Category:

Religion and Social Movements

Charles Stearns Wheeler, the Transcendentalist Pioneer Who Inspired Walden

Charles Stearns Wheeler built a shanty in 1836 near Flint’s Pond in Lincoln, Mass., and the next summer Henry David Thoreau spent six weeks at it. It is widely accepted today that Thoreau got the idea to build his Walden cabin from his experiences living there.

The recent discovery of the Wheeler-Thoreau Shanty Site by Jeff Craig has been welcomed for revealing important historical details about the shanty. It had become a complete mystery in modern times. Not only did Craig’s discovery reveal the shanty’s exact location, but it also provided critical information about the dimensions, construction and similarities that the shanty had with Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond.

Charles Stearns Wheeler

Charles Stearns Wheeler, Transcendentalist Pioneer

It has been well established the Wheeler shanty influenced Thoreau to build his Walden cabin, but what led Charles Stearns Wheeler to build it in 1836? The historical record is not clear. There are no Wheeler documents in existence today that give us the specific reasons he built his shanty. However, some clues in the historical record do give us insight on why he built it.

In his 1951 biography, Charles Stearns Wheeler – Friend of Emerson, John Olin Eidson states, “In no way did Wheeler show himself the transcendentalist so much as in his experimenting with the back-to-nature philosophy by building and living in a hut on the shores of Flint’s Pond, a half mile from his home and two miles from Walden. He spent several college vacations in the hut from 1836 to 1842, possibly beginning with the six week vacation in July and August, 1836, between his junior and senior years at Harvard.”

Emerson’s Influence

Wheeler was a transcendentalist under the influence of Emerson when he built his shanty in 1836. Eidson writes, “Wheeler’s joining the transcendentalists was more an act of allegiance to Emerson than conversion by faith to any new philosophy…His hero worship of Emerson began soon after his first hearing Emerson preach, and his faith never wavered. Their personal association probably began with the editing of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and led to Wheeler’s joining the transcendental group.”

Wheeler had been actively working with Emerson before Emerson even published his influential essay Nature in September 1836. Nature helped define the Transcendental movement, and Wheeler was aware of Emerson’s beliefs about finding divinity in nature (and each individual) before the essay was published. Wheeler also belonged to the Transcendental Club from the beginning, when George Ripley held the first official meeting at his house on Sept. 18, 1836.

The Shanty Setting and Purpose

With Wheeler heavily influenced by Emerson, it is reasonable to assume that Wheeler was at least partially motivated to build his shanty at Flint’s Pond by his transcendental beliefs. By building his shanty on Wheeler land overlooking Flint’s Pond, Charles Stearns Wheeler established an important precedent. He built a dwelling where he would be able to pursue a back-to-nature experiment in outdoor living. Wheeler himself described the setting for his shanty as “a beautiful and secluded spot, about 15 miles from Boston” in a memorial that Wheeler wrote about his close friend and Harvard classmate Charles Hayward. Hayward had spent time at Wheeler’s shanty during the summer of 1838.

Wheeler’s birthplace, where he grew up in Lincoln, Mass.

Wheeler continued his description of Hayward: “The love of nature, of the country, and of rural enjoyments, were sentiments which were strong in his bosom from childhood. He adds ‘The quiet of Cambridge I shall be sorry to forsake; I hope I have learned from its many beauties of scenery to regard the natural world as something higher than mere trees and stones, –to see something above the material in the beauties around us. A part of the last summer of his life was spent in a beautiful and secluded spot [at Wheeler’s shanty], about 15 miles from Boston; and it was there that, in communion with Nature and her God, he determined to forsake all lower ambitions, and to devote himself to His service.”

The Natural World

This excerpt from Wheeler’s 1839 memorial to Hayward gives us a clear indication of Wheeler’s transcendental beliefs, and the importance he placed on perceiving “the natural world as something higher than mere trees and stones.” Through this memorial about his friend, Wheeler indirectly gave us the reasons why he built his shanty. Wheeler clearly emphasizes the transcendental connection between Nature and his shanty. He states, “and it was there that, in communion with Nature and her God, he determined to forsake all lower ambitions, and to devote himself to His service.” For Wheeler, his shanty was a place he could be “in communion with Nature and her God,” and pursue his transcendental aspirations.

Thoreau Followed in Wheeler’s Footsteps

Influenced by the six weeks he spent at Wheeler’s shanty in 1837, Henry David Thoreau built himself a cabin at Walden Pond in 1845. Thoreau originally tried to obtain permission to build his cabin at Flint’s Pond. But he was denied (probably by Lincoln resident Ephraim Flint, who Thoreau severely criticized in The Ponds chapter of Walden). Charles Eliot Norton, a friend of Emerson’s and a student in one of Wheeler’s classes at Harvard, said Wheeler, “introduced Thoreau to some of her [Nature’s] intimacies to which he had not then attained” (during their sojourn together
at Flint’s Pond).

