America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (13 page)

This core value ran rampant throughout his North Side plant, which he began constructing in 1890 and which quickly earned the moniker “A clean spot in Pittsburgh.” (This was no mean feat. “There the night is made lurid,” wrote
Pittsburgh Dispatch
reporter Theodore Dreiser in 1894, “and the very atmosphere of the day darkened by the flames and the smoke.”) For his headquarters, Heinz selected a vitrified brick that could withstand frequent washings; thus he could keep the building spotless inside and out. By 1910, the firm’s fifty-acre campus on the banks of the Allegheny River consisted of seventeen buildings, including a three-story equine palace. Even Heinz’s stables, widely considered the best commercial operation in the country, were kept spick-and-span. A series of machines fed, watered, and brushed the fleet of two hundred black draft horses, which had to be inspected by the founder himself (or Mueller, in his absence). Uniformity in measurement was of paramount importance; the horses, Heinz insisted, all had to be the same size and weight. The entrepreneur, who drew few distinctions between bipeds and quadrupeds—“A young man ought first to be a clean, wholesome animal” was another motto plastered on the office walls—treated his beloved equine charges just like his children; he would both coddle and punish. While his ailing horses could enjoy the benefits of a glass-enclosed Turkish bath, those who kicked were banished to a specially designed “jail.” The stables were just as “perfectly ventilated” as the five-story Administration Building.

With cleanliness a synonym for his brand, Heinz was eager to show off his supersanitary workplace. In contrast to the benzoate users, who manufactured “the kind of food you would not care to eat if you could see it made,” the H. J. Heinz Company, as its ads insisted, had nothing to hide: “Our doors are always open. The public is free to come and go at all hours.” For decades, “the cleanest, largest and best-equipped Food Product establishment in the world” offered factory tours. The guides who escorted the twenty thousand visitors a year around the “Heinz Pickle Works” followed a prescribed route, using a prepared script. The stellar stables were the first stop. Then came the printing department and box factory, followed by the can factory, where, amid a loud din, workers sterilized and soldered the vessels of various Heinz varieties at breakneck speed. The tour then went from the bright and cheery “Girls’ Dining Room”—60 percent of the workers were female, most of whom were Polish or Italian immigrants between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one—to the Baked Bean Building, where cans were filled at the rate of 150 per minute. And before picking up their going-away present, a Heinz pickle pin, curious onlookers got to inspect the Pickle Bottling Department, where hundreds of “Heinz girls,” decked out in freshly laundered blue uniforms and spotless white hats, labeled and capped the pickle jars.

While the elegant factory incarnated efficiency, it was not quite the workers’ paradise that the self-absorbed industrialist believed it to be. As with his horses, Heinz gave his “little helpers” a few choice goodies, including free manicures and noontime carriage rides. But in what mattered most, he was stingy. Piecework was common, and the majority of his “girls” made less than $6 a day at a time when $7 a day was the poverty level. “Excellent building construction, thorough cleanliness, dressing rooms, rest rooms, natatoria…Whenever they are at the service of the employees,” wrote sociologist Elizabeth Beardsley Butler about the H. J. Heinz Company in 1909, “we have reason to be glad.… [But] their service is of little effect if it serves merely to obscure facts of low wages.… Pleasant surroundings compensate neither for excessive work, nor a fundamental deficit in the financial basis of self-respect.” (In contrast, as Butler also noted in her landmark study of Pittsburgh’s working women, the men at the Heinz company did “all the responsible work” and received much more generous compensation.) Three decades before Charlie Chaplin’s
Modern Times
dramatized how screwing nuts on an assembly line could lead to nuttiness, numerous “Heinz girls” had already lost their minds by placing countless cans onto labeling machines (six to eight workers were needed to keep the cans humming along in succession) or by sticking slices of pork onto rapidly moving baked beans. “Speed pressure and a low rate of pay,” concluded Butler, “destroy nervous vitality, and keep the standard of life near the margin of degradation.” After just two years, the typical “Heinz girl” was no longer seduced by the free ketchup and
relish
—the long tables in the “Girls’ Dining Room” were dotted with fresh bottles that had failed inspection because of a loose cap—and had moved on.

