result that you will be constantly training, in connection with your library, a succession of your librarians & catalogers who will be called to take charge of the new libraries springing up on all sides Just as N Y has led all the states in meeting the demand for trained teachers by founding no less than ten normal schools, so you will be sure to have at least one center for training competent librarians, withold one 88 ·out whom no satisfactory library progress is possible Fortunately this training can be so combined with your own library work as to impose a very slight financial burden You will almost never find one man eminent as a spe cialist in any of these departments who at the same time has business training & natural gifts that will enable him properly to care for the financial & business details of the work In my intense interest in this whole matter I have ven tured to verify my own judgment by taking into confi dence a few eminent educators Every man con sulted has expressed to me his firm belief that this great work as outlined in this long letter is entirely practicable & that if carried through its influence will spread to every state of the Union Obviously Dewey in this naive but ingenious letter had clearly in mind that he was himself the right man to carry through for the Regents the program he had laid out for them he believed he had that combination of business training and natural gifts which he him self said was essential He did not merely set forth a plausible program at a most opportune time for good measure he suggested however indirectly that he was himself just the man to carry out the program The sig nificant point is that the Regents agreed with him Con vinced that he was exactly the man for the job they of fered it to him and within a week he had definitely broken hıs relations with Columbia and had accepted their offer In this manner began the first of the great diver 89 ·sions” that were to carry Dewey progressively farther and farther away from the library work with which his name will be forever connected, but one can easily appreciate the appeal that this new opening had for him He knew that his position at Columbia hung by a thrcad, and with it the position of the little new Library School for which he had worked so hard (That he had alı cady planned to carry the School to Albany is obvious 10 anyone reading between the lines of the ingratiating ninth paragraph of his memorandum to the Regents) The new position offered him a fresh start and larger possibilities for usefulness It also offered him financial betterment, incidental though that may have been A fresh professional start afforded Dewey a unique opportunity to profit by his Columbia experience Seeing clearly these Columbia mistahes, he could now avoid repeating them in his letter to Reid he had said as much not to carry on a program faster than his superiors could "digest his new ideas”, "a progressive administration" must not seem to be "taking the bits in its teeth”, it must leave no “excuse for partisan opposition", it must “maintain above possibility of criticism the dignity of the Regents ” These phiases sound like the words of a chastened man swearing a whole set of new New Year's resolutions But no more than a leopard can change his Melvıl Dewey change his disposition or restrain his enthusiasms He tried hard But his eleven years at Albany as secretary of the Board of Regents were in many spots could 90 ·respects a replica of his five preceding years at Columbia Again and again he was in hot water-with his Regents with the legislature with the State s executive adminis tration Governor Hill had reversed himself on his proposal to legislate the Board of Regents out of existence mainly because Dewey had been appointed their secre tary and was promising a new deal for them a later governor proposed to abolish the Board of Regents largely to get rid of him and his new deal! Nothing could be farther apart than the pro Dewey and the anti Dewey accounts of what Dawe in his biog raphy calls the fighting years at Albany The pro Dewey accounts tell the story of a high minded and zealous servant of the state endeavoring to bring to con summation long overdue educational reforms in the face of every sort of underhanded political opposition and of every kind of venomous sordid scurrilous and utterly unjustified personal attack The picture drawn by the antı Deweyites is that of a man as shifty as a weather juggling legislative appropriations around to provide funds for pet reforms not only unauthorized but definitely forbidden ignoring established precedents without compunction and almost without reason and doing so in the face of official warning not to do so riding with a high hand over Regents and legislature alıke untactful not willing to work in harness etc. How much this sounds like Columbia all over again Obviously the truth must lie somewhere between these vane etc 91 ·two extremes One fact at least is undeniable whatever the cause, or whoever was to blame, Dewey, almost from the day he took over the Regents' secretaryship until he resigned eleven years later, was repeatedly in some sort of minor or major conflict When he finally went out, his enemies were, of course, exultant, but even his best friends on the Board of Regents accepted his final resignation with something like a sigh of relief Where so much smoke went up to Heaven there must have been some fire Dewey was not politically wise enough to win himself "a good press " Phrases like “After Dewey's Scalp," “Charges Against Dewey,” “Storm in the Board of Regents," iun through the newspaper headings of the period To a considerable degree this last was perhaps not his fault Political fights usually make news, thousands of pages of research material of the greatest scientific value ordinarily do not Through such headline trivia as the “Dui-Dewey" controversy, Dewey's name was made known to thousands who never heard of him in any other way, who knew nothing about his constructive work, nothing about the hundi eds of men and women whom he was sending out, imbued with his own eagerness and enthusiasm, to spread the gospel of librarianship to every corner of the world This was unfair to him, of course, but it was the fact Just what was the fire that created all this smohe? The fundamental issue over which the battle raged all through his incumbency was not by any means one of 92 ·his own making It derived from the already mentioned bipartite nature of the States educational system and the ever simmering struggle for control that went on be tween the two halves Dr Andrew S Draper Superin tendent of Public Instruction at Albany from 1886 to 1892 ind so in a sense Deneys rival for educational power and prestige was also aggressile in able admin istrator and just as strong a personality as Dewey himself This dual educational system with its co cqual admin istration was as Governor Hill had said anomalous and only men of unusual tact and a strong cooperative sense could have made it work harmoniously As neither Dewey nor Draper was marked for his tact they clashed from the start Each accused the other of poaching on his preserves of grasping for more power The first round of the battle Dewey won for the Regents Draper resigned and took another position If this conflict of educational authority was the funda mental issue there were scores of subsıdiary ones most of them absurdly trivial--so trivial in fact that in all the eleven years of Regents meeting minutes only two of them were even dignified with official ref erence It was in these minor daily routine matters that Dewey was everlastingly getting into hot water in such things for instance as his almost continuous controversy with the accounting officers of the State The trouble here was largely that consummate rationalızıng ability that dogged him all his life the idea that if something was right and wise he must somehow find a way to do 93 ·it-and, moreover, to do it at once-however financially circumlocutional, or technically unauthorized, or tactlessly forced, the way that he chose might be Almost always the ends that he wanted to accomplish were wholly desirable ones But he never learned that even desirable ends must sometimes be postponed, never lcarned the patience that he had himself said was essential, never learned the virtue of consistent and unvarying straightforwardness, never leai ned how "to speak softly" in the presence of political opposition Dewey realized the pitfalls that surround the handling of official finances and set out to avoid thcm Soon after his appointment, on December 10, 1889, we find the Funance Committee of the Regents approving "the new method of classification of accounts adopted by the Secretary" and "heartıly" endorsing the “suggested rules governing financial administration submitted to the Committee by him” But in due course Dewey found, as every government official does, that the very rigidity of bureaucratic accounting practice is to some extent selfdefeating, that emergencies sometimes arise almost demanding temporary abrogations of established practice in some minor pai ticular Such temporary abrogations, if conscientiously undertaken for reasons that are clearly in the public interest, if openly done, and if rarely done, are easily defendable Trouble develops when these three "ifs” are ignored-particularly the last! But juggling with figures-and not using the word "juggling" here with any derogatory connotation-became 94 ·in time almost a passion with Dewcy He became fasci nated with them he liked to play with them Over the years also partly as a result of the ingrained thrift of his boy hood partly as a result of years of propagandızıng with the lernest of funds he des eloped to a high degree the art of slating on thun financial ice But consummate ndroitness in keeping a half dozen balls in the air at once may be entirely pardonable and cren praiscworthy when dealing with personal funds but open to cisy criticism when handling official funds The charge of personal vcnality was as a matter of fact several times brought against Deucy during hus Albany years It is significant of the utter lack of foundation behind these charges that not cien a passing reference to this sort of attach on Dewcy appears anywhere in the official min utes of the Rcgents And always when such charges were brought or cien insinuatcd Dewey promptly demanded investigation and always they were completely disproved Here for example is a part of the report of one point subcommittee of the State Senate and Assembly made in 1895 It was charged by the said newspaper The State that Secretary Dency had committed offenses derogatory to his office in specified particulars Witnesses were sum moned beforc the committee to testify It will clearly appear that not a single charge involving the in tegrity and official conduct of the accused was sustained In weighing all the testimony token and that could be obtained from witnesses produced no other result could be reached by the committee than that the charges 95 ·were not only not sustained, but that by the means and spirit in which they were brought and persistently prosecuted, they were vexatious, frivolous and detrimental to public interests So far as personal venality was concerned, the facts were quite the contrary In 1899 an official of the Library Bureau wrote to an official in Albany a letter regarding supplies, one sentence of which is significant "You hnow Mr Dewey leans backward a bit in his desire to be perfectly straight as to letting Library Bureau, directly or indirectly, get any business of the State