In any case, the American electorate won’t be treated to any displays of the adoring-spouse pose perfected by Nancy Reagan, who never tweaked her husband in public and whose worshipful mask never slipped no matter how many times she sat through the same speech. “I can’t do that,” Mrs. Obama says. “That’s not me. I love my husband. I think he’s one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met, and he knows that. But he’s not perfect, and I don’t want the world to want him to be perfect. If you look for that, then people can’t try hard stuff, because you might mess up. We want leaders to be bold and to try some things that might not work, because they might work and be great. I think that’s one of our failings as a nation—we’re looking for our leaders to be something that’s not realistic, and then we’re deeply disappointed when they don’t live up to those unrealistic standards. So let’s shake that up a little bit. We’re moving into the 21st century, and life is different. We’ve struggled; we’ve grown. Let’s not be hypocrites about it, either. Let’s not say we want one thing and then demand you be something you’re not.”
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Some voters contrast the Obamas’ apparent openness with the hairsplitting evasions that alienated many of the Clintons’ former admirers. “I trust Michelle to tell you how it is, good or bad,” says one longtime Democratic activist at an Obama event in New Hampshire. “But I don’t trust Hillary to tell me the truth, and I don’t want to deal with all the history of Bill’s infidelity. Why didn’t she kick his ass out? I know many women who would be voting for her if she had kicked him out.” She scowls, and then confides that her own unfaithful husband left her with two children and another on the way. “I don’t need Hillary’s baggage,” she says. “I’ve got enough of my own.”
The Clintons have long elicited such intensely personal reactions, and their marriage continues to occupy center stage despite decades of public scrutiny. Some voters see the Obamas as representing the chance for a fresh start with honest straight shooters—a prospect that Mrs. Obama deftly encourages. “Barack will not be a perfect president, but he will always tell you the truth,” Mrs. Obama assures her audience in Londonderry. “You will always know where he stands.”
Though she never mentions the Clintons, her emphasis on her husband’s personal integrity implies a clear contrast between the Clintons’ oft-tortured marriage and her own. Her husband has behaved honorably in his personal as well as his political life, she says: “He is a fabulous husband and father, and I think that is right up there with everything else you should look at.”
Some of her husband’s supporters give Mrs. Obama much of the credit. “She talks about Barack being a good husband, but it takes a strong wife to make a good husband,” says Representative Paul Hodes, a New Hampshire Democrat who has endorsed Obama.
So far Mrs. Obama has avoided making any specific promises about what she would do as First Lady. But as for who she would be, her attitude is clear: what you see is what you get.
“I am really being as authentically me as I can be,” she says. “When people ask, ‘What kind of First Lady will you be?’—I’m going to try, in all this, to be honest, hopefully funny, and open, and share important parts of me with people, hopefully in a way that will help them think about their lives and avoid the mistakes we may have made in our lifetime. What you see on the trail is probably who I will be as First Lady, because that’s really who I am.”
But she has no illusions about maintaining an independent career if her husband reaches the White House. “Absolutely not,” she says. “I don’t think that’s possible or realistic or desirable. Everything I do on my job would pose some huge conflict.”
These days her very participation in the current campaign reflects the depth of her commitment to her husband’s goal, according to her friends. “She hasn’t taken this role every time he’s run for office,” says Cindy Moelis. “This is the first time in all these elections that I’ve seen her be as passionate and committed as she has been.”
“I think they really struggled through it, but once the decision was made, she’s totally gung-ho,” says Susan Sher.
As for the outcome of this race, Mrs. Obama seems philosophical about her husband’s prospects. “We’re doing our best,” she says. “I hand it over to people and say, ‘O.K.—it’s on you,’ so I’m good.”
Such earnestness proves too much of a temptation, however, and she quickly succumbs to a characteristic flash of mischievous humor. “I’m good,” she repeats, her voice starting to quaver. “No, really—really! Can’t you tell? I’m great with it!” She buries her head in her hands and pretends to sob.
But then she straightens up in her chair and gives a blank, faux-happy smile, as if beaming mindlessly for the camera. Nobody’s perfect, and Michelle Obama—lawyer, soccer mom, hospital executive, Senate wife, potential First Lady—is the last person who would ever want you to think she considers herself a finished product who has it all together.