In early 1915, the seventy-year-old Heinz, accompanied by his son Clifford, took the SS
Great Northern
to San Francisco. En route, they sailed through the recently opened Panama Canal. The City by the Bay was hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition—running from February 20 to December 4, this World’s Fair would attract nineteen million visitors—and the semiretired founder was eager to oversee the Heinz exhibit set up by the firm’s expo manager, Mr. Foster.

Heinz’s youngest child was now a thirty-one-year-old junior member of the company’s board of directors with solid credentials as an equestrian—he had inherited his father’s love of horses—and a playboy. Eight years earlier, Heinz had dashed up to New London, Connecticut, to wrest the recent college graduate away from a nurse with whom he had eloped. (The marriage was soon annulled.)
AGED FATHER IS GRIEVED
, ran the headline of the
New York Times
account of Clifford’s escapade. Despite ongoing conflicts—in his diary, Heinz would express regret about the age difference between Clifford and his flings—Heinz showed more restraint with his favorite traveling companion than with other family members. And as father and son settled into their hotel on the fairgrounds, Heinz’s pique toward Clifford’s older brother Howard, then running the company back in Pittsburgh, was mounting, and the man who still held the title of CEO felt he had no choice but to speak his mind.

 It wasn’t anything about the fair that upset the founder; he was proud of the sensational Heinz tower that stood in the central crossway of the elaborate three-hundred-thousand-square-foot Palace of Food Products (originally called the Pure Food Building, it was later dubbed “Palace of the Nibbling Arts,” as visitors got to taste samples as they strolled). The curio collector who headed the Pittsburgh Egyptology Association had designed a pyramid of fifty-seven canned and bottled condiments, which rose up to the heavens. “Need we say,” Frank Morton Todd, the official historian of the fair, would later write of these unique building blocks, “they represent the product of Mr. Heinz of Pittsburgh, Purveyor to his Majesty the American Citizen?” And underneath this Babel-like structure, spectators could view a moving picture of Heinz workers planting tomatoes and bottling ketchup. Of these images that also displayed the latest in both farm and factory machinery, Todd would add, “Cleanliness and wholesomeness were apparent in every stage of that progress.”

Howard had recently taken over as the head of the company’s board of directors, and Heinz, fearing that he was becoming irrelevant, was suddenly convinced that his successor could do no right. In a six-page screed, written on March 9, 1915, from San Francisco, the founder berated Howard for not doing enough to call attention to “our splendid display” at the fair. “Our opportunity in California,” he stressed, “is now.” While the company had erected a thirty-foot electric sign that flashed “57” across the bay, Heinz demanded an additional $25,000 be spent on print advertising. “If my methods of advertising,” Heinz railed, “have been a failure, the world at large would have made the discovery. I now insist that we act. Other men who have not the means for advertising are advertising their products.… I urged this before I left home but cannot find a single advertisement in the magazines. Are you asleep?”

With his own skirt-chasing days behind him, the nearly forty-year-old Howard had evolved into a happily married father of two young sons, H. John (known as Jack) and Rust.
2
And in contrast to his brothers, the industrious industrialist had developed a knack for micromanaging both the business and his tempestuous father. Since the Great War prevented Howard from shipping Heinz back to Germany for his annual “cure,” he had begun encouraging his father to make more sales trips within the United States (such as the several-month-long sojourn in San Francisco). Howard had also learned how to tune out Heinz’s outbursts, a tactic that further enraged his father. “You will probably feel that I am nervous,” Heinz protested in the middle of his nastygram from California. “No, I am feeling better today. The sun is shining.” Addicted to control, Heinz, like other aging obsessives, was unable to pass the reins to the next generation without making a fuss.

Heinz concluded his diatribe by accusing Howard of being too domineering with his fellow board members and of spending too much time in his office. “You know you enjoy better health not at the desk,” Heinz advised, “you accomplish more, the results are greater away from the desk, and yet you are determined to stay at the desk.…You are working too hard at the desk.” Unable to appreciate individual differences, Heinz couldn’t understand why everyone did not behave exactly as he did. But in contrast to his father, who was most productive when in motion, the Yale-educated chemist had a deliberative, scientific bent. (Years later, on a visit to the Steel City, Albert Einstein would pronounce Howard Heinz “one of the two most informed and entertaining men” whom he had ever met.) While Howard appreciated the founder’s seat-of-the-pants creativity, the son would implement the father’s “great vision” by more technocratic means. Howard’s investments in chemical testing, for example, would produce one of the first quality-control departments run by an American corporation.