Library, Albany Equally scrupulous was Dewey's hatred of nepotism In a letter written by James Russell Parsons, Jr, in 1894, to the Albany Evening Journal, in answer to a critical comment in that says paper, he Mr Gallup received an appointment in the regents' office before marriage to Mr Dewey's niece, during Mr Dewey's absence in Europe and contrary to his expressed wishes This connection by marriage has retarded his advancement If the regents and other friends had not recognized Mr Gallup's exceptional administrative abilities he would either have resigned long ago for a wider field, or still be working for a ridiculously small salary in comparison with his deserts Nevertheless, as all experienced politicians know, but as Dewey himself did not seem to realize, charges of this sort-no matter how "dirty" their origin, how completely unfounded, or how thoroughly disproved–zf they are repeated often enough and uttered emphatically enough 96 ·come finally to leave a certain amount of ineradıcable impress It sometimes secmed honeser as though Dewcy went out of his way to develop new frictions where none had before existed (Buying bicycles wholesale for his office staff raised one controversy A tempest in a tcapot over his insistence for a while on spelling his name Dui was another typical example) It was these utterly trivial things that lept him a storm center and they really did handicap hım Much of the uscful and efficient cdu cational work that he did for the State came to nothing and much that he might have accomplished remained undone all to a large degree because of these defects of personal temperament Tlus was the more unfortunate because he did so much that was excellent progressive and constructive Just before he started at Albany Henry Barnard then United States Commissioner of Education had written him Jour intense carncstness and power of work and of getting willing work out of others will be an inspiration Even if nothing new should be at once attempted your way of doing things will be a You cant help introducing a progressive element In other words he began under the best of auspices His first great constructive work was that of putting through the legislature in 1889 an act recodifying and consolidating so much of the educational laws of the State as related to the powers and duties of the Board of Regents This was followed up in 1892 by a new com new cra 97 ·prehensive University Law, a law that was referred to, at a later convocation of the Regents, as a model of condensed, accurate expression, of wise, slatesmanlıhe, educational legislation, so comprehensive in its sweep and far-reaching in its provisions that any commonwealth might be proud to possess such a compendium of school law It is an interesting comment on the fairness of this bill and the thoroughness with which it was prepared that it did not receive a single amendment and passed unanimously in the senate, and with scarcely a dissenting vote in the assembly All through his eleven Albany years, Dewey carried through a vast amount of other more or less routine work of this sort, work that does not lend itself to dramatization, but, as a whole, constituting an imposing record of solid accomplishment Repoits, bulletins, and circulars, etc, rolled out in a flood He revitalized all the Regents' old departments and divisions, and established numerous new ones This work may be called "houtine,” but we must remember that much of it became routine only after Dewey had inaugurated it For he was continually striking out into some new field of educational endeavor The aggressive fertility of his nestless mind was astonishing, but no less astonishing was the unremitting energy by means of which he diove through the detail that made his di eams become actualities In these eleven years it is no exaggeration to say that he completely transformed the work of the Office of the Board of Regents In this cumulative mass of educational accomplishment 98 ·he did the work of 1 dozen men and did most of it well Take the annual cducational Convocations of the Regents as an example Dawcy did not actually originate them but they had so long been a dead letter that to all intents and purposes he did That he was successful in his revavalication of them is cuidcnt Chancellor Upson in 1894 said We wc all very much indebted to you for the success of thc Convocation Without your tact and industry and energy and enthusiasm it would be a fail ure It is good and noble work that you are doing in this and all the rest of it Hamilton Wright Mabic at the time a trustcc of Barnard College commented The Convocation was a tremendous success thanks to the electrical battery wluch you somewhere conccal about your person I do not think I ever saw so many first class men together in an educational assemblage and ciery thing was so harmonious and genial you are to be con gratulated and you have a capital instrument for thor oughly practical educational work in the Convocation saw its possibilities for the first time Obviously the Regents Convocations were the 1876 meeting of librarians all over again in a different field His successor as secretary of the Board of Regents James Russell Parsons in lus preface to a printed com pilation of the Regents minutes for the decade 1889 99 remarked that the period of Dewcy s secretaryship was the period in which the University came to be recognized as one of the most effective educational organizations in 99 ·the United States ” In their own ſormal resolutions, when they accepted his resignation as their secretary, the Regents themselves said The board recognize in Mr Dewey an organizer of genius, an executive of great skill, an educational leader of marhed originality and energy, and an officer whose administration has coincided with the largely augmented usefulness and honor of the University we record with gratitude his meal for the welfare of the service of the state, his devotion to the interests and good fame of the board and his constant sympathy with the cause and institutions of higher education in the commonwealth and in the nation, and that we rejoice to believe that his rare gifts and abilities will still be at the service of the University in a field congenial to his wishes and commensurate with his extraordinary qualities the board accepts his iesignation with renewed expression of its regret, and of its high regard and esteem for its secretary and its friend These are obviously not forced or perfunctory phrases There is here no damning with ſaint praise, but rather a sincere tribute to great service iendered In accepting his resignation as its secretary, it is perhaps neither unfair nor an overstatement to assert that the Board threw Dewey to the wolves as a sort of "appeasement” gesture The educational "unification" pot was at the moment boiling furiously again, and the life of the Regents themselves was again at stake At the very meeting (December 22, 1899) at which Dewey resigned 100 ·as secretary the Regents voted upon thrce alternative and contradictory resolutions defining their official altı tude toward unification and so relating to their own future (That their votes upon all three resolutions were widely split shows clcarly their own lack of unanimity of opinion) Furthermore if we are to accept the official record Dewey humself took the initiativc in the appease ment gesture HC is quoted thus I agree with Superintendent Skinner that vastly morc harm is being done to cducation by the heated discus sions misunderstandings and misrepresentations now so rife than by all the friction between the two departments No personal sacrifice would be too great to secure har mony and peace among the cducational workers of the state and I am more than willing to withdraw my own personality from the discussion His later statement to the Regents actually offering his resignation is as interesting for its form as it is sig nificant for its subject matter A compirison of its plirise ology with that which he had used cleven years before in his statement to them in 1889 shows how much of the vocabulary and technique of educational and political method he had acquired during his secrctaryship of the Board As to the agitation about unification I opposed promptly and strongly the inclusion of the University law in the revised education law when it was proposed in 1896 because the University was doing admirable work under its own law It was the proposal to transfer the 593 IOI ·high schools from the regents to the elementary school department which brought about the present differences It has been persistently suggested in various quarters that I had fomented this discussion about unification to the end that my jurisdiction as secretary should cover the elementary schools of the state In fact I have never seen one minute in which I wished such power I have profound iespect and admnation for the common school work without the slightest desire to cngage in it Twenty-seven years ago I chose as my carcer that part of education which centers in the public library Dewey's resignation was accepted The wolves were appeased, and the Regents saved Unification agitation, for a second time, died down In accordance with his own suggestion, Dewey, although he had resigned as the Board's Secretary, continued on as State Librarian and Director of the Library School But, five years later, in 1904, the legislature at last passed an educational "Unification Act," bringing all the educational activities of the State under one administrative head, and Draper was recalled from the University of Illinois to be that head For Dewey this was the beginning of the end The two men were incompatible Both probably realized that one department wasn't big enough to hold two such personalities That Draper, when he returned to Albany with full power, deliberately set about to oust Dewey is probably not the fact, but that he was entirely fair to him may equally IO2 ·be doubted He probably preferred not to have him around he had the unquestionable right to select his own subordinates and when aggressive action developed from a new angle to force Dewey s retirement from all State office he did not oppose it This new attack to which Dewey proved vulnerable had as is often the case with political attacks nothing whatever to do with either his personal probity or his professional services to the State It hinged upon the Lake Placid Club (of which more in the next chapter) which Dewey had started a few years before and which was at the time growing rapidly At first it took the form of the accusation that the work of the Club was diverting him from his service to the State Library but this particular charge was pretty completely quashed by a considerable body of testimony including the following indignant letter dated February 9 1905 from Herbert Putnam Librarian of Congress The petition now before your Board of Regents asking the removal from office of your State Librarian rests upon incidents with which in themselves we other li brarians have no concern and as to which we are not entitled to speak but one charge 15 from time to time reiterated that he spends a considerable part of each year away from his office Now to those of us who know Mr Dewey professionally such a charge is as ridiculous as its motive appears to be contemptible Mr Dewey eats drinks sleeps and talls library and library work throughout the twenty four hours the week the month and the year His phys 103 ·ical whereabouts at any one time is immaterial He is the clearest example in our profession of a man who can not shake off his business There is no man living today to whom more than