USA > New York > Noted living Albanians and state officials. A series of biographical sketches > Part 6
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Mr. Danforth is one of the directors and also the at- torney of the First National bank of Bainbridge, and a member of the board of education in that village, where he now resides. He is not only one of the most popular state officers at Albany - urbane, genial and sunny -but he is one of our politicians, too few in number, whose love of lit- erature, science and the fine arts is a predominant trait of character. Among the perplexing and pressing duties of public life he has found time occasionally to deliver a num- ber of lectures on literary, scientific and legal subjects be- fore various societies and organizations in different parts of the country. And in these efforts he has displayed the fine
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taste and finished composition of the man of letters, and the love of all that is beautiful and sublime in nature, science and art.
Among the popular addresses which he has delivered with gracefulness and effectiveness, before select and appreciative audiences, are those on " Orators and Oratory," " Self Made Men," "Young Men in Politics," and " From Quebec to the Golden Gate." His patriotic fervor has also been poured forth in Decoration Day addresses, and Fourth of July ora- tions.
The veterans of the Union army have no warmer, truer friend than Mr. Danforth in the whole country. When the rebellion broke out he was a boy of eleven, but if he had been old enough, he would in all probability have been among those who rallied around the dear old flag and marched to the front in defense of the Union. As it is, he has shown every mark of respect and admiration both for the living and the fallen brave in the glorious army of free- men. On many occasions, both public and private, his feel. ings and sentiments have been fully expressed regarding the Union veterans and the sacred cause for which they fought and bled on many a hotly contested battlefield. We select one of these occasions as illustrative of the patriotic zeal of Mr. Danforth. At the thirteenth reunion of the One Hun- dred and Fourteenth regiment, in the village of Bainbridge, he gave expression to his feelings in what has been regarded as one of the most fervid, patriotic and eloquent of his speeches. In that address, which we regret we can not re- print here in full he said :
" Soldiers of the One Hundred and Fourteenth : You re- member the time when you were with glorious Phil Sheri- dan in the valley. You recall Bisland, Port Hudson, Win-
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chester and Cedar Creek. None of you will ever forget that memorable 14th of June, 1863, when Tucker and Cor- bin fell, and your gallant colonel in command of Weitzel's daring old brigade, fell at its head mortally wounded, lead- ing in the charge. No braver, truer patriot ever lived than Col. Elisha B. Smith. His mantle fell on worthy shoulders, and Col. PerLee has been spared to be with us to-day.
" We see around us to-day, on every hand, emblems of mourning. The world is racked with grief because of the death of our great chieftain. His memory is enshrined in every heart. His career is without a parallel in the history of the world's great men. A brave and successful soldier, he was also a generous adversary. With the same heroism with which he met the enemy in the field, he also met the dire enemy of an insidious disease, and for many weary weeks and months, looked into the face of the angel of death who was slowly but surely approaching as if even he were reluctant to lay his icy hand on the brave, great heart which is now at peace.
" Every man who wore the nation's blue, who patiently marched under the midday sun, and paced at midnight the lonely sentinel's beat ; who stood unblanched in the waves of battle, and bore the flag in the fiery rain of shot and shell; every soldier in the ranks, is found upon the muster roll of the nation's heroes and upon the tablet of the na- tion's affection.
"Soldiers of the Grand Army, it is your proud distinction to have fought in the war for the Union. The badge you wear is more honorable by far than the gaudy emblems of chivalry. Your country honors those brave heroes that lie beneath the sod, but in honoring them she would not for- get those who survive. You have gone unmoved through
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storms of fire, but in your faces I read the deep emotion which agitates you to day.
" It is the proud boast of Bainbridge that her sons were loyal to the old flag in the dark days of our country's his- tory. In behalf of the people of this town, I extend to you a cordial, hearty, heartfelt welcome. Welcome, thrice wel- come to our hearts and homes."
Mr. Danforth takes great pleasure in gathering around him standard books, illustrative of general history, biogra- phy and literature, as well as in the collection of rare and valuable autographs and manuscripts. He is the owner of one of the original drafts of the Declaration of Independ- ence, in the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson. It was re- cently discovered in a garret, down south, and is a priceless treasure. He is also one of the few fortunate collectors who has succeeded in acquiring a complete set of autograph letters and documents of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. And now, at the age of thirty-nine, with a mind already richly stored with the treasures of learning, especially in his own chosen profession, he has still a brilliant future before him in the higher walks of a useful, refined and cultivated life.
On the Ist of October, 1889, Mr. Danforth was unani- mously nominated, by the democratic state convention, at Syracuse, for state treasurer, and was elected by the large plurality of nearly 15,000 over Gen. Ira M. Hedges.
II
MELVIL DEWEY.
