Read America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Online
Authors: Joshua Kendall
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Retail, #Nonfiction, #Historical
By 1895, the Lake Placid Club, as the Deweys’ “cooperativ summer home” became known, was up and running. The couple sought to sign up members with needs similar to their own, noting that the club was designed primarily for “the overworkt or convalescent needing special building up for the coming year’s work.” This resort for the very, very nervous—to borrow a line from comic Mel Brooks, who called the asylum in his 1977 film
High Anxiety
“the Institute for the Very,
Very
Nervous”—featured numerous golf courses and tennis courts as well as inviting hiking trails; however, it lacked some standard amenities found in most hotels. While the club housed three unabridged dictionaries, it had no bar, cigar stand, or stock ticker. To ensure the equanimity of its guests, Dewey also forbade gambling and “partizan politics.” As explained in the 250-page handbook published in 1901, which described its operations and customs, tens were everywhere:
Like Jefferson, he was also constantly thinking about building new additions to his home, though he was just a would-be architect. As one biographer has put it, Dewey “haunted every structural effort with his personal presence day or night, equipt with his perpetual companion, a six-foot measuring stick, each foot divided into tenths.”
His stewardship of the Lake Placid Club, however, would jeopardize his position as the state’s top librarian. Once the press got wind that he was away from Albany for five months a year, he was vilified. That charge he could fend off with the following testimonial from Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress: “Mr. Dewey eats, drinks, sleeps and talks library and library work throughout the 24 hours, the week, the month and the year.” But another scandal—i
nvolving
race, not sex—that emerged at about the same time provoked outrage that he could not contain. In January 1905, upon discovering that the club excluded Jews from membership, influential Jewish leaders circulated a petition to Andrew Draper, state commissioner of education, demanding Dewey’s ouster. As the dozens of signers maintained, what Dewey chose to do on club grounds was his business, but money from the state’s coffers shouldn’t be used to pay a state official who held such prejudice. Dewey countered that he “despised it [prejudice]” and wasn’t directly involved in formulating this particular club policy. This defense didn’t wash with the public. The comments by one Manhattan rabbi, published in the
New York Tribune
that month, captured the sentiments of many: “Such a distinction will not do. One cannot play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.…The fact remains that the State Librarian…has been the manager of an organization which puts the gravest affront possible on the entire Jewish community.”
Dewey’s anti-Semitism was closely tied to his love of order, the reigning social order. While he had Jewish friends, he realized that certain powerful members of the upper crust didn’t like to mingle with Jews and other minorities; and fearing their disapproval—and the attendant loss of membership in his club—he chose not to make any special exceptions. “No one shall be received,” ran the discriminatory clause in the club catalog, “as member or guest, against whom there is physical, moral, social or race objection.” In this case, Dewey’s obsessionality was fully in synch with that of his times. This is precisely the argument that
Harper’s Weekly
used in February 1905 in a spirited editorial defending Dewey’s exclusionary practices at Lake Placid: “Experience has taught that Jews destroy the popularity of clubs and summer hotels where their presence is conspicuous. Non-Jews don’t like the general run of Jews as companions.” In explaining this predilection, the magazine stated that “average Jewish manners are different from the average manners of non-Jews” and also alluded to the concern that more socializing between the races—it referred to Jews as “Asians”—might lead to more intermarriages, adding that an “important purpose of organized society is the promotion of marriage.” But as usual, Dewey projected his flaws onto others. To a friend, he made the case that Draper, the New York State official entrusted with deciding his fate, was emotionally unstable and in cahoots “with the Jews for my overthrow.” That fall, he was forced to submit his resignation as both the New York State librarian and the head of the library school.
The following year, Dewey suffered another body blow when he was ostracized from the American Library Association. His womanizing had finally caught up with him. In 1905, with his career on the line, the press savaging him as a bigot, and his wife sequestered at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Dewey kept propositioning women left and right. For those who, like Dewey, turn to sexual gratification largely to numb emotional pain, acute stress can often be a trigger for an increase in promiscuity. That May, he tried to put the moves on Adelaide Hasse, a New York City librarian, then beginning a massive index of government documents. Offering to help the thirty-seven-year-old bachelorette publish her work, the fifty-four-year-old Dewey invited her for an extended visit, writing that “I have horses and an auto and will give you a lot better air than you breathe in great and wicked Gotham.” Hasse did come to Albany, but didn’t stay for the weekend, as originally planned. After one long drive, she “ran away so suddenly,” as her disappointed host later put it. While Hasse was alarmed by Dewey’s “obnoxious personal traits,” she discouraged the ALA from taking any action against him. Two months later, right after the 1905 ALA convention in Portland, Oregon, Dewey went on that fateful ten-day ALA-sponsored trip to Alaska, where he apparently lost all ability to control his sexual impulses. And in contrast to Hasse, the outraged female librarians on the Alaska trip demanded that the ALA take a stand. The following June, with two librarians threatening to resign if Dewey appeared at the 1906 ALA conference set for Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, James Canfield, Columbia’s librarian, urged Dewey not to attend lest he “precipitate a crisis which none of us could control.” While Dewey reluctantly agreed, he just didn’t get it, writing Canfield that “I…had so much trust in women. Pure women would understand my ways.”
For the next couple of decades, Dewey’s relationship with the ALA remained frosty. In 1907, upon learning that a librarian had suggested erecting a statue to “M.D.,” Edwin Anderson, his successor at the New York State Library, blasted this notion as “a serious blow to decency.” In 1915, Mary Wright Plummer, the head of the library school at the New York Public Library, then also serving a term as ALA president, remarked, “There is no demand on the part of librarians for Mr. D’s presence.…I shall never, as long as I am a member of the profession, consent to meet him.” This ALA founder and two-time president—he was elected to one-year terms in both 1890 and 1892—wouldn’t be officially rehabilitated until 1926, when he gave a notable address at the fiftieth-anniversary meeting.
