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Amherst College

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.

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What the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges in New England Said in 1972

In 1972, undergraduates at the Yale Daily News published The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, an entertaining but blatantly sexist description of what it was really like to attend several hundred colleges.

The Yale newspaper continues to publish an annual Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, one far more anodyne and less offensive than its earliest version. Imagine such a publication today describing Trinity College coeds as “unattractive.”

That first Insider’s Guide actually contained the sentence, “One [Trinity] history professor explained, ‘These girls don’t have to worry about being molested. Their faces are their chaperones’.” Really.

Many schools were going coed at the time, and women and minorities clamored for fair treatment. And yet it apparently didn’t occur to the editors of The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges that they might offend female readers with comments like, “The young ladies are especially warm and are reportedly easily convinced of the virtues of losing their virtue.”

Colleges in the early 1970s were loosening their rules in the midst of the sexual revolution. And campuses all over the country were reeling from the unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

So the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges found an audience for answers to such questions as “Do students smoke pot?” “How hard is it to get a date?” “Do the dorms have curfews?”

Yale campus

Insider’s Guide to the Colleges

Tufts, which had gone coed, could be better than Williams or Wesleyan for men because, “There is something discouraging about the wild-eyed, hangdog look students develop at those isolated, all-male institutions,” the Insider’s Guide reported.

Bennington College won praise for its relaxed parietals. About the only rule it had was to ban lighted candles in dormitories.

Back then, people considered Bennington expensive at $5,000 a year for tuition, and you could go to UMass for $1,000 if you lived in state.

Sports didn’t get much attention at UConn.

And something else has changed since then. The Insider’s Guide described “the perennial middle class,” with rising expectations and hopes. It turned out to be not so perennial, after all.

Below are excerpts from the guide about New England colleges.

Amherst College

1250 men.

Amherst men tend to be strapping, athletic, handsome, friendly, preppy types of guys. They study hard but not too much, and they owe much of their image to the prep-school students – a third of the student body. The college held frequent lectures, rock-and-roll concerts, dances and mixers that the students from three nearby colleges attend.

“Another advantage we should mention is the active drug trade in the area – if you’re interested in that sort of thing,” wrote the Insider’s Guide.

Bates

650 men, 550 women.

The authors lumped Bates with small, out-of-the-way liberal arts colleges that had a good reputation. Bates was ‘superintellectual’ with no social life. Lewiston, Maine, was a hole, and the dull campus ‘unceasingly Georgian.’ The male-female ratio at Bates, provided ‘virtually unparalleleld social boredom.’ (But not for the female students, presumably. There were 650 men, 550 women.)

The school won praise for its many academic offerings and Robert Chute, a poet and scientist on the faculty. The administration, though, was characterized as autocrats who won’t retire ungracefully resist change and make everyone else uncomfortable.

Bennington

61 men, 500 women.

Bennngton, wrote the Yalies, was a peculiar place where both pot-smoking and touch football were on the rise. But whether a student would enjoy Vermont’s rural beauty depended on the ability to endure mud – and the near-constant bombardment of music and dance. For the Bennington girl of limited patience, the authors recommended a car – or a jet.

The unstructured college had no grades and no traditional organizations, though the students took their studies seriously. The Insider’s Guide included an anecdote about a ‘coed’ (male student) caught by a female student emerging from the shower naked. She smiled, said “hi” and walked past.

Boston College

4772 men, 1780 women.

Any school in or near Boston got a thumbs up from the authors because of the lively cultural offerings and preponderance of students. They simply described Boston College as Catholic, a university and located in Boston, actually Chestnut Hill. “But 25 cents and 20 minutes on the MTA will get you to Boston,” they note.

Boston University

6,070 men, 8,582 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges called Boston University a typical big urban university. Hungry hordes of Harvard and MIT men are the bane of a BU man’s existence, noted the authors. The school has strong offerings in political science and fine arts. It’s so big, you can take many course offerings, including an African language. But you can be as forgotten as an MTA schedule.

Bowdoin

947 men, 96 women.