MONG the noted librarians of our country who have shown great efficiency, untiring devotion and unusual progressiveness in their calling, stands in the front rank Melvil Dewey, director of the state library and secretary of the University of the State of New York. Born December IO, 1851, in the rural village of Adams Center, Jefferson county, New York, he is the youngest son of Joel and Eliza Green Dewey. His love of books - a love which has never forsaken him - began as soon as he was able to read. His greatest delight was to be among books, arranging and classifying them to suit his juvenile ideas. He loved also to call them his own. Like Dr. Isaac Watts when a child, he would say when money was given to him : "A book, a book; buy a book." When, in 1864, the present edition of Webster's unabridged dictionary came out, this incipient librarian went ten miles to the book store in Watertown, and brought home the coveted volume for which he paid $12 of his own childish savings, the largest coin of which was a five-cent piece.
In 1865, when the collegiate institute was opened at Adams, three miles away, our boy was, of course, there as a pupil on the day of opening, and in 1867 he was one of the last students to leave its burning building. In 1868, in his 17th year, he began his work in education by teaching a district school in the town of Rodman. In the spring of '69 he followed the old principal of the Adams institute to
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Oneida (N. Y.) seminary, and gained first place for scholar- ship. In the winter of '69 the village school at Bernhard's Bay, Oswego county, engaged the vice-principal of the Oneida seminary for its teacher, but, having a call to one of the leading academies he urged the trustees to give his place to his best pupil, Mr. Dewey, who took it and taught and managed the school with marked success. At its close he spent one term in the preparatory department of Alfred University in Allegany county, N. Y. Obviously his fit for college had been fragmentary and was one to two years less than full requirements, but with characteristic zeal he chose Amherst from the leading colleges of the country, as the one promising him the best education, and without knowing a single teacher, student or graduate, entered the class of 1874, with heavy conditions in Latin, Greek and mathe- matics. He not only worked off his conditions, but gained in each subject à place in the advanced division, and won prizes on competitive examinations.
From childhood he had announced his purpose of giving his life to the cause of education. His study convinced him that the school and college were alone unable to do the needed work in popular education, and that in the future the library was to be recognized as the essential comple- ment of the school, and as the real university for the people, most of whom could never attend any other. Thousands of able men and women were devoting themselves to the school side of education, but the new library side was not yet fully recognized.
At the beginning of junior year he, therefore, began giv- ing fully half his time to studying library methods. His innate skill in such matters was soon discovered by the fac- ulty and trustees, who were not slow to utilize it. During
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the rest of his course, and as long as he could be induced to remain in this narrower field, he was in full charge of the Am- herst college library, which won an enviable reputation for its new methods, as he laid the foundation of his now ex- alted reputation as a broad-minded, progressive and skillful librarian. He there saw the great need of radical changes in library management. He deplored the general neglect of the college library, which was altogether too much over- looked as a factor in college education, being often attached to the chair of some "overworked professor, or put in the charge of the janitor and opened four or five hours per week in term time only." He was studying all this time how to remedy these defects and make such libraries more generally useful and popular. In this study he visited and inspected scores of other libraries, and found the same con- ditions as at Amherst, with the same crying need for im- provement. Impressed with the importance of the great . work of which he was destined to be an apostle, he finally gave up all other plans and decided to devote his life to this new profession, though it was then unheard of for a college student to announce librarianship as his chosen pro- fession.
He found, scattered here and there, earnest and able li- brarians, but, with rare exceptions, each working without utilizing, and generally without knowing, what his fellows were doing. To attain any thing like the high ideal he had set, he recognized the necessity of putting in motion various agencies which should combine all these scattered efforts into a single epoch marking movement. These needed agencies were : -
I. An association of the most earnest American libra- rians, to promote esprit de corps, and organized effort.
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2. A monthly library journal devoted, not to the literary, but to the practical side, as a means of constant communi- cation.
3. A library bureau, where could be focalized the library interests of the country, and where could be done much needed work impracticable for the society or the journal, such as equipping new libraries with the best modern methods and appliances for doing the highest grade of library work most economically and satisfactorily.
4. A library school for training the most promising candi- dates, both men and women, as librarians of the modern type.
5. State recognition and encouragement, similar to that extended so recently in the history of the race to the school system.
So great results could be achieved only through the de- votion and sacrifice of some earnest soul willing to work in- tensely and wait patiently for step after step to be taken, without losing faith in ultimate success.
Boston and its vicinity were conceded to be the best center on the continent in which to undertake such a work, while it was utterly impracticable in the country village of Amherst. In 1876, therefore, declining the urgent and flat- tering invitations of the trustees of Amherst college to re- main as their librarian, Mr. Dewey moved to Boston, and devoted himself with all the enthusiasm of a genuine stu- dent and originator to popular education through broaden- ing, simplifying and systemizing library work. The task he had undertaken was difficult. His idea was to strike out from the old, beaten paths regarding libraries and their man- agement, to raise the college library to the rank of a dis- tinct university department, and to make of the free public library a people's college.