After Heinz’s death four years later, company officials were surprised at what they found in his big desk, located directly across from Howard’s, on the fourth floor of the Administrative Building. Inside its main drawers were various mementos along with several steel tape measures and some measurements, which no one was able to decipher.

O
n the morning of Wednesday, January 5, 1887, Columbia College’s new library school was set to open. But the trustees of the college, then an all-male bastion located in midtown Manhattan, wanted to shut it down before its founder, the thirty-five-year-old Melvil Dewey, Columbia’s Librarian-in-Chief for the past four years, ever met the first class. As the handsome six-footer with the jet-black hair and bushy beard later recalled, he was suddenly immersed in “one of the sharpest battles of my life, for what I knew to be right.”

The previous day, the chairman of Columbia’s committee on buildings, Charles Silliman, had informed Dewey that he would not have access to any classrooms. The reason for the fracas? The entering class of twenty—Dewey’s initial hope for ten, his favorite number, had to be scrapped—included seventeen women, and the trustees, whom Silliman represented, were reluctant to allow any “petticoats” on campus. However, this champion of women’s education wasn’t going to let Silliman or anyone else come between him and his lofty goals. As Dewey later wrote, he considered himself a “Moses” who was about to “lead those particular children to the promised land.”

Dewey had been consumed by the idea of starting a library school for more than a decade. In an essay, “Apprenticeship of Librarians,” published in 1879 in
Library Journal
, Dewey lamented, “Physicians, lawyers, preachers, yes even our cooks have special schools for special training.” An admirer of Dewey’s various writings on librarianship as a profession, Columbia’s president, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, was firmly on board. “The librarian,” Barnard wrote upon hiring Dewey in 1883, “is ceasing to be a mere jailer of the books, and is becoming an aggressive force in the community.” That same year, in a speech at the annual American Library Association (ALA) conference in Buffalo, Dewey suggested that the school’s curriculum should pivot around cataloging, bibliography, and literary methods, by which he meant classifying, arranging, and indexing. From the get-go, he envisioned training more women than men. “In much of library work,” Dewey noted, “woman’s quick mind and deft fingers do many things with a neatness and dispatch seldom equaled by her brothers.”

In the spring of 1884, Dewey, with the help of his close friend Barnard, who dropped by his office most afternoons, got Columbia’s trustees to authorize a library school; according to the original plan, the new institution was to be up and running by the fall of 1886. The one catch was that Dewey’s training program had to be “self-sustaining,” meaning that fees would have to cover expenses. After encountering a set of bureaucratic roadblocks, Dewey was forced to postpone its opening until the beginning of 1887.

But when Dewey publicly announced that he planned to admit women, the trustees started to push back. And as much as Dr. Barnard supported the new library school, he was losing the will to fight. In December 1886, he cautioned Dewey that Silliman’s “new phase of opposition” was likely to spell doom. On January 4, after learning of Silliman’s latest rebuke, the seventy-seven-year-old Columbia president tried to enlist several college officials to help Dewey. But late that afternoon, Barnard gave up, believing that the battle had been lost. Feeling faint, he called for his physician. Dewey, however, then immediately sprang into action. He sent for the janitors, whom he asked to fix up an unused storeroom over the chapel. They quickly scraped the walls and patched up the rickety furniture. Dewey also hired a truck to bring some additional chairs from his West Fifty-Sixth Street apartment.

And so opened more or less on schedule the world’s first library school, Columbia’s School of Library Economy (thus named, Dewey later quipped, because it forced him to get “the most possible out of the appropriations not available”). Proud of his victory over “the enemies of women,” Dewey would always remember January 5, 1887, as the day that he had “kindled a fire whose light will surely be seen down through the generations.”

