Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  She would be forced to reconsider. Over 100,000 women worked in munitions factories alone during the war, many discovering that they excelled in heavy industry. More than a few also found that they liked their independence. Liberated not only by modern housekeeping but by changing attitudes as well, women realized that they could perform paid jobs more than competently, working simultaneously inside and outside the family. Nonetheless, war was one thing, ordinary life another. After the smoke cleared, the men wanted their jobs back, even if the women meant to keep them.

  Before the country could confront such new social issues, however, history paused, reconnoitering with the detritus of battle. In the worst influenza outbreak ever recorded, deaths worldwide ranged from 20 to 100 million, depending upon the scribe doing the frenzied reporting. The 1918–19 epidemic killed more people in one year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages did in an entire century, claiming greater numbers in six months than AIDS would record in twenty-four years. For all of its notoriety in America as a decidedly unwelcome immigrant, evidence suggests that the “Spanish flu” originated in Haskell County, Kansas, then traveled across the state to an army base. It accompanied the soldiers going overseas, afterward hitching a trip back to the United States with the troops returning home after the war.

  In spite of its protection from the urban crowding feeding the virus, Tuxedo Park shared in the fatalities, underwritten, like New York City’s 33,000 deaths, by the anomalous summer of 1918, when the region recorded a record high temperature of 104. Subsequently, just as the entire Hudson Valley rebounded from being held hostage to August’s heat, the Midwest was hit with its coldest winter on record, making some mutter that God’s wrath was upon the nation.

  At Tuxedo Park, women not affected by the flu epidemic tended local patients, 400 of whom died. One apparent victim was Minnie Coster’s husband, William; another was Juliet Hamilton’s eleven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. The new fear of the crowded germ-riddled city inflated prices for the seemingly safe property in the country, so Emily decided to sell the houses she’d inherited from her parents. After all, her writing was producing little income these days. She disposed of three of them quickly, retaining the smallest lot, with the beautiful little cottage Bruce had loved, for herself. When she finally sold it in 1927 to Katharine Delano Collier, the transaction would signal the end of Emily Post’s legendary reign at Tuxedo Park.

  CHAPTER 38

  EMILY POST WAS LUCKY, AND SHE KNEW IT: BOTH HER SONS HAD returned from the war intact. Now the three of them would step into the modern age together, traveling routes that would test the fortitude of this family beyond anything they could imagine.

  Bruce Post was still trying to figure out what to do with his life. Though he had served honorably in stateside duty, patrolling the Mexican border for two years, he knew his tame service record didn’t compare with Ned’s dramatic exploits. After the war, when Emily took a new city apartment at 350 Park Avenue, she ensured that there were plenty of rooms: for both sons, three female servants (all Swedish), and even one of their daughters. But Bruce would elect to live with Katharine Collier for a brief period, possibly to get away from the hoopla surrounding his handsome, romantic war hero brother. He occupied the third floor of Collier’s town house, his bedroom cheerily ordained “the Bruce Post room” thereafter. The Colliers, with their mixed family of two sons and two daughters, had become like close relatives to Emily’s “baby,” as she still fondly called the charming six-footer.

  In contrast to his younger brother, Ned Post had been dating girls from an early age. He was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the independent youth culture that had developed upon the war’s end; he had, after all, returned from overseas a hero. He happily moved into his mother’s city apartment, quickly becoming a popular figure on the Manhattan party circuit—and, of course, at the resorts of the rich. Soon he was spending time with a childhood acquaintance from Tuxedo Park and Newport, Barbara Loew. The two had grown up together, and Barbara’s mother, Florence Baker Loew—and even Barbara’s grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. George F. Baker—were friends of Emily’s, all from the same set. Beautiful, blond Barbara Loew enjoyed society more than did her august grandparents or even Ned, her pleasure apparent at her lavish formal debut during the summer season at Newport two years earlier.

  The genial if reserved Baker family would have impressed anyone. Two years earlier, just after the reclusive patriarch helped finance wartime flying lessons on Long Island for Yale undergraduates (the fraternity later known as the Millionaires’ Unit), the Forbes 400 list had ranked him fourth among the nation’s wealthiest citizens. In 1931, the legend of George Baker’s fortune would be immortalized when his New York Times obituary, listing his assets, pronounced him “one of the richest men in America”—and, equally daunting, the third-wealthiest man in New York City.

  Emily was pleased when the engagement of two of Tuxedo’s finest was announced on February 2, 1920: Barbara, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W. Goadby Loew, and Edwin Post Jr., the son of Mrs. Price Post and the grandson of the late Bruce Price. Though Ned was close to his father, he didn’t even consider asking his mother to add Edwin’s name to the announcement; he and Bruce had always played by Emily’s rules, which included omitting their father’s name from any occasion where hers was listed.

  Even as such conventional manners reinforced the sort of strict behavior nurtured in the postbellum South, Emily observed other people she respected chipping away at it. In Harlem, a much-discussed uptown energy could be purchased temporarily by white people like Ned Post and his friends, eager to participate in the feverish new nightlife. But activity that integrated black and white citizens was generating unease as well as excitement among Emily’s crowd, breeding deep-seated fears even among the most enlightened liberals. The respected novelist, critic, and photographer Carl Van Vechten, defiantly mixing the races at his dinner parties, nonetheless assumed that “Harlem’s rhythm and heated sexuality” came from “primitive, primordial roots, no longer extant in whites.”

  Such so-called heated sexuality was increasingly considered a valuable commodity, wherever it appeared. At times, the 1920s seemed to be preoccupied, even obsessed, with sex. In the face of daunting publicity, while the war overseas was being fought, Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne had opened the country’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, outraging the authorities, who shut it down ten days later and imprisoned the women. Still, the Victorian Angel in the House was yielding to a new model who not only expected a public vote but demanded a type of personal fulfillment that her mother, taught to sublimate bodily pleasure, hardly knew existed. During the final years of the decade, even the Ladies’ Home Journal fully supported sex education.

  By 1920, the transition from the Victorian age was complete, the war’s end a mere exclamation punctuating an era long outworn. Young adults started “to sample the merchandise before making their final selection,” their casualness leading the journalist H. L. Mencken to declare confidently that “the veriest schoolgirl . . . knows as much [about birth control] as the midwife of 1885.” Furthermore, the New Woman demanded satisfaction on all levels of life, just as men did. Let her mother extol the shiny synthetic fabrics and the sturdy Bakelite: such domesticities failed to interest her. She was too busy admiring the brevity of the skirt she bought at Gimbels.

  Emily’s firstborn would plunge with the complete confidence of his class and gender into that liberated new world. On May 6 at four P.M., Ned Post and the dazzling socialite Barbara Loew married at St. Thomas’s, Manhattan’s premier church. Described in detail by the New York Times, the wedding was represented by “the society life of New York, Tuxedo, Long Island and Newport.” Hours before the event, guests lined the pavement outside the church, hoping to get good seats. Even so, many stood in the aisles. For the groom’s mother, the bridesmaids, all of them children of her friends, connected Tuxedo Park to Manhattan in a blur of nostalgia. After the ceremony, the guests att
ended a wedding reception at 258 Madison Avenue, the home of the bride’s parents, just a few doors down from where Barbara’s mother, Florence, had grown up. Back in the Gilded Age, the Bakers had sponsored an even more lavish wedding for Florence: their house at 262 Madison had easily accommodated the afternoon’s “light breakfast” for five hundred. Though the number of guests was almost the same, today’s feast was relaxed by comparison, a product of the more casual decade.

  CHAPTER 39

  THE WAR WAS OVER, NED WAS LAUNCHED, WORKING AS AN ENGINEER for the Mack Motor Truck Company, and Bruce was trying to find himself, while his mother nudged him gently as he explored his options—which did not, he reasserted, include returning to college. Life seemed to have settled back into its prewar routines, and Emily found herself once again attending dinner parties instead of allotting her time away from work to volunteer activities.

  Though they could drink to the newlyweds in the privacy of a family setting, in 1920, she and her newly empowered female friends were still unable to raise a champagne toast at Delmonico’s in honor of their hard-won status as fully enfranchised American citizens. Prohibition reigned, promoted in many cases by the very women who had lobbied hardest to get the vote. Emily didn’t drink, but, ever her father’s daughter, she was disgusted with the government’s interference with what she believed were citizens’ rights.

  At one of the Saturday evening dinners for twelve where the guests routinely waxed indignant at the restrictive liquor laws, she was feeling particularly feisty, and she argued eloquently that all citizens should have the right to make their own decisions. Before long, the discussion turned to problems of civic versus personal domain, whereupon one of the erudite guests reminded the others that the French word for ticket, used to remind citizens to distinguish between private and public space, was actually the source of the English word etiquette.

  With that, Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield, lingering over dessert alongside Emily’s longtime family friend and legal adviser Phoenix Ingraham, now happily married, launched into a lament for what passed as etiquette books those days: mostly pretentious babble, he huffed, that had no grounding in ethics. He himself had written the satirical Manners for the Metropolis over a decade ago, a book that skewered both the pretensions of the newly rich and the snobbery of old money. As if suddenly inspired, Crownie turned to Emily, his dinner partner, and urged, “Why don’t you compose a book on how to behave?” Emily pooh-poohed the idea, embarrassed, in spite of the instructional articles she had penned for magazines over the past few years, that she was being asked to write a book about something as uninspired as manners.

  Perhaps the story about Frank Crowninshield inspiring Emily Post to write Etiquette is true. A savvy interpreter of others’ abilities, the editor surely recognized in his friend a hybrid perfect for the age, a woman proud of her past even as she sought to be part of the future. Crownie, ten years older than Emily, had deeply enjoyed getting to know her over the past twelve or thirteen years, first at Frank Hopkinson’s Sunday soirees, then, since Hop’s death, at more irregular but still frequent dinners that mutual friends gave. For her part, Emily had found Crownie smart, though a gentleman who wore his learning and his breeding lightly. Born in Paris to a well-connected but poor Boston Brahmin family who soon moved back to the United States, Frank had been tutored by his father, a mural painter, who’d passed on his knowledge and love of art to his son—just as Bruce Price had trained his daughter. A member of the exclusive Knickerbocker and Union clubs, Crowninshield, since he’d begun editing the year-old Vanity Fair in 1914, had already turned it into the premier omnibus periodical for men and women.

  Weeks after the dinner party, Crowninshield called Emily again about writing an etiquette book, luring his friend with his erudite but breezy take on America’s postwar needs: all those new war wives desperate to know how to write a thank-you note, all those immigrants who had made it to our country before the rules tightened, all those new-money people, ashamed to admit they had no idea how to behave in society. Over the past decade, the country had also witnessed unprecedented numbers of rural American women, the purveyors of the nation’s manners, moving to cities. He smoothly explained that he had taken the liberty of setting up a meeting between her and Richard Duffy, the new editor at Funk and Wagnalls, who had been one of Emily’s first supporters when he worked at Ainslee’s. Crowninshield also disparaged the present competition published by Doubleday, knowing he was appealing to Emily’s prodigious vanity.

  The Doubleday book to which he referred was the two-volume Book of Etiquette, actually an old compendium newly spruced up by a nineteen-year-old copywriter, Lillian Eichler. The original version, written by Emily Holt, emphasized “elaborate rules and petty details,” Crownie explained. Recently, the publisher had sought to increase sales by underwriting a publicity campaign of monthly cartoon advertisements depicting humiliating social blunders, especially those of young married couples and aspiring social classes. The offenders were shown ruining all future chances of success through their unwitting faux pas, born out of crass ignorance. Doubleday’s ads “infuriated” Emily, who later remembered that they “made me so blind mad that I couldn’t see straight.” She had grown up believing it wrong to shame others, a belief that had only strengthened with age.

  The myth of Etiquette’s origin is one of infinite delay, with Emily deciding only at the last minute to take on the project, almost (though she would never have said so) as a social obligation. Throughout the years, she would retell the genesis of Etiquette as if she had been horrified at the idea Crowninshield proposed, then appalled, even insulted, by this subject that he and Richard Duffy kept urging on her. Why would she be interested in telling people which fork to use? To write about such matters was beneath her. Just as bad, the subject was boring. Only when Crownie and Duffy convinced her that she would be serving the citizenry did she capitulate. With every recounting, Etiquette’s birth would grow more miraculous. The psychoanalyst Sue Erikson Bloland explains Emily’s myth as typical of the famous: “They came to me and made me do it.”

  Emily’s later description of her friends’ begging her to write about manners is, of course, betrayed by the hard evidence of the letter she had written to Paul Reynolds nine years earlier. She had beseeched her agent to arrange for her to write a monthly magazine column on the subject of etiquette. Emily Post should have known better than to commit such supplication to the archives. Two years later she would pen these words, as if she had learned her lesson: “Remember that every word of writing is immutable evidence for or against you, and words which are thoughtlessly put on paper may exist a hundred years hence.”

  ETIQUETTE BOOKS, CALCULATED to placate the demons of insecurity, had been wildly popular in America from the country’s inception. Citizens of the raw, new nation were ripe for instruction as they looked to their future, far from the motherland. New Yorkers especially proved a fruitful market for etiquette books; the mandarins of Boston or Philadelphia had names or property to confirm their worth, while New York was still up for grabs, a center for commerce and new money and for immigrants attracted by stories of both.

  The city’s mad mix of backgrounds had created less than uniform manners. Recently minted gentlemen had to learn to stop blowing their noses into their bare fingers and to avoid hitting the backs of ladies’ dresses when spitting out their chewing tobacco. By the early nineteenth century, Manhattan bookshops and newsstands overflowed with books and articles on “good form” and “proper social usage.” Such etiquette writers were talking to the new Americans, unaccustomed to being “in society.”

  These social novices, as they created a uniquely blended middle class, needed to learn what to wear, what food to serve, and which people to invite to their parties, or they might be blindsided by those just a rung down the ladder, always nipping at their heels. The country’s exotic blend of backgrounds and world cultures demanded constantly updated instructions on conduct. Manuals seemed to appear
nonstop, trumpeting opportunities for everyone. No matter where you came from, etiquette indicated where you could end up. As Arthur Schlesinger has maintained, the story of etiquette in America illustrates the opportunities engendered by the “leveling-up process of democracy” itself.

  From 1870 to 1900, five or six books a year appeared on the broadly defined topic of manners. Then, for the first two decades of the twentieth century, the subject spilled over into the popular magazines littering American living rooms, driving the quest for the good life until the First World War, when there was a predictable lull in inquiries on local behavior. By the time that Emily Post was asked to write her book, the market was bulging again, full of volumes that, as far as she was concerned, were second-rate.

  Her assessment was correct, according to most historians: “Few of the hundreds of etiquette books published in America since the time of Jackson left any more than a thumbprint on American behavior until Emily Post came along in 1922,” according to the historian Esther Aresty. “Then, in the way that Victrola identified phonographs, Kodak cameras, Frigidaire refrigerators, and Kleenex cleansing tissues, ‘Emily Post’ became a synonym for etiquette. Purchasers of her book rarely ask for it by title, let alone its full title. . . . To ask for ‘Emily Post’ was sufficient.”