Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  Newport hummed, though the gravity of losing her father must have slowed down even the indomitable Josephine for a few months. But the truth remains that Emily’s mother was never one to show much emotion. Much like her daughter after her, she tended to her psychic pain by staying busy, digesting the psychological detritus piece by piece, everything in its own time. Josie valued things that affected life directly.

  Josephine also believed in taking the measure of the signs around you. Back in Manhattan, that had included watching the majestic ten-story Dakota apartment building, far uptown on the Upper West Side, take its final shape. Solitary against the sky, the building, three years in the making, was almost completed. As what were basically permanent hotel suites begun substituting for conventional private residences, the urban sensibility seemed to shift, the cityscape ceding space to ever more restaurants and apartment buildings. Commissions burgeoned for the city’s top architects, among them Bruce Price.

  More work for her father meant less time for his daughter; Emily knew this. At least she had an increasingly full agenda herself these days. That autumn Emily turned eleven, an age that advanced her to the next, more serious echelon of studies at Miss Graham’s School for girls. Convenient to her home—though during Emily’s tenure it would move from West Twelfth Street to 63 Fifth Avenue, at East Thirteenth Street—Miss Graham’s proximity proved opportune when Emily needed extra coaching to speak the perfect French now expected of her.

  Her later disparagement of the school was almost certainly aimed at defending her halfhearted studies during girlhood: “For six years I attended a school in New York—the Misses Graham’s Seminary for Young Ladies—don’t you love it? But that didn’t help much. I got my real education from listening to my father.” When she was much older, and more confident about her native intelligence, she would admit that she “didn’t like school much” and tried to avoid classrooms whenever possible. “I was absolutely the world’s worst student,” she would claim.

  By the time Emily was enrolled, northeastern society knew what they were paying for when they sent their daughters to Miss Graham’s: connections, after all, not test scores, guaranteed the best placements in life. And in reality, in spite of Miss Graham’s willingness to let the girls’ academics slide in favor of social events, Emily’s school had a formidable history of hiring august teachers, including, while she attended, the founder of the New York Times, Henry Jarvis Raymond. Mentored by Horace Greeley, the well-respected founder and editor of the New York Tribune, Raymond was a promoter of disinterested, honest journalism at a time when tabloid news prevailed. Nor is it likely that the illustrious Morgans, the Rutherfords, or the Trowbridges, whose daughters also attended Miss Graham’s, would be completely lax about their daughters’ schooling. Jennie Jerome, the mother of Winston Churchill, did not appear ill-served.

  THE SCHOOLGIRL EMILY had increasingly come to love Uncle Frank; for a change, Bruce Price wasn’t the only man figuring prominently in the child’s life. On August 18, 1883, Hop won the government contract to build the Statue of Liberty’s base. Miss Liberty was a gift from the French government meant to stick in the British craw upon America’s centennial. Her arm and torch had been displayed in Madison Square Park, at Twenty-fourth Street, since 1876, the next seven years spent in a national campaign to finance the statue’s foundations. Now, the construction funded at last, Uncle Frank was the man of the hour. Almost daily, it seemed, Hop Smith’s name appeared conspicuously in the city newspapers, as if he were as important as Liberty herself, whose concrete support would cost the government $8.94 per cubic yard. The end of the nineteenth century was an era of numbers, an age devoted to codifying and classifying; calculations were next to godliness. Expenses were meticulously detailed for the public: Frank Smith’s base required $51,000 to $52,000. To be made of concrete composed of sand, cement, and broken stones, it would measure 93 feet square at the bottom and 70 at the top and stand 48 feet, 8 inches high. The pedestal, rising to an altitude of 112 feet, would require a platform 67 feet square at the base and 40 at the top. Reciting the numbers reinforced the statue’s significance: Who would have thought so many layers compiled the Statue of Liberty’s foundation?

  From the beginning, Hop installed Emily Price at his side. She joined him in his small tugboat as he inspected Miss Liberty’s support material. Sharing with her his sketches, as if Emily’s intelligence justified adult respect, Hop Smith served as mentor at a key moment in the life of the girl who was “almost twelve” (as she constantly reminded her mother). This was the type of extracurricular education of which Miss Graham wholeheartedly approved. As Hop and Emily toured his work in progress several times a week, the girl strutted proudly. While the statue’s foundation took form, Emily was allowed to explore the cavernous “secret” rooms in the monument’s hollow interior. The experience turned out to be an idée fixe in the making. She pretended she was a princess, this strange edifice her castle. A not entirely singular fantasy for young girls, it nonetheless took hold of her imagination with a ferocity her other memories rarely exhibited.

  Contributing to the literal foundation of what was to be her country’s welcome to strangers eager to be Americans affected Emily deeply. That she worshipped Frank Hopkinson Smith second only to Bruce Price made for a potent combination: Liberty and a second father she adored. In her later spill of vivid memories of Smith, she never mentioned his children or his wife. If readers of Emily Post’s life relied on her anecdotes alone, they would assume Uncle Frank was a lifelong bachelor—devoted to his ersatz daughter in lieu of his own family. Yet his long-term marriage and lifelong doting on his children were singled out in all the elegies to him years later.

