Melvil Dewey

Melvil Dewey, pioneering sexual harassment since the Gilded Age.

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“”For many years women librarians have been the special prey of Mr. Dewey in a series of outrages against decency.

—Tessa Kelso, the head librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library, in a letter dated to 1924.

Melvil Dewey (December 10th, 1851–December 26th, 1931) was the American inventor of the Dewey decimal system (DDS). Dewey also revolutionized the public library system. Dewey is almost singlehandedly responsible for feminizing the job of librarian, contrary to the attitudes of the time. This enabled many women to achieve a form of economic independence previously inaccessible to them. However, Dewey was also a notorious sex pest whose conduct was so egregious he was cancelled for it in 1905! Dewey was also a notorious racist even by the standards of his day. A club Dewey owned explicitly forbade Jewish, Catholic, and African American membership in the club in its bylaws, which because Dewey was a New Yorker got him cancelled, again, for antisemitism (no one in a position of power gave a shit about the anti-black racism) in 1905. Such "restricted clubs" were common into the 1960s, so his cancellation was more due to the fact that he was a public employee who owned such a club.

Early life and general oddities

Starting in his childhood, Dewey took on a deep, almost compulsive, attraction to organization. Dewey promoted efficiency in all walks of life, up to chopping off the two additional letters of his own first name ("Melville" becomes "Melvil"), and generally removing any extraneous letters that Dewey perceived as getting in the way of proper pronunciation. He was so committed to spelling reform that, for a time, he even changed the spelling of his last name to "Dui." Dewey claimed that this practice could remove three years off of a student's education.

Amusingly, a friend of Dewey once clocked him speaking exactly 180 words per minute during a lecture.

Pioneering sexual harassment

Dewey's unwitting and unwilling harem, or put more politely: the graduating class of the 1887-1888 School of Library Economy at Columbia University. Dewey is the ugly bastard highlighted in red.

One prominent librarian, a woman named Adelaide Hasse, approached Dewey, seeking support for an ambitious new project of hers. Dewey agreed, ostensibly because he recognized her talent. Hasse had invented a new way to organize government archival systems, but was "disappointed" when a male colleague took the credit. Hasse had since transferred to a position as librarian at the New York Public Library, which came with a "better salary."

Hasse had then set up a correspondence with Dewey, who suggested they meet privately to discuss Hasse' project. Hasse, encouraged by this, agreed, and so met up with Dewey in Albany, New York. Dewey, however, had no intention of actually supporting Hasse' project. He instead intended for the meetup with Hasse to be little more than a "weekend-long date." Hasse, incensed by this, fled almost immediately after Dewey took her on a private car trip. We don't know exactly what transpired, but it can be readily inferred that Dewey's conduct was incredibly "offensive": (as Hasse later described it to her colleagues) even by the standards of the time.

Just to place this in proper context, while this story sounds like it could have involved Harvey Weinstein, this took place over a century and a decade before the Weinstein allegations came to light. Dewey's conduct was so intolerable that he got cancelled for it in 1905. This was during an era when sexism was openly normalized (women would be "judged harshly" for reporting sexual harassment), but Dewey's conduct was so egregious that many women like Adelaide Hasse felt that they had a strong enough case to present to the public.

Dewey was for decades one of the world's most influential librarians, but was also hated by the librarian community for his misconduct. Ironically enough, many women owed their status as librarians to Dewey. Dewey insisted on "admitting women" to the then male-only librarianship program at Columbia University.

Dewey was well aware that the system of public libraries he envisioned required cheap labor, and he saw women as the source of that cheap labor. Although Dewey championed female employment in the library sphere, he also thought that harassment came with the territory, and acted accordingly. He was so obsessed that he would require potential employees to get "bust measurements" as part of the application process. Dewey would also insist on "entertaining" female librarians in private, and observers once saw Dewey casually groping two live-in assistants of his, both of whom were women.