to him is due the prodigious activity of the past quarter of a century in the promotion of libraries, and in the diffusion of interest in them There is no one who has done more to stir with enthusiasm for practical library service competent people who are needed in it His name is more widely known abroad than that of any other living American librarian, for his contributions to library technique and to the general acceptance of public libraries as a motive force in popular education Putnam's courageous defense was unavailing, for this claim that Dewey was giving an undue proportion of his personal time to the work of the Club was really only a smoke screen The 1eal issue at stake was something very different The Club had, from its beginning, excluded Jews from its membership Dewey might-and did --point out that, as a private club, it had a perfect legal right to do this, he might claim that the Club's rules were made by its Council, of which Council he was personally not even a member, he might assert that, although he held a controlling interest in the Lake Placid Company, this corporation's relations with the Lake Placid Club were contractual only Nevertheless it was no more possible for him to disassociate himself from all responsibility for this Jewish exclusion rule than it was for Stalın to disclaim all responsibility for the acts of the Comintern A Jewish group, headed by several 104 ·important figures petitioned the Regents for Deweys resignation The bitter racial flavor which this petition added to the previous attacks proved potent Since Deweys orig inal appointment the personnel of the Regents them selves had greatly changed Heretofore they had always supported him in all their minutes there had previ ously occurred only a single instance of official criticism of any of his acts (In this one case the matter of the New York Preparatory School that criticism had been minor-solely that he had written for them a minute which seriously erred on the score of good taste fair ness and propriety And even in this case Dewey had promptly countered by showing that the minute in ques tion had been submitted to the Regents for approval and had been discussed and amended by them!) This new accusation against Dewey together with the political weight behind it was something the Regents felt they could not ignore Dewey was heard-at length-in his own defense But one reads between the lines of testimony his realization that he was on the way out Beside the Jewish question other personal attacks were being made at this particular time attacks even harder for him to combat Although he did not lack friends they were becoming a little weary of coming to his defense so endless a process had it become He had antagonized too many people The peti tion to the Board served to bring all the smoldering op position to him to a focus The Board of Regents after 105 ·prolonged discussion" on February 15, 1905 unanimously "censures the publication by an officer of the Education Department of the anti-Semitic expressions complained of communicates the formal and severe rebuhe of the Board and admonishes the Director that the further control of a private business which continues to be conducted on such lines is incompatible with the legitimate requirements of his position" This action of the Regents, nominally at least, left actual decision as to his future to Dewey The choice offered was a hard one to leave the library work to which he had devoted the best part of his life, or to give up the Club which he had come to love It took him six months to make the decision On September 21, 1905 he resigned as State Librarian and Director of the Library School ·XI THE DIVERSIONS- THE CLUB As A DEWEY diversion the Lake Placid Club comes in a little different category from either his secretaryship of the Board of Regents or his two reforms for one thing it was a much greater diversion for another it was a diversion in both meanings of the word Lake Placid was actually discovered by Miss Lydia B Godfrey Mrs Dewey s sister and her successor as librarian at Wellesley) She built a cabın on the hill Overlooking Mirror Lake near the spot that she was to occupy in summer thereafter for nearly forty years and invited the Deweys to visit her there They found Lake Placids climate and scenery so delightful and the im munity it offered from the hay fever from which they both suffered so complete that a year later they became her near neighbors Dewey had had in mind for several years the idea of starting a cooperative vacation club resort Next to Miss Godfrey's cabin on the edge of Mir ror Lahe was a little run down north woods hotel This ramshackle building he bought it became the nucleus of the Lake Placid Club The preliminary announcements of the proposed club were sent out by Dewey in 1893 Among those whom he 107 ·fust circularized weic scicial men who becamnc lifclong members. William B Howland of thc Outlook magazine, thc Rev Lyman Abboil and Hamilton Wright Mabic In his circular hic told them hc fclt that the Lake Placid country offered the sctling for an icical summer resoul, and he added "Wc arc intenscly interested in getting for neighbors pcoplc whom of all otheis 10 would prcfcr So thc Club was starıcd, running its first year in conien Lional club fashion, cooperaticly owned and cooperainely administered This first year was a troublous one is always, Dercy had very dcfinite and posibile idcas as to its future and management, not all the other members agreed with him Thcrc were also financial difficuluics res of the first members had any idea of making any substantial investment in a club The inevitable happened Dency's energy carried the day, and the disscntcrs dropped out He was ready to raise moncy, and did, and he who pays thc piper always calls the tunc Soniconc has to call it Committees and boards may be able to carry on enterprises already established, but no cmbryonic business enterprisc grows to success from nothing unless somc ono man is enthusiastic enough, and ablc cnough, to carry the burden and responsibility of its direction So far as the Club was concerned Dewey was both cnthusiastic and able Very soon, therefore, although the outward forms of club-hood were preserved, the Club ceased to be an ordinary one in the accepted sense and instead became a very special sort of proprietary enterprise, of which 108 ·Dewey was so far as actual practice was concerned the absolute dictator of all his rationalizations the Club was in many respects thc ne plus ultra Hc rcfcrred to it not as a summer resort club but as a unii crsity in thc woods To him it was not a business but a great semiphılın thropic institution Hc assured himself as he assured others that its growth had not been fortuitous and gradual but that it had been planned in folo by its founder on that happy day wlien first his cycs rested on the Adirondacks Mount Marcy Consistently hc stated that it was not a one man enterprise but an cnurcly coopcratrc vcnture ouned controlled and managed by a self selected group of congenial spirits Furthermore for every one of these happy conclusions he carefully provided duly atable proof by specific chapter and crsc Ignoring all these icnuous rationalizations extremely solid and vitally important facts still remain First thc Club from its scry beginning did lave an institutional character all its own 1 social atmosphere and a type of patronage utterly different from those of any other summer resort a character that did milc it unique second this character and atmosphere were almost wholly the result of the Deucy impress The Clubs acceptance of simplicity in dress and in its archi tecture and furnishings its lavislı provision for whole some sports and amusements thic sustained enthusiasm that perpetuated for years such distinctic Club customs tno 109 ·as Float Night, the Indian Council Fire, the Yule Log Festival, etc , its stubborn endeavor to eliminate drinking, its careful choice of its employees and the type of them, its very largely successful attempt to abolish tipping, the constant endeavor to look after the welfare of the children of Club guests, the continual emphasis on health and safety, behind the scenes, as well as in sight, the consistent endeavor to give the Club the best in music-all these characteristics (and many others) were primarily the result of Dewey's own personality and insistence They made the Club “the Club," and they helped to make it the altogether delightful vacation resort that it was The great growth of the Club began in 1905, when Dewey for the first time made it his main interest and all-year-round place of residence Those who were with him then realized that at last the burden of work he had carried uncomplainingly for so many years was beginning to tell on him His hay fever was becoming an ever more aggressive affliction He had come to love the Adırondack country Thanks largely to the devoted and tactful work of Asa O Gallup, then and for many years thereafter its manager, the Club was at the time growing rapidly When he left Albany, Lake Placid must have beckoned to Dewey like some green field where he could kick up his heels in relief But "MD,” whether at Columbia or Boston, at Albany or Lake Placid, was not of the relaxing type Once he was installed at Lake Placid the year round, IIO ·his latent energies went into high gear again The result was the phenomenal development of what in the course of the next two decades became not merely a great vaca tion resort but an internationally known institution One says institution deliberately for when the stage the press and the public at large come to use the phrase Lake Placid in an acquired or secondary sense just as they have come to give secondary meanings to such other geographic names as Hollywood Palm Beach and Monte Carlo one can justly say that a real institution has been created In thirty years the Club increased its assets its membership its annual income and its amaz ing offering of entertainment perhaps tenfold For exactly how much of this growth Dewey himself was personally responsible it is hard to say Certainly his was the vision that saw farther and faster than any of his Club associates his was the financial adroitness that kept the huge complex alive making it function in all its complexity and yet proliferate continually at the same time like some sort of business amoeba It is true that as with the Library School he gathered about him a long line of able associates In the early-and criticaldays there was Gallup a host in himself Miss Grace Godfrey who carried the Club technically speaking through its adolescent growing pains Mrs Dewey the only one ever able to curb his exuberant desire to ex pand Gallups successor Harry W Hicks and of course many others But the driving energy that insisted on forging ahead was always MD s-and his alone III ·Always his associates cried that he was going too far too fast, always-so long as he lived-he was able to prove them wrong Nothing was more characteristically “Dewey-esque" than the Club's opening in winter. It had started as a summer resort, and opened its full facılıties all winter for the first time in 1906-7 Those who were there then well remember the dire prophecies of financial disaster which Dewey, in a minority of one, ignored, insisting that the Club could, should and would become a great winter as well as a great summer resort Twenty years later, when the Club had become the "St Moritz of America,” was housing the international Winter Olympics, and had a larger "house count" in winter than, in 1906-7, it had had in summer, he could well afford an “I told you so