Henry David Thoreau

Ellery Channing wrote a letter to Frank Sanborn in 1883 describing Wheeler’s Shanty experiment and Thoreau’s six-week stay there. Channing wrote, “Stearns Wheeler built a ‘shanty’ on Flint’s Pond for the purpose of economy, for purchasing Greek books and going abroad to study. Whether Mr. Thoreau assisted him to build this shanty I cannot say, but I think he may have; also that he spent six weeks with him there. As Mr. Thoreau was not too original and inventive to follow the example of others, if good to him, it is very probable this undertaking of Stearns Wheeler, whom he regarded (as I think I have heard him say) a heroic character, suggested his own experiment at Walden….It seems to me highly probable that Mr. Wheeler’s experiment suggested Mr. Thoreau’s, as he was a man he almost worshipped.”

The Seeds of Walden

Certainly, other reasons contributed to Thoreau’s decision to build his cabin at Walden Pond. However, the seeds for his Walden cabin experiment were planted by Charles Stearns Wheeler. He forever changed Thoreau’s destiny by helping him realize he wanted to emulate the same outdoor living experiment he had experienced at Flint’s Pond. As Laura Dassow Walls commented in her 2017 biography (Henry David Thoreau: A Life), “Thoreau had dreamed of living in a cabin by a pond ever since his idyllic summer with Wheeler, reading and writing in a shanty overlooking Flint’s Pond—a dream he shared with Margaret Fuller as far back as the autumn of 1841.”

Jeff Craig at the Wheeler shanty site today

The Wheeler shanty was “the birthplace” of the Transcendentalist’s back-to-nature outdoor living experiment. While Wheeler was influenced by Emerson in building his shanty in 1836, Wheeler has the distinction of being the first Transcendentalist to actually do it. It is interesting to speculate how history might have been changed if Thoreau had never known Wheeler, and had not spent six weeks at his shanty in 1837?

For more information about the Wheeler-Thoreau shanty site discovery, click here.

0 comment 469 views

Banbury Cake, the Puritans’ Favorite Treat

On Dec. 24, 1706, Judge Samuel Sewall brought a Banbury cake to a sick friend in Boston. Sewall, best known as one of the Salem witch trial judges, served for many years as chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature. He had a wide circle of friends, and kept a diary for 50 years. In it, he recorded much that happened of significance in Massachusetts during the late 17th and early 18th century. He also included his own inability to get a date.

Samuel Sewall

Sewall’s diary also reveals the workings of a staunch Puritan mind, which brings us to the Banbury cake.

Banbury Cake

The Banbury cake originated in a Puritan stronghold, the town of Banbury in Oxfordshire, England. It’s a pastry stuffed with spiced currants or other dried fruit. Banbury bakers have made them since the 16th century.

The first recipe appeared in Gervase Markham’s The English Huswife in 1615. It starts with four pounds of currants to make “a very good” (and very large) Banbury cake. Then one takes flower (flour), barm (leaven or yeast), butter, cream and sugar and “works it together for an hour.” The pastry surrounds the currants, and the whole thing is baked “according to bigness.”

Banbury cake, illustration by Leslie Landrigan

The characteristic Banbury cake has an oval shape with three slashes across the top. It got famous over the centuries. In 1869, Robert Chambers wrote, in his Book of Days, the cakes “are exported to the most distant parts of the world, one baker alone, in 1839, disposing of 139,500 twopenny ones.”

Banbury had a reputation for cheese, cakes and ale, though some have said its fame rested on cheese, cakes and zeal. They referred to the extreme Puritanism that characterized its inhabitants. Banbury’s zealous Puritans prompted the English poet Richard Braithwaite to write in 1638,

To Benbury came I, O profane one!
There I saw a Puritane one,
Hanging of his cat on Monday,
For killing of a mouse on Sunday.

You’ve probably heard a different poem about Banbury:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.

Banbury still has a cross, though not the original. The Banbury Puritans tore it down (too Papist) around the time of the English Civil War.

Statue of Banbury’s Fine Lady and cross (atop steeple)

Saye-and-Sele

One of the staunchest Puritans who lived near Banbury was William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye-and-Sele. He supported colonization of North America. In 1632, he got a deed of conveyance for a large tract of land along the Connecticut River and his company appointed John Winthrop the Younger to serve as governor. Saybrook, Conn., bears his name, along with another incorporator, Lord Brooke.

We know of other Puritans from Banbury who came to New England during the Great Migration. The Rev. Samuel Newman, for example, emigrated from Banbury to Dorchester (now a Boston neighborhood), then helped found Rehoboth, Mass. And Samuel Borman emigrated to Ipswich, Mass., from Banbury.

Arthur Wellington Brayley speculated the Massachusetts Puritans especially enjoyed the Banbury cake. Brayley noted how Samuel Sewall brought one to a sick friend in his 1909 book, Bakers and Baking in Massachusetts, Including the Flour, Baking Supply and Kindred Interests, from 1620 to 1909.

