Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  WHEN THEY GOT HOME, Ned immediately began writing an article about the overseas trip. Published in the New York Times Magazine, it was striking for its graceful prose. The following summer he would write a follow-up for the New York Times, the newspaper hawking a brochure about “Henri the War Dog” to raise money for the Allies. First her husband, then her son: Emily’s secret conviction that a solid, traditional college education underwrote a writer’s tweaking of syntax had only grown as she’d watched her firstborn effortlessly toss off his piece about their European adventure.

  Compounding her wavering confidence, Harold Ober, Paul Reynolds’s partner, soon conveyed the disappointing news that he had sent the already published story “The Calico Girl” to every plausible publication, and each had declined to option it as a novel. “Dear Mr. Reynolds—it is rather discouraging, isn’t it! However, if it is no good—it is no good!” Emily tersely wrote to her agent, rather than responding to Ober directly.

  Her subjects felt increasingly out of date, even to her. That spring, the country was largely preoccupied with the war overseas, not society. For a short but violent few months, the nation temporarily discharged its anxiety by returning to its past, reassessing the Civil War through the safety valve of fiction. On March 3, 1915, The Birth of a Nation mesmerized Manhattan when it made its New York debut at the Liberty Theater on Forty-second Street. Though the movie’s violence felt radically at odds with the domestic plots Emily favored, she found herself deeply moved. The portrayal of old friendships sundered when sons joined opposing armies reminded her how her father’s brothers had suffered just such anguish.

  More insidiously, The Birth of a Nation paved the way for a renewal of racial violence barely suppressed since the Civil War, and it dangerously romanticized the Ku Klux Klan in the process. At least Emily’s novels, however dated they seemed, were safely stationed in a rarefied past no one sought to resurrect. The War Between the States—between families—was something else, seeming to have been fought only yesterday to many of the movie’s audience. Even the academic, usually liberal Woodrow Wilson honored the silent film, making it the first feature picture ever screened at the White House, with Thomas Dixon, upon whose book the movie was based, at the president’s side. “The Calico Girl,” not the Civil War, seemed from a bygone era.

  It is unlikely that Emily Post’s family and friends saw any connection between the racial stereotypes influencing even the most sensitive of their crowd and the ugly local warfare promoted by the stunning silent movie. Neither Emily nor her Uncle Frank believed in a class subjugated on account of race. But they failed to see that an exalted “Best Society” coexisting alongside ethnic segregation was as illogical as the chimera of exalted “pure” Dutch ancestry they had always found ridiculous. The racial condescension and ignorant assumptions of Hop’s genial novels coexisted uneasily with his avuncular aura. Even his popular novel Colonel Carter’s Christmas, for instance, read aloud in the presence of Mark Twain nine years earlier, referred to the benevolent protagonist’s loyal prewar slave as a “worthy darky” with a “scrap of a pickaninny” son.

  However the company she kept discouraged Emily from rethinking her views on racial relations, it’s a good thing that she could depend on Uncle Frank and his circle for socializing just now. Her decorating projects were rewarding, but they didn’t provide the same sense of accomplishment—or the large audience—that writing her books had. Stationed among other authors at Hop’s Sunday night soirees, she could define herself as she wished—who would argue, whatever her subjects? Still, she could take only so much chatter, no matter how sophisticated; she had long preferred work to endless repartee. Using his mother’s ennui as leverage, Ned began to badger her about taking a coast-to-coast trip in their own country: once again, he pointed out, he could be the chauffeur. They had the automobile, and it was a shame not to use it. A brilliant idea, Emily concluded, her sudden enthusiasm scuppering her listlessness.

