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

  Dewey’s last day at the Amherst library was Friday, March 31, 1876. He could have left town then, but his fervent worship of decimals led him to delay his journey until a week from the following Monday—April 10. The man, who hated vacations as a matter of principle, spent a few days engaging in his favorite hobbies such as horseback riding and hunting. Saturday the eighth turned out to be a disaster. That evening, he and “Mother had a misunderstanding.” “She of course,” he wrote in his diary, “had a big cry and I of course had to pacify her, all of which was less restful than sleep would have been.” Though tired, Dewey felt better on Sunday: “We had several little crys among the family during the day but got on very happily otherwise.” That afternoon, he boosted his sagging spirits by “talking library” at the home of his former boss, Professor Montague. But he still couldn’t shake the existential anxiety that had engulfed him. “It was a sad day,” he wrote in his diary shortly after retiring to bed at 9, “for I feared it would be my last.”

  On moving day, Dewey squeezed in a four-hour stopover in Worcester, where he thoroughly examined the wares of the new Wesson and Harrington firearms store. Everything about guns and their construction had long fascinated Dewey, and he posed a series of probing questions to the owner, Frank Wesson. After an extended discussion, Dewey became convinced “he [Wesson] had the best pocket and long range rifles on the market.” As with other obsessives such as Jefferson and Lindbergh, new gadgets could leave him feeling spellbound. That evening, the new sales rep found some temporary lodgings in Malden, a short commute from his office at 13 Tremont Place in downtown Boston. On the morning of the eleventh, he met with the librarian Charles Cutter of the Boston Athenaeum—Beantown was then a library mecca, and this elegant venue was just one of its prominent shrines—to get some feedback on his new “skeme.” The meteoric rise of an American icon was now under way.

  Eighteen seventy-six was to be an annus mirabilis for Dewey. Within a few weeks, Ginn agreed to expand his job description to include both selling library supplies and editing a new journal for librarians. As the managing editor of the American Library Journal—to reflect its international aspirations, the adjective was soon dropped from the title—Dewey suddenly had a huge platform. “Born with a disposition to run things whenever I could get a chance,” as Dewey noted five decades later in his unpublished memoir, “3/4 of a Century,” he immediately made the most of the opportunity. That spring, he became the prime mover behind a national gathering of librarians at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, thus organizing the conference that would, in turn, create the American Library Association. Unknown to some and dismissed by others—in a line that circulated widely, an Amherst philosophy professor described Dewey to the Librarian of Congress as “a tremendous talker, and a little bit of an old maid”—he initially faced stiff opposition. Wary of the newcomer, the head of the Chicago Public Library wrote to his counterpart in Boston on May 31: “It won’t pay for you and me to attend that barbecue.” But Dewey was not to be deterred, promising his colleagues that they would experience “the most profitable three days of their library life.” Thanks largely to Dewey’s infectious enthusiasm, 103 librarians from around the country—including those head honchos from Boston and Chicago who were to become the ALA’s first president and vice president, respectively—showed up at the Pennsylvania State Historical Society on October 4, 1876. Two days later, Dewey signed on as the ALA’s first member and was elected both its secretary and treasurer. Librarianship, as Dewey stressed, was officially a “profession.” And with his classification text now required reading for his colleagues around the country, the ALA’s youngest member would soon forever change how America both organized and disseminated information.

  This flurry of activity would, however, leave Dewey close to a nervous breakdown by the time he hit the quarter century mark on December 10, 1876.