“Banbury was also famous for its Puritanism, and this savor may have extended to its cakes,” Brayley wrote.

Mr. Bayley’s Banbury Cake

Samuel Sewall wrote the following about his Christmas Eve visit in his diary:

Visited Mr. Bayley as I came home: he has a very sore Mouth. He tells me he has left off observing the distances of his Fits, is tired and done. I gave him a Banberry cake, of which he eat pretty well, complaining of his Mouth.

As a good Puritan, Sewall noted with approval all the shops opened for business the next day — Christmas.

And, to his credit, he later apologized for his role in the Salem witch trials.

There are plenty of recipes for Banbury cake on the internet. Here’s one we’ve adapted from The English Kitchen.

Ingredients

1 lb. all-butter puff pastry, cold
3/4 cup turbinado sugar
1/4 cup butter
scant cup sultana raisins
scant cup dried currants
1/2 cup finely chopped candied citrus peel
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon mixed spice (see recipe below)
1/3 cup granulated sugar

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400*F. Line two baking sheets with parchment.
Measure the fruit, spices, peel and butter into a bowl along with the turbinado sugar. Mix well, using your hands, until the mixture clumps. Shape into nine evenly sized balls.
Roll the chilled puff pastry out on a lightly floured surface to a 15-inch square, no more than 1/8 inch thick. Cut into nine five-inch squares. Place a ball of fruit filling into the middle of each square. Bring four corners up over the filling to meet in the middle and pinch shut. Pinch all four sides shut as well. Flip over and lightly flatten into a circle in the palm of your hand. Using a rolling pin, with the folds on the bottom, gently roll into circles. They should be four inches in diameter and 1/2 inch thick.
Brush the tops lightly with water. Measure the granulated sugar into a bowl and lightly press the wet tops of the cakes into the sugar.
Place onto the baking sheets, leaving plenty of space in between. Using a sharp knife, make three slashes into the top of each.
Bake for 25 minutes. Allow to cool on the baking sheets. Best eaten on the day.

Spice Mix

Combine 1 tablespoon cinnamon, 1-1/2 1 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 teaspoon coriander and nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/4 teaspoon each of ground cloves and all spice. Mix well and store in an airtight container out of the light for up to six months.

For more about the Banbury cake, click here.

Image: The Fine Lady and Banbury Cross By Jongleur100 – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7439313. This story last updated in 2022.

0 comment 596 views

Brahmin Anti-Semites Fight the Brandeis Nomination to the Supreme Court

Louis Brandeis didn’t become one of the greatest Supreme Court justices ever without a dogfight. The bitter battle over the Brandeis nomination to the high court in 1916 exposed a virulent strain of anti-Semitism among Boston’s elite.

But it was really his support of ordinary people against concentrated wealth that made the fight over Louis Brandeis’ nomination the most contentious in U.S. history.

Louis Brandeis

Not until the nomination of Robert Bork 71 years later would the Senate engage in such furious debate.

Brandeis believed the law should reflect social change and the real concerns of the world. The courts didn’t exist just to defend property rights, he thought.

His adversaries fought him tooth and nail. Over four months, witnesses, pundits, reporters, opponents and supporters joined the standing-room-only crowd in the Senate chamber during the nomination fight. His opponents feared he would bring his radical new ideas to the court.

They had good reason.

The Brandeis Nomination

President Woodrow Wilson, like Louis Brandeis, distrusted corporate bigness. He was the strongest supporter of antitrust laws among the three men who ran for president in 1912—himself, Theodore Roosevelt and President William Howard Taft.

Brandeis, a prominent Boston attorney known as the “People’s Lawyer,” supported Wilson for president. Brandeis had led public fights to improve workers’ safety, curb corporate power, break up railroad monopolies and expose insurance fraud. His campaign on behalf of Wilson took some of the progressive vote from Roosevelt and helped usher Wilson into the White House.

Several years later, as Wilson looked toward reelection, he needed to shore up his progressive credentials. So when Justice Joseph Lamar died in January 1916, Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis, 59, to the Supreme Court.

Brandeis in 1915.

“I am not exactly sure that I am to be congratulated,” Brandeis wrote his brother. He probably had an inkling of the swift and furious response his nomination would inspire.

Brahmins in Arms

In 1890, with a reputation as a brilliant and promising young corporate lawyer, Brandeis had accepted an invitation to spend a weekend at the summer home of Brahmin financier Henry Lee Higginson. A year later, Mrs. Higginson was the first to visit Brandeis’ wife, Alice, on her return from their honeymoon.

Henry Lee Higginson

But Higginson changed his views about Louis Brandeis after he fought J.P. Morgan’s effort to monopolize New England’s railroads. In 1916, Higginson from behind the scenes financed the battle against the Brandeis nomination to the Supreme Court.

The Wall Street Journal denounced Brandeis as “super-extreme” and “rabid.” The Los Angeles Times called him a “dangerous demagogue.”

Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, an open anti-Semite, circulated a petition to oppose the Brandeis nomination. Fifty-five influential people signed it with Brahmin last names like Gardner, Peabody and Adams, as in Charles Francis. Seven of the 16 presidents of the American Bar Association signed a letter that called Brandeis unfit.

Former President Taft called the Brandeis nomination “one of the deepest wounds” he had ever suffered as an American. He called Brandeis a muckraker, an emotionalist, a socialist, a hypocrite, utterly unscrupulous, a man of “infinite cunning” who had “much power for evil.”

Later, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, Taft came to like and respect Louis Brandeis.

The Fight

It took four months of charges and countercharges for Brandeis to win the nomination. He did not defend himself personally–not the custom of the time. His enemies excoriated him.

His opponents charged him with unethical behavior. One detractor accused him of breach of faith as counsel to the Interstate Commerce Commission because he supported a big rate increase for the railroads. His defenders took the witness stand to say he’d done no such thing.

Another witness, Clarence Barron, called himself a farmer and testified to Brandeis’ unfitness for the high court. Barron, a journalist, had actually attacked Brandeis during his fight against Morgan’s attempted railroad takeover.

The Rev. A.A. Berle testified that Boston’s Brahmins had enjoyed such total control of Massachusetts for so long they believed anyone who disagreed with them is “ipso facto a person who is either ‘dangerous’ or lacking in ‘judicial temperament’.”

Or as Justice William O. Douglas later put it,

… the fears of the Establishment were greater because Brandeis was the first Jew to be named to the Court.

Justice Brandeis

Ironically, Brandeis did not actively practice his religion. He did not belong to a synagogue, he celebrated Christmas and he enjoyed ham.

Brandeis had graduated from Harvard with a goal of making a lot of money as a lawyer so he could devote his time and energy to progressive reforms.

He and his college friend Samuel Warren formed a law firm, now Nutter, McClellen & Fish. Warren married a wealthy anti-Semite who refused to invite Brandeis to their wedding, despite their friendship and business ties.

But Brandeis didn’t complain of anti-Semitism before, during or after his nomination battle, according to his biographer, Melvin Urofsky. He probably understood the unsettling nature of his challenge to the settled thinking of the conservative Establishment.

On June 1, 1916, his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court was official. He then sat on the court for 23 years. As his opponents had feared, he changed the direction of the high court.

Impact on the Court

Brandeis interpreted the Constitution to guarantee the right to privacy, which he described as “the right to be left alone.” He created the Brandeis brief, legal arguments that depend on facts and figures from the real world, not just legal principles. Civil rights lawyers used Brandeis briefs to argue and win the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal school desegregation.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1925. Brandeis is on the right, bottom row.

Louis Brandeis sat on the court for 23 years. He did not change his mind about the threat posed by corporate monopoly. In 1933, his friend and confidante Edward Keating quoted him saying,

We can have democracy, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

With thanks to Louis D. Brandeis: A Life by Melvin Urofsky. This story updated in 2022.

0 comment 240 views

Elphage Daignault architect of the Sentinelle Affair

The Sentinelle Affair: Keeping The French in Franco American

In 1919, the Federation of Canadian Catholic Churches in America decided to tackle the need for better schools. Catholic parish schools adequately served younger students. But for high-school age students, the existing institutions were deemed inadequate.

The Federation intended to change that with a series of state-of-the-art high schools, and it would start in Woonsocket, R.I. At times, Franco Americans made up more than three-quarters of the Woonsocket population, many drawn from Canada by the vibrant mill economy.

Elphage Daignault, architect of the Sentinelle Affair, and his wife

The Providence Catholic Diocese unveiled plans for the Mont Saint Charles Academy in Woonsocket with fanfare. The Franco-American population embraced this proposal for a fine new school. But as fundraising for the school began, rumors began to circulate. The new school would conduct classes in English only. French would only be taught as a separate language course.

The decision to push Franco-American students through an English-speaking school touched a nerve and ignited the Sentinelle Affair. The Sentinellists decided to preserve the French language in the church, community AND schools..

At the center of the Sentinelle Affair stood Elphege J Daignault. As the controversy raged from 1923 through 1929, Daignault earned a reputation as a savior of French-Canadian culture – or an agent of Satan, depending on your point of view.

Daignault – born in Woonsocket in 1879 — studied at college in Montreal, Boston and New York. From 1922 to 1936 he served as president of the Canado-American Association.

Elphege Daignault and the Roots of the Sentinelle Affair

mont-saint-charles-academy-which sparked the sentinelle-affair.

Mont Saint Charles Academy Postcard

In the 1920s, the French language was under assault in states around the country. Many enacted English-only laws to discourage immigrants from retaining their native tongues in their new home in America.

Italian communities had founded the Knights of Columbus, closely aligned with the Catholic Church, to defend against attacks on Italian culture. The Franco-American community followed up with the Order of the Crusaders to serve the same purpose. A secret society, it worked to counter anti-Canadian bias.