On the other hand, it was also amusing, this same twenty years later, to remember the thousand reasons that Dewey had had, in 1906-7, to prove beyond the shadow of question that the only possible desirable winter vacation for anyone had to be taken amid the ice and snows of Placid, and that Florida in winter was altogether the most debilitating, enervating and unhealthful section of the world imaginable For, two decades later, the Club had set up a winter branch of its own in Florida, and, with Dewey himself a winter resident there, an amazing change in Florida's climate had occurred It had become as perfect-ıf different-as that of Lake Placid itself! II2 ·At the time of Dewey s death the Club had become not only the largest residential club in the world but probably also the largest vacation resort of any sort. It housed its guests in a half dozen or more independently functioning clubhouses and scores of separate cottages Most of these were in the main Club plexus on the north side of Mirror Lake (like the village of Lake Placid the Club is not located on Lake Placid itself but on the smaller neighboring lake) but one the famous Adirondach Lodge lay at the foot of Mt Marcy twelve miles south one on Cascade Lake was still farther away and one was at another Lake Placid in central Florida (For a time the Club had operated still an other clubhouse on Long Island Sound in Connecticut but this had been discontinued) But the Lake Placid Club was and is much more than an all year round club hotel It is a self-contained com munity requiring for its operation scores of subsidiary buildings There is a correlative system of clubhouses and cottages to house its hundreds of employces of all classes There are a dozen club farms raising all sorts of food for sale as well as for Club consumption dairy farms poultry farms vegetable farms etc. The Club has its own laundries cold storage plants warehouses sawmills and lumberyards its own carpenter painting plumbing and sport-equipment shops It has of course a whole system of riding stables and garages of retail shops stores and booths and of tearooms and lunch counters quite aside from the various regular clubhouse 113 ·dining rooms It has its own chapel, motion-picture theater, and orchestras, its own post, telegraph, express, and railroad-ticket offices It owns many thousands of acres of land, and maintains five golf courses and hundreds of miles of private roads, bridle paths and trails Its total assets run up into the millions Such a complex organism as this could not have grown up in a night As a matter of fact it was the development of many years, but all of it is the tangible projection of the vision and enthusiasm of the man who created it We have called the Club an institution It is It is easy to belittle it, to call it "just another summer resort,” to refer to it as though it were the mess of pottage for which Dewey gave up the best years of his life, years during which he might have done much more for librarianship But it is altogether possible that this sort of criticism is just neither to the Club nor to him The Club was, and is, much more than just another summer resort Many thousands of people came to love it It had a very definite and real influence on resort life and its development all over the United States It had its little Dewey grotesqueries, but these were part of its individuality In 1922 the Deweys had had chartered by the Regents of the State of New York the Lake Placid Club Education Foundation To it they turned over their entire common stock (controlling interest) in the Lake Placid Company, the holding corporation for the Lake Placid Club This foundation was to be wholly a philanthropic 114 ·institution using the income received on its holdings of Club securities to further the welfare of librarians and other educational folk (who had always been ex tended special courtesies at the Club) and those seed sowing activities-spelling reform metric reform and the lihe-so dear to Deneys heart Unfortunately the depression caught the Club in a greatly over extended position—its habitual position With Dewey at the finan cial helm it had weathered dozens of storms had he been still alive his daring and adroitness might have pulled it through even the trials of 1929 39 The Club passed into a sort of not unfriendly recen ership and was even tually reorganized a process not completed until 1943 The reorganization was carefully done It left the Club physically at least substantially intact 115 ·XII THE DIVERSIONS THE REFORMS 1 DcwCY'S INTEREST in spelling reform went bach at least to his Alfred days It incubated and grew at Amherst, as his diary evidences By 1875 the American Philological Association had become sufficiently interested in the matter to appoint a representative committee (such men as March of Lafayette, Whitney of Yale and Child of Harvard) to consider and report on the possibility of reforming our chaotic spelling This committee made a number of "reports," which, in general, received the endorsement of the Association Meanwhile, in August, 1876, an International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography was held at Philadelphia "to settle upon some satisfactory plan of labor for the prosecution of the work so happily begun by the American Philological Association and various other educational associations in this country and England” To this centennial conference came the same fiery young enthusiast from New England who, the same year, journeyed thither to help launch an American library association From it emerged the Spelling Reform Association, of which, although he was not even a philologist, Dewey was destined, for 116 ·nearly sixty years to bc thc secretary and dynamo The National Education Association formally cndorscd the new movement in 1898 by adopting what was then its shibboleth the so-called 'Tu clic Words and gain in 1916 when it approied the substitution of for cd in past participles so pronounced In 1906 when An drew Carnegic offered the moicmcnt hus financial back ing and the Simplified Spelling Board was organized the success of the morcment seemed almost in the offing Why then did it collapse? Why is spelling reform temporarily more nearly a dead issue than any in the whole category of Dency reforms? The cicntual his. torian of the movement will probably record that it was killed not by its enemies but by its frıends and killed by them because they relied too much on argu ment and failed to pay adequate heed or indeed any heed whatever to human psychology Argument? No one was cvcr yet able to advance csen onc sound argu ment against the simplification of our English spelling it is absurd time wasting brain adding anachronistic inconsistent derivaticly mislcading confusing-cvery other one of the hard names that Dewey and luis con frères called it But any attempt to alter spelling runs up against one of the strangest and strongest of all human emotionsprejudice The job of spelling simplification is primarily one not for the philologist but for the psychologist that 15--to put it very bluntly-for very high-grade advertis ing experts Stubborn insistence on change however 9 117 ·well mcant and well argucd, is always in danger of being met-as it was met in the case of simplificd spell. ing-by cvcn morc stubborn resistance to change Wicn it comes to udiculc, thc spelling rcformer uses a dan. gerous weapon, for ridiculc was (lactly what the more citieme of the advocates for simplificd spelling, includ. ing Dcwcy himself, Ict themselves in for Canny Andics Carnegie sau: the simplified spelling problem far more clearly than did the plulological experts who were in charge of its solution for fun in April, 1903, hc wrote I attach morc importance to genuing right on the ten most awkward words than I do to any gencial ou wide scheme that can be suggested I want some practical result for my moncy, to begin with I should consider the success in the gencial adoption of the change in thosc ton words worth Ten Thousand Dollars a year for ten ycars, and would not consider morc talk worth One Dollar And a year latcı hic wioLC "I have made up my mind that iefoi m in spelling can come only by degrees All his liſe, with Carnegie money or without it, Melvil Dewey cai ried on the campaign for simplificd spelling, carried it on in the face of uidicule, undei criticism, amıd rebuff of every soil, and at heavy personal cost of time and money His insistence on it icnded to alien. ate some of his best friends, it definitely hurt the Club, yet he never wavered oi ictreated or compromised by so much as a single inch Admirable? Yes A splendid 118 ·in fact measure of the amazing moral courage and intellectual integrity of the man 'ct if one is to be strictly and wholly honest in ones judgments one will probably have to admit that Deneys uncompromising indecd almost fanatical devotion to the cause of simplificd spelling probably hurt that cause more than it helped Simplified spelling in English will come in time-just as it has already come in Portuguesc in Danish and in scicral other languages that needed it far less it will come because the arguments fijoring it arc irrefutable Cserything that Dcxcy claimed for it is true It will save months of cicry childs school life Just as Carnegie believed our present terrible spelling as one of the chief barriers to the wider use of English as the international language ind so in turn a barrier to world peace If only Dency could have been a little more patient a little more willing to make hastc slowly Dewcys interest in metric reform followed very closely the spelling reform pattern In 1991 he gave this characteristic story of lus coniersion to the cause (all his own spellings being in this case reuned) In shool in Adams Center I rebeld ngenst compound numbers I told the teacher that jeometrı tantus ? strait lyn was thic sliortest distance bent een 2 points & that it was absurd to hay long inczur sumeyors mezui & cloth mezur also absurd to hai quarts & bushels of diferent syzes & to hav avoirdupois troy & apothccani weits with a pound of feathers hevier than a pound of gold I spred out on my attık room table sheets of foolscap & desyded that the world needed just i mezur 119 ·for length, 1 for capasiti & 1 for weit, & that they should all be in simpl decimals lyh our muni I was puzzling over the names to giv the new mezures when I red that Senator John A Kasson of Iowa had past in Congress a bil legalizing the metrik sistem I looht it up at once, found that it met my plan idealı, & the next week went to our vilaj lyceum & gave a talk on the great merit of international weits & mezures From that day I became a metrih apostl At Alfred and Amherst metric reform lay dormant for a while in Dewey's mind, but soon after reaching Boston he chartered the American Metric Bureau, and started, almost single-handed, to propagandize for the new faith As usual, he let others take the glory while he took the work. He had himself elected secretary, and carried all the expense Metric reform developed no Andrew Carnegie for itself, perhaps fortunately, for, if progress was perforce slower, it was sounder Although Dewey never lost interest in it, other and more pressing duties in time forced it out of the immediate orbit of his activity There is, of course, almost as little sound argument against metric reform as against spelling reform It is, again, basically, almost wholly a question of prejudice If one analyzes this popular anti-metric prejudice a bit, it will be found that it is really not against a decimal system of weights and measures as such, but almost wholly against the