“The premier reform this past year was the welcome arrival to the Maine wilderness of 100 bright-eyed damsels,” reported the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges. Bowdoin attracted intelligent, affluent middle-class types. Ten percent of its students were black as a result of a massive student recruiting program begun by the mostly white class of 1965. Additionally, Bowdoin had considerable academic strengths, strong fraternities and an overemphasis on sports – “albeit out of proportion to any actual quality on the part of the teams.”

Bowdoin

Brandeis

1,100 men, 1,100 women.

Brandeis in 1972 was a New York Times kind of place. High-scoring Jewish kids from New York and Boston apply to Brandeis, along with one Ivy, usually Columbia. A confrontation took place in 1969, when African-American students occupied the communications building in a demand for Afro-American studies. The president gave the students amnesty and tried to reconcile with them. The Yale students called him, ‘an extreme in-vogue liberal.’

Brown

2,800 men, 1,150 women.

Brown had just merged with Pembroke, and Brown men held some antipathy toward the former Pembrokers. The men resented their academic success, and preferred to date women from other schools on weekends, the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges reported.

“The problem with the coeducational experience is those women actually want to learn things,” wrote the Yale students. And yet, they concluded, the Brown experience is far from oppressive.

Main Green at Brown

Central Connecticut State College (now University)

3,417 men, 3,275 women.

What is now Central Connecticut State University was then described as, ‘a hodgepodge of new programs, archaic majors and overcrowded classes.’ CCSC experienced growing pains as it planned to double in size, resulting in, ‘an irritating mixture of the academic and practical. Experiencing growing pains as it planned to double in size.

Clark

958 men, 716 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the College reported that Clark’s fastidious admissions department had done a unique job in picking extremely individualistic people. It praised the school for its psychology and geography departments, and cited the Heinz Werner Institute as one of the finest research centers for developmental and comparative psychology. Clark, the guide concluded, offered a top education and a social wasteland.

Colby

837 men, 697 women.

The Insider’s Guide had no love for Colby, described as having apathetic students, a dissatisfied faculty and not much to do in Maine. The college also still gave preferential treatment to alumni offspring.

Connecticut College

359 men, 1175 women.

Recently shed of its ‘for Women’ name, Connecticut College competed with seven sister schools for students because of its outstanding faculty. And it did it despite lacking the luster of Vassar, the notoriety of Sarah Lawrence or the location of Radcliffe. Doris Day girl-next-door predominated on campus, but the problem is Connecticut College isn’t really next to anything. It cannot escape New London, the guide concluded.

University of Connecticut

7,863 men, 5,159 women.

One student summed up the school in five words. “I like UConn. It’s fun.” It was a typical huge state university, though hugely ridden with strife. One-third of the students left every year for academic reasons. Sports, the Insider’s Guide reported, were ‘little heard of.’

Dartmouth

3500 men.

Dartmouth had earned a reputation as an animal school, full of men who can’t control themselves when they get within a certain distance of woman. One freshman class was said to have more than 100 high school football captains, the guide reported.

But the authors acknowledged change at Dartmouth. Students devoted a recent Green Key weekend to workshops on Kent State, Cambodia and the Black Panthers. Almost as an afterthought, they add Dartmouth offered a superb education with an especially good math department.

East campus, Dartmouth

University of Hartford

1807 men, 1440 women.

U-Har was steeped in the finest traditions of suburbia and the American dream, wrote the Insider’s Guide. Located in the wealthy suburb of West Hartford, it stood among three excellent golf courses. The campus had a bourgeois air, but the student quality was improving and so were the academic departments. Plus, noted the guide, “You can have a good-as-hell time.”

Harvard

4,700 men.

The Yale authors offered four advantages to Harvard: interesting and diverse undergraduates, Boston location, prestige and a fair education without working too hard. Among the disadvantages: graduate students often taught undergraduates. Plus Harvard students tend to be obnoxious big shots. The campus was divided into wonks, jocks and preppies, so it was easy to wash out socially.

Another drawback: Though swarming with girls, Harvard ordered all girls out of the rooms at midnight.