The incident that ended up getting Dewey cancelled was a cruise that Dewey took in Alaska. The purpose of which was to "unwind" after a "long ALA conference" and ostensibly "plan the future of the newly envisioned American Library Institute." For the women onboard, however, it was no vacation, but more like a slog through hell. Four women would come forward separately accusing Dewey of sexual harassment. The ALA, an organization Dewey co-founded, forced him out in response. Many female librarians, including Hasse, were given the chance to testify, but many refused, perhaps fearing for the careers they had fought so hard to build.

As for Dewey himself, he recognized his behavior was "unconventional," but stopped short of outright calling it harassment. It remains unclear as to what Dewey's conduct exactly looked like, and this isn't exactly surprising either considering the social mores of the time, but we can know for certain that his behavior was especially bad even by the standards of the time. In Dewey's own words, he was characterized as a "a hopeless scamp that no self-respecting librarian [would] dare be in the same county with."

Fifteen years after Dewey was expelled from the American Library Association, Dewey would be subject to another investigation, this time headed by the then head of the Los Angeles Public Library Tessa Kelso. Kelso would find that Dewey allegedly harassed his own daughter-in-law, prompting her to move out of his house. Dewey, of course, denied the allegations and called Kelso and the other investigators "old maids" who wanted to "ruin his career." The investigation was eventually dropped.

In 1930, yet more allegations came out. This time Dewey's former stenographer accused him of sexually assaulting her, including forcibly "kissing" her in a black taxi. Dewey dismissed the allegations as "blackmail", but eventually paid $2,147 to "hush" the allegations.

Like many powerful men of the time, Dewey's history of sexual harassment was treated by biographers as a footnote to his career. Biographers would call Dewey "strange" or "compulsive," but never actually prioritize his history of sexual harassment, instead focusing on his contributions to the library system.

Dewey made the system of female librarianship possible, but we will probably never know just how many women's careers he ended or hindered in his "quest for sexual power." It is important to keep this in mind when remembering this man's life and deed.

Classism

See the main article on this topic: Classism

Dewey was a classist. He believed that libraries should only stock what he thought of as "quality literature." This meant literature that taught people to be "good and obedient Christians", like the Bible. His recommended content for the masses included morality tales and "intellectually gentle personal guidance." Works of humor and entertainment would not "improve" the moral "quality" of the people and so Dewey recommended they be removed from collections. To quote Book Riot:

Entertainment might poke fun at authority. Worse still, politically subversive material might make people want something better out of life than a 12-hour shift in a coal mine every day.

Fortunately Dewey's classist beliefs did not make it into general academia, as "once trained librarians cycled out of his Albany-based School of Library Economy, they went right ahead and started stocking fiction."

Racism

Inherent to the system

Dorothy Porter, the woman who helped to decolonize Howard University's archival system.

Second edition of the Dewey decimal system.

“”…religions Dewey associated with people of color ended up with way less space than the “real” faith.

—Anna Gooding-Call

Racism can unfortunately be found in the DDS itself. The way this manifests is through how the DDS categorizes subjects, and how it places importance on those subjects. It is important to remember the reasons Dewey wanted a public library system. He was most definitely not an altruist. He believed the poor should be "content with non-unionized factory work," and that Christianity was the "only real religion." As for people of color, Dewey did not address them at all.

The extent of Dewey's racism can be seen in how he classifies religions. Each Dewey heading contains within itself with ten subjects, divided each into sub-topics that "add digits" to the end of each numeral. Six out of ten major subjects in the 200s deal with Christianity, which to emphasize the point again, Dewey considered the "only real religion." Three of the remaining subjects deal with topics either "explicitly or implicitly" related to Judeo-Christianity. All non-Christian religions get the whole of the 290s, one single division, to themselves. Islam, the Bahá'í Faith, and Bábism all share 297. Religions of "Indic origin," including Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, get 294. Hinduism in particular gets all of 294.5 to itself. Meanwhile, Germanic mythology gets the entirety of 293 to itself, evidently indicating what the organizers of the DDS considered to be more important a subject.

299 covers "everything else," and this division is probably the most obvious example of racism in the DDS. To give an example of this, religions of black African descent get the entire whopping division of 299.6 to themselves. Even more egregiously, the entire rich religious traditions of Haiti get relegated to, and bear with us here, 299.6097294. The rich religious traditions of Haitian origin get much less space dedicated to them than the Germanic mythology of European origin, because someone decided that Haitian religions were less important than religions of white, European origin.