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In a recent address, in noticing the change already brought about, he truly says : " The old library was passive, asleep, a reservoir or cistern getting in but not giving out ; an arsenal in time of peace; the librarian a sentinel before the doors, a jailer to guard against the escape of the unfor- tunates under his care. The new library is active ; an ag- gressive, educating force in the community ; a living foun- tain of good influences; an army in the field, with all guns limbered; and the librarian occupies a field of active useful- ness second to none."
From the first, Mr. Dewey took a broad view of the whole library subject, and brought all his energy and in- tellectual resources to bear on the accomplishment of his thoroughly digested plans and high aims. By personal visits, urgent correspondence and contagious enthusiasm, he suc- ceeded in interesting the leading librarians of the country in his plans, so that within six months after going to Boston three of the five agencies were well started. The American library association, of which he has from the first been the secretary in charge of its offices, property and work, now includes several hundred of the best library workers of the Union. The Library Journal, of which he was managing editor till 1881, when pressure of other duties compelled him to resign active work to his former associates, appeared during the week of the first meeting of the association and has gone on till now. - Fourteen volumes of this pre-emi- nently practical monthly, each minutely indexed, have been completed, and are an unequalled mine of valuable and inter- esting matter for librarians.
The work of the library bureau, which has steadily grown during these fifteen years, was also begun at once in the same office where Mr. Dewey, as secretary, manager and editor,
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did literally the work of three men without receiving the salary of one; for there was no endowment from which to pay for this much needed missionary educational work, and neither the Journal nor the library bureau was a money- making institution, but it was counted a good vear that showed no direct loss.
As the new education was to come through reading, it must fail if the masses were unable to read, and in face of the growing illiteracy even in Massachusetts, a score of the best-known, thoughtful educators, recognizing the two great obstacles to universal primary education, after investigation and estimates, signed a statement drawn up by Mr. Dewey, expressing the belief that a full year of the school life of every child might be saved by complete adoption of the in- ternational decimal or metric system of weights and meas- ures in place of compound numbers, and that two or three years could be saved if the absurdities of English spelling were eliminated. The full work of the library could only be done by stemming this tide of illiteracy, and so Mr. Dewey again took the laboring oar in founding, in 1876, two more national educational societies, the American Metric bureau and the Spelling Reform association, each devoted to removing a great obstacle to general education.
For fifteen years he has continued to be secretary of all three associations. Besides editing, from time to time, depart- ments devoted to some phase of his work, he has started and edited the Metric Bulletin, changed later to Metric Ad- vocate, and the Spelling Reform Bulletin, changed later to the quarterly magazine Spelling, in addition to the monthly Library Journal and the quarterly Library Notes, a maga- zine of librarianship started in 1886, to help the large class of libraries not reached by the more costly journal.
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The success of the American library association in its first year was so evident, that the principal English libra- rians were anxious to follow its lead, and Mr. Dewey con- sented to go to London for the organization of a library association of the united kingdom, undertaking to take with him two or three leading American librarians. He suc- ceeded in raising a delegation of twenty-two (the largest from any country, except England) at the international conference called in London. In evidence of their appreciation this new association enthusiastically adopted the Library Journal as its official organ, and eight of the foremost English libra- rians accepted invitations to serve as his associate editors without salary.
A cardinal principle with Mr. Dewey is that we must stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, and fully utilize the experiments and experience of others, if we are to make any substantial progress. He has, therefore, traveled many thousand miles in this country to visit and study the workings of American libraries, and as this sketch goes to press he is again crossing the Atlantic to study the adminis- tration of the best libraries, museums and universities, and specially, the important recent educational movements for extending the work of the old universities among the people.
His reputation as a most skillful specialist in his profes- sion having become widely extended, new and enlarged fields of usefulness were opened to him. In 1883 he became chief librarian of Columbia college, and in 1887, professor of library economy and director of the Columbia College Library School, which was a creation of his own, and of which the remarkable and practical success has justified his most sanguine hopes. Albanians may congratulate them-
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selves that the school was so wholly Mr. Dewey's in incep- tion, plan and administration, that the leading librarians of the country considered it essential to general library inter- ests that it should continue under his personal direction. This fact has enabled the regents to secure its transfer to the state library, where it promises to do an even greater and better work than in New York, without involving any expense to the state.
This school takes selected candidates, after graduation from the literary colleges, and gives them a two years' thorough professional training for librarianship. It has already drawn pupils from all sections of the country from Maine to California, and at present thirteen states are repre- sented, though less than twenty pupils are admitted from about one hundred annual applicants. The school has won the highest encomiums from leading librarians and the press, at home and abroad. Each year shows more clearly that it will be perhaps the most important factor in the modern library movement, since it is scattering through the country enthusiastic apostles, each of whom enlists the active inter- ests and sympathies of new circles.