imported nomenclature in which the international system arrays itself The simplicity of decimal calculation of itself readily wins popular ac- I20 ·it 15 ceptance (as witness our American currency) rather the foreign names given the metric units that rouse American antagonism Perhaps some day our metric reform advocates will rcalize this and will see that after all names are relatncly unimportant If for instance our yard were officially made a meter long and our mile were made 1000 of these yards long instead of 1760 if our gallon were officially made the exact equivalent of a liter if we made our inch a decimeter long and so had 100 inches in our yard instead of 36 if in other words most of our names were retained but were applied to their nearest mctric equivalents it is altogether licly that the metric system could be put over in this country in very short order and put over just as painlessly and unconsciously as was the anomaly known as daylight saving Names are not important the important thing is to decimalize our present chaotic system of weights and measures and at the same time to bring it into conformity with the international system Americans are used to pounds and they would get used to a pound weighing a hilo gram much sooner than they would get used to a kilogram Of course this is prejudice Of course it is silly But it is also a fact to be reckoned with As to how much the library profession lost because of Dewey s premature retirement from it-for he virtually did retire from it when he left Albany in 1906-no one can say It is not impossible that his library lifework was then done He had made his great contributions I21 ·perhaps they were all he had to give Of course he could have lingered on as an elder statesman, preaching the fervent gospel of library service to a new generation On the other hand, perhaps, with the passing of years and changing conditions, that gospel would have lost something of its initial effectiveness Library science in 1906 was no longer the simple thing it had been back in 1876 in the days of the pioneers, it was, on the contrary, very rapidly becoming an extremely complex corpus of experience Even in his later years at Albany, "MD” had, to some extent, lost touch with its newer minutiae Although no one could rcasonably assert that he had a one-track mind, it is true that all his library tracks pointed unswervingly in the same general direction And yet-one remembers the wealth of his knowledge of library practice and the strength of his insistence upon taking the intensely practical approach to cvery libiary problem One remembers-most important of all-his kindly personal interest in young librarians, the vibrant magnetism of his personality, his unflinching professional courage, and the unswerving faith with which he believed in the mission and future of libraries One remembers these and wishes that there might have been no "diversions." 122 ·XIII THE PERSONALITY OF THE MAN IN THE PRECEDING pages there has been built up what may seem in many respects to be an extremely puzzling picture Its apparent inconsistencies an inevitable part of it for Melvil Dewey was a complex of contra dictions This was true both in trivial things and in great ones At the Club-for an instance of the former--he was keenly interested in providing opportunities for com petitive outdoor sports for others and did so lavishly but he never took part in them himself He could not play any musical instrument nor sing yet he had a genuine love for good music. All his life his first interest was in books he lived ate drank and slept books But that interest extended only to their contents for the shell that held those contents for beautiful printing and fine binding he had not the remotest concern Although he was a professed miser of time he wasted it prodigiously-his own and that of his friends--in his efforts to save it A lifelong preacher of careful conser vation and of the closest sort of thrift he was in some of his financial matters an outstanding exemplar of the most prodigal recklessness Thoughtful for others to 123 ·an unusual degree, he was, in other of his dealings, utterly cold and tactless Finally, although inherently kindly in disposition, continually doing all sorts of nice things for all sorts of people, although all his lifc he was actuated by what he honestly thought to be the highest of motives, he nevertheless could at times do things that even his best friends found it difficult either to cyplain or condone These inherent character contradictions were all part of Dewey What of him physically? He was tall and powerfully built He was obliged to wear glasses constantly There glinted behind them two piercing dark eyes, generally characteristically puckered in either a smile or absorption of thought His outstanding physical attribute was his obvious nervous energy To this every reminiscence of him refers On a few occasions (listening to music was one) it was possible for him to heep still, but, when he did move, he could not move slowly A fellow student of his Amherst days says “I remember him as a tall active man of rather higli nervous temperament” Twenty years later, Georgia Benedict, then a schoolgirl at Albany, gives the following impression of him She had wanted to take a book from the State Library, and, she writes My request was referred to the Director, and I was ushered into an office where a black-haired, blackbearded, black-eyed gentleman in a pepper-and-salt suit was working away with a hind of furious quiet at a big desk I was struck by the speed and accuracy of his 124 ·morcments It was like watching 1 finc machine an clcctric machunc-the air llout lum was vibrant with cnergy His decisiveness thic sparkling dirkness of his f1cc (dominued by huis vu cyes) his intense energy impressed inc dccply Indeed I was 1 little ancd and am still in rccollection I had come into contact with an immense force too briefly to fccl that forcc as per sonal and Lindly only as strong These were a little giris impressions but she saw Iccnly and described truly It would be difficult to write in so fcw words a more accuraic description of the impression Ini Dency s personality mide upon those whom hic mct You miglit like the min or you might not gencrally you did But wlicther you liked lum or not your fccling about hum icnded to loc intcnsc and you reconed the dcfinito impression that you had mot an unusual per sonal force Although Dency was plıysically well built hic was all hus life vulnerabic to the lacks of all sorts of minor ailments-coughs colds digestisc upscis-and particu larly in its scason to lay fcicr As a boy lic sccms to haic bccn rugged enough but by the timc lic lind rcachcd college lic had begun to abusc thc machinc to abuse it not by dissipation but by oscrwork In 1868 hc records in his dirry Dr Policr cramıncd me thor oughly and told Charlic privately I would not live tho jcars Sıx ycars later in a lcuter to his brother he says I feel the lack of tone and fire I would wear 1 ragged coat and live in a garret if I could have my old 125 ·strength and health” In 1875 he had a serious attack of typhoid fever which he himself says "barely left me alive" His Amherst horseback riding perhaps really did save his life He continued it for years, Mrs Dewey, who was a good horsewoman, often accompanied him By the time he left Albany he had at least found out what was the matter with him "I seem," he writes, "to be getting the better of my bad stomach, which I think was simply due to nervous exhaustion and overwork" (which was undoubtedly the fact) Constant fightingand it is no exaggeration to say that Dewey was always fighting someone-will eventually wear out even the hardiest of digestive apparatuses and the strongest of nerves A good deal of his apparent lach of tact was undoubtedly the result of sheer nervous exhaustion Only a harried man would so far forget himself as to write to one of his own Regents "TVhen you come in my office we waste two hours in tall over matters that could be disposed of in two minutes if you would only form the habit of writing down what you want me to consider and sending it to me by mail.” Fortunately, this particular Regent was too well poised himself to take offense His reply in this case was that it was Dewey himself who did most of the talking-probably the fact! In any event, over the years, Dewey wore himself out, and it is altogether probable that only his withdrawal to the fine air and relative peace of Lake Plaad saved him from a complete breakdown 126 ·He boasted that he neser worried and perhaps he ncier did-consciously But responsibility of any sort lias a way of getting under our physical and mental skins surreptitiously He would havc said that what saved him was his not drinking or smoking in fact he ncier drank cien tc? or coffcc Relaticly spcaling he was a small caler and a long slecper and these habits also undoubtedly helped him carry his inordinuc load Mrs Dency did what she could to protect him and in time hc amc to listen to her a little That he lived to be cighty he oncd largely to her His cnthusiasm cropped up in cicrything he did He was content to do nothing by halıcs If something was good it was very cry good Bicycles came into voguc while he was at Albany Abruptly his many years of horseback riding werc renounced for the new mechani cal stccd After a ucck he writes I realized that a new world was opening to me and as the months pass the priceless value of the new cxercise lins steadily in arcased in my estimation It has done more for my health and pleasure than the best of the fifteen saddle horses I live owned and at onc is enticth the cost If bicycles were a good thing Dewey reasoned that etcryone should have one So he became forthsich an ardent propagandist for bicycle riding He urged all his stalt to ride he arranged to buy bicycles for them at wholesale installment płyment rates he built them a bicycle shelter in lus own Madison Avenue yard and special racks for bicycles at the State Library (He even 127 ·managed, as we have remarhed, to get into a fight with the State authorities over them!) If, by 1906, when he left Albany, the bicycle craze was long since gone and forgotten, it was only because he had acquired a new enthusiasm, the just-cominginto-use automobile On it he lavished all the cnthusiasm that he had given in turn to horses and to bicycles While he and Biscoe were in Europe together in 1891 it is recorded that they bought a tandem! (Even as late as 1906, however, he was keeping one pair of fine horses-of which he characteristically offered the free use to those of his library-school students able to drive them) As with bicycles, so with fountain pens Most of us are content to carry one But, if fountain pens are a good thing-and Dewey passionately believed that they were-why carry only one? He himself habitually carried a row of five, each one filled with a different colored ink, and he had on his desk a whole battery of others, of assorted shapes and sizes, each one adapted-or so he persuaded himself-to meet some special purpose To him half-way endorsements of anything, in fact all shades and shadows of approbation, were compromises, and he hated compromise In the earlier days of the Club-to take another minor example-electricity was expensive, and all its buildings were lighted by acetylene But this was not at all because it was the cheapest alternative available No, indeed It was because acetylene was the safest, the healthfulest, the 128 ·cleanest the most efficient light known to man-a con clusion arrived at we were told after exhaustive re search by our 7 greatest xperts So those