By the time of the Sentinelle Affair, Elphege Daignault had already made himself a thorn in the side of the Providence Diocese of the Catholic Church. In 1914, he led a group that forced Bishop William Hickey to remove the French Marist Fathers from the Sainte-Anne Parish of Woonsocket and replace them with a local, native Franco American.

The plans for the English-only high school outraged Daignault and his supporters. A lawyer, judge and politician, Daignault opened up two lines of attack on the plan. He sued in state courts, accusing the church of improper use of funds by soliciting donations from Franco-American Catholics. The funds were used for projects that not only didn’t specifically serve their community, but actively undermined the community by attempting to snuff out the French language and culture.

Daignault argued the church method of pooling all donations did not comply with the terms under which it solicited them.

He took a second tack, filing appeals with the Vatican asking it to intervene in the matter and to halt the Anglicization of church schools.

La Sentinelle is Published

In addition to trying to win his case in the courts of the Vatican and Rhode Island, Daignault also decided to turn to the court of public opinion. To promote his point, Daignault took an active role in running a Woonsocket newspaper: La Sentinelle.

While many Franco-Americans supported Daignault’s views, they generally were not as hostile and direct while challenging the church.

He accused his enemies of murdering the French culture and of operating deceitfully.

He also turned the fight into an ethnocentric attack on Irish-American Catholics, a prominent force in the American Catholic Church. Irish clergy, he contended, were “national assassins.” And he called their French Catholic supporters traitors to their people. The church had embraced the unstated goal of Irish domination. Daignault also mocked the Irish for embracing the language of their oppressors – the English.

Daignault’s megaphone grew as newspapers in Holyoke, Mass. and Nashua, N.H. echoed his editorials, which he sometimes signed and sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Blaise Juliet.

Opposition to Daignault

Daignault’s voice was not the only opinion found in the Franco-American press. His critics voiced their opposition in newspapers in Manchester, N.H., as well as Holyoke, Woonsocket and Lawrence in Massachusetts.

They accused Daignault of trying to foment a modern crusade and creating controversies where none existed. He vilified his enemies, they charged, by challenging their patriotism simply because they disagreed with him.

Even many who agreed with Daignault could not support his vitriolic attacks on the church.

Taking the Fight to New Hampshire

Far from backing down, Daignault took his campaign to Manchester, N.H. In that state the language issue also simmered as Bishop George Albert Guertin worked to modernize New Hampshire’s Catholic schools. Guertin also planned to limit the speaking of French to just language classes.

Daignault attacked popular Franco-American priest P.J. Ernest Devoy, an advocate for education. Devoy, he charged, was bilingual but never used French in his official capacity. Daignault called it a “diabolical” practice.

But there was growing weakness in Daignault’s campaign. He could draw a sizable crowd to rallies, but regular Catholics were wary of his attacks on the church.

Then the Franco-American Catholic Federation in 1924, at its annual meeting at Willimantic, condemned Daignault’s tactics.

He lost his court challenges in the Rhode Island courts. His requests to the Vatican yielded no support. Finally, the machinery of the Catholic Church stopped tolerating his dissent.

In 1928, the Vatican declared it would hear no more from Daignault. The church authorized Bishop Hickey to excommunicate Daignault and 62 of his followers. Daignault then attempted two more Hail Marys. The Rhode Island Supreme Court threw out his final lawsuit. And when he sought legal protection within the Vatican courts against excommunication, he failed.

Finally, in January of 1929, Bishop Hickey delivered a message to Daignault and his supporters. If they did not renounce their position and repent before Easter, he would then bar them from entering any Roman Catholic Church.

Daignault caved. He publicly promised to seek forgiveness from the church authorities. He also apologized so the church would readmit him. Hickey called it the “greatest consolation I have had since the unfortunate movement was launched.”

The End of the Sentinelle Affair

The church defeated Daignault, but it did not completely silence him. He continued writing articles urging Franco-Americans to retain their culture. Then in 1933, a stroke slowed him substantially, and in 1937 he died of a heart attack.

This story updated in 2022.

Thanks to:

The Sentinel Affair (1924-1929) and Activist Survival: The Franco-American Experience in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, by Richard Sorrell. The Sentinelle Affair: A Study in Multilingual Language Practices, by Jason Peters. Elphège J. Daignault et le mouvement sentinelliste à Manchester, New Hampshire, by Robert B. Perrault. And Rhode Island and Connecticut newspapers.

Image: Mme et M. Elphège Daignault : d’après la photographie originale de l’agence photographique Pacific and Atlantic.

0 comment 269 views

Melvil Dewey, the Womanizing OCD Librarian who Organized the Olympics

Melvil Dewey had an obsession with the number 10. He slept 10 hours, wrote 10-page letters and created the Dewey Decimal System to organize libraries. He also had an obsession with women, as in kissing and hugging them. Which is why he’s described as having a “complex legacy.”

