Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  Ned, staying for ever longer periods in New York City as his mother grew more disoriented, finalized an agreement with freelance writer Dorothy Giles of Cold Spring, New York, to ghostwrite what would become Truly Emily Post, published by Funk and Wagnalls within months of his mother’s death. On March 13, 1958, Giles—who would die the same year as Emily—signed the contract for a biography “by Edwin Post,” with herself “nowhere to be credited as author or collaborator.” She would be paid $5,000 in three installments: $1,250 on signing the letter of agreement; $1,250 upon delivery of half the manuscript; and $2,500 when the complete text, in final typed form, was delivered to the publisher on January 1, 1959. If Emily had been sentient, she would have been more interested in the financial arrangements than in revisiting the ledgers Ned turned over to Giles.

  IN 1960, THE GRANDSON of a poor Irish immigrant like those Emily’s book had tutored was elected as the United States’ first Roman Catholic president. Less than two months earlier, on September 25, 1960, at 39 East Seventy-ninth Street in the coop that her younger son had helped her design, Emily Post died in her bed. Officially, her cause of death was pneumonia, but in the fashion of those who watch a loved one deteriorate month after month, her companions insisted it was just “old age.”

  The obituaries followed fast and furious, the news appearing on the front page of the New York Times and the Los Angeles papers. The Chicago Tribune claimed that her age, treated with such reticence that it was not mentioned in her sketch in Who’s Who in America, had “finally” been disclosed. Then its reporter too got it wrong by a year: “She was born in Baltimore on October 27, 1873.” The year of her birth (usually a toss-up between 1872 and 1873) and her age when she left Baltimore (ranging from five to twelve years) depended upon the newspaper. Life magazine remembered her fondly and respectfully: “In a favorite position on her wide sofa, Mrs. Post dictated answers to her daily mail in a low voice with a good deal of laughter.”

  What impressed commentators most was Emily’s willingness to confront reality. “Emily Post took the world of people as she found it,” the New York Times reported. “Probably you were never going to meet the Grand Duke and so it didn’t matter much whether you knew exactly how you should address him. But when the daughter was married it was useful to know such things as what the father of the bride should do at the wedding reception. The advice she gave was often little more than simple common sense, but her reputation as an authority made this advice easy to follow. Having easy good manners herself, she succeeded in taking a lot of the ladi-da out of cultivated living. She was the enemy of the little finger that extended elegantly from the teacup. She decried the supercilious gape through the lorgnette.” A few days later, the Times commended Emily Post as a “pioneer” who simplified etiquette “in a time when many believed that good manners were necessarily elaborate.” Her local Vineyard Gazette recounted her “primary rules”: “use your common sense” and “don’t be self-conscious,” and then “you’ll be all right. . . . I’m firmly against doing things by rote.”

  The accolades at least hinted at the historical distance Emily and Etiquette had spanned. Emily Price Post was a product of the defeated and desiccated South, born when her parents and their families had barely recovered their balance after the Civil War. She grew up in the dual shadow of the Gilded Age and the skyscraper, a blend of nostalgic looking back at what never was and an aggressive interaction with the future. Railroads and agriculture, dependent on each other, had boomed. Electricity, the telephone, the automobile, the radio, the television: each fed the others. By the time Emily Post died, her country was launching rockets into outer space. Etiquette, a “ticket” to society, was also a cultural history of her nation. She didn’t know when she played in the base of the Statue of Liberty that Miss Liberty would one day welcome an audience who would read her book to learn how to be proper Americans.

  Other women who had tried to buck the system on their own weren’t so fortunate as Emily Post. On the same page where the Washington Post announced Emily’s death, a much smaller column announced that of fifty-nine-year-old Ruth Rowland Nichols, “world famous flier . . . society girl . . . regarded with Amelia Earhart as one of the pioneering women in American aviation.” A few years earlier Nichols had flown an air force jet faster than one thousand miles an hour at 51,000 feet, setting another record for women. Now, it appeared, the lonely woman had taken her own life. The roster of firsts for the twentieth-century woman could have contained thousands of names. Emily Post was one of the lucky ones.

  JUST OVER TWO WEEKS after Emily’s death, during a General Assembly meeting at the United Nations, Comrade Nikita Khrushchev removed his shoe and banged it on the table. Connecting two radically disparate moments, Life magazine immediately responded to the comic spectacle with the article “What Would Emily Post Have Said?” Khrushchev’s boorish behavior, which would have worldwide repercussions, had taken place “not far,” a mere two miles, from Emily’s deathbed. “It may seem frivolous to discuss [the Assembly’s] breaches of etiquette, as though the menace of Castro, for example, were his careless choice of forks,” Life noted. But in the end, there was “a connection worth tracing between manners and politics. Etiquette, as Mrs. Post always insisted, is ‘the code of instinctive decency, ethical integrity, self-respect.’ Politics is a branch of morals, too.”

  The funeral was private, though carefully, lovingly redolent of her past. The church at Madison and Seventy-first, within walking distance of her apartment, had witnessed many such ceremonies for Emily’s crowd these past few years. Practical to the end, and following her parents’ example, Emily Post was cremated. Her ashes were buried in the cemetery at Tuxedo Park, the date of her birth, 1872, chiseled in stone at last. Not even a lady’s prerogative could bend the truth now.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TWO GENEROUS GRANTS, A NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES yearlong fellowship and the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, jointly sponsored by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, sustained me in multiple ways while I wrote this book. Financially, they were godsends. Even more important, they reassured me that I had something worth saying and the wherewithal to say it. I am especially grateful to Marion Lynton for endowing the Lukas award, and to Linda Healey, Susan Braudy, Kevin Coyne, Richard Pollak, and Nicholas Lemann for their votes of confidence.

  Joseph Wittreich at CUNY Graduate Center and Arthur Danto at Columbia University have remained stalwart supporters for many years, professors who showed me the way and then graciously stamped their imprimatur on my studies a long time ago, loyally staying my course however tortuous its direction. Their gracious sustenance has, over the decades, emboldened my critical enterprise. They are exemplars of public intellectuals, those individuals whom Richard Altick, mentoring me even earlier, called scholar-adventurers.

  Far less directly, but proving again the power of the text, a scholar from afar, chronologically and otherwise, also lit the path of my inquiry. Years ago, while living in Stuttgart, I spent months studying Norbert Elias’s astounding The Civilizing Process, originally published in Germany in 1937, within two years of his parents’ deaths at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. I stumbled upon the book long after Elias had achieved renown and respectability in the 1960s, and I was not prepared for its breadth and erudition. I strongly suspect that its trenchant chapters on manners and the organizations of society and state played a part, decades later, in leading me backward to Emily Post. I hope so. I believe, though they’d initially be astonished at their pairing, that Emily Post and Norbert Elias would have appreciated each other.

  The family of Emily Post has been unfailingly gracious and supportive. William (Bill) Goadby Post, Emily’s grandson, and his wife, Elizabeth (Libby), have brooked, with charm, my near-constant interference these past seven years. Cindy Post Senning, Peggy Post, and Peter and Tricia Post have gone out of their ways to accommodate my needs, often at great inconvenience to themsel
ves. Allen Post and William Post Jr. have also been willing and ready whenever I asked for their input. Matt Bushlow and Katherine Meyers and, especially, Elizabeth Howell, at the Emily Post Institute in Vermont, never demurred those times I needed extra help, even meeting me in their New England office on early Saturday mornings, always at the ready, cheerfully filling my endless requests.

  On the other side of the genealogy charts, Nora Post, the granddaughter of Emily’s ex husband, has steadily made herself available to me, by e-mail and, more delightfully, once we realized we lived within miles of each other, in person. Though she is not of Emily Post’s blood, Nora’s unflagging energy and unflappable good spirits make it seem as if she came from a similar mold—one that makes sense of her grandfather’s attraction to my subject so many years ago.

  INVALUABLE AFFILIATIONS THAT PROVED seminal to this book include a disproportionate number of librarians and private archivists. Anyone who has tapped the unflappable David Smith at the New York Public Library for his vast knowledge and his unfailing willingness to find whatever is needed knows him as a giant to writers lucky enough to cross his path. The Hudson Valley’s Fran Shapiro, at the Kingston Regional Library, along with Christian R. Sonne, the historian of Tuxedo Park, have gone far beyond the norm, insisting kindly that all their work was in the line of duty. Roberta Fiore, of Long Beach Historical Society, mailed me her private copies of books impossible to obtain otherwise. Donna Halper answered my confused questions about the beginnings of radio with humor and grace and, most of all, with alacrity. Eric Homberger read the early sections of my text when the Astors and Vanderbilts had really pulled me down: How would I ever keep them all straight? That he lives in England mattered not a whit: within hours, I received his detailed emendations. Pony Duke was tireless in his generosity, whether from the mountains of Montana or up close, in Manhattan. Correction upon correction: he cheerfully undertook vetting my genealogy and anecdotes until—I think—I finally got it right. His sister, Katharine Selznick, even went so far as meeting me for pizza in Pacific Palisades. From obtaining obscure, hard-to-find copies of hundred-year-old texts to tracking down quotations I couldn’t identify, these sources, these friends—anonymous when we started—were indefatigable. This book would have been several more years in the making without their knowledge.

  Research assistants were loyal no matter what challenge I frantically issued, including my willing soldier at Bard, Rebecca Jones, who inherited all the tedious details at the very end. But most of all, my dear Tracey Middlekauff was my ally in arms, the stalwart who tended me and mine in Baltimore and Brooklyn in ways that elicit awe among my fellow writers. She also mentored two hardworking young writer interns, Jessica Ruggieri and David Hillstrom.

  Closer to home, my Hudson Valley writers’ group offered advice that was inevitably useful: Sue Erikson Bloland, Richard Hoffman, Holly George-Warren, and John Milward. Sue and Andrea Grunblatt, both psychoanalysts, were also tireless in answering questions dealing with Emily Post’s psychological makeup. On a personal level, Sue and Marilyn Manning sacrificed their own work when I needed transportation after I fell ill. Lorraine Johnson, Jennifer Naidich, Jen Dragon, Leslie Siegel, and Robert Warren seemed always at the ready, whatever my needs, however inconvenient for them. Richard and Alice Hoffman, who moved out of their house in Woodstock to give me a place to recuperate when I was sick, were extraordinary in their kindness.

  At Random House, publicists, designers, and copy and production editors who have ensured this book shows to its greatest advantage include Bonnie Thompson, Judy Eda, Robbin Schiff, Sally Marvin, Karen Fink, and especially Steve Messina.

  My editor, Susanna Porter, once again made the always fearful and fearsome task of revising a manuscript if not exactly a piece of cake, at least a medicine that went down easy. Of all her “suggestions,” I suspect I rejected only one, and even that was so I’d have some self-respect left. In addition to her editorial legerdemain, Susanna showed a benevolence of spirit in urging me to take all the time I needed to write this book. There was no hurry, she emphasized. It is to Random House’s credit, and particularly to Susanna’s faith, that I was allowed to finish at my own pace.

  Flip Brophy was equally steadfast, never pushing me but emphasizing that whenever I was ready, she was there, to guide, to encourage, to support. Probably neither Susanna nor Flip has any idea what their confidence meant to me.

  I have discovered that each book is empowered by a gift of good fortune that at first seems pleasantly incidental but proves providential instead. Miriam Medina, the creator of thehistorybox.com, was the angel sent my way for this one. She read my author’s inquiry in the New York Times and, from that point on, freely and magnanimously gave me the benefit of her wide-ranging genealogical knowledge and research skills. Over the past seven years, we have e-mailed weekly, sometimes frantically several times within an hour—and we’ve still never met face-to-face. If it were not for the extraordinary personal circumstances of my writing this book, I would dedicate it to Miriam—she was that important.

  Individuals who assisted on this project include but are not limited to Wint Aldrich, Gabriele Almond, Mary Alstrup, Bob Armstrong, Samantha Barbas, Neil Bascombe, Allen Bell, Tony Bettencourt, Michelle Boxley, Tsofit Butler, Mark Caldwell, Joan Didion, Stephen Dubner, A. St. George B. Duke, Michael Fredman, Ross Freier, Rev. Edwin A. Garrett III, Courtney Goines, Christopher Gray, Samuel Graybill, Bonnie Haas, Nancy Hadley, Paige Horn, Laura Jacobs, Susan Jacoby, Jeffrey W. Jarrett, Michael Kammen, Beverly Rae Kimes, Chuck Klosterman, Catherine Lynn, Karal Ann Marling, Margie Menard, Nancy Milford, Gary Nigh, Cesar Pescolini, Lori Plutchik, Julia Reed, Wayne Reilly, Mark Renovitch, Kate Rounds, Shelby Scates, Vincent and Catherine Scully, Katharine Selznick, Dori and David Sless, John Siemon, Jane Smith, Patrick J. Stevens, Jean Strouse, Yvonne Sylvia, Anita Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Linda Zeller, and Kristy Zornig.

  Institutions and their representatives also contributed generously: Allegany College of Maryland; Allegany County Public Library, Cumberland, Maryland; Bob Flesher, American Banjo Fraternity; American Institute of Architects, Washington, D.C.; Valerie Hawkins, American Library Association, Chicago; Susan Robbins Watson, Hazel Braugh Records Center and Archives, American Red Cross; Terri Chiao, Architectural League of New York; Babylon (New York) Public Library; Adam Gross, James T. Wollon Jr., and Carlos Avery at the Baltimore Architecture Foundation; the online 1864 Baltimore City Directory Project; Elizabeth Rafferty, Baltimore County Public Library; Bar Harbor (Maine) Historical Society; Braille Institute of Los Angeles; Bucks County (Pennsylvania) Historical Society; Gillian Thorpe, Julia L. Butterfield Memorial Library; Charnley-Persky House Museum Foundation, Chicago; Colony Club, New York City; Jennifer B. Lee, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Patrick J. Stevens, Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Cornell University Library; John G. Langley, Cunard Steamship Society; Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, Duke University Library; Edgartown (Massachusetts) Library; Diana Carey and Mary Jo Price, Lewis J. Ort Library Special Collections, Frostburg State University; Surrogate Courthouse and County Clerk’s Office, Orange County Courthouse, Goshen, New York; Town and City of Goshen, New York; Larry Ashmead and Helen Moore, HarperCollins Publishers; Harvard Alumni Association; Giordana Mecagni, Doris Stevens Collection and Jessie Tarbox Beals Papers, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; Deb Whitehorse, Iceboat.org, Four Lakes Ice Yacht Club; Indiana University Archives (Dodd, Mead); Kingston (New York) Public Library; Lynn Rankin, Ladies’ Tea Guild of Southeastern Massachusetts; Lagrange Historical Inn; Travis Westly, Newspaper and Current Periodical Room, and Patrick Kerwin and Jeffrey M. Flannery, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Leslie Gottlieb, Lighthouse International; Lincoln Highway Association; Long Beach (New York) Historical Society; Long Island Museum of American Art; Eulalie Regan, Vineyard Gazette and Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society; Carol Fleeger
, Martha’s Vineyard Inn; Linda Wilson, Martha’s Vineyard Museum; Maryland Diocesan Archives; Melissa Ray, Maryland Historical Society; Carl Spadoni, McMaster University Library Division of Archives and Research Collections; Mercer Museum/Bucks County Historical Society; Abigail Grotke and Miss Abigail’s Time Warp Advice; Christine Nelson, Morgan Library, Archives Committee; Museum of the City of New York; Ken Beck and Shu Lin Lee, Museum of Television and Radio (New York and Los Angeles); Renee Braden, National Geographic Archives and Special Collections, Washington, D.C.; Rajal Lele, NBC Archives; Miriam Touba, New-York Historical Society; Eric Robinson, New-York Historical Society Library; Arnold W. Roepken, Archives, New York Stock Exchange; New York University Archives; New York Yacht Club; Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore City; Margaret Sherry Rich, Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Sallie Sypher, Putnam County (New York) Historical Society; Nancy Kelly, Rhinebeck (New York) town historian; Marjorie Strong and Alycia J. Vivona, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park; Rosina Sherwood Collection, Emmet Family Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Society of Architectural Historians, Chicago; Kathy DiPhilippo, South Portland (Maine) Historical Society; St. Clement and St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Wilkes-Barre (Pennsylvania); St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Tuxedo Park; Staten Island Historical Society Library; 3quarksdaily.com; Kate Nielsen, Tuxedo Park Public Library; Carrie T. Hayter, Union League Club; Lynn E. Eaton and Rachel Sailor, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, University of Iowa Libraries; Ann Hudak, Maryland and Rare Books Department, University of Maryland Libraries; Vermont Historical Society; Carl Spencer, Wagnalls Memorial Library; Jennifer Dintaman, Washington County Historical Society, Hagerstown, Maryland; and Edmund Wilson Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Collection of American Literature.