“You can get better higher learning elsewhere,” the authors snarkily concluded.

Holy Cross

2,400 men.

Holy Cross has not wavered in its intent of educating concerned Christian gentlemen, wrote the guide. The school’s social life disappointed, but promised to improve soon with the introduction of coeds in 1973.

University of Maine at Orono

4,025 men, 3,000 women.

Though it offered a course in meat cutting, UMO ranked among the better state universities. And the gap between rules and reality bordered on the unbelievable. Liquor was forbidden on campus, but the ban was observed as well as the speed limit on the Maine Turnpike, noted the guide.

The students enjoyed skiing, and drinking ranked as the most popular activity on campus. In many ways, though, Orono was a relic from another age, when jocks score well and ROTC remained untarnished. Spanky and Our Gang was the last group to play there, and the political and cultural revolution had only begun to penetrate the Maine woods.

Hannibal Hamlin Hall at UMO

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

3,825 men, 250 female.

MIT, a science school, was one of the finest in the country. It had its drawbacks, though. Once girls found you out as a Tech Tool, they won’t look your way. But ‘across a short span of aqueous filth known as the Charles River lies the City of Boston,’ report the authors of the Insider’s Guide. The Boston-Cambridge metropolis included 52 girls’ schools, however, making a 5-to-1 ratio in favor of the men.

At a time when authorities tried to weed out radicals from college campuses, MIT gave refuge to Noam Chomsky. Someone calculated Chomsky cost the school $1 million in government contracts and alumni giving. “We think it’s a credit to the school that they keep him on,” wrote the clearly left-leaning authors of the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges.

Massachusetts State College System

500-4,300 students.

Massachusetts’ state colleges offered a refuge from the modern world, wrote the Yale students. Their seven campuses were sound, secluded, white and straight. As state colleges went, Mass State ranked among the best of the lot. It was good academically, and highly competent in the training of teachers. Campus rules, though, rated ‘puritanical.’

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

8581 m, 6505 f

UMass-Amherst actually boasted lower acceptance rates than Harvard or Yale. Nonetheless, the Yale students dismissed UMass’s average student as ‘boorish, not very intelligent and not very interesting.’ However, some students living off campus were doing ‘amazing things.’ The guide described those amazing things as ‘writing poetry, painting and smoking dope.’

Middlebury

1,000 men, 700 women.

The Insider’s Guide described Middlebury as ‘clean, conventional, self-satisfied.’ Surrounded by cows and farmland, the academically demanding school put students under intense pressure. Middlebury was also famous for its foreign language and literature programs.

The Emma Willard House at Middlebury.

Mount Holyoke

1,750 women.

Mount Holyoke deliberately placed itself in South Hadley, Mass., far from the corrupting influence of uncensored literature, alcohol and men. All that changed, and the school was replacing the ‘creative but frustrated Emily Dickinson image’ with something more progressive, the guide reported. Despite a remarkable offering of student activities, ‘a flock of females in full flight’ might trample someone standing by the bus stop at the main gate on a Friday afternoon.

University of New Hampshire

5,163 men, 3,672 women.

Back in the early 1970s, the conservative Legislature and apartheid-supporting Manchester Union-Leader harbored much hostility toward students and universities, the guide reported. The school had the highest out-of-state tuition in the country and steep in-state tuition. It also had a lousy location, as Durham had no discotheques.

UNH had some pluses: a pretty campus and an excellent philosophy department under Peter Sylvester. Students generally came in the ‘apple-cheeked farm’ type.

Thompson Hall at UNH

Northeastern

9,400 men, 4,600 women.

Northeastern, reported the guide, was large, mediocre and sometimes troubled. But it was also on the way up. The co-op program launched some students into journalism, television and Wall Street, along with ‘palatable’ jobs for many others. On the downside: a location in a high-cost, low-quality, unsafe neighborhood.

Radcliffe

1250 women.

“Many Cliffies are as hip as they are huggable,” the Insider’s Guide reported. However, the old image of Radcliffe as a polite, restrained school for wealthy women hadn’t entirely disappeared.