That first year, the school’s twenty students, who hailed from all over
Americ
a—one even came from England—paid $50 each for four months of instruction. With his limited budget, the well-connected Dewey relied heavily on the services of twenty volunteer lecturers from around the country, including Ainsworth Spofford, the Librarian of Congress, who addressed “What to Read and When to Read and How to Read.” Dewey and his assistant librarians at Columbia also taught courses for which they received no additional remuneration. Dewey emphasized technical and practical matters. In a talk entitled “Light, Heat and Ventilation,” he expressed his concern that electric lights might put “freckles” on books. “Pure air” for libraries became a personal crusade. Dewey’s wife, Annie, whom he had married a decade earlier, pitched in by lecturing on indexing. Despite the “super-annuated building” and the often dry subject matter, students listened with “the ferment of enthusiasm.” They essentially lived in the library from early in the morning until its 10 p.m. closing time, when they still could be found combing over their lecture notes. Dewey had succeeded in imparting his missionarylike zeal to a new generation. Library work, he insisted, was not just about “shoveling” dusty books; it was really about giving every American the opportunity to pursue a lifelong education. At the end of the first term, eleven of the twenty students signed up for a second academic year during which they would attend classes for a total of seven months.

Dewey was soon flooded with a steady stream of new applicants. And in his excitement, he got a bit carried away. On the application form that he designed, he requested some curious pieces of information. Now, he didn’t actually require females to submit their bust size, as generations of incredulous indexers have snickered about (such as the 1971
Library Journal
editorial writer who, in referring to this urban legend, wondered, “Like what did you
really
have in mind, Mel baby?”). But he did ask for a few telling measurements—namely, height and weight—as well as a description of hair and eye color along with a photo. Regarding his discriminating taste in future librarians, he once remarked, “You can’t polish a pumpkin.”

Unbeknownst to most Americans, who are familiar with his name largely through the use of his signature achievement, the ingenious Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system, America’s pioneering librarian had a dark side. Dewey’s desire to bring more women into the library business was rooted in part in his own out-of-control sexual desire. As one historian has noted, the library school may well have been “a Trojan horse” designed to smuggle babes onto the Columbia campus. While hard evidence for each and every one of Dewey’s alleged extracurricular activities is not available, a pattern is clear and undeniable. Throughout his adult life, Dewey sought out inappropriate relationships with women. In fact, in 1906, this serial sexual harasser was forced to resign from the American Library Association, the organization that he had helped to found a generation earlier, because of his scandalous behavior. A year earlier, as four “prominent women” in the ALA charged, during a ten-day ALA-sponsored trip to Alaska following the organization’s annual convention, Dewey had made unwelcome advances on several librarians. As a highly respected female member of the guild summed up the matter in 1924, “For many years women librarians have been the special prey of Mr. Dewey in a series of outrages upon decency.”

Like Heinz, Dewey started out as a hyperobedient boy; as a youth, he was constantly trying to please his demanding and chronically stressed-out mother. But as an adult, Dewey would seek to turn the tables. Once he discovered that he could exercise power over women, he would insist that they do his bidding. The man who couldn’t connect first charmed before attempting to dominate.

Dewey’s career as an organizer extraordinaire began early. By age five, Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey—his name paid homage both to the novelist Herman Melville and to the Hungarian freedom fighter Louis Kossuth—was already arranging and classifying the contents of his mother’s pantry in order to improve the efficiency of the household.

The adult’s abiding love of order was a direct response to his chaotic boyhood in Adams Center, a small town in western New York, located in the so-called burned-over district, the part of the state known for its Protestant fervor. “It [my home],” he wrote in his diary early in his undergraduate career at Amherst College, “was hurly-burly, scolding, etc. too much, and neither of my parents ever practiced any confidences with me.” Convinced of his “own unworthiness,” Melville (as he was called until he dropped the final
le
at the age of twenty-five) felt little anger about his difficult circumstances; instead he blamed himself. Straightening up his environment could help him ward off these deeply rooted feelings of shame. He spent many an afternoon cleaning up the yard, the cellar, and the woodshed as well as picking up stones, plowing the garden, and polishing his mother’s sewing machine. As Melville also recorded in his diary, his early years were “as monotonous as the roar of the Niagara.” Dull routines would become a lifelong addiction.

His mother, Eliza Dewey, was an imposing figure “who never feared anything.” “She was,” Melville later recalled, “famous as was father for being the hardest worker in town.” This industrious Seventh Day Baptist handed off the bulk of the care for her fifth child and second son—whom she would refer to as “her baby” well into his thirties—to her eldest daughter, Mate, then in late adolescence. Her neglect would have long-lasting effects, as would the torrent of austere maxims and scary injunctions that flowed from her lips. “Praise to the face,” she insisted, “is an open disgrace.” “Don’t waste” was oft repeated. Her thrift knew no bounds. After Melville became a successful adult, she would ask him to send back his old shirts, which she would then fix up for her husband, Joel Dewey, a perpetually struggling merchant.