  Soon thereafter, at one of their habitual weekend dinners, she proposed to an editor friend of hers, the elegant Frank Crowninshield, that she spend the spring driving across the United States, penning an account as she traveled. Within weeks, Crownie called and suggested that she motor from New York to the sumptuous world’s fairs at San Diego and San Francisco, describing the western extravaganzas for Collier’s, owned by his friend Condé Nast. An omnibus magazine that competed with the Saturday Evening Post for readership, it featured such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, and Willa Cather. What a perfect forum to advance her writing career—and with such a subject! Remember, the persuasive bon vivant reminded Emily, President McKinley, just a few minutes before he was assassinated at the Buffalo world’s fair, had asserted that “Expositions are timekeepers of progress.” Now the West was making its bid for fame, and Crownie encouraged his friend to explore her own country for a change. Emily Post, reporter, agreed to visit both exhibitions.

  But in the middle of her cheerful flurry of preparations, Emily received the sad news that Uncle Frank had died, at the age of seventy-six. Obituaries, inevitably noting his modesty, emphasized his unusual prowess at multiple careers: engineer, artist, illustrator, and short-story writer. In spite of his considerable success with portraiture and illustration, Francis Hopkinson Smith had always insisted that he be termed an amateur. Similarly, his accomplishments as a writer, a talent exercised only after he turned fifty, were equally serendipitous. A natural after-dinner raconteur, he had been persuaded by friends to commit his stories to paper, whereupon he’d discovered that others enjoyed his deceptively light touch as well. Though he wrote and illustrated volumes of personal travel narratives, covering Cuba, Mexico, Venice, Constantinople, and Holland, his most widely bought novels and short tales dramatized life in the Old South, elegies for the distinguished family he had been born into.

  More personal reminiscences also appeared in the New York city papers. “There never was a kinder nor cleaner gentleman, nor yet one capable of more withering indignation when indignation was deserved,” a letter to the New York Times declared. “If ever there was a radiant center of cheerfulness and light, he was one.” The wide-ranging praise suggested why Uncle Frank had been a family favorite, with a natural gregariousness that had reminded Bruce Price not to take himself too seriously.

  CHAPTER 35

  ON SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 1915, THE YEAR VIRGINIA WOOLF PUBLISHED her first book, The Voyage Out, Ned, Emily, and her favorite cousin through marriage, Alice Beadleston Post, began their drive across the country. The writer traveled in her long, elegant Mercedes, with steel tires and a pull-up half top that look primitive today. The threesome was in frequent danger of getting stuck in the mud, the Lincoln Highway proving years behind schedule, its official dedication having been held months earlier.

  Begun in 1912, the United States’ first transcontinental highway, extending from New York to California, had been planned to officially open at the same time as the world’s fairs in San Diego and San Francisco. With the help of Goodyear and the Packard Motor Car Company, Carl Fisher, the developer who had recently created Miami Beach by dredging a swamp, was building a highway worthy of a president’s name. But in 1915 it couldn’t be considered finished by anyone’s standards.

  In spite of warnings from car clubs and officials connected to the Lincoln Highway about its still primitive road conditions, Emily was determined to see America. Nor would we know from her subsequent chronicle of the voyage west that a year earlier she and her car had barely made it out of France. As if averting her eyes from the European battlefield, she held war stories at bay as she discovered her own nation. The forty-five-day trip during one of the wettest springs on record would prove seminal to the writer’s psychological maturation, enhancing her ability to look beyond what she already knew.

  Collier’s suggestion that Emily keep a journal of the itinerants’ most mundane experiences appealed to her compulsive nature from the start. She had already shown herself to be infatuated with acc
ounting, recording everything from the number of yards needed to cover a couch to the cost of decorative lace by the foot. Now she put her fastidiousness to professional use, documenting the minutiae of the trip: gas, food, lodging, car repairs, and generous tips, all of which would cost $1,800 (in today’s money, around $36,000). The magazine articles and the subsequent book, By Motor to the Golden Gate, captured Emily’s deep satisfaction at understanding life around her through what would ordinarily be considered insignificant details.

  As the intrepid threesome trekked the rough, sometimes impassable trail from New York to California, Emily’s keen observations of social and cultural differences fairly shimmer with intelligence, her excitement inscribed within the precisely detailed ledger pages. Surprised at the towns’ variety and the variable landscapes she encountered, Emily compared New York favorably with Europe. Leaving Albany, she noted, “the roads have been wonderful, wide and smooth as a billiard table all the way. There were stretches of long wide roads as in France—much better than any in France since the first year theirs were built. One thing we have already found out; we are seeing our own country for the first time!”

  “We had expected the scenery to be uninteresting!” she continued exuberantly. Instead, “No one with a spark of sentiment for his own country could remain long indifferent.” Alongside the “splendid-looking cows, horses, houses” she observed “in every barn, a Ford.” Culinary specialties created outside of Manhattan and even beyond the reach of her beloved Hudson Valley amazed her: “Crepes Suzette, which were delicious” ended a lavish dinner that cost only “a dollar and thirty cents” per person. Her hotel was practically sumptuous, she declared, though a modest but clean inn was all that she had expected. Such plenty explicitly reminded her (uncharacteristically) of those less fortunate: “Going through these miles after miles of perfect vineyards and orchards, it seems impossible that in New York City are long bread lines, and that in other parts of our great country there is strife, hunger, poverty and waste.”

  When the travelers reached Chicago, they paused to wait out the record-breaking rains, which had turned the highway into furrows of mud. Emily couldn’t help comparing Chicago high society, among whom was a good friend of hers, with society back East. Though she didn’t name her prototypical Chicagoan, it was probably Elaine, the naïf Emily had taken under her wing at the weekend party near Paris years before. After Emily had taught her how to fit into the social gathering, helping her alter her dress and arrange her hair, a spontaneous friendship had grown between them, and now Emily apparently used the woman herself as an analogy for appreciating Chicago. “Once in a very great while,” she wrote, “one meets a rare person whom one likes and trusts at first sight, and about whom one feels that to know him better would be to love him much. To me Chicago is like that.”

  Attending a dinner Elaine gave in her honor, Emily thoughtfully monitored which topics were most popular at the table. Unlike the witty, acerbic barbs of her youth, her observations showed insight and imagination, as well as a strong sense of fairness in the name of difference. “Boston society is distinguished and cultivated. Chicago society interesting and stimulating. At least that is what the people I have met in these two cities seem to me,” she averred. Furthermore, she observed, “the Chicagoans love their city, not as though it were a city at all, but as though it were their actual flesh and blood.” They despise the very mention of New York City, she said, just as a loving parent doesn’t enjoy hearing about the Smiths’ beautiful baby. Instead of finding such urban devotion ridiculous, she thought Chicagoans’ “love of their city . . . something wonderful, glorious, sublime. . . . I don’t suppose a New Yorker ever wants to live anywhere else, but if sentence should be passed on me that I had to spend the rest of my life in Chicago I doubt it I would find the punishment severe.”

  After her little entourage passed through Chicago, however, Emily grew careless, offering less than enthusiastic descriptions of the diners and hotels she experienced farther along the road. Collier’s midwestern readers sent irate mail to the magazine, responding negatively even to the writer’s most determined praise. The “many pleasingly plump” husbands and wives at the Bakers’ Convention in town made delicious bread, Emily offered; but the compliment felt compensatory. A local paper in Iowa City chastised her for speaking ill of the area’s roads and disparaging its food. Citizens of Cedar Rapids were particularly pained by Emily’s unflattering description: “The rooms we were in depressed us to the verge of melancholia. Dingy bottle-green paper, a bathroom in which the plumbing wouldn’t work, a depressing view of a torn-up street.”

  She would apologize in the preface to By Motor to the Golden Gate the following year. At least she had reconfirmed for herself the power of the pen, the care necessary to avoid giving unintentional offense when writing nonfiction. Carefully choosing her words, she explained that travelers passing through an area for the first time naturally relied upon their initial impressions, noting, “An ugly, down-at-heels, uncomfortable hotel makes you think the same of the city.” But she also acknowledged that the truth was not always as uncomplicated as it seemed at first thought. “I do realize . . . it is a very distorted judgment that appraises a town by a few rooms in an hotel,” she admitted.

  Any disappointment was more than compensated for by what lay ahead. By the time Emily reached Santa Fe, she was in awe of the wide spaces and vivid colors of country hitherto a secret to her. The experienced traveler confessed, “We, ourselves, to whom the antiquities and wonders of far countries are perfectly familiar, did not even know the wonders of our Southwest existed.” Even as she extolled nature’s beauty, Emily was learning to relax into the mundane pleasures of daily living far from the bustling East. Extremely hungry, having postponed their meal all day, she and her party eagerly anticipated their dinner at “Mrs. Seth Brown’s,” a restaurant they had seen advertised for its home cooking. Its specialty was southern fried chicken. “Couldn’t we speed it up?” the ravenous woman urged her son.

  The restaurant turned out to be a saloon, its food served “in the rear of a bar . . . smelling of fried fat and stale beer.” Their fantasized dinner consisted of some “greasy fried fish, cold bluish potatoes, sliced raw onions, pickled gherkins, bread and coffee.” Nevertheless, upon reflection, Emily appreciated the peculiar pleasure of the unexpected. “There is one consoling feature in such an incident,” she wrote. “Although it is not especially enjoyable at the time, it is just such experiences and disappointments, of course, that make the high spots of a whole motor trip in looking back upon it. It is your troubles on the road, your bad meals in queer places, your unexpected stops at people’s houses; in short, your misadventures that afterwards become your most treasured memories.” Such a realization was not new to Emily; it captured her joy in integrating what was current or surprising with the nostalgia for time past, a recipe for the best that life could offer, as far as she was concerned.

  TO EASTERNERS, IT SEEMED preposterous for one state to sponsor two world’s fairs at the same time. But this was California, its residents insisting that their vast territory was really two different countries in one. The prevalent opinion held that San Francisco was the grande dame, with Los Angeles and its region “abjectly bourgeois, upstart crass.” Somehow the spunky stepsister, San Diego, had won the bid to join in a two-for-one exhibition that year, with visitors allowed to buy a single ticket for admission to both fairs. Everyone understood that San Francisco, its accreditation ensured by committee, was the official world’s fair.

  When she finally crossed into California, Emily was initially put off by how “overdone” she found Pasadena and Los Angeles. San Diego, however, proved so satisfying it justified her entire trip. The city’s central plaza reminded her of Venice, while the modestly sized fair itself was “a pure delight.” She wrote so appreciatively of the event that the San Diego Historical Society’s website uses her description today:

  The composite impression of [San Diego] is a garden of dense
shiny green in great mass and profusion against low . . . buildings of gray white, no color except gray and green until you come into the central plaza filled with pigeons as in St. Mark’s in Venice, and see a blaze of orange-and-blue striped awnings, stripes nearly a foot wide. . . . [The exhibition’s] simplicity and faultless harmony of color brought out [the city’s] values startlingly.

  Omitted in all of Emily’s discussions of the fair, including her three articles for Collier’s, was the palpable tension surrounding the organization of the San Diego exhibition, a buzz that energized the fair and filled the city’s newspapers but that Emily found indecorous to include. The board of directors had initially refused to allow women to be on the planning committees. Only when the San Diego County Women’s Association threatened to plaster the fair’s restrooms with posters denouncing the men had the board agreed to include women in all future decisions.

  Yet for all her interest in San Diego, it was San Francisco’s spectacle, with its proof of history’s progress, that dazzled Emily. The Panama Pacific International Exposition, held from February 20 to December 4, 1915, had taken over three years to complete, and its success was a morale builder as well as an economic tonic for a city almost destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire.

  She could hardly choose a favorite from the bounty displayed everywhere she turned, though the astonishing forty-three-story Tower of Jewels, covered with glass “gems,” happily reminded her of her father’s gift to his young bride so many years before. She still had the gilded box that Bruce had handcrafted himself in order to set off the exquisite stones he and his father-in-law bought Josephine on the Prices’ honeymoon trip of 1870. This current Tower of Jewels used colored tin mirrors, “shimmering in the wind through the Golden Gate” and looking, Emily believed, “like a diamond and turquoise wedding cake.”