Now one may think this isn't that big of a problem, but the crux of the issue lies in that gigantic cutter number itself. Anna Gooding-Call puts it bluntly:

Now think about the last nonfiction library book you borrowed. If you have one handy, grab it. If you happen to be reading in the library, amble on over to those shelves and take a gander at the spines of those books. Do you see any that bear a cutter number longer than four digits?

Of course not! Book spines aren’t that big and catalogers have better things to do than manage seven-digit cutter numbers. What that means is that catalogers boil down long cutters out of necessity. In the case of 299.6097294, our call number for Haitian religions of Black people, it’s likely to end up as 299.609, or even just 299.6. That would lump it in with all faiths with origins associated with Black people, both in and out of Africa, aside from Black Muslims. (They get to go in 297.8, “Islamic Sect and Reform Movements.”)

So it's incredibly insidious that, because book cutters are going to get shortened as a matter of practicality, that books on Haitian religion are going to be much harder to find than books on Germanic mythology. Local cataloguing conventions will make this worse, as often times books will get organized by authorial name rather than the cutting number. This means that anyone interested in finding a book on Haitian religion will have to slog through the entire shelf of non-Haitian religions of black African origin "alphabetically by author."

The ethnicity and nationality category (305.8) isn't immune to this either, as the Germanic peoples get a nice, clean cutter of 305.82, whereas 305.895 covers everyone of East and Southeast Asian origin. The Greeks get 305.88 to themselves. It doesn't take a genius to realize the problems with shoving two billion people with incredibly diverse languages, cultures, religions, and "collective priorities" into what Gooding-Call sardonically calls the "cataloguing equivalent of a studio apartment" while singular European ethnic groups get the cataloguing equivalent of entire continents unto themselves.

Now while advances in computer technology have to some extent helped to mitigate this issue, it is not a complete fix. After all, not everyone has access to computer search engines where they can easily search for whatever book they want without having to slog through the DDS. There have been attempts to "decolonize" the library catalogue system, with one scholar in particular, Dorothy Porter, placing the names and works of black scholars alongside white scholars, but no particular system has been widely adopted to replace the DDS, so the systemic problems built into the DDS remain.

Antisemitism

Lake Flaccid Placid, home of the Lake Placid Club.

Dewey was the owner of the Lake Placid Club, and he helped to write the policies banning Jewish, Catholic and African-American membership. Dewey was so virulently antisemitic that he went as far as to buy land adjacent to the Club to prevent Jews from so much as looking at it. One can imagine Dewey broke out in hives whenever a Jewish person entered a ten mile radius of his club's location.

Dewey's exclusionist policies went so far as to refuse to hire minority workers. Even other Club members were discomforted by the egregiousness of Dewey's racism, although that did not stop them from joining the Club. Apparently Dewey had stupidly left the antisemitic rulebook that he and his wife had written out, available for others to read (since this was a "librarian shindig" people were going to read it). The person who read it was a friend of Henry Leipziger, a Jewish member of the New York Library Association's circulation committee. Together Leipziger and his friend read the rulebook that explicitly forbade Jewish membership. Leipziger had tried for years to join the Lake Placid Club, to no avail. Now he knew why.

Leipziger did the "opposite" of shutting up about Dewey's racism, and went public. Leipziger specifically felt that, as Dewey was the "state librarian" of New York, that Jewish tax-dollars were being wasted on an unashamed antisemite. Leipziger hired a lawyer to boot Dewey from his job, but because of Dewey's prominence he managed to keep his employment following a brutal review, albeit only through the "skin of his teeth." Following public outrage, however, Dewey lost his state employment.

No one bothered to comment about Dewey's racism against Native Americans, black people, Hispanics, or Asians. These people were not "woke" by any measure of the term. Dewey managed to be such a racist asshole that even the racist assholes surrounding him were disgusted.

See also

• Jeffrey Epstein, a prominent sexual predator much like ol' Mel here
• Harvey Weinstein, ditto
• James Buchanan, another guy who was so racist even the racists in his day hated him