This nineteenth-century Tiger Mother could also hold her own in mano a mano combat with feral creatures. At the age of two, Melville was grabbed by a huge dog that proceeded to rip out chunks of skin near his left eye. Hearing the screams, the local doctor hopped off his horse and tried to intercede, but to no avail. In contrast, as soon as Eliza put down her sewing and spotted the fight, she immediately wrested the toddler out of the dog’s jaws.

Melville’s father also deferred to the domineering woman of the house. A devout Baptist like his wife, Joel Dewey was a boot maker who ran a general store that sold everything from groceries to farm supplies. The timid shopkeeper never could refuse to let his customers—even ne’er-do-wells—buy on credit. The elder Dewey routinely accepted old cows and pigs as a substitute for cash. At thirteen, Melville began waiting on his father’s customers after school. Not long after that, the avid reader—as an adolescent, he devoured all five volumes of Lord Macaulay’s
History of England
—first went into the library business. (Like Jefferson, he was no fan of the novel; he called fiction the “deadly enemy of mental power.”) In a corner of the store, he maintained a small collection of books, which he would rent for two cents a day. After taking a bookkeeping course, this whiz with figures, who would later win Amherst College’s prestigious Walker Math Prize, did a complete inventory of his father’s wares. Melville initially hoped simply to improve the store’s methods. But his digging around led to the discovery of a staggering 155 promissory notes, of which 133 were no longer valid. Melville’s calculations revealed that his father was actually losing money. In 1869, at the urging of his youngest child, a reluctant Joel Dewey sold the store. Melville and his parents then moved into the home of his elder brother, Manfred, a well-to-do piano salesman, in the neighboring town of Oneida.

Having attempted to fix his family’s precarious finances, the grandiose seventeen-year-old turned his attention to reforming the world. Though he would soon shed his rigid Baptist beliefs, for the rest of his life he would infuse his work with evangelical zeal. The late adolescent, who never openly rebelled against his parents, began railing against “old fogies who are continually croaking ‘let well enough alone.’” A technology lover, enthralled by the “elegance and speed of the steamboat and railroad,” Melville sought to liberate the engines of progress. In November 1869, he settled on a cause that would occupy (and preoccupy) him for the rest of his life: “I wish to inaugurate a higher education for the masses.… If the time and talent now expended at the shrine of mammon could be devoted to education what a mighty revolution would result.” His work as a librarian, devoted to providing “the best reading for the largest number, at the least cost,” as he later put it in the famous ALA motto, would fulfill this pledge, but in his precollege days, he had mostly tens on his mind. Given that America’s haphazard system of weights and measures resulted in untold waste and confusion, the adoption of the metric system, Melville believed, could help jump-start the entire economy. “But certainly the [metric] system,” he wrote in 1869, “can never be used by the people until it be learned by the people.” Thus he saw it as his mission to right this wrong from the bottom up.

The very act of measuring was also dear to the young man’s heart. Melville loved translating everything into numbers, including himself. On his fifteenth birthday, he began keeping a chart in which he tracked his height and weight as well as the value of all his possessions, divided into categories such as clothes, cash, and books. He updated these figures on every birthday for the next decade. In 1866, his books—including “his most essential,”
Webster’s Dictionary
, for which the twelve-year-old had shelled out $10 in 1864, nearly his entire life savings at the time—were worth $50; this amount dipped to $45 in 1870 before spiking up to $142 in 1875. In his sophomore year at Amherst, thanks to Professor Edward Hitchcock Jr., who ran the college’s physical education program, he was delighted to have access to a whole new set of data. “My expiratory capacity is 273 cubic inches,” he wrote in a diary entry dated December 10, 1871, “chest 38 in passive, full 39 in, arm 12.75 in, fore arm 11.25 in (all as taken by Dr. H).” (As he also noted, he actually compiled these “birthday statistics” the night before; that year, he resorted to this “Irishy way” of keeping his diary because the tenth fell on a Sunday.) Numerical measurements, even those that weren’t expressed metrically, had a remarkable power to induce feelings of calm. “I feel well repaid for the time spent,” he observed at the end of that birthday entry, “since these results…make me feel more safe and certain.”