Moreover, Radcliffe girls were aggressive, and Tillie-from-the-sticks would have had a hard time of it. The school also had a larger proportion of rugged, gutsy, infighting radicals than Harvard.

University of Rhode Island

5,907 men, 4,338 women.

URI fit the description of the state U in every respect, according to the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges. Except, perhaps, that it was a ‘surprisingly dull place aided by gifted administration.’

The book praised President Werner Baum for refusing to turn over a list of guest speakers and their fees to the attorney general. He wanted to search for subsidies of radicals and take away the school’s tax-exempt status. On the other hand, the administration enforced curfew, parietals and a ban on liquor at fraternities. URI also got low marks for its location in Kingston, which had little more than cow pastures, farmland and a pizza place.

URI Quadrangle

Simmons

1475 women.

Simmons tries to train women professionally while giving them a liberal arts background. It had recruited more black and underprivileged students than any other women’s college. The students got very involved in the issues of the day, just not on campus. Located in Boston, they will never lack for dates.

Smith

50 men, 2,450 women.

Smithies, wrote the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, are “prim, pretty, young, innocent, apple-cheeked, bubbling and dull.” The admissions office prefers girls who more resemble Mary Poppins than Scarlett O’Hara, they noted. Smith offers bookish seclusion, once considered the ideal women’s education. But now, they wrote, people think education is about “people, experiences, excitement and initiation.”

Trinity

1060 men, 530 women.

Trinity, noted the Yale newsmen, had a chip on its shoulder because it got left out of the Little Three Ivies — Amherst, Wesleyan and Williams. So it made up for it in social prestige. Trinity decided to give each man a bedroom, a living room and a bedroom for his valet. Times had changed by 1972, however. Trinity was trying to diversify its student body, which it held to rigorous admission standards.

Tufts/Jackson

2,400 men, 1,100 women.

Tufts got high marks for location and student body mixture. Described as a “good school,” it had proximity to Boston where something cool and something groovy was always going on.

Wellesley

1750 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges described Wellesley as almost a cartoon of the Ideal Respectable Yet Academically Worthwhile School for Young Ladies. It described many of the girls as Junior League liberals — idealistic, but they don’t do anything about it. The college had topflight offerings in English, history, the arts and languages, but showed weakness in science and math.

Wellesley College

Wesleyan

1200 men, 200 women.

Though Middletown, Conn., offered nothing but boredom, half the students at Wesleyan had cars. The school had the highest percentage of black students in the country – nearly 15 percent – outside of historically black colleges. Though occasionally too liberal for older alumni, Wesleyan then was “one of the most exciting academic centers” in the United States.

Wheaton

1200 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges had no love for Wheaton, which it described as a suitcase school that offered a solid liberal arts education with little pressure. Norton, Conn., however, was a difficult handicap to overcome.

Williams

1200 men, 325 women.

Williams offered a topnotch education, and would give Yale or Harvard a run for their money if it were bigger. The administration considered teaching more important than research, and prominent political scientist James MacGregor Burns taught there. Williams’ rural location was a drawback, however. Williams students’ parents supposedly sent their sons to college in the fall with a briar pipe and three-piece woolen underwear. Then they could count the days until spring thaw.

Yale

4,000 men, 1,000 women.

You would be correct in assuming the writers from the Yale Daily News would brag on their school. They noted that Yale was the hardest college to get into. They attributed that, in part, to the school’s sensitive and liberal administration which had quelled unrest during a three-week strike related to a Black Panther trial nearby. Its upper-middle-class students longed to fill the shoes of such public servants as Cyrus Vance, William F. Buckley, Jr., or Sargent Shriver. (Certainly Law School students Bill and Hillary Clinton did.)

Old campus of Yale University

They described Yale as a cross between Princeton and Harvard. It had the best English department in the world, the best French department outside of France and outstanding history, political science and biology departments. As far as social life went, Yale had a large “hippie-radical-drug-freak contingent” and “a monarchist party known as the Party of the Right.”