who were at the Club in those early days struggled to prick out plugged up acetylene burners waited for lealing gas to blow them all up and swore at the 7 xperts! When a few years later the Club finally installed elec tricity acetylene was quickly quietly and completely forgotten Dewey s passion for saving time has already been referred to It was a passion that had for him far more than an economic basis wasted time was actually a moral issue Time wasn t merely money it was to him a por tion of an all too short life in which so much more for the betterment of mankind had to be accomplished than one could possibly achieve at best He developed in Mrs Dewey this same hounding idea and early in their married life they drafted a whole series of formal writ ten agreements with each other providing jointly and severally for the employment of their respective allot ments of time to the best advantage With Dewey this passionate urge to economize time cropped up in all sorts of unexpected places It was what lay at the bottom of his interest in spelling and metric reform It started him off on his lifelong interest in shorthand It made him devise for those who could not read his shorthand a long list of breves or artificially abbreviated forms for the commonest words (such as e for the and qu for quite ) Generally these 129 ·"bieves” were readable, even by thc uninitiated It made him, in citing figures, always use numerals in place of then spelled-out words It made him continuously preach classification, simplification, standar dization Why? Because these things all saved time Sometimes dus standardizations went too far foi him to keep up with them himself-much to the quict amusement of those who worked with him As a inattei of fact Dewey never was a very good cxemplar of his own precepts, and only too often his own desk was an inchoate mass of materials in process As Berne A Pyrke, then Commissioner of the State Department of Agriculture, once wiote "We are living in an age when there is a tendency for human beings, like commodities, to become standardized Dr Dewey offered stern i esistance to the standai dization process He had as strongly marked a personality as any person of my acquaintance" Dewey would have been able to be more efficient if he had not taken on so much more than any one man could possibly accomplish He delegated when he thought he could, but some things he was ieluctant to entrust to anyone else, as a result, his work was habitually in arrears The chief job of May Seymour, his private secretary for many years, was to break through the log jams of promises that were continually piling up to overwhelm him And Mary Emogene Hazeltine gives the following example of the difficulties under which all his co-workers labored in trying to meet the "dead line" dates that came up 130 1 ·When the ALA met in Lakewood on Chautauqua in 1898 I was the local chairman of the Committee on Arrangements I found it almost impossible to get any word from Mr Dewey secretary of the ALA at the time It came to the point where the local com mittee actually had to know certain things for the sake of local arrangements I sent him an important letter special delivery and followed it by a telegram asking immediate reply to special delivery letter just mailed After that he was very prompt with his answers Members of his staff recall one amusing incident When the Efficiency Society was formed Dewey was of course one of its most prominent and energetic mem bers One day during the first World War when Dewey was deep in special Society committee work for the pro motion of efficiency methods in government offices another very prominent member of his committee ar rived at the Club unexpectedly to confer with him Dewey cast one glance around his office and for once in his life realized that it presented a picture of com plete disorder He thereupon had every loose paper in the room hurriedly swept into a huge clothes hamper which was in turn hidden in a nearby closet When the distinguished visitor walked in a moment or so later the office presented a fine impression of clean cut efi ciency--but it took the Dewey secretarial staff a week to straighten out the contents of that hamper! His personal kindnesses have been referred to To young people especially to those who were trying to get into librarianship or to keep on with it they were 131 - ·region He never advertised what he did, and no one will ever know how many he helped, not only with friendly encouragement, but with actual cash Pressed for money though he generally was, he was never so pressed as not to have the money necessary to help out some youngster who really needed something When he was teaching at Bernhard's Bay hc bought, out of his own pochet, fifty new spelling books for his pupils At this time his salary was three dollars a day Pressed for time, too, though he always was, he was never so pressed that he could not give it freely when ambitious young foll wanted his help Under the law all Regents certificates were supposed to be "signed" by the secretary of the Board Each year there were tens of thousands of them, prior to Dewey they had all, as a matter of course, received a rubber-stamped signature But not from him “If a child has worhed for years for a scholastic honor," he argued, "the least I can do is to take a half minute to sign his cei tificate" And sign them personally he did–he, the great time-saverl-nearly 300,000 of them in his eleven years Edith Rowley, later for many years librarian of Allegheny College, but long, in summer, an executive employee at the Club, wiote One thing was so repeatedly verified as to be unchallenged He had an unvarying sympathy for the workers on the Club payroll and a desire to have them work under the best conditions possible In all the time I was in charge of a department containing hundreds of help- 132 ·ers over a long period of time I never knew of a valid claim or a reasonable request that would make for health comfort or happiness of the group to be refused He was always generous He was as generous with his home as with his time and his money Every Albiny student was a frequent and welcome visitor there Nor was this cordiality a pose he liked young people shared their interests and enthusi asms honestly enjoyed doing helpful things for them Even now scores of present day librarians remember Melvil Dewey not as the leader of their profession but with deep personal affection because of the aid he gave them when help meant much No whatever were Melvil Deneys personal faults love of money was not one from his Amherst days when he taught scores of his fellow students shorthand free of charge simply because he thought it would be useful to them through his later life when though he had become rich he continued to live as simply as ever down to the end when he finally turned his entire estate over to a philanthropic foundation he paid little attention to personal reward His career at Boston-doing work for nothing for three reform organizations and get ung heavily in debt for bare living expenses-was typical At Columbia and Albany alike he received no compen sation for his work as Director of the Library School It was to promote the reforms in which he so ardently believed that he could beg and often did that he could squirm and worm and contrive and often did that he 133 ·could shate on thin ice, financially, and do almost everything but steal His thriftiness was ingrained He came of a relatively poor famıly As a youth he practiced the severest economy-simply because he had to When he went to Amherst he resolved to earn all his college expenses, and he almost did He hept carcful accounts with himself all through his school and college years In them we find such items as “tape for clothes, 5 cents," "balance on hand, 10 cents," "loan from W S Biscoe, 70 cents," "carrying coal, 50 cents," "sale of broom, 13 cents He records "I walled over to Northampton from 8 to 10 in the morning, taking it casily and saving 75c-and getting some good cvercise" These almost penurious habits stuck with him all his life Fontaine For's "Old String Saver" had nothing on him He used to save every scrap of writing paper, even opening up used envelopes in order to utilize their insidesi Yet, as his enterprises enlarged, he would, without hesitation, plunge into commitments involving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the most tenuous of shoestrings! His indifference to personal acclaim has already been noted Those who denied its existence simply did not really know the man for the things he was fighting for he did seek publicity in every possible way, and in every possible direction, and he was always so aggressive about getting publicity for them that he could not help but get some for himself But this personal publicity was indirect and unintentional Equally unintentional 134 ·was the cicrcise of his own personal magncuisin Set this was so rcal a force that just as wherc McGregor sal was the head of the table so wherever Dency wys he bc aime almost automatically the center of discussion and thic focus of interest He had a rody uit 175 a good conucrsationalist and when occasion demanded a flucnt speaker The only occasions horcicr that sccincd to him to demand flucnt specch were those in which he was cndcrroring to get something conacic accomplished He had no usc for airy persiſage for graceful but mciningless tribuic for thic purcly conventional Occasional address In debito lic was a formidablc antagonist llc could marshal cnough convincing argument to wear down all ordınırs opposition But iſ hc found thic direct opposition in surmountable hus mind w75 so nlcrl that he could promptly twist his whole line of approrch so the los opponents might be dismayed to find themschics being attached as it scrc from thc rcar they would be sud denly disconccried to hear hin using their arguments to prove his case Of course thuis particular sort of argu mentativc ability sometimes whips back His political opponents at Albany 1ccused him of being is slippery as an ccl Dont get into an argument with lum said one of the hecnost of them you may curry an zy the iden that you have non it but when the smoke cloin away you ll find that though you won the arguniciit hic 1175 gotten what he was after This strength of his in argumentatic dcbite was 135 ·attested many times St Clair McKclwy, a member of the Board of Regents, conſesscl that Dewey was able to get thc unanimous approval of the Board 10 one course of action, and then, six months later, when he had changed his mind, was ablc to get them to rcicise themselves with the same unanimity Time and again, during 'thc days of the Club's cypansion, banking oi crcditor groups mcl with lum, dcicomincd, alıcı prior confcicncc and carcſul agreement among themselves, this limc to bell the cat (10, to hold lum down to a more conservative course of Club derclopment) Every time, when these confcicnces finally biolc up, Deucy had succeeded in convincing them all that the thing he wanted to do was cxactly the night, wise, conservative and desirable thing to do Many clements conuibuted to his argumentalive abilily, but the chief one was always lus cnthusiasm This was unqucnchablc and usually irresistible Nor was this enthusiasm a maticr of verbal trichcry or oratorical pyrotechnics It convinced because it was genuine Once Dewey had convinced lumself that something ought to be done, he fought to get it donc with cicry weapon in lus mental armory When a moral issuc-or what he thought was a moral issuc-was at stake, he became completely blinded to all distinctions of what was normally