So there was this guy. Melvil Dewey. God, what a terrible fucking name.
Anyway, he invented the Dewey decimal system in the late 1800s, and was also kind of a massive dick. I grew up using the system at school. What I didn’t know is that he was horrible with women. Often organizing trips with only women to sexually harass them, or calling women his “old nemesis.”
He was also a racist, and a pusher of white peoples version of religion, Christianity. He even worked numbers into his system for these things. 326 meant slavery, and 325 was colonization.
An interesting snippet of an article discussing Dorothy Porter, who re-categorized a good portion of how libraries organize a classification scheme for black literature:
All of the libraries that Porter consulted for guidance relied on 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 explained in her oral history. In many “white libraries,” she continued, “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.”
– Smithsonian Magazine
(I love it when smart people use the word stupid. Makes me happy.) Anyway, I go through all of that, to say this:
No matter what people do: cure smallpox, create timeless works of art, lead a country, or create a now outdated, problematic classification system still used in over 200,000 libraries worldwide today:
Most, but not all, were and are total fucking dicks.
They were abusive jerks. I am not a fan of when people say, “oh, they were a product of their time” or “that’s just how people were back then.”
Fuck that. They knew better. It was power, through and through.
It’s like smoking. I smoked a lot from my 20s to my 40s. Starting and stopping for years on end. I knew it was bad for me. I knew what I was doing. But my parents, who also smoked in the 60s and 70s, would always say, “we didn’t know it was bad for us.”
I call bullshit on that too. My father was a doctor, my mother a nurse. They knew. They just didn’t like that I did it.
Anyways, if you’re a dick, you’re a dick. (My parents are not dicks though. They were a product of their time.)
Time (and most people) will fucking hate you. Dogs will look the other way.
But do me a favor. At least own it. If your a dick, just say you’re a dick.
Dewey would ask women to submit photos when applying to School of Library Economy at Columbia College, saying “You cannot polish a pumpkin.”
What a fucking turd biscuit.
Dewey owned that he was a complete fucking piece of shit. I wish more people would just admit they suck, and then we could go about our business, ignoring them until they go away. (Or, if applicable, thrown into prison forever.)
Then future generations can mock them.
And as I really want to go into what goes in to polishing a pumpkin, (hint: it’s dumb) I’m pretty sure this hits the nail on the head for what Melvil’s driving force in life was:
Why’d I even come up with this stupid system if I can’t get nerdy chick action.
– ANewAccountCreated