  Bruce proudly observed Emily’s interest in understanding Miss Liberty from an architectural perspective. Spurred on to allow his precocious daughter to accompany him to otherwise all-male construction sites, he felt responsible for Hop’s obvious success with Emily. Given this most recent evidence of her talent, Bruce was willing to forfeit the masculine solidarity he was accustomed to, in order to educate the girl. Throughout her adulthood, in an odd absence of larger cultural reflection, Emily would wistfully recall Bruce’s sadness that her gender denied her the chance to become an architect herself. She so clearly had a talent for this kind of work; what a pity she’d been born a girl, he said more than once. Had she been a boy, she could have become his partner and eventual successor. Without ever pondering the motivation for choices she made as an adult, Emily would set out to prove to herself, most of all, that she was a worthy heir to Bruce Price.

  In fact, by the time Emily thought seriously about a career, there were already women architects, however small their number. In 1886, Louise Bethune, who some said was the first professional female architect anywhere, had become a member of the prestigious AIA, the American Institute of Architects. Several journalists suggested that Bethune’s birthplace, a small town in the center of New York State, had spurred her to achieve: she grew up next door to Seneca Falls, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had conducted the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1848. In October 1881, when Bethune opened an architectural office in Buffalo, she ensured that the occasion coincided with the presence of the state’s Women’s Congress in town. Nor were women limited to artistic fields: in 1884, Belva Ann Lockwood, a well-known suffragist and lawyer from Washington, D.C., forty miles south of Emily’s Baltimore home, ran for president of the United States—and she did so again in 1888. She received an astounding four thousand votes (from men, who alone could vote).

  But if enlightened attitudes toward gender were slowly working their way into the American psyche, atonement for slavery and subjugation of black people seemed headed in the opposite direction. The same year that news about the Vanderbilt class warfare temporarily outstripped interest in maneuvering Miss Liberty to harbor, the Ku Klux Klan, nearly twenty years after its founding, was accelerating its efforts to cleanse America. Such extremism Emily would have abhorred and, of
fered the chance, tried to squelch. But ugly radical factions weren’t what shaped her careless consideration of racial minorities; that culprit, a failure of intellectual sophistication, was more subtle. Throughout the decades, she would enfold her ambivalence about upper-class superiority into her belief in giving everyone a fair shake. People of color had to play by the same rules as everybody else: in America, men and women, girls and boys all had an equal opportunity to learn how to behave. As the idea of inherited class eroded throughout the twentieth century, Emily would breathe a sigh of relief. Now there was no contesting the idea that quality could be had by anyone who wanted it badly enough.

  In light of her birth, Emily Price should have grown up in an era where the prejudices of her parents would soon become a thing of the past. After all, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 had been written three years after she was born. It outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations, a major step in promoting equal coexistence. But instead of life steadily improving for former slaves and other black citizens, in 1883 a conservative Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of rescinding the landmark legislation. The “separate but equal” coexistence established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 would remain the law of the land until the 1960s.

  CHAPTER 8

  BY LATE 1884, WHEN NEW YORK’S AUTUMNAL BALLS BEGAN, BRUCE had served his family commendably, if sometimes functioning like a finely tuned machine. He had dutifully joined all the right clubs, from the Century to the Salamander and, most important, the Union, which dated from 1836 and had a yearly waiting list of five hundred applicants. Bruce Price, a real club man, society murmured approvingly.

  Cleveland Amory has explained the appeal of club life to the upperclass man of this era: “Here he had the best of his well-bred friends, the most comfortable of his well-stuffed chairs, the best of food, drink and cigars from his well-stocked lagers and cellars, the least irritating of reading material from a well-censored library, and the best of games from well-mannered losers. Here he could do what he pleased when he pleased where he pleased and with whom he pleased; here, and only here, did he find sanctuary and his four freedoms: freedom of speech against democracy, freedom of worship of aristocracy, freedom from want from tipping, and, above all, freedom from fear of women.” It was to the gentlemen’s club, Amory pointed out, that lady friends not part of the intimate family circle wrote, the letters discreetly delivered by the club servants, facedown, on silver trays.

  The only membership Bruce Price refused was the prestigious Union League. A product of the Civil War, the club had supported the North. The Union League had spearheaded the building of the Metropolitan Museum a few years after the war ended and had helped found the Red Cross. Now its members were working on the Statue of Liberty project. But the past still stung people like Bruce Price. Emily later explained that her father had refused the club’s invitation because of the organization’s occasional disrespect toward the South.

  Though Bruce’s prejudices were passionate, they were few. Always convivial, he became more gregarious with age. In the past he had needed much solitude, in spite of his easy nature. By 1884 he was thirty-eight years old, and operating with consummate social skill. He had realized that he thrived on the routine and comfort of club life and male social events, enjoying both rhythms more than the feminine home life he shared with Josephine and Emily. The era’s frantic attention to speed suited his perfectionist tendencies well, but he had learned that he also needed a way to relax.