justifiable or unjustifiable Call this casuistry Call it what you like It wasn't mcicly that the end justified the mcans With him iationalization went much farther than that with him, whatever the means, it became the right and honest thing to do It was this extreme 136 ·intensity of conviction this utter inability to see any side of an argument cicept his own that made him such a dangerous opponent Walter Biscoe once said of him If Melvil Dewey did not agree with any one he did not hesitate to say so He was willing and anxious to learn from the opinions and discussions of others If however a principle was involved he would not yield a point In a letter to George William Curtis written March 29 1892 Dewey himself said The price of achieving great results is often that we make some enemies whose personal notions must be over ridden This is an ex tremely revealing statement of such stuff as Dewey im plies in this statement are martyrs made And prophets And fanatics And he had in his own make up a good deal of all three But after all it is the prophets and martvrs and fanatics who shake our sodden world and make it move 7 tiny bit farther along some upward path In Dewey the will to achieve was so strong that he often failed to weigh justly the forces in opposition Sometimes it seemed as though he deliberately refused to admit that any opposition existed! Perhaps this was courage of a very high order Perhaps it was another phase of his amazing ability to deceive himself Yet how ever hard he fought his animosity was never personal There was nothing venomous or spiteful about it All that he wanted was to secure his opponents acquies cence he had not the slightest interest in hurting or humiliating him of this amazing lack of personal bias 137 ·there is no better example than the letter which he wrote President Taylor of Vassar on February 13, 1904, regarding Dr Draper's personal qualifications Remember that he is writing of a man threatening to undo him and all his work, and writing at a time when his feud with him was at its height My confidence is largely dependent on Draper's personality You know I scrapped with him when he was here, was never considered his personal or official ally, but by many was supposed to be his educational rival I fcel therefore that I am in a position wherc no one will accuse my judgment of being warped in his favor I have canvassed the country icpeatedly and am forced every time to the conclusion that lus very unusual experience, his strength, his reputation, the confidence of legislature and people in his educational worh, which he has to an unusual degree, make him the very best man in the United States to come here at this time It is a crime to have this friction continue longer and a discredit to us all It was just because he was so paradoxical that Dewey's enemies could not understand him Because they could not appreciate the peculiar quality of his idealism, they called it a pose Because they were unable to understand such a letter as the Draper letter above, because they could not understand how he could apparently wish to be the personal friend of men on whose idcas he was waging unrelenting war, they accused him of insincerity Because his continued iteiation of a few gieat basic principles of librarianship came in time to sound somewhat bromidic, they overlooked the fact that he was the 138 ·one who had made them basic by means of the very itera tion of which they complained Dewey s eager spirit craved much but never serenity To create something worthwhile to achieve success in some venture for human betterment and having achieved it to begin a new venture-to him this was the breath of life In a letter from Florida dated December 10 1931 he quoted approvingly the conclusion of De Stael that it is the summit of human happiness to feel each night that one has made some progress toward a worthy ideal And he added Forty years ago [Mrs Dewey and I] counted fifteen local state or national organizations or movements of which the chief load was in all these the real work has been done by unusually loyal co-workers My share has been like a gadfly to prod others into action The world has always given me more than my share of the credit Did Dewey ever regret any of his fights? Did he ever wish he had made fewer enemies? Probably yes Yet so far as he was concerned his conscience was clear In what he thought at the time he dictated was his last message a message addressed to my associates in many good causes he said on me As I look back over the long years I can recall no one I ever intentionally wronged or of whom I should now ask forgiveness Doubtless I have made many mistakes but according to my light I have tried to do right and so if my race is run I can go down into the last river serene clear-eyed and unafraid 139 ·Those who know Dewey best believe he wrote that paragraph with the most absolute sincerity To believe that whatever one does is right, is, obviously, too convenient a philosophy of life to be casily credible But to believe is not at all the same thing as to pretend to believe Many a clever man has fooled the world, but very few men of real intelligence have ever been able completely to fool themselves Dewey undoubtedly had at times this particular ability At times it was a helpful shield, at times it led him astray In it lies, I think, the explanation of some things in his life that would otherwise be enigmas 140 ·XIV THE END ON AUGUST 3 1992 Annie Dewey died for forty four years she had given her husband unswer ingly loyal support in all his interests and undertakings A keenly intel lectual woman in her own right she nevertheless felt that his welfare and work were so much more important than hers that they should come first and gladly she so placed them Because she believed sincerely and intensely in him and in his ability her moral and mental support were something on which he came to lean perhaps more than he himself suspected Yet Mrs Deney was herself a pioneer in educational work and her interest in and sympathy with her hus band s many activities were therefore neither forced nor fortuitous Although she had come to Wellesley a young girl just out of college and of course entirely without either library training or experience she was conducting the library there with marked success when she left it to be married Many years later at Lake Placid she found a special niche of endeavor of her own in domestic a then just developing professional field for women She and Melvil had become acquainted with Mrs Ellen H Richards one of the first great leaders in science 141 ·the new field With her enthusiastic cooperation and advice, the first Lahe Placid Conference on Home Economics was held at the Club in 1899 These Lake Placid Conferences continued annually for ten ycars, helped financially and otherwise by Mrs Dewey Eventually they grew into the American Home Economics Association, now a large and influential national organization Of the original Conferences Mis Dewey was for many years president She had therefore every right to take pride in the flowering of her own grain of mustard seed The family life of the Deweys was uneventful As a famıly the Deweys had always been philoprogenetive, and Melvil is on record as having hoped for a large family of his own In this he was disappointed He had but one child, a son, Godfrey, born September 3, 1887 Godfrey inherited his father's interest in shorthand, and is now recognized as a world authority on its philological and scientific backgrounds Mrs Dewey's last years were shadowed by illness and by blindness, but she accepted both uncomplainingly, learning-when past seventy-to read and to typewrite by touch so that she might still carry on 1 The urge for service was as strong as ever “We shall have to celebrate our anniversary far apart this year," she wrote Dewey, shortly before she died I am feeling stronger If I could only do more real good work Love, and heaps of it" It is interesting to note that her sister, Lydia B Godfrey, a member of the second class of the Columbia Library School, and her successor as librarian at Wellesley, also met, at seventy, the same affliction, and met it with the same quiet Godfrey courage 142 ·Melvil was at Chautauqua at a committee meeting when she wrote him again on July 31st 1922 DEAREST The Gallia chorus was given last evening very accept ably doing Harry much credit Several spoke of it and said it was a pity Mr Dewey was not here for it Both the solos were well done There was a big crowd and Oh how we do need the Agoral People sat on the stairs and everywhere they could hang on by their eyelids To her typewritten letter she added this pathetic post script in the shorthand they both used It is lonesome without you come home She passed away in her sleep three days later with Mr Dewey still away Two years later he married again His second wife Mrs Emily Mckay Beal, had come to the Club some years before to assist in its administrative detail A widow a warm friend of the first Mrs Dewey a welcome member for years of The Cedars (the Lake Placid home of the Deweys) household a devoted believer in Melvil s lifework the closer tie of marriage was a natural development of their situation Meantime in the course of years several other women who in entirely different ways had meant much to him had died We have already referred to the fact that Melvil Dewey found women more satisfactory to work with than men All his life a group of them as secre taries as teachers in the Library School as co workers in On the other hand it is perhaps noteworthy that the Festschrift volume was masculine in its origin and predominantly masculine in authorship 143 ·many causcs, as friends, had been very close to him The list of them is too long to do morc here than cite a few names, collectively, however, they played a significant part in his personal development, and in making possible the realization of many of his dreams Florence Woodworth (unlike the rest, fortunately still with us), for thirty-thee years the Assistant to the Dicctor of the Library School, known and beloved by hundreds of students, May Seymoui, for many ycais Dency's private secretary, his loyal aide in all his varicd activities, Katharine L Sharp, long head of the University of Illinois Libiary School and latcı ſoi scvei al ycars a vice-president of the Lahe Placid Club, Dorkas Fellows, Miss Scymour's successor in Decimal Classification revision, the "TVellesley Half Dozen," alicady icfeucd to, Margaret Miller, foi many yeais a member of lus personal staff, Mary Eileen Ahern, for thity-six years editor of Public Libraries, Ada Alice Jones, long a membei of the Library School staff, Theresa Elmendorf, hcad of the Buffalo Public Library, and many others The power of his personality was so great that all who worked with him were devoted to him His work was their work True to the educational theory that he had outlined as a lad of seventeen, he, thiough them and many others, multiplied himself manifold In February, 1927, Dewey ieceived warning that the end of a long and hotly contested race was approaching The youngster, who in his teens had been thought doomed to an early death, was now seventy-six All his 144 ·life afflicted by minor ailments he had as yet known few serious ones But this year-he was at the Florida Lale Placid Club at the time-he had a shock not so serious a one as at first appeared but still a warning In the statement that he dictated at this time a state ment already quoted from he said I am profoundly grateful that I have had seventy five years with so much of the supreme joy of hard work so little pain