Birthday: If, in Borges' vision, paradise was a sort of library, in Melvil Dewey's, it was a library staffed entirely by beautiful lady librarians.

Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey (1851-1931)
Pioneer of library science, social reformer, author

In 19th century America, nothing set one’s course as a revolutionary like being named for one. As the fervor of the 1848 European revolts swept the world, Melvil Dewey’s dad caught the bug and named his fifth and last child for the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth.

Melville, for his part, determined early in life that his calling was to reform education for the masses. While in college, he set up the Library Bureau, a company that set the standard for library card catalog cards and cabinets. Then he created a new classification system for the organization of his cards in his cabinets, copyrighting the Dewey Decimal System in 1876, the year of the American Centennial Exposition and its celebration of American creative genius (in 1893 the Bureau unveiled the vertical hanging file at the Chicago World’s Fair). 

In one his few life fails, Dewey set up the American Metric Bureau- also in 1876- to reform the national weights and measures (churlishly, the only 2016 presidential candidate to champion the issue, Lincoln Chafee, never once mentioned the name of his movement’s patron saint). In a spare moment, he set up another chimerical club- the Spelling Reform Association- and changed his name to Melvil Dui, though the surname proved provocative and was soon retired.

All these things Melvil Dewey did before he graduated from Amherst in 1877.

A freshly-minted Master of Arts, Dewey formed the American Library Association in 1877 and became editor of Library Journal. He spent years as its secretary, and two as its president in the 1890s. 

He moved to New York in 1883, becoming Chief Librarian of Columbia University. There he created the first American school of library science; by the time he moved to Albany to become the New York State Librarian in 1888, he took the library school with him (refunded as The New York State Library School, it did not return to Columbia until 1926). 

Ever the top-downer, he championed the idea that state librarians should control school and public libraries. From that vantage point, he pressed the use of his classification system by them; a separate system, developed by Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam in 1897, gained control of the academic and government library market over the Putnam's forty-year tenure.

Dewey pioneered the traveling library- a collection of 100 well-chosen books (he picked them) sent to rural hamlets with no library services. In those days, public libraries were few, in big cities, and often required memberships. At the same time Dewey ran the State Library, he doubled as secretary and CEO of the University of the State of New York from 1888 to 1900.

In 1895, Dewey founded the Lake Placid Club, an upstate New York resort where educators would find rest, health and improvement at low cost. The idea took off though Dewey’s control-freak side imposed all manner of restrictions on membership, most notably, barring Jews. The policy blew up in 1905; the University Regents declined to remove Dewey as State Librarian, but a public rebuke from them prompted his resignation.

As might be expected of a man who always knew better, Dewey piled up enemies like cordwood and cherished them all. He also knew least about himself, constantly falling prey to a truly Bob Packwood-like, nerdy passion for women. When he set up his library school, Dewey stared down the Columbia board’s opposition to admitting women; for him, training up women librarians was one part progressive thought in action, and one part anticipating the Hollywood casting couch. It was rumored that he asked for their bust sizes with their applications. Though the rumor turned out to be false he did require a photograph from each female applicant since "you cannot polish a pumpkin." During a ten day trip to Alaska with the American Library Association Board, no less than four leading American librarians ratted him out for putting the move on them; he was ostracized for the rest of his life.

He put the issue more high-mindledly, declaring, “To my thinking, a great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand, and, above all, a great heart. And when I look into the future, I am inclined to think that most of the men who achieve this greatness will be women.” 

Dewey was undeterred. It was a big world and much in need of reform. In 1906, he and a group of other American worthies persuaded Andrew Carnegie to underwrite the new incarnation of his Spelling Reform Association as the Simplified Spelling Board. Dewey loved calling his creations Boards and Bureaus, rather than associations. The latter term implied others might have a say in what the organizations did.

Spelling reform was ever a cause for intellectuals and eccentrics; Dewey now had access and the means to impose it from the top down. He persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt, already an enthusiast, to issue an executive order requiring government agencies to adopt the Dewey System.

The plan was ridiculed by the press and politicians alike. The Constitution guarantees Americans freedom of spelling, went the argument. This was a gross presidential overreach. Later that year Congress directed government agencies to stick to their Webster’s. The Supreme Court weighed in: the United States Reports would stay old school, too.

Roosevelt, whipped, rescinded the order. Dewey pressed ahead, irritating Carnegie, who felt spelling reform would advance best if suggested, rather than imposed. His concerns ignored, Carnegie left the Board out of his will. After his death in 1919, it ran out of money and closed up shop.

Dewey turned his energies back to the Lake Placid Club, vastly expanding it (among its employees, who numbered over 1100 by 1923, was the poet Marianne Moore) and opening a second one during the Florida real estate boom of the 1920s. From 1899 to 1907 Dewey sponsored an annual Lake Placid Conference to host various reform movements, including one led by Ellen Swallow Richards, the founder of the home economics school.

As the Club's semi-benevolent dictator, Dewey made sure his theories of spelling were put to good use. A September 1927 menu is headed "Simpler spelin" and features dishes like Hadok, Poted beef with noodls, Parsli or Masht potato, Butr, Steamd rys, Letis, and Ys cream. It also advises guests that "All shud see the butiful after-glo on mountains to the east just befor sunset. Fyn vu from Golfhous porch."

Dewey died at his Florida club the day after Christmas, 1931. The following year, the last of his great projects came to fruition: his son Godfrey, who was the US ski team’s manager, and US contingent’s flagbearer at the 1928 Winter Games’ opening ceremony, enlisted his father to help him land the 1932 games for the Lake Placid Club. The Games came, were a huge success, and put the resort on the map as an international destination.

Comfortably stuck in the past, the Club fell into the news again in 1954. A New York Times article criticized the Club for its refusal to admit African-Americans and Jews. The B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League filed a complaint about the Club. The dispute lasted several years until the League decided to drop the charges of discrimination in 1959. Representatives of the Club claimed that its members were religiously motivated and, therefore, wished to vacation as Christians among Christians in order to "strengthen their appreciation of and attachment to Christianity.” The 9600-acre resort, which contained a theater, library, dozen of tennis courts, seven golf courses, a fire department and a school for the employee’s kids, thus became a sort of church and anticipated the exclusionary religious freedom arguments roiling public debate today. Under Dewey's rules, the Club was strict about membership, avoiding fashionable vacationers (and thus creating its own set), not serving alcohol in the dining room, and only accepting guests who came recommended by other members. The criteria for membership remained intact until 1976.

By then, the world had changed. Families didn’t relocate to a resort for the summer any more. Membership declined; the Club’s last bow was serving as IOC headquarters for the 1980 Winter Olympics. After It closed, the buildings sat, derelict, a target for vandalism and arson, until the last was torn down in 2000.

Melville’s son, Godfrey, died in 1977, having served many years as honorary chair of the Phonetic Spelling Association.

The American Library Association forgave Dewey his skirt-chasing and inducted him into its hall of fame in 1951. During his long life, he published ten books, all setting out rules for running libraries.


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