Images: Smith College campus By MonsieurNapoléon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64894359; Yale, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33181529. Yale campus Yale campus By Namkota – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50507969.. Wellesley College By Grom – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6424795. Brown’s Main Green By Chris Rycroft – https://www.flickr.com/photos/193316968@N06/51768485409/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113810038. URI quadrangle By Wasted Time R – en:Image:URIQuad.jpg, Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=891529. Thompson Hall Thompson Hall at UNH By AcrossTheAtlantic – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63031225.. University of Maine CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1405898. The Willard House in Middlebury By PenelopeIsMe – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4363690. Bowdoin By Polarbear 11 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14571061.

This story about the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges was updated in 2023.

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Frederick Tuckerman, the Man Who Would Be Emily Dickinson

If Frederick Tuckerman had been born a woman, you might think he was Emily Dickinson’s twin.

Frederick Tuckerman

Like Emily, Frederick Tuckerman came from a well-to-do, public-spirited, intellectual family. He became a recluse in western Massachusetts, as did Emily. Frederick attended college (Harvard) only briefly, as did she (Mount Holyoke), and he wrote poetry. Like Emily, he published only a few of his many poems during his lifetime.

Unlike Emily, he didn’t have an adulterous neighbor who published his poetry posthumously and made him famous.

Frederick Tuckerman

He was born Feb. 4, 1821 in Boston (Emily, Dec. 10, 1830) into the illustrious Tuckerman family. His brother Samuel Parkman Tuckerman composed sacred music for the Episcopal Church. His cousin Henry Theodore Tuckerman was a well-known critic and essayist.

Another brother, Edward Tuckerman, taught botany at Amherst College. He spent decades collecting lichens in the White Mountains, and Tuckerman Ravine is named for him. He and his wife also befriended the Dickinson family, and letters from Emily to Edward’s wife Sarah survive.

Frederick Tuckerman went to Harvard in 1841, but eye problems sent him home. He then returned to Harvard Law, graduated and gained entry to the Suffolk Bar. He found the law distasteful, though, and spent the rest of his time studying literature, botany and astronomy.

Bird’s-eye view of Greenfield, 1917

In 1847, then only in his mid-twenties, Frederick Tuckerman moved to Greenfield, Mass., just 20 miles north of Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst. He married the gentle Hannah Lucinda Jones that same year.

Frederick Tuckerman spent his days walking the countryside around Greenfield and nights gazing at stars through a telescope. He made herbariums and read English literature, which he loved.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Unlike Emily Dickinson, though, he traveled. In 1851 he went to England and met and befriended Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Tennyson invited him to come back and stay with him, which he did three years later.

Final Retreat

In 1857, Hannah died while giving birth to their third child. Frederick deeply mourned her loss and turned further inward. He wrote poem after poem to work out his guilt and his grief. One sonnet begins,

I leave the town; I climb the mountain-side, / Striving from stumps and stones to wring relief; / And in the senseless anger of my grief, / I rave and weep; I roar to the unmoved skies; / But the wild tempest carries away my cries!

Hawthorne

Three years after his wife died, Frederick Tuckerman self-published his one and only book of poetry, called Poems. He then sent copies to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They replied politely. Only Hawthorne seemed to appreciate his work.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

(Emily Dickinson, too, had poems published during her lifetime, though probably without her authorization.)

Frederick Tuckerman spent the rest of his life in dignified privacy, dying at the age of 52 on May 9, 1873.

Emily died May 15, 1886 at age 56. Her late brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, published her poems to wide acclaim.

Higginson, by the way, had attended Harvard with Frederick Tuckerman. As an old man, Higginson recalled Tuckerman, ‘as a refined and gentlemanly fellow, but I did not then know him as a poet.’

Rediscovery

Poets Seat Tower

It would take decades for Frederick Tuckerman to win acclaim for his poetry.

In 1909, a wealthy poet named Louis How put together an anthology of American poems that included two sonnets by Tuckerman. Though the anthology never went to press, an article about it caught the attention of the poet and scholar Witter Bynner. He got in touch with Tuckerman’s grandchild, obtained a cache of his poems and published a new anthology of them in 1931. Another critic, N. Scott Momaday, brought out an edition of Tuckerman’s poetry in 1965.