  Dewey’s classification text also turned out to be the magnet that would attract his first wife. On April 18, 1876, he crossed the Charles River into Cambridge to give a lecture at Harvard “on locating books by numbers and subjects and not by numbering shelves,” as the college’s librarian recorded in his diary. Annie Godfrey, then the twenty-five-year-old librarian at the newly established Wellesley College, just happened to be in attendance. Three months later, Dewey sent her a proof of his book, offering “to answer any questions that may arise and…to receive any corrections or criticisms that may occur to you.” They picked up the dialogue about decimals a few months later at the librarians’ powwow in Philadelphia, where Annie became ALA Member No. 29. Admiring his “devotion to…[his] life work,” the frumpy and slightly overweight librarian, who shared his passion for horseback riding, became the pursuer. For the next year and a half, Dewey kept her at arm’s length. He cited overwork, a claim that was partly true. In late 1876, after his string of successes, Dewey felt drained and confused about what to do for an encore. He also began having trouble carrying out daily tasks. That November, a despairing and humbled Dewey, who had endured considerable criticism from his parents as a boy, begged Richard Bowker, his editor at Library Journal, to give him “a blowing up for my weaknesses.… It makes me shiver, but I know the final effect is good.” He rebounded, but slowly. At the first annual meeting of the ALA in the fall of 1877, the overtaxed workaholic achieved little besides standardizing the size of a catalog card at 7.5 × 12.5 centimeters.

  But the more likely reason why he put Annie on hold was that he had taken up with his former Amherst flame, Mary E. Much of the future couple’s correspondence from 1877 has been burned, so the truth is hard to come by. Annie, who had an ardent suitor of her own—a hard-driving steamboat captain—didn’t give up easily. She also understood her man. While she supported his grandiose ambitions, she made him promise not to work after ten. “I am going to haunt you,” she wrote Dewey on December 5, 1877. “Every night when the clock strikes ten,” she added, “I shall come to you in imagination…and whisper ‘good-night.’” (Dewey would take to the idea; several years later, when he became director of Columbia College’s library, he would close the building at the decimal hour.) In a birthday letter posted five days later, Annie wished Dewey “many years of usefulness.” They were married the following October.

  In the socially prominent Annie Godfrey—her cousin was Mary Bucklin, wife of Bay State governor William Claflin, and her contacts in Cambridge included the legendary poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—the twenty-seven-year-old Melvil found a spouse who matched him eccentricity for eccentricity. They got to work right away on their shared goal of improving both themselves as well as the rest of humanity. Beginning in 1878—and for at least a decade after that—each month, they compiled a detailed list of “time-budgets” and “resolutions”; the latter came with a set of fines that they slapped on themselves whenever they missed the mark. Both partners were often penalized for the use of slang. Much to Dewey’s delight, Annie’s side of the ledger featured the following admonition, “Don’t waste a minute.” Dewey swore to seek “accuracy in print,” but he had difficulty staying true to his word; one week, his self-rating on this scale came to a measly 48 percent. Like her husband, Annie rarely passed up the chance to turn the human experience into a number. She tracked every penny that ever left the house, every jar of fruit she ever canned, and every button she ever purchased. On the matter of writing implements, however, they didn’t quite see eye to eye. While Dewey was never without five fountain pens in his vest pocket, each containing a different color of ink, Annie preferred toting pencils, color-coordinated with both her notebooks and the pockets in her customary white dresses. Perhaps as a tribute to “the lady in white,” after Annie’s death, the still-in-a-hurry septuagenarian would make the switch to a custom-made pencil with different colored leads on each end.

  The marriage—which would produce a son, Godfrey, born in 1887—worked splendidly for Dewey; he got everything he wanted, including the freedom to come and go as he pleased. Besides the loneliness, Anni
e had to put up with her husband’s roving eye. This penchant was perilous, because Dewey was constantly surrounded by temptation, particularly after he started the library school at Columbia. Despite mountains of incriminating evidence, Annie repeatedly stood by her man. During the 1906 sex scandal, Annie wrote a confidential letter to an ALA official declaring, “Women who have keen intuitions know by instinct that they can trust Mr. Dewey implicitly.” Annie’s misplaced faith in her husband may well have contributed to her ill health. She suffered from both frayed nerves and hardened arteries, for which she received all sorts of medical care, including residential treatment at Michigan’s Battle Creek Sanitarium. Dewey wasn’t at home when Annie—by then both exceedingly frail and totally blind—died in 1922.

