Speed Kings (17 page)

Oddly, or perhaps not so very odd at all, depending on your worldview, Dewey's marriage was a model of probity. He and Annie, another librarian, had became husband and wife in 1878. Their relationship, Annie wrote, was based on “intellectual companionship and friendship stronger than the usual tie.” They devoted themselves to self-improvement. At the beginning of each month they would write lists of goals, and when the month was over, they would grade each other on how close they had come to achieving them. A typical list of his included “be more patient,” “think twice before speaking,” “dress with more care,” and “rise early and eat slowly.” She drew up “time budgets” that broke days down into chunks: “Exercise 1 hr; Self-Culture 1 hr;
Sing 15min.” This was the household Godfrey Dewey was born into, in September 1887.

The Deweys were so enamored with their way of life that they decided, ultimately, that they should make it the basis of a new model community. Each summer they would scout likely locations. In 1893, they settled on Lake Placid. Annie's sister already lived in the village, and Melvil fell in love with the place while he was visiting her there. He bought seventy acres on the eastern shore of Mirror Lake and an old ramshackle mansion on a neighboring plot. They planned to pay for the upkeep by letting cottages to their friends. Melvil imagined that this new property would become a kind of cooperative vacation resort, a “university in the woods.” He invited a select group of friends and acquaintances to join him there, explaining in a letter that “we are intensely interested in getting for neighbors people whom of all others we would prefer.” The group began to buy up land all around, to protect against “undesirable neighbors.”

By then Melvil had moved on from Columbia. He and Annie had moved to Albany, where he became the secretary for the Board of Regents at the New York State Education Department. He continued to act, his nephew Freemont Rider wrote, like “a fifty-ton tank, riding roughshod over all sorts of obstacles toward its chosen objective.” In 1888, he was appointed the New York state librarian. It was a remarkable achievement for a man from such a humble background. Melvil Dewey was now a man with a measure of wealth and influence.

In 1895, the Lake Placid Club was formally launched. That April, Dewey wrote a letter to James Laughlin, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, listing the names of some of the professors who were already members—H.A.P. Torrey from the University of Vermont, Herman Neil from Amherst, Jeremiah Jenks from Cornell. Laughlin's eye stopped at Jenks's name. “Socially he would not be agreeable to me,” Laughlin wrote in his reply. “And if more of his kind come I think I should be more comfortable elsewhere.” Laughlin thought, mistakenly, that Jenks was a Jew. Once Melvil had corrected him, Laughlin joined the club.

Melvil realized that “the club shall get a bad name by taking them in”—and by “them,” he meant Jews. He later told Jenks, “I have some Hebrew friends who are very charming. But I should dare not break the rule barring them from Club membership.” Those rules, of course, had been drawn up by Dewey himself. The club operated, in the words of Dewey's nephew, as a “kind of proprietary enterprise,” with the man himself “absolute dictator.” Every last detail of it bore his mark, from the timing of the evening “lights out” (at 10 p.m.) to the choice
of Protestant hymns at the Sunday sing-alongs to the simplified spelling used on all the signs and official documents. The breakfast menu in the restaurant at the “loj,” as Dewey insisted it was called, offered “kiperd herin,” “bredcrum gridl cakes,” “stud apricot” and “egs to order.” Alcohol, tobacco, and gambling were prohibited. Tipping was banned, as were all guests “against whom there is physical, moral, social, or race objections.” And just in case that wasn't clear enough, the club's literature added, “It is found impracticable to make exceptions for Jews to others excluded, even when of unusual personal qualifications.”

