America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But by then, Dewey had already landed a cushy new job in Albany, where he would serve as both director of the New York State Library and as secretary of the Board of Regents at the University of the State of New York.

 “My whole five years at Columbia,” Dewey later recalled, “were a constant struggle against the anti-Women element.” While he would remain clueless about the “anti-Women element” in his own personality, he still deserves considerable credit for being a trailblazer in female education. During his Manhattan sojourn, Dewey befriended Annie Nathan Meyer, a twenty-something autodidact who bemoaned Columbia’s exclusion of women. Inspired by Dewey’s “vision and idealism” as well as his “purposeful punch,” Meyer went on to found Barnard College, New York’s first women’s college, in 1889. As Dewey observed that year, Barnard “in its pre-natal days was probably discussed more in my private office in the Columbia library than anywhere else.” In 1926, under President Nicholas Butler, Columbia would acknowledge its harsh treatment of Dewey, agreeing to take back the library school, which had accompanied him to Albany in 1889. As Butler noted, Dewey’s “offense of having admitted women to the University without authority, was, in view of all that has happened since, ludicrous in the extreme.” Dewey is also directly responsible for the sprouting of library schools—which, in the late nineteenth century, constituted a significant new avenue for professional advancement for women—all over the country. By 1893, five disciples—alumni of his programs at Columbia and Albany—had already founded similar schools in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Amherst, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Over the next couple of decades, another ten Deweyites would also strike out on their own.