  During the first few years of their marriage, Dewey’s career hit a snag. The core contradictions in his character were creating constant chaos. Like other obsessives, Dewey was more in love with the semblance of order—the illusion that everything was under control—than with order itself. And the man who preached patience and discipline had trouble regulating his own impulses. As Dewey acknowledged, his tendency to overextend himself was “infinitely silly”; nevertheless, he kept trying “to undertake to do 5 things at once.” Likewise, despite his fierce advocacy of organizational efficiency, he was never a team player; in fact, he often alienated colleagues with his stubbornness and arrogance. A procrastinator, he couldn’t pass on his copy to the Library Journal’s Richard Bowker on time. What’s more, even his own memoranda and missives to his editor, as he admitted, were also “wholly without organization.” When Bowker and publisher Frederick Leypoldt told him that some belt tightening would be needed to cope with spotty revenue, he threatened to jump ship and start a rival outlet. Startled by Dewey’s wayward ways, Leypoldt’s wife characterized him as “as miserable a specimen of a gabbling idiot as I ever beheld.” By the end of 1880, Dewey would be dropped from the journal. In the late 1870s, he faced another setback when the business opportunity that had lured him to Boston fizzled out; he was not able to create a market for metric goods, as he had hoped. Upon his twenty-eighth birthday, seeking a fresh start, the struggling entrepreneur turned to a name change, settling on what he perceived to be the more efficient Dui.

  Dui’s first venture was to become the president and secretary of the Readers and Writers Economy Company, a library supply outfit. But after only a matter of months, that company was also veering toward bankruptcy, its shareholders charging him with fraud and mismanagement. As it turned out, the man who had a way with figures couldn’t be counted on to keep the books; he repeatedly mixed up personal and corporate accounts. Dui claimed that the lapses were unintentional, but he was still forced to resign in late 1880. He became an emotional and physical wreck. “Hay fever took me down this year, and I suffered terrible,” he wrote to Bowker, with whom he continued to work on various ALA matters, in October 1880. “For 12 hours at a time for two or three days I could not open my eyelids.” While he would later proudly assert that he “never worried,” he was the king of the psychosomatic symptom. Throughout his life, in addition to hay fever, he was also susceptible to colds, coughs, and “bad stomachs” as well as bronchitis, laryngitis, and asthma.

  Suddenly an unemployed pariah, Dui continued to feel depressed, humiliated, and, according to one colleague, suicidal. Overwork, he conceded to a friend toward the end of 1880, “has nearly cost me my life.” For the next couple of years, he scraped by as a freelance consultant for local libraries. Though down and out, Dui kept thinking big. “I feel my fingers tingle often,” he told Bowker in June 1881, “to get hold of some large enterprise.” His fingers worked fast. Several months later, Dui started a new company, the Library Bureau, which would sell business equipment of all sorts, including the hanging vertical file, which he invented. Over the next decade, his shares in this rapidly expanding venture, which would be folded into the Sperry Rand Corporation a century later, would make him a rich man.

  The following year, Dui was visited by more good fortune. Columbia College was building a new library at the center of its Madison Avenue campus and needed a new director to organize its half-dozen independent book collections. The college’s president, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, figured that Dui was just the man for the job. The two men had formed a bromantic bond years before, based on their shared love of tens. An important figure in the ALA—he had also been there at its creation in 1876—Barnard had known Dui for nearly a decade. The reigning president of the research group, the American Metrological Society—Dui was its secretary—Barnard was the author of the five-hundred-page magnum opus The Metric System of Weights and Measures, then in its third edition. This rhapsody to the metre, litre, and gramme addressed the beauty and efficiency of “units that have decimal multiples and submultiples.” And if Barnard harbored any doubts about what Dui could do to spiff up Columbia’s scattered and scanty collection, then ranked forty-ninth in the country and just sixth in New York City, Columbia professor John Burgess quickly put them to rest. Recently recruited from Amherst College, the political scientist showered praise on his former colleague’s “fine genius for classification and convenient arrangement.” Barnard had only one concern; trustees were dumbfounded by the ridiculous spelling of the job candidate’s last name. (So, too, was William Poole, head of the Chicago Public Library, who joked that “Dewy” might be better, given his naïveté.) To keep his hat in the ring, Dui quickly reverted to being Dewey and promised to eschew simplified spelling in his official correspondence.

