24. Dewey of Libraries’ Dewey Decimal System Was an Awful Creep
The #MeToo era brought attention to allegations of harassment and misconduct by many famous names. Melvil Dewey, chief librarian at Columbia University, a founding member of the American Library Association, and the man after whom the Dewey Decimal Classification System used in libraries is named, does not appear in modern headlines. However, if he was alive today rather than nearly a century dead, he would have been front and center as one of the more awful perpetrators of predatory behavior and harassment.
Dewey, long revered as the “father of the modern library”, made tons of inappropriate advances towards women. Their numbers included many fellow librarians, and even his own daughter-in-law, who once fled his house to escape his overtures. Said sexual harassment, coupled with rabid racism and vicious anti-Semitism, was excessive even by the sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic standards of his era. As seen below, that kind of awful personal behavior eventually got him kicked out of the very library association that he had helped found.