Poets Seat Tower plaque

However, a different kind of homage to Frederick Tuckerman took shape in 1912. Then, a sandstone observation tower called Poets Seat Tower was built in Greenfield to commemorate the spot loved by poets, especially Tuckerman.

Tuckerman’s biographer Eugene England noted another similarity between Frederick Tuckerman and Emily Dickinson:

Allen Tate’s comment on Emily Dickinson can be adapted to Tuckerman. All pity for his starved life is misdirected; his life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent.

Images: Plaque By Jerry Dougherty – http://public.fotki.com/GCDOUGHERTY/miscellaneous/massachusetts/greenfield-ma/greenfieldpoetsseat-1.html, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7119511. This story was updated in 2022.

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16 Fun Facts About Noah Webster, the Dictionary Writer Who Was Slightly Nuts

Noah Webster was an odd duck, a famously fussy lexicographer who not only Americanized the English language but created the idea of American patriotism.

He wrote the first real American dictionary, called, appropriately, An American Dictionary of the English Language, which took him 28 years to finish. His goal: to standardize American speech.

Noah Webster by James Herring.

He couldn’t afford law school after he graduated from Yale in 1778, so he taught schoolchildren. His students used books published in England, sometimes pledging allegiance to King George III. They didn’t learn American geography or American history. Noah Webster decided to change all that.

Noah Webster also advised Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, co-founded Amherst College, started America’s first daily newspaper and pushed Congress to pass copyright laws.

He was quirky and odd, thought highly of himself and didn’t always get along with people. But the qualities that made him annoying also made Noah Webster a Founding Father.

Noah Webster in 16 Takes

He personally counted all the houses in every town he visited. Traveling across America in 1785 and 1786, he tallied 20,380 houses in 22 cities. Webster exchanged that information with other people who counted houses.
He had the cheek to chastise George Washington over dinner at Mount Vernon in 1785. Washington mentioned he wanted a Scottish tutor for his step-grandchildren. Webster, then all of 26, told the 53-year-old hero of the Revolution that he should find an American for the job.
A lot of people didn’t like him because of his vanity. When he met Dr. Benjamin Rush at a dinner party in Philadelphia, Rush congratulated Webster on his safe arrival in the city. Webster replied, “Sir, you may congratulate Philadelphia on the occasion.” (Eventually, Rush and Webster became friends.)
George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

Dumped
He was dumped twice, the first time by a woman who found him too boring, the second time by a woman whose minister told her to marry someone else. Rebecca Greenleaf finally said ‘yes’ to his marriage proposal. “I suspect I am not formed for society,” he wrote to her before their marriage.
He probably had obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (see No. 1), often mentioning in his diary his ‘depression,’ ‘anxiety’ and ‘nervous affectations.’ He wrote his famous Blue-Backed Speller and later his dictionaries as a form of therapy.
Webster hated Shakespeare, complaining his language was ‘full of errors.’
He was often broke and in debt, though his wife was rich, his speller sold nearly 100 million copies and he landed America’s first blockbuster book deal, $42,000 over 14 years. He borrowed $1,500 from Alexander Hamilton so he could move to New York and start the country’s first daily newspaper, American Minerva.
Webster wrote the first American dictionary in 1806, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Critics complained it had too many vulgar words. He replied he took out two-thirds of the vulgar words in Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, leaving out arse, bum, fart and turd. He did keep piss, boghouse, buggery, sodomy and catamite.

Such a Deal

9. Noah Webster got a good deal on a mansion in New Haven because Benedict Arnold had lived in it. (It cost him only $2,666.66.)

10. Like his friend Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster wanted to reform American spelling. Unlike Franklin, he succeeded, at least in part. He took out excess letters, like the ‘u’ in colour and honour, the extra ‘l’ in traveler, the ‘e’ on ax and the ‘ough’ in plow. He also reversed the ‘re’ in theater and center. Some of his changes didn’t make it, like bred for bread, wimmen for women, tung for tongue and dawter for daughter.