and so many opportunities to help make a better world The rich legacy I leave you is the chance to carry to fruition these movements we have started Carry on-Don t give up the ship! The right thing always succeeds in the end I am grateful for the trust and affection which has made my work easier and my years happier I wish that my ashes may rest in the altar of the Club Chapel in the midst of what I have loved so well Let there be no monu ment except the Club itself He recovered from this attach however and carried on for four years more on December 10 1931 came his eightieth birthday Five years before in 19 6 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary meeting of the Ameri can Library Association at Philadelphia Dewey had been invited to be the guest of honor It had been his first AL A convention in many years Although he had said little there was no doubt that the gratitude and respect shown him there had warmed his heart greatly Some of his personal enemies had died Others had felt it was time to forget Now on the occasion of his eightieth birthday a good many more hatchets were buried and 145 ·a large part of the library profession joined in a spontaneous tribute to the man who was, in a very real sense, its creator He was decply moved by the dozens of congratulatory letters and telegrams that he icceived Two weeks later, on the day after Christmas, he died, of a cerebral hemorrhage His body was ciemated and his ashes deposited, as he had wished, in the crypt under the allar of the beautiful Lake Placid Club chapel, beside those of Annie Dewey and two little giandsons As the writer remarked in the Preface, he does not ſcel that it is within the province of such a slender volume as this to make any formal appraisal of the mcaning of Melvil Dewey's liſc, or of his place in the development of the library profession Dorothy Canfield Fisher once wrote to him “I would like to wiite something about you personally and your brain, and what it has done to our generation and will do to the next There are so few originating brains in any generation that they ought to be chronicled” Another has phrased the essential quality of Dewey's contribution to library development far better than the writer could "He forgot himself When he spoke, huis imperfections were lost in the glow of his enthusiasm When he organized, the fire of his faith burned away all obstacles He abandoned himself utterly to his tash, and the task molded him into greatness "3 Bruce Barton "What Makes Men Great" 1926 p 205 146 ·INDEX Abbe Adelaide E 79 Abbott Lyman Club pioneer 108 Abbreviations Deweys use of 1 9 30 library 62 3 Adams Center High School 12 Ahern Mary Eileen 144 Alfred University Deney at 9 American Home Economics As sociation 142 American Library Association 201 63 and the Library Journal 75 endorses Library School 42 3 fiftieth meeting of 149 founding of 67-70 Library Supplies Committee of 64 American Metric Bureau American Philological Associa tion and spelling reform 116 Amherst Decimal Classification at 28 30 Dewey as a student at 19 9 as librarian at 57 Anti Semitism Dewey accused of herst 14 Barton Bruce quoted 146 Bates Eva A 5 Bates Mrs Helen Pave lo Beal Mrs Emily Mchay 143 Benedict Georgia impression of Dewey : 45 Bernhards Bay School 89 Bicycles controversy over pur chase of 97 Deneys enthusiasm for 1 78 Billings John Shaw on Library School 43 school lecturer 48 Biscoe Walter Stanley at Am at Columbia 79 early work on the DC 137 Library School staff 53 school lecturer 48 Boot maker Dewey as a 4 Boston Dewey at 06 Bowker RR and NY Library Club 70 and the Library Journal 7 6 on the Library School 43 school lecturer 48 Breves 1930 Buchham Mrs Martha T 79 80 Butler Nicholas Murray on Li brary School 801 1120 1043 Associations library 6771 Ayers Alice 79 Baker GH school lecturer 48 Barnard Henry endorses Dewey 97 Barnard President 44 55 on Dewey 49 50 as a librarian 58 60 Capen Edward on D C 33 4 Carnegie Andrew and the Li brary School 5 and simplified spelling 117 8 Carr Henry A on library School 43 147 ·Carr, Mrs Hcnry A, 43 Catalog cards, standardızıng of, 61-2 Chamberlain, Judge Mcllcn, on Library School, 43 school lecturer, 48 Charges against Descy, 93-6 Child, Prof, and spelling rcform, 116 Children, Dewcy's interest in, 89, 132 Clarh, Prof John Bates, 17 Classification, Dewcy's carly in. tcrcst in, 6 library, 356 "Classification Decinalc, 36 Coc, Ellen M , school locucr, q8 Coeducation, Dcucy and, 46, 55 Columbia Libiary School, 41 51, Dewey, Mrs Emily McKay (Bcal), 143 Dewcy family, 3 Doucy, Godfrey, 112 Dcwcy, Jocl, 3-4 Desc), I lomas, 3 Draper, Dr Andreu S, comes back to Albany, 102 3 Dcucy praises, 138 Doucy's mal, 93 Drinking, Dency's hatred of, 11, 103, 127 "Du" 3. 92 Caton, Adclaicic, 79 Edgerton, Winifred, 79, 80 Idmands, J, school lccturci, 18 Lducation, Deucy's intcrcst in, 8, 18 53-5, 80 Women in, 79 80 Convocations of the Regents, 99 Crunden, FM, and the ALA, 69 quoted, on Library School, 43 school lecturer, 48 Curtis, George William, Dewcy letter to, 137 Cutter, Charles A, and founding of ALA, 68 9 and Rcaders & Writers Iconomy Co, 64 editor of the Library Journal, 74 quoted, on DC,35 on Library School, 43 school lccturer, 48 Cutter Classification, 38 Educational Lili, Recodification of, 97-8 Lfficiency Society, Dency and thc, 131 Elmcndorf, Thcrcsa, 144 on Deucy's attitude toward 1 omcn, 81 Employment agency, Library Bureau, 63 Luropc, Doucy's first trip to, 22-3 Lipansivc Classification, 35 Davidson, H E, and the Library Bureau, 65 6 Decimal Classıſıcation, 18, 20, 27- 40 Deveny, Mary M , 79 Dewey, Admiral George, 3 Dewey, Mrs Annie, 226, 35 at Philadelphia meeting, 78 blindness of, 142 death of, 141, 143 work in home economics, 141 Tairchuld, Salome Culler, and World's Lair cxhibit, 81 Library School staff, 53 Tellous, Dorhus, 144 and library abbreviations, 62 3 od of DC, 32 "Tcstschrift" volume, Dewcy, 143, 146 Tishcr, Dorothy Canfield, quoted, on Deucy, 116 Fishc, John, 22 Tlctchcr, W I, school lccturer, 48 Florida, Lahe Placid Club in, 112 Toster, W E, school lecturer, 48 Fountain pens, Den cy's enthusiasm for, 128 Frey, A R , school lecturer, 48 148 ·nal 73 Anna Da 53 5 80 Gallup Asa o Club manager Lamed J N school lecturer 48 110 11 Leypoldt Frederich H and the state officer 96 Library Journal 7 6 Cetchell ed of DC Leypoldt Mrs F H 74 Gillett C. R school lecturer 48 Librarianship Derveys contribu Ginn Bros and the Library Jour tions to 57 66 Library Association of the United Kingdom 3 70 Library associations 67 71 Library Bureau 20 69 6 employment agency 63 state business and the 96 Latxe I did 10) Library Journal 0 Wellesley librarian 14 founding of 76 Green Eliza 8 Library Notes 47 77 Green S S on Library School Library of Congress Classifica 43 tion 38 quoted on Library School 18 Library periodicals 7,7 Guild Reuben A school lec Library School Columbia 41 51 turer 48 Library School NY State 51 6 Hannah G school lecturer 48 Library Supplies Committee Hazeltine Mary Emogene and Dewey 181 Low Seth 49 50 58 Hewins Caroline M school lec and the Columbia school 45 turer 48 Hewitt Grace 81 Mabie Hamilton Wright on the Hichs Harry W and the Club Convocations 19 111 Club pioneer 108 Hill Gov David B 93 Mann Benjamin P on Library would abolish Regents 85 6 Teverses himself gi March Prof and spelling te Horseback riding Deweys love form 116 of 14 126 Howland William B Club pio Marney ed of DC: Mchelway St Clair on Deweys neer 108 skill in argument 136 Merrill Chester ! quoted on Jews exclusion of from Lake Library School 43 Placid Club 104 5 Merrill Mrs Winifred E 79 80 Jones Ada Alice 144 Metric reform Dewey and 84 Library School staff 53 Miller Margaret 144 Lake Placid Club Dewey and Missionary work Dewey con the 83 4 107 15 şiders 17 attacked' at Albany_1096 Montague frot 19 Lake Placid Club Education Morgan Appleton school lec Foundation 114 5 turer 48 Lake Placid Conferences on Home Economics 142 National Education Association Lane WC school lecturer 48 and spelling reform 117 School 43 1192 149 ·staff, 53 Nelson, C Alcx, school lccturer, Rcaders & Writers Economy Co, 48 64 Nepotism, Dewcy's hatred of, g6 Rcformer, Doucy as a, 116 22 New York Library Club, 70 Regents, NY Statc, and the Li- New York Preparatory School, brary School, 51-2 Dency and thic, 103 Dcucy and thc, 83-106 New York State Library, 27 Red, Whitclau, asks Dcwcy's New York Stalc Library Associ? advicc, 839 tion, 701 "Rclatiic location, and the DC, New York Statc Library School, 38 9 51-6 Richards, Mrs Ellen H, 141 new plans for, 90 Richardson, I C, school lcc New Yorh Statc Rcgents, 83-106 lurer, 18 and the Library School, 512 Roulcy, Edith. quotcd, on Dcwcy Newspaper criticism, Dcucy and, as in cmployer, 13-3 92 Sanderson, Edna, Library School Oncıda Seminary, 9 Oncida, NY, moic to, 9 Saunders, I, school Iccturer, 48 Schwartz, J , school lecturer, 48 Page, Nellic F, 79 Scclyc, Prof Julius, 18 Parker, and thc Library Burcau, Scymour, May, 130, 141 65 cd of DC, 32 Parsons, James Russell, on Library School staff, 53 Dewcy's hatred of nepotism, Sharp, Katharine L, 141 96 Shorthand, Amhcrst classes in, praises Dcwcy's work, 99-100 16 Patten, Frank C, on the Library Godfrcy Deucy's interest in, School, 45-6 142 Pcoples, W T, school lecturer, Sıblcy, Jlarvard libranan, 22 48 Simplificd Spelling Board, 117 Periodicals, library, 72-7 Shinner, NY Supi of Educ, io1 Phalen, Charles, 10, 14 Smith, Mrs Benjamin D,79 Philadelphia, library mccting at, Smith, Lloyd P, quoted, on D C, 33, 78 33 5 spelling reform mcctinig at, on Library School, 43 116 Smoking, Dewcy's hatred of, 10 Plummer, Mary Wright, on the 11, 127 Library School, 47 Spelling rcform, Dency's interest Poole, RB, school lccturer, 48 in, 84, 1169 Poole, William Frederich, 23 Spelling Rcform Association, 21, and ALA, 69 on Library School, 43 Spolford, A R, school lecturer, school lecturer, 48 48 Publishers' Weehly, 73 Standardization, Dewcy's work Putnam, George H, school lec for, 61-2 turer, 48 Store, Joel Dewcy's, 4, 9 Putnam, Herbert, Herbert, endorses Dewey's woih, 103-4 Tachygraphy, Amherst classes in, Pyrhe, Berne A, on Dewey, 130 1167 156 150 ·Teacher Dewey as a 69 Thrift Dewey and 123 134 Time saving Dewey s passion for 129 30 Toad Hollow School 7 Towle Mrs Grace H 81 Tyler Martha 79 80 Upson Chancellor of Regents 99 Wasson Mrs E A 79 Wellesley Half Dozen 79 Whitney J L school lecturer 48 Whitney Prof and spelling re form 116 Winsor Justin 23 43 and the A LA 69 Women at the Library School 46 55 Dewey and 15 Dewej s work with 143 4 in library work 78 82 Woodworth Florence 144 Library School staff 53 Wyer James I quoted on the Library School 54 Valedictory Deneys high school 12 Vinton F school lecturer 48 Walter Frank Library School staff 53 151 ·THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION The American Library Association, established in 1876, is an organization of libraries, librarians, library trustees and others interested in the responsibilities of libraries in the educational, social and cultural needs of society It is affiliated with more than fifty other library associations in this country and abroad It works closely with many organizations conccincd with cuucation, recication, rescarch, and public service Its activities are carried on by a headquarters staſ], voluntary boards and committees, and by divisions, sections, and round tables, all interested in various aspects or types of library service Its program includes information and advisory services, personnel service, ficld work, annual and midwinter conferences, and the publication-not for profit-of numerous professional books, pamphlets and periodicals