Melvil Dewey

Dewey had an enormous impact on the development of libraries in the second half of the 19^th century. He founded Columbia University’s library school and the American Library Association, and he started the traveling library, the library for the blind and the interlibrary loan. He also helped organize the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid, where he started a health resort. There his obsessions manifested themselves with $10 membership and a requirement that people turn out their lights at 10 p.m.

Another unpleasant Dewey trait showed up at Lake Placid: his bigotry. He only allowed white Christians into his resort.

Those biases were reflected within the Dewey Decimal System, which marginalized non-Eurocentric subjects.

Melvil Dewey

He was born in 1851 in Adams Centre in upstate New York, known as the Burned-Over District. Waves of reform and evangelism swept over it from 1800 to 1850. The district gave rise to Mormonism, Millerism, the Shakers, the Oneida Colony, abolitionists, suffragists, temperance, educational reformers and Melvil Dewey.

His parents, Joel and Eliza Dewey, made and sold boots and shoes from their little shop. Known as the hardest working people in town, they did not show much affection. That may explain their son’s predilection for unwanted hugging and kissing of women.

As a boy, he had a mania for system and classification. According to an aunt, he liked to arrange his mother’s pantry. He earned nickels and pennies for doing chores and then walked 10 miles to buy an unabridged dictionary with his savings.

His obsession with the number 10 began in high school when he discovered the metric system. He also realized his birthday, December 10, 1851, occurred exactly 52 years after the French National Assembly adopted the platinum meter bar as a standard unit of measurement. The meter measures one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris.

On Jan. 29, 1868 16-year-old Melville Dewey was attending class at the Hungerford Collegiate Institute, a college prep school. A fire broke out in the building, and Dewey carried as many books out as he could. The fire got worse, so he watched from outside in the cold. Exposure and smoke inhalation resulted in a bad cough that left him bedridden for months. His doctor didn’t think he’d live. That near-death experience left him obsessed with something else: efficiency, because life is short.

Amherst College

After high school he taught for a while, went to Alfred College for a semester and then transferred to Amherst College.

In his junior year at Amherst he got a job at the library, then in Morgan Hall. He fretted over the unsystematic way the library shelved books. Back then, libraries had their own systems, but they had to re-catalogue and re-index books when they acquired new ones.

Main quad at Amherst College

Dewey had an “aha” moment when he came up with the answer: a system using letters and decimals to organize books according to their contents. He suggested it to the Amherst Library Committee, which liked the idea. Not only did the committee let him implement it, it named him assistant librarian.

He graduated in 1874, but continued to work at the library. In 1876, he published A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloging and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library. Today, more than 200,000 libraries in 135 countries use it, according to one estimate.

Another of his ideas didn’t go over so well: spelling reform. He changed the spelling of his name from Melville to Melvil to eliminate those inefficient and unnecessary letters at the end of his name. He often signed his last name Dui.

In 1876, he left Amherst for Boston—regretfully, according to his efficient spelling.

“Sum day, dear Amherst, may it be my happy lot tu pruv how great iz the love I bear yu. Proud, always, everwher to be counted among yur sonz, I am Very truly, Melvil Dui.”

Boston

Two years after moving to Boston he married Annie Godfrey, the former librarian of Wellesley College. They had one son, Godfrey.

In Boston he started a company that made and sold library supplies, including the hanging vertical file, which he invented..

From Boston, now “Melvil” organized a librarian convention at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, which then led to the American Library Association (ALA). He also helped found the American Library Journal.

New York

Dewey and his family moved in 1883 to New York, where he got a job as librarian at Columbia University. There he founded the school of library economy. He encouraged women to apply, probably so he could get at them more easily. He admitted 17 women and three men. Applicants had to submit photos so Dewey could gauge their attractiveness. Dewey often commented “You cannot polish a pumpkin.”

Low Library at Columbia University

Columbia officials didn’t like having ladies at the college and decided to close the library school. But in 1888, Dewey left for Albany, where he got a job as state librarian. He also took his library sciences school with him, reestablishing it as the New York State Library School. (It returned to Columbia in 1926.)

Over the next 20 years, Dewey expanded and modernized the state library. Gov. Teddy Roosevelt called it “an inspiration to intellectual life throughout the state.” As state librarian until 1906, he created the first library for the blind, the first traveling library, the first interlibrary loan program and the first children’s library.

Olympics

In 1895, while serving as state librarian, he founded the Lake Placid Club, a health resort. There he could indulge all his whims, his obsessions and his bigotry. He banned Jews, blacks and other religious and ethnic groups. Dewey also continued his unwelcome hugging, kissing and touching of female subordinates.

And at Lake Placid, he could spell the way he wanted to. One 1927 menu listed “hadok, poted beef with noodls, parsli or masht potato, butr, steamd rys, letis, and ys cream.”

A promoter of winter sports, he also helped organize the 1932 Olympics at Lake Placid.