11. When he turned 20, his father gave him a nearly worthless $8 bill, and told him he was on his own.

12. It took him 28 years to complete his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language. It included 70,000 words, and one in every six words had never been listed in a dictionary before. They included emerging Americanisms like squash, applesauce, hickory, chowder and skunk, as well as words of his own invention: afterwise (wise afterwards or too late); vernate (become young again); zuffalo (a little flute… especially that which is used to teach birds.)

Emily Dickinson

Noah Webster, Pious Blowhard

13. To write his dictionary, he learned 26 languages, including Old English, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic and Sanskrit.

14. He founded Amherst College with Emily Dickinson’s grandfather, and Emily went to school with Noah Webster’s grandfdaughter. She later wrote that her lexicon (Webster’s dictionary) was her only companion.

15. He was an 18th century sock puppet who anonymously praised his own work and trashed his critics. The phrase ‘sock puppet,’ meaning ‘false online identity,’ made it into Merriam-Webster in 2009.

16. Though his blue-backed speller had no religious content, Noah Webster had a religious experience at age 40 and became a pious blowhard. As he was about to turn 80, he declared that he would rather be a bear and hibernate in winter than “be under the tyranny of our degenerate rulers.” He described Americans as “a degenerate and wicked people.”

This story about Noah Webster was updated in 2023.

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The First Black Phi Beta Kappas of New England

The Phi Beta Kappa Society, established at the College of William and Mary in 1776, is America’s oldest and most prestigious honor society. Its goal is promoting excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. Almost 100 years after its founding, after the Civil War, black Phi Beta Kappas began appearing in the society’s ranks. The first five black Phi Beta Kappas came from New England colleges. Here are their stories.

George Washington Henderson, University of Vermont

Born in 1850, George Washington Henderson started out life as a slave. He was most likely befriended by Union soldiers during the Civil War and came to Vermont at the war’s end. He was illiterate when arriving in Vermont but soon corrected that. By 1870 he was a student at the University of Vermont and graduated in 1877 at the head of his class.

George Washington Henderson

Henderson’s career included stints as a school principal in Vermont. He was ordained a minister, and his studies took him as far as Berlin, Germany. He became a college dean at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn. He ended his career in Xenia, Ohio as a professor of foreign languages.

Winfield Scott Montgomery, Dartmouth College

Winfield Scott Montgomery

Born in Mississippi in 1853, Winfield Scott Montgomery’s family moved to New Orleans where he lived until he was 10 years old. A one-time slave, Montgomery was swept up by the spirit of the Civil War and followed Union troops north. The young run-away was befriended by Vermont troops who saw he attended Leland and Gray Seminary in Townsend, Vt. He taught school and attended college part time. He detoured to Washington, D.C. to teach school there before returning to Dartmouth College. He graduated in 1878 and became a professor of ancient and modern languages at Alcorn University in Rodney, Mississippi.

In 1882, however, Montgomery returned to Washington, D.C. to return to his calling as a progressive principal in the city’s public schools. He never abandoned learning, however, earning a medical degree from Howard University.

Wiley Lane, Amherst College

Wiley Lane was born in North Carolina in 1852. His brilliance was apparent from a young age, and he attended Howard University’s prep school program. After three years studying at Howard, Lane moved north to Amherst College, where he graduated in 1876 — with his second bachelor’s degree — and he was admitted to the Phi Beta Kappa society.

Howard University lured Lane back as a tutor, and granted him a chair in the Greek studies department. To strengthen his Modern Greek, in which he needed further study, Lane enrolled in the American College of Modern Greek in Athens. He planned a tour of Europe following his course work. Lane’s career was cut tragically short, however, when he contracted pneumonia and died before he could depart on his travels.

James Major Colson Jr., Dartmouth College

James Major Colson Jr. came from a free black family in Petersburg, Va. As a young man he assisted his father in his work as a shoemaker, but his mother’s academic bent — she was a poet and opened a private school in Petersburg — showed the stronger pull on his future.

James Major Colson Jr

Colson traveled north at the age of 21 to be trained for college at the Middleboro, Mass. high school. He attended Dartmouth College and graduated in 1883. Returning to Virginia he became chair of science at the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. He ended his career as principal of the Jon A. Dix Agricultural and Industrial School, and was an active member of his community. He helped establish a YMCA, was frequently published and took up the study of weather.

Edward Alexander Bouchet,Yale University

Edward Alexander Bouchet‘s journey to college required little travel. He was born in New Haven, Conn. in 1852. His father was a janitor at Yale University and his mother did laundry for students. They encouraged their son’s studies from an early age, and Bouchet entered Yale in 1870. He graduated in 1874, Yale’s first black graduate.

Edward Alexander Bouchet

Bouchet’s academic focus was physics and mathematics, and he spent the bulk of his career as a teacher at the Institute for Colored Youth in Pennsylvania. When the institute closed its college-prep programs in 1902, Bouchet’s career took several twists and turns. He worked as a hospital administrator and customs agent before returning to teach at high schools in Lawrenceville, Va. and Gallipolis, Ohio. He ended his career on the faculty of Bishop College in Marshall, Texas. He returned to New Haven and died in 1918. Bouchet also might fairly claim to be the first black member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Yale’s society had disbanded at the time he graduated in 1874, and he was admitted some 10 years later when the society was revived and began filling the roles from the years when it was dormant. So while he graduated in 1874, his admission didn’t come until 1884.

Thanks to The Earliest Black Members of Phi Beta Kappa, by Caldwell Titcolm (Journal of African Americans in Higher Education). This story updated in 2022.

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Why an Eclipse Can Only Last Eight Minutes, by Mabel Loomis Todd

Mabel Loomis Todd is best known for editing and publishing the poems of Emily Dickinson, but she also knew a lot about astronomy. In 1894, the same year she released Emily Dickinson’s letters, she published Total Eclipses of the Sun, a guide to the history, science and appearance of the phenomena.

One critic called it a “stunning and illuminating guide to one of the most moving creaturely experiences to be had on Earth.”

Mabel Loomis Todd

David and Mabel Loomis Todd

Mabel Loomis Todd came to her astronomical knowledge by way of her husband, David Peck Todd, assistant professor of astronomy at Amherst College. He was a philanderer, while she had a long love affair with Emily Dickinson’s married brother, Austin Dickinson, who lived next door to Emily.

Mabel Loomis Todd often helped her husband in his astronomical observations and accompanied him on his eclipse-chasing voyages. She wrote a book, Corona and Coronet, about his expedition to see a total eclipse in Japan on August 19, 1896. She went along on the trip, which included 10,000 miles of sailing aboard the steam yacht Coronet. In the end, clouds obscured the sun during totality. David Todd was so disappointed he wished he was dead.

David Todd ultimately regretted choosing a career in astronomy, as he was never able to make the contributions he’d hoped to make. It was his wife who is still remembered as a first-rate science writer – though she is better known as Austin Dickinson’s lover.

The Eight-Minute Eclipse

In her first book, Mabel Loomis Todd explained that a total eclipse can only last eight minutes:

“That circumstance of a solar eclipse most attractive to the astronomer of the present day is the length of total obscurity. By some celestial mishap this can never be so long as eight minutes. As an average, three minutes will more than cover the length of total phase; and for astronomers and physicists, who are perplexed in their attempts to unravel the labyrinth of mysteries surrounding the Sun which the kindly intervention of the dark Moon discloses, these brief moments are all too short. Unfortunately the best eclipses always occur near the Earth’s equator; for while the lunar shadow sweeps easterly across our planet with a velocity somewhat exceeding 2,000 miles in a minute, an observer on the equator is, by the Earth’s rotation, also carried eastward, but at a velocity about one half as great.

“The nearer he is to either terrestrial pole, the slower he goes, and thus the sooner will the Moon’s shadow overtake and pass him by, and the shorter will be his time of viewing the Sun entirely covered.”

This story last updated in 2022.

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