When Mr. Dewey took charge of the Columbia college library in 1883, it was practically unknown outside the col- lege grounds, and equally unknown to many inside who completed their four years' course without ever crossing its threshold. When he left it in 1888, it was opened ten times as many hours, including all holidays and vacations, its great hall and smaller reading-rooms were thronged with readers ; its shelves had received in the six years as many books and pamphlets as in the preceding one hundred and thirty since the college was founded ; it had won its place as an important factor in the literary life of New York, and
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its reputation had spread wherever libraries were known. Numerous very complimentary articles and references ap- peared in European journals, a leading literary weekly of London, in its editorial columns, speaking of "the best ad- ministered library in the world, that of Columbia college in New York." The New York Evening Post said in an ap- preciative full column editorial : " The institution in its new and improved form is so recent that not one New Yorker out of five hundred knows of its existence. Yet visiting foreigners have expressed the highest admiration for its methods and conveniences for effective work."
The leading Canadian literary journal The Week, of Toronto, in discussing "libraries and education " said : "One of the leading spirits in bringing about modern reforms in library administration is Melvil Dewey, now secretary of the university of the state of New York at Albany. Until 1888, Mr. Dewey was librarian at Columbia college, New York. His predecessor had been the college janitor. When Mr. Dewey's five years of service came to an end he left the library more than doubled in extent, and in arrangement and management the best in the world. From occupying several inadequate rooms scattered about the building, ac- cessible only a few hours in the week, the books now fill the handsomest hall in New York -a hall perfectly ventilated, sumptuously furnished, lighted by electricity, and open four- teen hours a day. Mr. Dewey, whose organizing mind has in effect created this superb library, is the author of what is known as the " decimal classification " for libraries.
M. B. Buisson, for some years employed by the French government as its representative in foreign countries and at various worlds' fairs in studying libraries and higher educa- tion, in his official report on the New Orleans exposition and
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the American visits made in connection with it, gave several pages to unstinted praise of the work done by Mr. Dewey, from which space allows only a brief extract : "Columbia college has, above all, a library of the first rank. I have visited the library of Harvard university ; of Oxford, and of Cambridge, England, as well as those of several German universities, but in organization and facilities for work, I do not believe that the library of Columbia college can be sur- passed. It seems to me exactly to realize the ideal of a university library ; not yet in number of volumes, though it possesses already more than 75,000, but in its equipment and administration. It has a character of its own which de- serves to be studied, especially now when the reconstruction of the Sorbonne necessitates the reorganization of our own university library.
" Six distinct collections have been formed into a single li- brary, provided with all the improvements which the Bod. leian, the British museum, and the Bibliothèque nationale could suggest. The new librarian, Mr. Melvil Dewey, elected in 1883, who planned and carried out this transformation has accomplished a truly herculean task."
Mr. Dewey has spent much time during the past sixteen years in developing improvements in library economy, and hundreds of libraries are using devices, appliances and methods copied from other libraries or described in various books and pamphlets, but which originated in the experi- ments and studies conducted since 1876 by Mr. Dewey, or under his inspiration, in the library bureau or library school.
The phrase often met in library publications of the " Dewey system" has no definite meaning, for though he has been called on in hundreds of cases to plan or revise the
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systems used, he has no stereotyped form but studies each problem by itself, to find what seems calculated to do most good, considering all the special circumstances, and no two of the many library buildings and systems which he has helped to plan are exactly alike.
Because of its publication and wide distribution he is best known for his work on classification, which is often called the Dewey system, and is adopted in many of the best managed libraries of both Europe and America. It was published first as " Classification and subject index for cataloging and arranging books and pamphlets of a library" (Amherst, 1876). A second edition greatly enlarged appeared as " Decimal classification and relativ index" (Boston, 1885), and in 1888, under the same title, a third ; and in 1890, a fourth edition. He also published " Rules for author and classed catalogs, with fifty-two fac similes of sample cards" (Boston, 1888), followed by a revised and enlarged edition as "Library school card catalog rules" (Boston, 1889).
He has also in preparation, and has already printed, de- tached sections of a series of library handbooks, which will cover the whole field of library economy, as well as classifi- cation and cataloguing.
Besides the books appearing under his name, Mr. Dewey has contributed not a little to other books and pamphlets, and very largely to periodicals, though much that he has written has been unsigned. Some idea of his activity is gained from the fact that we find in the index to articles, notes and references in the first fourteen volumes of the Li- brary Journal, eight hundred and seventy-five entries under his name. From the first he has declined all invitations to write, speak or join societies, clubs or other bodies, except in the direct lines of his chosen work. Those who under-
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