WPA poster for the 1932 Olympics

That Complex Legacy

He did have friends, who sometimes got tired of defending him against persistent complaints about his behavior. In 1924, Tessa Kelso, former head of the Los Angeles Public Library, wrote in a letter, “For many years women librarians have been the special prey of Mr. Dewey in a series of outrages upon decency.”

In 1906, he went on a trip to Alaska sponsored by the American Library Association. He hit on four prominent librarians during the trip. Unlike women he’d hugged and kissed in the past, they spoke up. Dewey had to quit as state librarian.

At least one woman welcomed his advances. In 1924, two years after his first wife died, he married Emily McKay Beal.

In 1930, at the age of 78, he had to pay his former secretary at the Lake Placid Club more than $2000 in a sexual harassment settlement.

System of Bigotry

It wasn’t just his personal behavior that inspired criticism. His Dewey Decimal System marginalized non-Christian religions and the works of people of color. It also classified lesbian and gay subjects under “Abnormal Psychology,” “Perversion,” “Derangement” and “Medical Conditions.”

New York State Library

Dorothy Porter, for 40 years librarian at Howard University, challenged the Dewey Decimal Classification. “Now in [that] system, they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had one other number—325, as I recall it—that meant colonization,” she said in her oral history.

Porter said that in white libraries “every book, whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everyone knew was a black poet, went under 325. And that was stupid to me.”

Porter developed a new system of classification. Ironically, she was the first African American to graduate from Columbia’s school of library science.

Melvil Dewey died December 26, 1931, of a stroke at Lake Placid.

In 2019, the American Library Association voted to take Dewey’s name off of its highest honor, the Melvil Dewey medal. ALA members voted to rename it the ALA Medal of Excellence.

With thanks to Joshua Kendall Melvil Dewey, Compulsive Innovator in American Libraries March 24, 2014; William Weigand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey and to Mass Moments, Dewey Proposes Library Classification System.

Images: Amherst College By David Emmerman – PicasaWeb, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10411732.

This story last updated in 2022.

0 comment 626 views

New Haven, ‘the Wickedest City’ – The Devil and Man At Yale in 1895

In 1895, hundreds of ministers and church leaders came to New Haven for a conference of the Christian Worker’s Association. Little did the city know the conference would give the city the title ‘wickedest city in the world.’

Image of Yale -- Creator of the Wickedest City

“A View of the Buildings of Yale College at New Haven,” lithograph, published by A. Doolittle & Son, New Haven. Courtesy of the Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database.

Some of the most high-profile young pastors and religious leaders of the age gathered at the conference to recharge and re-arm themselves in the battle for the souls of America’s young people. And New Haven welcomed them, though the city soon had second thoughts.

The group started a fiery debate around the country about whether New Haven had let Yale college turn the city into the wickedest city in the world.

Wickedest City

Rev. Reuben Archer Torrey of Chicago started the kerfuffle at a reception opening the conference.

Rev. R.A. Torrey

Torrey, himself a Yale Divinity School alumnus, took firm aim at his alma mater when discussing immorality. The sons of the American privileged class were running amok, with devastating impact on the working class people of New Haven. The Christian Worker’s association focused much of its work on reaching out to poor young people and diverting them from lives of sin. But the streets weren’t the only places where Satan did his work.

New Haven, Torrey suggested, must have filled a potter’s field with the corpses of young girls, their downfall and demise brought about by their association with the heathen offspring of the American elite who filled Yale’s dormitories. Many of those despicable youth – now in adulthood – could be found serving in Congress.

Yale, and as a result New Haven itself, were awash with debauchery, earning it the” wickedest city” moniker.

Torrey’s speech found a welcome audience among the assembled Christian missionaries. Also in the crowd, however, was a writer from the New Haven Palladium newspaper. And he dutifully recorded Torrey’s sentiments and published them.

Rapid Outrage

The news coverage incensed New Haven’s business community. Defenders of Yale reacted immediately.

Rev. David Burrill Pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City eventually publicly attacked Torrey for his past behavior. He told colleagues that a week-and-a-half after Torrey arrived at Yale, classmates had to drag him to his room in a helplessly drunken state. For the next year-and-a-half, Torrey lead a “dissipated” life until rescued by Christian students at Yale. Torrey denied this.

Timothy Dwight

Timothy Dwight had only recently taken on the role of Yale president. A religious man who lead Connecticut’s Congregational Church, Dwight had inherited an institution in financial distress. Dwight had taken the unusual step a few months earlier of mailing out a letter declaring that Yale was, in fact, a trustworthy institution of Christian values, a suitable institution for young men to attend.

With no time for distractions, Dwight announced he would offer no opinion on the discussion about morality at Yale. Nor would he take any part in the discussion over the wickedest city. He wanted to do nothing to fan the flames. But the flames hardly needed any fanning.

