America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  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…educating 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 correspondence—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.”

  Over the next few years, Dewey devoted more and more energy to the efficiency movement. That fall, he hosted a meeting of the society at Lake Placid at which his wife presided over a session for the ladies on “Home Economics.” This expert on how to set a table insisted that silverware should always be placed “one inch from the edge of the table.” The following year, Dewey became chairman of a “Languaj Committee.” In January 1915, with the Efficiency Society struggling—despite the moniker, it was poorly managed, and the expense of maintaining its requisite ten clerks was creating a $200 hole every month—he was elected president. Dewey also couldn’t live up to the imposing title he now held. One afternoon during the Great War, he received word that a colleague from the Efficiency Society was about to visit him at work. Realizing that his office “was worse than a bear’s den,” he was forced to squirrel away his loose papers in a clothes basket, which was, in turn, hidden in a closet. (It would take a week for a secretary to unpack and organize the material in the basket.) In 1918, Dewey merged his outfit with the National Institute of Efficiency. But the new Washington, D.C.–based National Efficiency Society, which Dewey ran out of New York City, soon faltered. Dewey wasn’t able to collect enough $10 annual dues payments from America’s executives and engineers. By the early 1920s, this incarnation, whose motto defined efficiency as “the ratio of achievement to effort,” was, as Dewey was forced to acknowledge, “not ded, but sleeping quyt soundli.”

  However, unlike Dewey the management consultant, Dewey the “languaj” maven wasn’t just waved offstage. Several of his simplified spellings have been incorporated into the lexicon; catalog, like his first name, has done well without its vestigial last two letters, and New Yorkers now have their state thruway. Moreover, his celebration of the streamlined sentence has carried the day. Dewey’s ideas about prose would soon be echoed by his fellow upstate New Yorker, Cornell English professor William Strunk Jr., who, in 1918, completed the first draft of what has since become known as The Elements of Style—in its original form, this guide to word usage was passed out just to Cornell students. In fact, the governing maxim of this classic text, “Omit needless words,” closely parallels the takeaway from Dewey’s 1913 speech at the Aldine Club. (The book was later transformed into a megaseller when rewritten by the New Yorker’s E. B. White, who had studied with Strunk at Cornell, for a fortieth-anniversary edition in 1959.)

  Friday, November 25, 1927—25 N 27 in Deweyese—found the nearly seventy-eight-year-old Dewey in his office. He had an important letter to write.

  Dewey was then in Florida with his second wife, Emily Beal, an administrator at the Lake Placid Club since 1916, whom he had married two years after Annie’s death. After being sidelined with the flu for six weeks in the winter of 1925, Dewey decided to spend his remaining winters down south. He later explained, “6 fizicians told me that I was taking my lyf in my hands to try…to waste the vytaliti necesari to combat our northern cold.” But once again, a modest, private escape wouldn’t be sufficient; Dewey immediately began planning another cooperative community. In early 1927, he bought three thousand acres in the town of Lake Stearns in south-central Florida, which he got the state legislature to rename Lake Placid. On November 1, 1927, he opened a southern branch of his retreat headquartered in the spruced-up former Hotel Stearns, to which he gave a new moniker, “Club Loj.”

  Dewey was eager to thank Anne Colony, an assistant at the Lake Placid in the Adirondacks, for recommending his new stenographer, an attractive thirty-something redhead from Boston who had once worked as a secretary for Bishop Howard Robbins, the dean at Manhattan’s St. John the Divine Cathedral. Thus began his note of gratitude:

  Dear Anne: After a 2 week trial I report on your…selection of my companion and potential boss. I…wish I had bought her by the pound instead of the piece when the dainty little flapper got off the train. I told her she was better looking than I expected and would tell her later how good I thought her.… We conclude that you did a very good job for she is certainly a great improvement on the ½ dozen other candidates we experimented with.

  Without skipping a beat, Dewey continued dictating:

  As she is writing this herself I don’t dare say anything too complimentary for fear I would turn her bad while still young but she really is a mighty good girl. Thank you for finding her for me.

  When exposed to the decimal man’s lechery, the women in his inner circle were used to looking the other way. The following week, a reassuring Colony responded: “Your letter about DH pleased me very much and confirmed my judgment of her.”

  With such an inauspicious beginning, the relationship with DH was destined to end disastrously. Dewey’s boundary violations soon moved beyond the verbal to his standard repertory of hugs and kisses. In one incident in the summer of 1929 at the other Lake Placid, he embraced her in front of his wife. Rather than insisting that Dewey stop right away, his wife became an enabler; she allowed her husband to shift the onus onto DH. Under the arrangement the couple worked out, his secretary was supposed to tell Mrs. Dewey if she was ever troubled by his “unconventional” behavior, and only then would he agree to curb his excesses. Not long afterward, DH left his employ, and the Deweys forgot about her.

  But three months after her departure, DH’s lawyer sent Dewey a letter requesting $50,000 in damages for an alleged sexual “attack.” His former employee may have had character issues of her own, so it’s hard to determine whether his standard assortment of unwelcome hugs and kisses ever actually devolved into rape. Dewey claimed that DH had once confessed to him that she was prone to lashing out both verbally and physically—that she was a biter and scratcher. Dewey’s conclusion that DH was “unbalanst” and suffered from “impulses symtums” could have been tru
e; on the other hand, he may well have been attempting yet again to blame someone else for his own out-of-control behavior. Upon learning that Dean Robbins sided with DH, he wrote his lawyer, T. Harvey Ferris, that the cleric may be “a strong Puritan and honestly somewhat shocked that a man of high ideals should kiss a secretary, but he surely knows it has been done in thousands of cases and is too big a man to distort this into criminal intent.” (It’s unclear both how Dewey came up with this particular multiple of ten and exactly how many of these other cases involved him.) With Robbins willing to testify on behalf of DH, whose dream team of three savvy lawyers included a seasoned Tammany Hall politician, Dewey was in big trouble. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Ferris informed him, “This is no gentleman’s game.” In February 1930, Ferris negotiated a settlement, which Dewey quickly accepted. While admitting no wrongdoing, Dewey agreed to fork over to DH a total of $2,147.66 for lost salary and legal fees. His bill from Ferris came to another $435.51, a third of which went to Pinkerton detectives who had been hired to dig up dirt on DH and her lawyers.