Leaving his Madison Avenue home in Albany, Dewey began living in Lake Placid full-time. With no mountains of books to slap decimals on for the first time in decades, he focused his attention on his club and its numbers. “We have,” he wrote to his longtime friend, the publisher Richard Bowker, in 1909, “spent $313,000 on improvements since I resigned at Albany. That means a good deal.…We try in these various things to put into the working out of this idea as much energy and skill as we would into organizing a library. We have today over 650 guests, are taking in about $3000 daily for their expenses.” He managed Lake Placid just like the State Library. The key members of his Albany staff, such as May Seymour, the editor of the DDC, moved along with him. In 1907, he hired Katharine Sharp, another former student, then directing the library school at the University of Illinois; she became the club’s “Social Organizer.” He kept expanding its activities and programs, which would eventually include concerts by top-notch musicians, conferences run by leading scholars, and a school for boys. By 1920, the club featured a forest theater with seating for one thousand people, one hundred private cottages, and ten golf courses (he was finishing up five new ones to go with the five already built). That year, he could boast that members and guests hailed from forty-six states and twenty-six nations, and that the total number of visitors exceeded a substantial multiple of ten: “Over 10,000 come.…Already sum improvements that hav had more than national influence has started here….mor and mor the Club will be a rekogniyzed center for…e
ducating
the publik.”
Dewey also took the innovative step of keeping the club open year-round. The eight members who stayed on in the one heated residence that first winter season in 1905 entertained themselves by snowshoeing, tobogganing, ice skating, and cross-country skiing. By 1921, Dewey had added a speed-skating track and a ski jump. Soon Lake Placid was stacking up well against such international hot spots as St. Moritz in the Swiss Alps. By the end of the decade, the town, which still had fewer than four thousand residents, won the right to host the III Winter Olympics and the first on American soil. Since the club never did change its discriminatory ways, Jewish groups protested to Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt about the use of state funds to build a bobsled track. The ever combative Dewey relished this battle (which ended in a compromise whereby the new facility would be built in the neighboring town of North Elba rather than on club property). “This nu Jew attak,” he wrote to his club colleagues, “will giv us much valuabl publisiti.…their attak helps to show
why
our members have always declined to admit them.”
While Dewey was again rationalizing his bigotry, his prediction turned out to be correct. With Lake Placid still dotted with signs reading
NO JEWS OR DOGS ALLOWED
, Roosevelt opened the games in February 1932. The club then went into a steady decline before closing soon after the XIII Winter Olympics held in 1980 (famous for the so-called Miracle on Ice, the surprise victory of the Americans over the Soviets in hockey). Today Lake Placid remains America’s oldest continuously operating ski resort.
On Tuesday, May 27, 1913, Dewey was in Manhattan to give a speech at the Aldine Club on Twenty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue. The Lake Placid resident was a frequent rider on the sleeper train that his club ran to New York City every night at 10 p.m. The event was the monthly dinner meeting of the Efficiency Society, a group that Dewey had helped to establish a year earlier. This collection of business leaders, engineers, and educators was dedicated to doing for the American office what Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management had done for the American factory. But that was not quite how it worked out. In the end, most of the reforms proposed by the committee of ten that ran the show would have less to do with a Marxist nightmare—Communist radicals such as Vladimir Lenin often railed against the dehumanization of the worker caused by Taylor’s mechanization—than with a Marx Brothers routine (though Dewey and his nine brethren weren’t trying to be funny).
Dinner was at 6:30, and Dewey, the first speaker of the night, began his talk before some three hundred Efficiency Society members and guests shortly after eight. “In keeping with its name,” the
New York Times
reported the next day, “the society ‘got down to business’ by eliminating long introductions of speakers.”
Since his ignominious exit from the library world in 1906, Dewey had rebranded himself as a management consultant focused on organizing organizations. He had the street cred. After all, Frederick Taylor himself had cited the decimal system as an early influence on his industrial system of classification. In 1912, Dewey published a forty-page book chapter, “Office Efficiency,” which began thus: “Man goes from barbarism to civilization by lerning [
sic
] to do things better, quicker, more easily or cheaply.” He was trying to transfer his various library innovations, which he dubbed the “spirit of 76”—a phrase also used by Jefferson to refer to the American Revolution—to the workplace. But his recommendations—such as using the decimal system for filing everyday
correspondenc
e—often bordered on the ridiculous. Dewey was a steadfast advocate of the paper clip—of the large steel spring, not the brass horseshoe variety—which he believed could eliminate “the few seconds spent in unfurling or uncreasing a paper.” He also insisted that desks should have windows at the left and that roll tops should be verboten as they “tempt to disorder.” This level of detail—along with his immersion in such mundane matters as dust management—would scare off many executives from organizing their offices à la Dewey. But his linguistic innovations held more promise. As he also argued, simplified spelling combined with tighter prose could save corporate America considerable time and labor.
Language was to be the focal point of Dewey’s after-dinner speech. He began by mentioning that he used to spell his name with an extra
le
before his own conversion forty years ago. According to Dewey’s estimate, 15 percent of the energy spent on typewriting machines was wasted. “Language,” he stressed, “is a machine for accomplishing results. It is meant to convey the thought of the writer to the mind of the reader and the simplest way in which this can be done is the best way. We use needless words and false motions.” Dewey gave a host of examples. He preferred “buyer” to “purchasing agent,” “many” to “a large number of,” and “invite” to “extend an invitation to.”