  That autumn, everybody was actually keeping the same time, a very promising scientific advance, in the architect’s opinion. Time zones hadn’t existed previously; each town and city along a rail line had created its own slightly different noontime. Now there would be uniform schedules for the entire United States: Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern. With the world split into twenty-four zones, routines such as determining railroad timetables acquired a new precision that would promote efficiency.

  Still, most people, unlike Bruce Price and his friends, would know only one time zone all their lives. And New Yorkers, whether transplanted or longtime residents, could be forgiven for thinking their city at the heart of the world. New York was for everyone, and everybody came. That year the world’s first roller coaster debuted in Coney Island, creating almost as much excitement in 1884 as the Ferris wheel would at the Chicago world’s fair the following decade. Innovative entertainment unfolding in Times Square allowed New York ladies to participate in nightlife without losing respect—as long as respectable men accompanied them. Dance halls, theaters, and restaurants reached out to female customers, their presence driving prostitution and pornography to the tenement districts at the city’s southern and western borders. Women of every class were seeing more of life than they had for most of the previous century.

  THERE WERE THOSE in this exuberant age who pushed geographical limits even farther than crossing the newly regulated time zones. On November 22, 1884, while Josephine and her twelve-year-old daughter embarked on a monthlong holiday in Baltimore, Bruce attended a widely publicized dinner at Delmonico’s, in midtown. Where else would the city’s finest choose to fête a romantic explorer, a true hero of the age? Tonight’s guest of honor was so important that the restaurant was closed to ordinary business.

  Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely was an Arctic explorer who had survived more than two years at the North Pole without supplies, from late 1881 until early 1884. Only a few years before, an expedition financed by the expatriate and social pariah James Gordon Bennett Jr. had been crushed, along with its brave leader, whom Bennett had financially supported, by the polar ice on its voyage to the North Pole, sinking all on board. Even the notorious Bennett, who had publicly urinated in the fireplace of his soon-to-be ex-fiancée’s friends, flinched when told of the crew’s fate. Greely, in contrast, had survived this latest polar disaster, leading the remnants of his group to safety. Now, as he was celebrated by high-ranking army and navy officials, Bruce Price, architect, sat among them.

  Having grown a bit plumper on the requisite duck, oysters, tenderloin, and turtle that Delmonico’s routinely served these days, the architect mixed easily with the illustrious explorers and military heroes. His connection, yet again, was the omnipresent Frank Hopkinson Smith. An unusually convivial event, the gathering encouraged the jolly company to vie with one another to show their appreciation of the honoree’s pluck. But only after they had downed their coffee and lit their cigars, settling back to hear what they knew would be a once-in-a-lifetime story, did the real show begin.

  It was the kind of compelling adventure Bruce Price relished and, still awed, shared weeks later with his wide-eyed daughter. He admired men indifferent to danger, knowing himself to be cautious by nature, though immoderate in desire. One reason he and his father-in-law had gotten along so well was his genuine admiration for Washington Lee’s never-say-die spirit.

  Now here he was, listening to Lieutenant Greely detail his near-death exploits in the Arctic sea. Nonstop press coverage guaranteed that his story was a repeat by now, but the men were still awestruck as Greely vividly detailed the ordeal: disaster had struck when the supply relief ship failed to show up. The result was horrific, only six numb men surviving out of the original twenty-five.

  What heroes they were, larger than life, if they could face down such disaster and beat it. Yet Greely had survived in large part because his wife had galvanized an exhausted rescue team into giving it one more try—and that time they had finally found her husband. The spellbound listeners stood up to toast the woman behind the man, and after the convivial cheers quieted, the group smoked a few more cigars, drank some additional sherry, and then headed off for their favorite club to share some substantive nuggets with less fortunate friends.

  The trip, and the audience’s fascination with it, typified the period’s sense of boundless horizons, suddenly within grasp. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many Americans and Europeans romanticized distant and unexplored lands; the more exotic a
place seemed, the more compelling the challenge. Africa, with its still virginal commercial markets, and the Arctic, ready-made for the true explorer, had particularly captured the popular imagination.

  Bruce Price’s professional skills, oiled by his social affability, assured him a nearly limitless run of invitations to such gatherings. On the increasingly infrequent occasions when he was home for dinner at 12 West Tenth Street, he jovially passed on detailed accounts of his office life as well as of the social events he attended. The glamour of her father’s schedule reinforced Emily’s sense that Bruce’s activities and his personality were infinitely more interesting than her mother’s. Though Bruce was always courteous and respectful to Josephine, he exhibited a restrained but obvious impatience with her heedless return to practical issues. Luckily, by the middle of the following year, while Emily attended what she viewed as increasingly tedious classes at Miss Graham’s, her parents became aware that they were about to hit pay dirt, and the realization pleased them equally. Josephine’s boosterism and Bruce’s guileless but gutsy work ethic, undergirded by real talent, had irrigated the seeds of a project that set up their daughter better than any social opportunity they could have imagined.