The season’s social distractions, geared to her favorite profession, proved a tonic for Emily, shocked by her cousin’s death. On January 23, 1931, Ken Murchison, a family friend, Bruce Post’s mentor, and his grandfather’s beloved colleague, yet again joined the antics of the Society of Beaux Arts Architects, founded in 1894 with Bruce Price and his colleagues at the fore. Its balls highlighted Venice one year, a Renaissance reconstruction the next. A certain playfulness had always helped undercut the public’s suspicion of a lurking elitism, such misgivings aroused by the frivolity and the high ticket prices ($15 in 1894). Money and architecture seemed interbred. Now, with large numbers of the profession standing in breadlines, even the well- heeled and best- known architects could no longer take their jobs for granted.
An advertisement in early January had described the ball as “modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic.” “Fete Moderne—a Fantasy in Flame and Silver” prophesied a new architectural surge just around the corner. The organization staged a “tableau vivant” of Manhattan’s skyline, a dramatic contrast to the pastoral tableaux Bruce and Josephine had created at the Academy of Music when Emily was a little girl. The runway was festooned with several dozen architects- as- models dressed to recall the buildings they had designed, including the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Fuller Building, and the Waldorf-Astoria Towers. Though this group was known for its disdain toward contemporary art, the artists still swayed with the times, at least tonight: Main Street was done up as a Cubist “midway” with “modernist trees dotting the village green.”
PUBLICITY GENERATED BY the gala disguised for a few more weeks the toll the Depression was exacting from Bruce’s profession. The New York Times reported in mid-January that more than 500 architects had registered at the Emergency Employment Committee in Manhattan, 180 of them in “desperate need” with two or more children to feed. Over the next months, the profession’s employment rate dropped further; new buildings were not on anyone’s list of priorities. Emily was a near- constant presence at fund-raisers led by the Women’s Auxiliary of the American Architects Society, whose volunteers tried to help architects find work. Even Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, who typically supported feminist agendas these days, sponsored relief events for the men (and more than a few women).
But by March the situation had only worsened, and Emily’s organization enlisted the New York Times to again publicize the architects’ plight. Socialites with their wealth intact devised a strategy to employ architects on their abundant private lands, with these “owners of country real estate” funding the project. After all, roofs still needed mending, and the exteriors of many houses shouted for a new coat of paint. Porches, stairways, stone fences: the architects, when hired, found that they could build such necessary country improvements by themselves, their assistants no longer necessary.
While her father’s revered profession stagnated—men her dead son’s age suffering the most—Emily was interviewed by the Associated Press on the question of “to dunk or not to dunk corn pone in potlikker,” the habit of soaking eggless cornbread in leftover green bean juice a well- publicized characteristic of Louisiana’s notorious Governor Huey Long. “I can’t set down rules that conflict with neighborhood customs,” Emily politely responded. “The only thing I can offer is when in Rome, do as the Romans do . . . . The only thing I really care about is rudeness of the host or hostess. Their business is to see that the guests enjoy themselves. If it is going to make somebody unhappy to have to dunk, let him be allowed to crumble. We can’t set rules here in New York for the rest of the world without knowing neighborhood custom.” Emily Post had become a relativist, whether she knew it or not.
THOSE OWNERS OF country estates suddenly needing repairs were responding to President Hoover’s plea: private citizens and charities had a duty to bail out the homeless and unemployed. Worried that federal charity programs would inure Americans to helping their own, Hoover urged states to succor their individual communities. Cities, bearing the greatest burden, were already strained beyond their resources, and this new mandate only made things worse. Chicago fired policemen, firemen, and teachers, many of whom had already gone eight months with no paycheck. Franklin Roosevelt, the governor of New York, worked with aides to develop a work relief program.
The Depression encouraged Americans to close ranks as the financial crisis reached global proportions, and Maryland politicians, determined to boost morale, decided that 1931 would be the year to make “The Star-Spangled Banner” the national anthem. In March, the words of Emily’s relative Francis Scott Key, composed during the British attack on her beloved Baltimore, finally became official. Not everyone supported the choice: set to the tune of an old English drinking song, Key’s piece hardly seemed a logical choice to celebrate the routing of the English enemy. But most Americans felt only kinship these days to their ancestors across the sea. Less easy to ignore was the argument that the song was too hard to sing. Two amateur sopranos, known locally and brought in to perform for the House Judiciary Committee, proved to the officials’ satisfaction that the notes were well within most people’s reach.
That same month, the second revision of Etiquette was published, the changes few but significant. Funk and Wagnalls’s advertising exploited the country’s current insecurity and need for reassuring national rituals. On the one hand, Emily’s diplomatic protocols, based on recommendations she had written when queried by the country’s Department of State, were still included in the book, striking a high tone. At the same time, Etiquette no longer even pretended to address primarily people of financial means or those underwritten by a predominantly Knickerbocker lineage. The ads emphasized that “special chapters [were] written in answer to countless requests from the smaller communities, and from young householders” lacking servants. New instructions explained “the simplest wedding,” as well as discussing ceremonial differences to observe for diverse religions. Matter- of- factly, Emily even suggested the most tactful ways to deal with brides and grooms who had previously been divorced.
IN SEPTEMBER, VANITY FAIR published a series of readers’ questions answered by a panoply of experts, Emily Post side by side with prominent ministers, educators, and columnists. Her success in the limelight emboldened her the following month to hire another agent, the first since she’d parted with Paul Reynolds ten years earlier. Holman Harvey would not handle her books or magazine articles—she settled those business deals herself nowadays—but would help her negotiate with newspaper syndicates. She hoped to land a contract for a weekly or perhaps even daily column. Harvey, with extensive experience at Reader’s Digest, promptly approached executives at the Bell Syndicate, one of several newspaper consortia. Emily liked the idea of being responsible for her own success: writers were paid according to the number of newspapers that subscribed to each columnist.
Through Harvey she negotiated hard, requesting a minimum $500 monthly cash guarantee, but the Bell representative balked. The two sides finally came to an agreement: Bell offered Emily a three- month trial period, followed by a guarantee of $150 a week. At any time she could give thirty days’ notice and cancel her contract. Her column, to be titled in all the newspapers some variant of “In Good Taste,” would debut in the fall of 1932. It would eventually be featured in two hundred newspapers, the daily readership totaling 6.5 million people.
By the time she’d completed her negotiations with Bell, Emily was back on the air. That October, General Electric inaugurated the GE Radio Hour, a series of weekly programs carried by fifty- four NBC stations. The show featured nationally and internationally prominent women, including Emily Post. Throughout 1931 (and for the early part of 1932), Emily spoke for six minutes twice weekly on WEAF Red, appearing on the well- respected journalist Heywood Broun’s Newspaper show for thirteen weeks. At the bottom of her tattered sheet of appearances, one of the few such memorabilia that she saved, she placed an asterisk after Broun’s name: “Only woman on a man
’s program. Had top popularity rating. Terhune; Erskine; Van Loon; Morley, on one night each; EP on 2 nights.” Without a doubt, Emily Post was as competitive as anyone. Never, though, did she indulge such ambition over the obligation to act honorably. As she stressed to her public, she meant to talk with them “not so much [about] the mere problems of etiquette, but the more profound things in life, such as morals, ethics and good taste.”
CHAPTER 52
BILL POST REMEMBERS FONDLY HOW, DURING THE EARLY PART of the 1930s, his grandmother reserved Sundays as their day, “just for Grandmama and me. The elevator man always greeted me, then took me to the ninth floor. Grandmama loved sitting on the floor even as an old woman, and with me, she never sat anyplace else, especially when we did projects together.” Until he was eleven or twelve, Bill, Emily at his side, spent his Sundays casting soldiers from lead molding sets his grandmother combed stores and catalogs to buy for him.
She spoiled him, he admits today: “She devoted those afternoons to me. I couldn’t do anything wrong, in her eyes: I was her only grandchild.” Such singularity came at a cost. Emily had a “tendency to be demanding” when the two got together. It was all or nothing. “When she was ready to turn her full attention onto you, it could be suffocating,” Bill recalls, reluctantly. “She was ‘focused’ on me, almost obsessive. Or maybe a better way to say it is that she cared very deeply about me. But sometimes it felt claustrophobic.” Emily’s loyal secretary, Yvonne Sylvia, who worked for her during the last decade of her life, says carefully, “Even when I was her seasonal worker on the Vineyard, she could be smothering, kind of overwhelming even if she didn’t mean to be. I felt sorry for her sometimes, as if she was a little sad though she was happy.”
But not even for her Billy would she shirk her work. If, as the historian Frederick Lewis Allen maintains, the five- day workweek was the decade’s most significant innovation, Emily Post kept to her old pace, her only regular break Billy’s Sunday afternoons. “Nothing, including me, could interrupt her morning writing,” her grandson states emphatically. Another unalterable routine was mealtime regularity—and brevity, as if Emily was making up for those endless hours at the table when she and Edwin entertained or, even worse, dined with their showier friends: “Grandmama ate at strict times, at one P.M. for lunch and seven P.M. for dinner, always leaving the table within ten or fifteen minutes. The longtime maid stood in the stairwell five minutes before the hour so she could walk in at the exact time. Or if my grandmother was out on the upstairs porch the maid would go halfway up the stairs and wait for the hall clock to strike seven before going the rest of the way up, to say ‘Dinner is served.’ I would run home from playing with neighbors to avoid being two minutes late, and if I was, she just ate without me, cheerfully requesting that I be served once I was comfortably seated. If I came very late, she’d sit there while I ate to keep me company, even though she was already finished with dessert. She wasn’t annoyed, she just had a regimen and not wasting time was a big part of it.”
AT LEAST FOOD and shelter would never be a problem for Emily, though the majority of Americans would find 1932 the hardest of the Depression years. Around 13 million people, a third of the nation’s workforce, were now unemployed. Steel production dropped to 73 percent, with a further decline predicted. Comparisons of the Federal Reserve Board’s Index of Industrial Production put numbers on the despair: U.S. Steel, for example, registering early in October, then on November 13, 1929, falling to a shocking 150, now—three years later—was at . General Electric, a few years ago at , came in at 34.
However inconsequentially, even Emily was affected. “My grandmother was especially concerned about getting her contract renewed for 1932,” Bill Post remembers. “To her credit, she understood that while for her this was a matter of pride more than anything, for most people out of work, it was a matter of feeding their families.” Her anxiety proved ill- placed anyway: on January 4, she was back on New York City’s WJZ, giving the first of fifteen talks on etiquette to be delivered daily at 4:00 P.M.
For those whose finances and families were stable—or who could rely upon long- guarded family income—there were still frivolities to attend. That spring, Minnie Coster’s daughter remarried, this time to royalty whose family always staged its weddings in Monte Carlo. And there were chastening reminders of sorrows worse than poverty. The kidnapping of Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s baby played out daily on the front pages of the city’s newspapers from the first day of March until the middle of May. Soundly asleep in a bastion of love and protection, far from harm’s way, the baby had nonetheless been stolen from his home, the kidnapping striking at the heart of American hero worship and seeming to imply some decrepitude in the state of the union. After all, publisher Henry Luce had made Lindbergh the first “Man of the Year,” his image gracing Time magazine’s cover in 1927. Now the crime riveted the nation’s attention upon Lindbergh again as it conferred a measure of schadenfreude upon the suffering masses, reminding them that money alone didn’t cure all ills. If Charles Lindbergh’s family wasn’t safe, whose was?
While most of America seemed transfixed by the kidnapping, Emily was pouring her energies into revoking Prohibition. Finally, here was an issue where she agreed with President Roosevelt: he should endorse the Twenty- first Amendment at once, stimulating the economy even as he rooted out the corruption bred in Prohibition’s wake. As part of a coterie of prominent New York women convinced that for thirteen years the ill-conceived law had wreaked havoc on the nation, she urged that political candidates be judged primarily upon their position on repealing the Eighteenth Amendment. Emily’s outspokenness was noticed, and a letter to the New York Times praised her for the spirit, courage, and frankness she showed in indicting the politics of “dry” citizens.
Before she left for Edgartown that spring, she again worked on relief projects for unemployed architects, their increasing numbers distressing her. The Women’s Division of the Architects’ Emergency Committee creatively conceived of every possible mission that could help feed a hungry family, including a survey of traffic conditions along Fifty- ninth Street; a campgrounds appraisal in Beacon, New York; an industrial study of steel, brick, and mineral resources for Columbia University; and an assessment of the city’s food- storage systems required by the Welfare Councils of New York. After these projects were depleted, the committee scoured the outlying areas for any remotely related work. Ambitious young college graduates as well as their experienced elders vied to design and build a gas station. Over two thousand architects entered the contest, where the winner and thirty- five runners- up would split a “pot” of a mere $975.
That summer the market hit bottom, down 89 percent from its high in September 1929. Emily’s new advice column for the Bell Syndicate might well prove disastrously ill- timed, she realized, with few newspapers in a financial position to take on new commitments. Instead, she proved such a hit with readers that papers soon appraised her domestically oriented column as one of their surest assets. On September 14, hometown papers from Appleton, Wisconsin, to Hoboken, New Jersey, ran her opening “Good Taste Today” column, subtitled “Tea Trays and Service Plates.” “Dear Mrs. Post,” the first letter asked—it was “from a man,” Emily noted— “should one use a small hemstitched cloth or the bare table” when serving tea? Readers looked to her for a reality outside the financial crisis of their times. She wrote with authority and with a compassion that presupposed everyone was on her side—and she on theirs; she spoke to equals, even as she clearly assumed command.
The easily tired woman now seemed indefatigable. In December 1932, she broadcast from New York City’s WJZ Blue several times a week, concluding her month’s appearances on December 26 by appearing on WJZ at 10:45 A.M. and then on WEAF at 6:45 that evening. She shared the program with a baritone soloist, a sister team of organ players, and various other speakers. Judging from the grainy newspaper photographs that remain, she was finally showing her age. Her plump if pasty skin still retained some o
f its natural translucence, her face now settling into a consistent look of contentment. The hunger shadowing her wary posed photographs from the past had finally been appeased by her current satisfaction: sixty-year- old Emily Post was fulfilled. Emily Post was happy.
CHAPTER 53
AMID THE FRANTIC, HOPEFUL HILARITY OF STILL ILLEGAL MID-NIGHT toasts as 1933 got under way, there lurked forebodings of evils far greater than Prohibition or the Depression. That January, Germany’s new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, was sworn in; the next month, his Nazis, in order to seize power, burned down the Reichstag building. The almost immediate consequence to the United States was the migration from Germany of approximately sixty thousand artists—writers, painters, musicians, actors— many of whom headed for the sanctuary of Ellis Island, where the Great Lady of Emily’s childhood stood atop Uncle Frank’s stone base to welcome them ashore.
In general, however, Americans were roiled by their own misfortunes, able to pay little attention to newcomers. In 1933, at the nadir of the Great Depression, one in four Americans who sought work was unable to find a job. Harlem had an unemployment rate of over 50 percent, and within the next three years property owned or managed by African Americans fell from 30 to just 5 percent. New York City would vote in a new mayor, who had represented in Congress a district that included several minorities. Fiorello La Guardia, from the time of his inauguration in early 1934, carefully but joyously glued the fractured city back together again. Riding into office on the “Fusion ticket,” a party formed from an amalgam of political perspectives, the chubby, five- foot- two man joked that he balanced the ticket all by himself. The child of Italian and Jewish immigrants, La Guardia was married to a Jewish Lutheran, with whom he had adopted two Scandinavian children. Facile in six languages, he met with inhabitants of a Yiddish neighborhood one day, a Puerto Rican one the next. Here was a man who represented everything good about America, shoring up the dreams of the poor, the worried middle class, and those who had been refugees themselves not so very long ago.
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