The Controversy Unfolds

As one newspaper put it: “People in New Haven are recalling and rehashing old stories of the hair-brained escapades of the sons of wealthy parents who come to Yale with more spending money than brains, and squander it in dissipation, to the lasting injury of their associates.”

And people didn’t have to cast far back in their memory for examples. The latest scandal had taken place in February of that year when Yale had to expel Elliott Shepard, great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Police had responded to Shepard’s dormitory and found him loudly partying with three women. After questioning, it turned out Shepard had imported a half-dozen prostitutes from New York for him and his friends.

Nevertheless, the pressure mounted on the association to tamp down the controversy. Torrey relented, and agreed to speak out on the matter because he felt it unfair that his words were damaging the city’s reputation.

Backtracking and Fueling The Fire

Rev. John Collins

On the final day of the conference, some 800 to 1,500 in attendance, Torrey and a local minister, Rev. John Collins, secretary of the association, teamed up to try to squelch the furor.

They made a mild rebuke of the Palladium, challenging the accuracy of its reporting and criticizing the newspaper for not checking its facts with Torrey before printing its articles.

“Did you hear me yesterday say that New Haven was the wickedest city in the world?” Rev. Torrey asked Rev. Collins. Collins replied that he had not and assured him that the report must have been an error.

The Resolution

The two ministers then offered a resolution to the conference that attempted to set things right.

“Resolved. That from our own observations and the statements of our president and secretary, the latter of whom has long lived in New Haven and as a city mission worker, had an unusual means of investigation, we believe New Haven to be, in nearly every way, a more than usually clean and moral city.”

Rev. Torrey had questioned the wisdom of the resolution but agreed to go along with it. Turns out he was right to worry. The resolution sparked fierce debate. Many in the crowd said that Torrey had only spoken what many ministers in the city had said about Yale and New Haven privately – often in more vivid terms than Torrey chose. Others questioned why the group should “whitewash” the city.

A stream of speakers rose, some to tell that they believed Yale was an upright institution. Any college had its share of young men who chose to live sinfully.

Mrs. Poteat Speaks on the Wickedest City

Rev. Edwin Poteat

Tucked in the audience were Rev. Edwin Poteat, of New Haven’s Calvary Baptist Church, and his wife Harriet Gordon Poteat.

Harriet Poteat was no minor figure. Her father, Adoniram Judson Gordon, was a well-known minister and missionary who founded Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. When she spoke, people listened. And she was in the mood to speak.

“When I heard Monday that Rev. Mr. Torrey had made these statements about Yale and New Haven, I said, ‘thank the Lord that he has the courage and Christian conviction to stand up and say so,’ she told the assembled crowd.

After seven years in New Haven, Poteat said she and her husband had witnessed a parade of students arriving at Yale. As a courtesy to their parents, the Poteats would ask the young men to dinner. The first year, they showed up and were polite. The second year, they showed up and had taken up smoking. The third year, they didn’t show up at all.

“They go down, down, down and I believe more boys are ruined in Yale University than any other place I know of,” she said. “I would as soon send my sons to Hell as to send them to Yale College.”

Fuel for the Fire

Poteat’s remarks fired up the assembly and members again began queuing up to tell of the tales of barroom wickedness they had observed in New Haven. Torrey and Collins quickly pushed their resolution to a vote.

The resolution passed, but Poteat’s speech had stolen the moment as newspapers across the country carried the news that Hell had been compared favorably to Yale.

Speculation began to grow about fallout from the conference. Reverend Poteat issued a statement that his wife was not inclined to retract her statement, though there was talk he would lose his pulpit. But before any effort at recrimination could build steam, the students of Yale stepped up.

Yale and the Wickedest City

As if on cue, one week after the Christian Worker’s conference, two Yale students, Henry Sage and Henry Bond, decided to have a night of debauchery with two local women, May Wilson and Annie True. Their escapades wound up splashed across the pages of newspapers.

Sage, a relative of millionaire New York financier Russell Sage, and the rest of the party, had spent an evening traveling the back roads drinking. Returning in the early morning hours, they had to summon a doctor when May Wilson collapsed. The doctor revived the young woman at the hospital and determined she had been under the influence of alcohol and some sort of drug.

Sage and other Yale students passed a hat and tried to bribe newspapers into suppressing the story. When that failed, they reached out to family who successfully had some newspapers pull the story. But it was too late. Other, independent newspapers published.

The Aftermath

As quick as it started, the story of the Devil and Yale died out. Rev. Edwin Poteat went on to have a long career, eventually serving as president at Furman University for 15 years. Rev. Collins would continue his work, with his efforts eventually laying the foundation for what is today the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Rev. Torrey preached throughout the world and wrote more than 40 books.

Timothy Dwight, meanwhile, developed a reputation as one of Yale’s most important presidents, helping steer the university toward a future in which the institution stressed academics and produced fewer “‘hair-brained escapades of the sons of wealthy parents.”

This story updated in 2022.

0 comment 403 views

Newer Posts

Older Posts