  On May 7, 1883, trustees offered Dewey the job as the school’s Librarian-in-Chief at a salary of $3,500 (about $80,000 today) a year. They also set aside $10,000 for the recataloging and reclassifying of Columbia’s books.

  Three weeks later, Dewey began work at the spanking-new English Gothic facility, built for $400,000, then a staggering sum, on Madison Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street. When he arrived, the director had only one employee—an assistant, who doubled as a janitor—and the library was open only three hours a day. For help with the pressing task of assigning decimals to its fifty thousand volumes, Dewey immediately hired six seniors from Wellesley College. This move was radical, as at the time nearly all librarians were male and Columbia was “almost as hermetically sealed to women as a monastery.” Within a year, Dewey presided over a team of twenty-one employees, including five department heads and “the Wellesley Half Dozen,” as his comely coterie of assistants were dubbed. Thanks to his industrious staff, Dewey soon cataloged the library’s fifty thousand volumes; this massive undertaking, in turn, served as the basis for an expanded second edition of his scheme published in 1885, which officially introduced the decimal point and two new decimal places. Dewey also began beefing up the now carefully arranged collection at the hefty rate of ten thousand volumes a year.

  Columbia’s state-of-the-art facility became a model for academic and public libraries around the world. No other libraries—not even those at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, or anywhere in Germany—were in its class. As the New York Tribune reported, it was “the ideal of a university library…in equipment and organization.” With three hundred Edison lamps allowing for evening use, Dewey could increase operating hours by a factor of ten. Patrons enjoyed a slew of modern conveniences, including trays of ice water and mail delivery. The elegant main reading room, with its fifty-eight-foot-high ceiling, could seat 160 visitors, to whom assistants could bring any volume on demand. After just one year, circulation jumped by a staggering 500 percent. Staff members were also prepared to answer queries at a reasonable fraction—1/1200—of their annual salary per hour. The transformation of the library didn’t escape the notice of students. “Suddenly the place seemed to have come alive,” one later recalled. “Something had happened, too, to the attendants. Brashness, alertness, service became the order of the day.” Order also reigned supreme in every nook and cranny. Rubber tips placed on the oak chairs and rubber wheels affixed to book trucks eliminated noise. And Dewey m
anaged to keep the premises spotless. To littering students, he passed out cards that read: “I picked up these pieces in the hall and infer that you threw them on the floor. My time and that of my assistants is too valuable for this work. Still we prefer to do it rather than have the building so disfigured.” Eager to tidy up other libraries as well, he circulated these cards among his colleagues across the country.

  Thrilled with his new hire, in May 1884 President Barnard remarked that Dewey “has been of more important service to the college than that of any other officer.” That spring, the trustees bumped up his salary to $5,000—the amount doled out to full professors—and conferred upon him a new title, professor of library economy.

  While the library school got off to a successful start in 1887, Dewey’s conflict with the trustees persisted. In fact, the animosity only increased. Dewey got flak for plowing funds initially appropriated for reclassifying books back into salaries—a move he tried in order to appease his overworked staff. Trustees also objected to his annual reports touting the library school’s achievements, which clocked in at fifty pages, twice the heft of those published by its already well-established law school. The Special Committee on Printing considered such marketing efforts “not in accordance with academic propriety” and a waste of precious dollars. Likewise, most of Columbia’s professors, irked by the tenacity with which he collected fines for overdue books, viewed him as an arrogant nuisance. And the presence of women on campus continued to bother the trustees as well as a considerable segment of both the faculty and the alumni. Dewey’s fate was sealed when his most influential and steadfast ally, President Barnard, resigned in May 1888. By the end of the year, Dewey, too, decided to step down.