“I think I’m 60 percent there,” she says. “I’m still a work in progress, too.”
(Michelle Obama would serve as First Lady from 2009 to 2017. Her best-selling 2018 memoir, Becoming, has broken numerous publishing milestones.)
SOCIETY AND STYLE
EMILY POST
EMILY POST’S SOCIAL REVOLUTION
By Laura Jacobs | December 2001
In 1921 the writer Edith Wharton published a novel called The Age of Innocence. It was set in the highest, mightiest circle of New York society in the late 1800s, a time known as the Gilded Age. Here was Society with a capital S, a world of Astors and Van Rensselaers, calling cards on silver trays, ancestral portraits on drawing-room walls. Wharton’s book was an elegy to a lost era of rectitude and reticence, unwritten rules and unspoken understandings. The people of this world, Wharton wrote, “lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies.” And when they spoke, they spoke as one.
A year later, in 1922, as if to smack closed the coffin on Wharton’s rose-colored era, Sinclair Lewis brought out Babbitt. In fact, he dedicated his novel, the story of a real-estate salesman in a boomtown called Zenith, to Edith Wharton. When the book begins, George F. Babbitt is hungover, and his first spoken word is “Damn!” Behold the climbing Everyman of postwar America. The name Babbitt soon symbolized the melting-pot, free-market Babel our country had become, a rising clamor of conflicting voices.
Another book was published in 1922. This one, however, was poised between Edith Wharton’s Gilded Age and Sinclair Lewis’s Jazz Age. Looking both backward and forward, it took Society’s unwritten rules (not to mention those faint implications and pale delicacies) and wrote them down in black and white so that anyone—new marrieds in the boonies, newly minted millionaires, even Mr. and Mrs. George F. Babbitt—could know the rules, too. And it wasn’t a silver spoon talking, but a voice of sterling character, wit, and wisdom. One of the 20th century’s great acts of democracy, 619 pages carried forth on a deeply ethical undercurrent, this $4 book was a masterpiece in its own right—a how-to and a self-help and an Old Testament and a constitution, with here and there dashes of satire. It would go on to 10 revisions and 89 printings in the author’s lifetime, never selling fewer than 30,000 copies a year. The book was titled Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home. But it swept America as “Emily Post.”
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She was born Emily Price in Baltimore in 1873, a 10-times great-granddaughter of John Alden, one of the Mayflower Pilgrim fathers of 1620. Emily’s mother was Josephine Lee, daughter of a coal baron from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Josephine was sent to Baltimore for finishing school, and while not the prettiest girl in her class, she was shrewd and knew exactly what she wanted. When Josephine met young Bruce Price, an up-and-coming architect with aristocratic good looks, a good background, but no money beyond a modest salary, she determined to have him. His talent, her drive—they were on
their way.
Bruce Price’s career carried the family to New York City, where he was soon one of the golden boys of late-19th-century architecture. “He is thought of as one of the artistic architects,” says Christopher Gray, who writes about the history of New York City for The New York Times. “If you had to compare him either to [architects Charles Follen] McKim or Stanford White, you’d say Stanford White, more of a designy type with great artistic flair.” Price won plum assignments, one of his biggest coming in 1885 when Pierre Lorillard III asked him to design Tuxedo Park, a 6,000-acre private sporting community about 30 miles north of Manhattan in Orange County. Tuxedo, as members called it, took its place alongside Bar Harbor, Maine, and Newport, Rhode Island, as a posh playground for the rich. Of the three, Tuxedo was the most inconspicuous in its luxury, correct yet rustic. Price was given four “cottages” at the club, and the family, having previously summered in Bar Harbor, switched allegiance to Tuxedo.
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Emily was an only child and a daddy’s girl, doted on by her father and devoted to him in return. When his American Surety Building was going up at Broadway and Pine—“a sophisticated skyscraper,” remarks Gray—Emily would visit the Wall Street site with her father, taking in every word he had to say about scale, proportion, and the classical line. “The rules are all there,” he told her. “Living is building. If you know the laws and respect them, you can’t help building well.” In later life she would refer to the American Surety Building with pride, explaining that it contained construction innovations that led to ever higher skyscrapers. More important historically was its aesthetic advance. Price designed it in the round, with a finished facade on all four sides so that no blank walls would blight the view. Just as Tuxedo Park suggested a way of life—the comfort of shared values—the American Surety Building was a monument to a way of being: upstanding on the inside, and, on the outside, gracious to all no matter what their angle.
Coming of age in the Prices’ red-brick town house at 12 West 10th Street, Emily absorbed the clockwork decorum of her day, the rituals of social expectation, all the while encouraged by her father to study art, history, literature. For Emily, who could herself have been the ingenue in a novel by Edith Wharton, it was indeed a life of surety. First, she was a beauty, tall and straight, her complexion famously alabaster, her delphinium-blue eyes often remarked upon. Second, she was self-possessed. In her debutante year of 1890, she was named by Ward McAllister, gadfly arbiter of Society, who coined the term “Four Hundred” (the number of Society’s chosen who could fit into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom), as one of the 10 ladies in New York who could gracefully cross a ballroom floor alone. Third, she was quick and clever. And yet, in Emily’s set, too much cleverness was cause for concern. As with entertainer Ruth Draper and actress (then decorator) Elsie de Wolfe, it could lead a woman into ego, exhibitionism, i.e., into the arts or onto—gasp!—the stage. When Emily made a sensation in a Tuxedo Park amateur theatrical, she was forbidden to act again. Emily’s destiny—what she and her finishing-school friends were groomed for from birth—was marriage to a man of her own class or higher, to be followed by children, preferably sons. Emily began to fulfill this destiny on June 1, 1892. She married Edwin Main Post of the Long Island Posts, manufacturers of railway equipment.
It was a brilliant match—Emily, the season’s most radiant debutante; Edwin, the handsomest of bachelors and moving successfully into finance. The courtship commenced with their first polka, a giddy beginning for two who loved to dance. They felt made for each other. And in many ways the Society marriage of that time was a kind of dance, a formal round in which you did not jar your partner or step on toes. While her husband rose on Wall Street, Mrs. Edwin Post mastered her role, teaching herself to be the perfect wife and hostess, and giving birth to two sons, Edwin junior and Bruce. She was also learning something else: her husband was not like her father.
Leafing through the Post-family scrapbook from the 1890s, one finds Emily in Victorian skirts, tightly corseted. Her boys are in curls and dresses until the age of two (the age of pants!), and poor Edwin junior must wear a cap, according to Emily’s caption, “to flatten ears.” The summers are pastoral, Emily in white linen framed by lawn and leaves, her hair up, her posture casting a glance of protection over her sons. Winters are silver, the Christmas tree great with mercury-glass garlands and balls, the toys underneath a fantasy of plenty. But absence is unmistakable. It is more than halfway through the scrapbook before the man who is Emily’s husband appears, the man with membership in 35 clubs, who drove a red Pierce Arrow trimmed in brass and was one of America’s 10 best bridge players. In the whole of Emily’s scrapbook there is not one photograph of the couple together, and there are only two of Edwin Post—slim, dark-eyed, distant—and these two were taken within minutes of each other. In one photo a cigar hangs nonchalantly between two fingers; in the other, no cigar.
Well, Emily loved books; Edwin loved sailing, sports. She was happiest at home; he preferred parties, friends. She was idealistic; he was hedonistic.
“Since she could not share Edwin’s enthusiasm for physical enjoyments, and he would, or could, not share her interests which were chiefly mental,” writes Edwin Post Jr. in Truly Emily Post, a biography of his mother, “there was nothing but for each to go his own way without interfering with the other’s pleasures. . . . Their private disappointments or failures to each other were of no importance to Society.”
Nor were such disappointments discussed. In the summer of 1902, Emily was persuaded to go abroad to visit friends at their European estates. The boys would spend time on a farm in France, and Edwin could yacht the Eastern Seaboard to his heart’s content. Emily, freed from the old routine, began a new one. Waking early, around six, she would sit up in bed and write letters—fresh, funny letters reporting the romantic intrigues, the human comedy, within these landed households (“A man who marries for money earns it! Every penny!”). Ten years into the marriage, it was not her husband to whom she sent these letters but her father. Emily was 29 and still clever. But now a different destiny was asking her to dance.
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It began later that year, when writer and family friend Frank Smith was visiting, and Josephine praised Emily’s letters from Europe, saying, “They made me laugh.” Smith asked to read them, and 10 days later Emily was invited to lunch with both Smith and George Barr Baker, the editor of Ainslee’s magazine, one of the most popular periodicals in the nation. Baker felt the letters could be recast to tell a story—a light romance—which could be serialized in Ainslee’s and then published as a book. Emily set to it, urged on by her father, who said, “You and I are alike. We are workers. We are only fully ourselves when we are working.” In early 1903, just as Emily was finishing The Flight of a Moth, a novel in letter form, her father fell ill. That summer, mere months before Emily’s words were in print, he died.
“The French say that the ideal condition for a woman would be to be born a widow; and that is nearly my case, as I am just now starting out upon what I feel to be a new life.” Emily gives this line to Grace, the widowed heroine of The Flight of a Moth, but it certainly reflects Emily’s own emotional terrain at that time. We see ambivalence about wifedom, her feeling of being alone within her marriage (she was known to call herself a “yacht-widow”), and perhaps even a wish to be a genuine widow. And there is the “new life” she is starting out upon—her life as a writer. In society she was Mrs. Edwin Post, but in print she had become her own property, Emily Post.
The Flight of a Moth was a hit, and Emily began work on Purple and Fine Linen, another romance, set among New York’s gilded class, and a book whose theme of slow-stealing marital disillusion (husband holding on to his bachelor habits, wife feeling like a “doll-wife” to be put in a “show case”) speaks of Emily’s own experience: “Every now and then she longed for someone, not only to talk to, but someone who felt as she did—
some one of her own kind.” Of course, all ended well in Emily Post’s early novels, with heroines and husbands reaching new levels of love and understanding. Already detectable is an urge to instruct, a hope for the way things could and should be. But Emily was not one to blind herself to the way things were. In 1905, when Purple and Fine Linen was published, her age of innocence ended.
Just as “Emily Post” was becoming a popular byline in national magazines, Edwin Post received a call from Town Topics, a New York weekly that specialized in scandal. Town Topics was not unlike the tabloids of today, except for one difference—it dug its dirt for blackmail. The basic M.O. was as follows: once a victim’s indiscretion was substantiated with names, dates, and sometimes photos, the victim received a note or phone call requesting an interview. He (it was usually a he) was told that if he cared to take an ad in Town Topics or buy a subscription ($500 to $1,000) to a special volume the company was publishing, the paper wouldn’t run the offending story. Edwin Post received his call on June 21, 1905. Town Topics suggested he buy a $500 subscription to its limited “edition de luxe of America’s Smart Set.” Edwin discussed it with his lawyer, who discussed it with Emily. She said fight.
GOT $500 FROM POST, THEN WAS ARRESTED. The story broke July 12, on the front page of both The New York Times and The New York Tribune. Right there for all to see was the threat made to Edwin: “Mr. Post . . . we have in our office some matter that you probably would not like to see printed. It is something, you know, about a white studio in Stamford and a fair charmer.” The love nest, the showgirl, the usual. The papers then gave a step-by-step account of the days leading from threat to arrest, which took place when Post, in a men’s room at the New York Stock Exchange, handed five marked $100 bills to Charles P. Ahle, a man associated with Town Topics. A detective hiding in the next room apprehended not only Ahle but a briefcase full of receipts from other “subscribers,” among them J.J. Astor, A. Van Rensselaer, and three (count ’em) Vanderbilts. The investigation later turned up the names of Stanford White, Isaac Guggenheim, and F. Ziegfeld (Flo). This scroll of shame was a veritable hall of fame, and Post, the Times reported, “received a regular ovation when he made his appearance on the floor of the Stock Exchange. One member shouted, ‘Go for them, