Encouraging others to see their homes as their cocoons further helped Emily to recuperate from her losses. Instinctively, she felt the need to insulate herself from the sadness that she could not entirely shed. As she sought to regain her balance, she helped others build their dreams. Buildings represented wholeness. Just as her father was eulogized as having “the will to experiment with [the] traditional past and to create something new from its very root,” so Emily hoped to do something similar.
She began working for architect John Russell Pope, with whom she felt deeply connected through the deathwatch he had kept with her and her mother at Bruce’s bedside. Now, under Pope’s guidance, she refined her amateur’s techniques, discussing with builders and customers her ideas for interior construction and decoration. Developing her own design methods, Emily cut out paper windows and taped them to walls, in order to show customers the effect she sought. Commissions poured in through the grapevine of her social contacts.
Nonetheless, however determined she was to define herself as a working woman, Emily was inevitably reminded of the privileges of her class. On April 14, 1912, an iceberg bested the supposedly unsinkable Titanic, and only the first-class passengers’ access to lifeboats saved Tuxedo Park’s Spedden family. Picked up by the Carpathia, one of Emily’s favorite ocean liners, the Speddens were welcomed on board by the Ogdens, fellow Tuxedo residents who succored their neighbors after a disaster they’d been told couldn’t happen. Anne Morgan quickly joined the Titanic relief committee and greeted survivors as they debarked, her passion for helping others admired by Juliet even if she privately noted that her sister tended to overextend herself.
To the upper-class, such catastrophes as a luxury liner that had been guaranteed to be unsinkable going down on its first voyage portended an unhinged society, its ruling classes as vulnerable as any others. Nothing seemed fixed; even society women were no longer dependable. Elsie de Wolfe, Mabel Dodge, and Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont were suffragists. Mrs. Belmont (formerly Alva Vanderbilt) was willing to let her society peers jeer at her as much as they liked, in order to advance equal rights for women. She led a heterodox parade of women in white: socialites, seamstresses, factory workers, housewives—class unified by gender—down Fifth Avenue. They marched from Fifty-ninth Street to Washington Square, drawing hoots and laughter all the way.
These “radicals” included women Emily knew. Inevitably, and in spite of her mother’s early urging to mind her own business, she was increasingly aware of the effects of gender (and, later, class) on social and civic power. But she had to find a cause that made sense to her own proclivities. She chose one that allowed her to further the professional needs of writers—women as well as men. As a founder of the Authors League, Emily helped develop an association crucial to the life of city writers who lacked financial resources. Though not involved on a regular basis, she raised funds and lobbied New York legislators several times on behalf of the league’s members. The agenda she helped draft covered everything from copyrights to fair contracts.
More flexible than most of her friends, she was finding the world taking shape around her more hospitable than the one she’d inherited. Even trivial changes often seemed ready-made for someone like her, someone tired of the overemphasis on fine food and elaborate, time-consuming preparations. Although she might not patronize the city’s first Automat, the Horn & Hardart recently opened in Times Square (she still had her cook, after all), she approved the principle, as long as people sat down while they ate. Mayonnaise became a lifelong mainstay of her diet, once she tasted sandwiches from Hellmann’s Delicatessen that year. One new practice did distress her greatly: social life for the upper-classes had shifted rapidly from home to fine, expensive restaurants, but Emily believed such meals a waste of her precious work hours. Until her death, having to kill time while awaiting one’s order—the diner at the leisure of the waiter, not, as at home, in charge of how the meal would proceed—and resisting the urge to beg for the check immediately tested her patience and courtesy to their limits.
IT WAS A NEW DAY, like it or not; everyone could sense it. If a couple of years ago the nation had learned, as a popular title put it, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, 1913 would dazzle readers with Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, a variant of the now firmly launched self-help genre. Paradoxically, the very speed of progress seemed to be immortalized in stone, as the year’s tallest structure, the Gothic Woolworth Building at Park Place and Broadway, began its long reign over Gotham’s panorama. More than twice as high as Bruce Price’s skyscraper, the 792-foot tower, vertiginously sheathed in neo-Gothic detail, seemed equally to evoke an ancient Christian ethos and the contemporary secular city. But women who wanted to gaze at its summit, whatever era it called to mind, still found themselves constrained to the ground: the average dress even now required at least 19¼ yards of fabric.
Yet this was also the year that a woman’s voluminous skirts were allowed to compete for office space. Tuxedo Park’s Mrs. William Laimbeer, who had rolled up her silk sleeves and taken on whatever work she could get to support her three children when she was widowed twelve years earlier, became an executive with the National City Bank of New York. She would supervise all business that dealt with women, instituting a new financial branch of the bank. Instead of garnering praise for its announcement, however, National City was chastised. It was about time, the local newspapers huffed, clearly aligning themselves with their increasingly enfranchised female audience. The New York Times criticized the bank for so belatedly recognizing “women as an economic factor.”
MOST OF THE WOMEN in Emily’s circle, when their spouses died, didn’t have to go to work and chose not to. In late autumn, the writer found herself consoling her friend Katharine Collier upon the recent sudden death of her husband, Price, who, while with a shooting party at a royal Danish estate, had dropped dead. Mere months before, Katharine had proudly witnessed his prizewinning but controversial work Germany and the Germans climb to No. 2 on the bestseller list. Now he left behind a widow whose life meshed well with Emily’s, from her background to her warm personality. Katharine Collier was loved for her generous spirit, and she was able to depend upon a physical energy that Emily lacked.
Other friends, not widowed, nonetheless faced upheaval. On December 22, 1913, the forty-six-year-old Minnie Coster, with her husband, William, and their three children, sailed home from Bologna, where they maintained a residence. It had been five years since banker Charles Coster, William’s brother, had committed suicide after he’d been caught bilking his customers out of millions of dollars. In spite of the accusations against William, he was subsequently declared completely innocent in the affair; he and his sibling had conducted their business out of the same office but otherwise acted completely apart, the court ruled, much to Minnie’s relief.
Such individual cases aside, by the end of the year the country’s economic future rested on far sounder ground than ever before. J. P. Morgan’s group of influential friends, dressed as duck hunters in order to throw nosy reporters off their track, had held a secret conference on Georgia’s Jekyll Island, where they’d created a new recipe for the nation’s long-term financial security. In spite of the tremendous importance of that backwater moment, the systematic reorganization of the nation’s money management meant little to most Americans. Nearly everyone thought the innovative but boring Federal Reserve Act of late 1913 was worth no more than a minute’s attention. To the men and women unfamiliar with the heady world of high finance, however, the new plan was an invisible sign of change.
Far more meaningful to most urban New Yorkers was the animation driving their city, whether New York’s Armory Show, with its crazy modern art, or the world’s first movie palace, Manhattan’s Regent Theatre, or the sensational Ziegfeld Follies. But of all the new landmarks that defined the year, the official opening of the New York–to–San Francisco transcontinental highway would affect Emily’s life more dramatically than anything indigenous to her city alone. In honor of
the president who had unified the nation, the cross-country road would be called the Lincoln Highway.
CHAPTER 34
THE BRIGHT, SOMETIMES BITTER SOCIETY MATRONS WHO HAD MADE their debuts a quarter of a century earlier registered the inexorable, enviable shift toward freedom evidenced in both popular and high culture. Edith Wharton spoke for many of them when she acidly observed, “What a woman was criticized for doing yesterday she is ridiculed for not doing today.” By 1914, signs that the distaff sex was on the move seemed to radiate from all directions, women’s burgeoning confidence reflected vividly in the period’s literature. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s infamous novel Herland, published as a magazine serial, dared take as its subject a land where, after procreating, mothers lived among themselves. Banding together to raise their children without men, the fictional amazons solved the quest for feminine autonomy by uprooting privileged Victorian males and taking on their professions and positions themselves.
Emily was more sympathetic to Edith Wharton’s asperity than in line with the agenda of radical feminist writers. That winter, during a fierce snowstorm on January 10, 1914, she mingled with the formidable Mrs. Wharton when the two women appeared at the Ball of Fine Arts. Sponsored by the Society of Beaux Arts Architects, the event featured Emily as the official representative of the invited prose writers while, in homage to her volume from five years earlier, Artemis to Actaeon, and Other Verse, Wharton led the poets. (Ethel Barrymore headed the list of actors, now more or less admitted into society.) The Beaux Arts Architects had been a second family to Bruce Price, and tonight it seemed to sanction his daughter’s talent in his stead. Emily Post, her head held high, felt herself a winner among equals.
She was not the only one from her social set who had become a professional scribbler, as women writers were often still called. Throughout the year, Anne Morgan saw her essays published in Woman’s Home Companion. Anne intended her articles to ease young lower-middle-class women into life beyond what they already knew. Forget about the Victorian mind-set, she urged: there was no need to hunt for a man to take care of you. Instead, go to work yourself—and early. Even if you married, you might find that you needed to bring home a paycheck.
Increasingly over the past few years, formerly domestic jobs had been driven out of the home and into the marketplace. There was, J. P. Morgan’s earnest daughter believed, no turning back. So many of today’s young women, like Anne herself, had “great men” for fathers, men whose “vision” and “Pioneer spirit” had more than once carried the day. Why, then, she asked, was it their daughters’ duty to do nothing more than find a mate? Why not learn history and arithmetic? Why remain an ignorant and unformed child?
Emily Post wasn’t a rebel like her friend Juliet’s courageous, quietly feisty younger sister; nor was she an innovator, though she admired the many such women taking center stage these days. But she was headstrong and smart, and she knew that the life bequeathed her wasn’t stimulating enough. She fully expected that once she had proven herself, her success would continue.
Instead, that spring, she became worried that her writing career had stalled for good. “The Chase of the Calico Girl,” the story of yet another society girl, had been serialized for the past year in the Woman’s Magazine, and at this point with her other novels, she had always secured book deals based on her installments. So far, there were no takers, and she was concerned that the story was dated. Reynolds demurred, insisting that her audience remained solid. “I am glad to have something of yours once more to sell, and I am interested in this story and expect to make a good arrangement for it,” he wrote her encouragingly.
In part to avoid waiting around to hear updates from Reynolds, Emily devised a perfect distraction, one that combined her love for her sons with her passion for traveling. She had recently learned that Ned and Bruce would not be spending July in Babylon, as they usually did. Edwin and his wife, Nellie (Eleanor), planned to go abroad this summer due to Nellie’s pregnancy and her wish to give birth in her native England. Emily knew that the boys loved both their father and their stepmother, and Emily had supported such loyalty. Now she realized that her sons, even the sophisticated college student Ned, would be deeply disappointed to miss their annual outing on the Great South Bay, where, just like their father, they rose every weekend morning at four to take the Macy onto the marshy water-ways with their father in search of ever-dwindling numbers of canvasback ducks.
Both to compensate for her sons’ letdown and to clear her head so she could write again, Emily suggested that she and her tall, strapping young men spend the summer driving across Europe. They would stop along the way to see friends such as Minnie Coster in England, back at her latest leased country estate, and Uncle Frank in the quaint French farmhouse he had rented near the coast. Ned and Bruce needed little persuading, especially because Emily agreed to stay in London for a few weeks to get their car remade to Ned’s specifications.
At the beginning of June, before the threesome left on their trip, Emily again wrote to Paul Reynolds. Deeply discouraged by his failure to interest publishers in her recent manuscripts, she sounded an unusual note of defeat and peevish ill humor in her correspondence: “What is the matter with the ‘Calico Girl’? . . . Why no news? I am sailing soon, now, and should like it settled.” Emily, instead of the usually astute Paul Reynolds, was the one who recognized the waning of her readership. Or perhaps she had admitted to herself that “The Chase of the Calico Girl” was little more than The Title Market and The Flight of a Moth combined and recycled. Reynolds replied two days later: “I offered ‘The Chase of the Calico Girl’ to Little, Brown and Company; then to Harper. Both of them have declined it. . . . I have not offered it to Dodd because I thought you felt that they didn’t do well enough with The Title Market.”
AT LEAST HER SONS’ excitement took Emily’s mind off her career for a while. With his mother’s permission, Ned had ordered a Mercedes for the family. Now he would have it Americanized with parts from the States added on by an English entrepreneur who specialized in “souping-up Mercedes and providing them with eye-popping aluminum touring bodies, external exhaust pipes . . . great disc wheels, and flaming scarlet upholstery.” Though no record of the Post amalgamation remains, a similar car commissioned from a London firm three years earlier had cost J. P. Morgan $7,275 (the equivalent of $150,000 in the early twenty-first century)—this at a time when Henry Ford had proudly announced that his workers would be paid $5 a day.
Emily, grumbling about the price tag for a car that one entered as if climbing into a bathtub, was further annoyed when her son showed her the bill for his “improvements.” The Mercedes still had no doors, she pointed out, even after all the supposed upgrading. At least the car’s ferry delivery onto the Continent proved relatively inexpensive. After warning her boys that if they kept spending at this rate they’d be forced to economize severely, Emily settled back for a summer of being chauffeured in luxury by her precious sons across the countries she had loved since she was a child.
Within days of their arrival in Paris, however, in contrast to the reassurances their friends in England had expressed, the threesome heard nonstop rumors of war. Still assuming the rumblings to be more gossip than reality, the Posts delayed making arrangements to return home, until they found themselves in danger of being stranded overseas. Just as chilling, when they made rest stops in France, they were unnerved by anti-German sentiment aimed at the suspicious foreigners driving a car whose Daimler-Mercedes engine had been built in Stuttgart. Nonetheless, in spite of the extraordinary and potentially dangerous political events surrounding them, Emily insisted that Ned and Bruce receive an encyclopedic tour of the Louvre, not just a pause at her favorite pieces. Determined to view each exhibit, she hardly noticed the excitement that had commandeered the entire first floor. A breathtaking museum heist was under way even as the single-minded mother coaxed her sons up the stairs.
Finally they began making their way back to the docks, though at times thei
r eventual arrival seemed no sure thing. Because of their overwrought German car, the Post family needed to clarify their loyalties—fast. The tirelessly creative Bruce came to the rescue with “Henri,” a stuffed animal he tied tightly to the car’s hood. Beneath the little black-and-white dog he and Ned attached a sign that said, “I eat Germans.” As the Posts slowly made their way back to the docks, they were greeted every few miles with cheers, all because of Henri.
But borders were closed, banks weren’t open—and cars were impounded for the war effort once they reached the port. Even the charming talisman failed to protect Ned’s pride and joy. Commanded by French officials to leave their expensive, shiny new automobile behind, he finally managed to convince a tired soldier, confused as the Mercedes was hoisted up into the air, that it would not be worth his effort to disconnect the cables already conveying the automobile onto the ocean liner. Emily, her sons, and their car quickly set sail for England, unscathed by an adventure they promptly turned into family lore.
Once they reached London, the Posts vacationed merrily until early September, when the boys returned to school and Emily went to stay for a month at the Turnures’ Mount Kisco house, about an hour from Manhattan. Emily’s cousin wasn’t often in residence, due to Dr. Turnure’s efforts to organize the first French mobile health unit near the Somme trenches, with Sadie herself preparing to work in a hospital in northwestern Burgundy. Emily listened to their plans with trepidation, realizing that her sons were now old enough to volunteer as well.
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