There was a history of anti-Semitism in the Adirondacks. Hotels and boardinghouses tended to be divided into those that accepted Jews and those that didn't. The latter would carry signs in the window: “Hebrews will knock vainly for admission.” But the Lake Placid Club was, as the academic Peter Hopsicker wrote, “the mountains' flagship resort for bigotry.” It became a target. Dewey had repeatedly refused admission to an acquaintance of his, Henry Leipziger, though he had never once given him a good explanation as to why. When Leipziger finally realized why he was being blackballed, he recruited a prominent Jewish lawyer from Manhattan, Louis Marshall, and the two of them set out on the warpath together. Marshall filed a petition with the Board of Regents calling for Dewey's dismissal from his position as state librarian. They argued that a public official had no business propagating such anti-Semitic material, especially when there were three-quarters of a million Jewish taxpayers in New York, all of them contributing to his salary, all of them offended by his prejudices. At first Dewey and his friends thought Marshall was “an evil genius.” Dewey said, “It seems a crime to wreck my life work.” He fought back. He wrote to the local papers protesting his innocence; he put together a forty-page pamphlet of evidence for his defense; he sent letters to two hundred prominent Jewish figures around the state arguing his case. He even started writing to all the individuals who had signed the petition, asking that they withdraw their names. The one thing he never did was apologize. He was too proud. Marshall dismissed Melvil Dewey's pleas as “nauseating slobber.”

The Board of Regents decided to allow him to continue his work on the condition that he realized his private business was incompatible with his public position. In short, he had to give up his presidency of the club. He couldn't do it. In fact, he sent out another pamphlet to the club's members explaining that while the club retained the right to “reject membership to any person not desired at the club,” they would be excising all specific mentions of Jews from the rules on the extraordinary grounds that “the Jews are too important an element
nowadays to be discriminated against by anybody who holds a public position. Jews may be despised, but their votes are respected.” It was all the ammunition Marshall needed. In September 1905, the Board of Regents asked for Dewey's resignation.

Dewey tried, for a time, to pursue another old interest: language reform. He met with the millionaire Andrew Carnegie and tried to persuade him to fund a body that would work to promote simplified spelling. Carnegie was keen on the project, but he had no desire to work with Dewey. Especially when, nine months after Dewey lost his job as state librarian, he was accused of “violating the standards of Victorian social conduct” by the four women he had molested at the ALA conference the previous year. In the space of a year, Dewey had lost his job, his ambitions, and his reputation. His life's work had been wrecked, just as he'd feared it would be.

Godfrey was seventeen when his father resigned from office, eighteen when he was dismissed from the ALA. He had convinced himself that his father was simply “indifferent to appearances” and had a “well-known disregard for conventions.” The father was such a strong personality that his only son was always going to bear his impress. The public humiliation fueled Godfrey's desire to reclaim his father's legacy by carrying on his work.

The family retreated to Lake Placid. If Melvil Dewey could not shape the wider world around him, he would work, instead, to make a new society on the shore of Mirror Lake. One molded in his own image, matching his exacting specifications. One of his employees actually believed that Dewey had grown so bitter that he was determined to “build a community wealthy Jews would covet but could not join.” By 1909, a decade and a half after it had been founded on a seventy-acre plot, the Lake Placid Club owned six thousand acres and 225 buildings, including three sawmills, a creamery, a milk plant, a chicken factory, and twenty-one farms, all of it in a thirty-five-mile radius of the club lodge. It had an annual income of five hundred thousand dollars, but Dewey had stretched the finances so far that the club was heavily in debt. He decided the solution was to keep the club open all through the year. His associates thought it a lunatic idea. But it worked. At first only “a few adventurous souls remained thru the season to see what an Adirondack winter was like,” but the group grew in number with each passing year, and got to be so large that the club laid out cross-country ski trails and erected two toboggan slides on the banks of Mirror Lake that sped riders over the ice and across to the village. Bolstered by the winter income, the Lake Placid Club went from strength to strength.

Vindicated by these successes, Dewey became more entrenched in his prejudices. He issued diktats reminding members that “new-rich groups” like “many Cubans” would also be denied entry because of their “lack of refinement” and stipulating that “negroes can be admitted only to servant's quarters”—all this despite the club lying in the very same valley as the farm of the famed abolitionist John Brown, whose body still “lies a-moldering in the grave” on that very site. In the early 1850s Brown brought families of freed slaves north to form a farming community in the Adirondacks, just a half mile from what would become the Lake Placid Club lodge. Dewey even bought up a stretch of land on the road leading to John Brown's farm because he was worried the owner “wd sell to Jews.”

Melvil seemed to view people much as he did books. He broke them down into five official classes, ranging from type “A,” who were “admirably suited to the ideals of the club,” through to “C,” “common clients,” and “E,” “unsuitables who must be excluded for the protection of the rest.” This last group included women who smoked and families who allowed their children to dance cheek-to-cheek. “Whatever fashion allows drinking, smoking, and gambling by women yung or old wil no more be tolerated at this family club than wud contajus diseases.” This attitude, oddly, didn't stop him from hiring a “dainty litl flapper” to work as his private stenographer. After spending a single summer working for him, she quit, and then filed a lawsuit against him demanding damages for what would today be called sexual harassment. He had repeatedly tried to kiss and caress her. This was when Dewey was seventy-eight. He settled out of court, for $2,147. “I have been very unconventional,” he admitted. “As men ar always who frankly show and speak of their liking for women.”

By that time Godfrey had grown into an adult, if not into his own man. He and his father had the same hard, square jaw, but Godfrey's build was lean and slight where his father had been big and bearish. Godfrey went clean-shaven, wore his hair in a tightly cropped side part, and sported small wire-framed spectacles. His skin seemed somehow to be stretched too tight across his bones. After graduation from Harvard he had studied for a master's degree in education. He wrote his thesis on the “Relative Frequency of English Speech Sounds,” devoted himself to furthering his father's campaign for simplified spelling, and devised his own “fonetic alphabet,” which he insisted would be of “constant and general usefulness.” He wrote endless books, many of them self-published, and articles encouraging people to use it.

He was, in his own way, obsessed with speed, just like Billy Fiske. Of course
he thought himself something of a sportsman—a bobsledder, a skier, even a racing driver. He was inordinately proud of the fact that in 1904, when he was still a teenager, he had driven from Albany to Lake Placid in twelve hours in a new Thomas Flyer automobile that his father had bought for the club. He was traveling at an average speed, the papers reported, of over 10 mph. But for Godfrey Dewey, speed was a means of achieving greater efficiency, not finding new thrills. He loved shorthand because it “saved 2/3s of your time and effort.” Like his father, he felt efficiency was a moral issue. “Time wasn't merely money,” wrote Freemont Rider. “It was, to him, a portion of an all-too-short life in which so much more for the betterment of mankind had to be accomplished than one could possibly achieve at best.”

After completing his master's, Godfrey returned to the family roost at the Lake Placid Club. He was married himself now, and he brought his family with him. He accepted his father's invitation to take on the management of the club. He and Melvil set up the Lake Placid Club Education Foundation together, to advance the cause of simplified spelling and other eccentric schemes including promoting cremation, prohibition, women's suffrage, and eugenics. They transferred many of the club's assets to the foundation. Godfrey became the vice president of what was now the largest residential club in the world. It owned 10,600 acres and had its own three-thousand-seat theater, twenty-one tennis courts, five golf courses, a resident orchestra, a chapel, stables, garages, shops, stores, tearooms, restaurants, cafés, a cinema, and a post office, as well as all those dairy farms, poultry farms, cattle farms, laundries, sawmills, and lumberyards.

Godfrey's mother, Annie Dewey, died in 1923. His father did not remain a widower for long: two years later he was married again. He was seventy-four now, and it was starting to show. He fell severely ill soon after the wedding. Godfrey began to take on more and more responsibility in the running of his father's empire, but Melvil did not make the succession easy. Bad blood began to flow between them, ill feeling sparked in part by Melvil's inappropriate behavior toward Godfrey's wife, Marjorie.

Enmity exploded between them in 1926, when Melvil and his new wife went south for the winter and decided to found a new Lake Placid Club in Florida. He bought a three-thousand-acre plot in the Florida highlands, near a town named Lake Stearns. He even persuaded the Florida legislature to rename the town Lake Placid. The new club was to be run on the very same lines as the old one. He sought to reassure prospective members by telling them that “Florida
has fewer negroes” than most Southern states, and that “we have no colord help” in the club. The Florida venture was a bust. Most winters, Melvil could count the number of paying guests on his fingers. So he turned to his son for help turning it around. Godfrey had assumed control of the original Lake Placid Club. He thought the Florida project a monumental folly and was convinced that his stepmother, Emily, was exploiting his father, driving the Florida club on so that she could take control of its finances. So Godfrey refused to release funds from Lake Placid North.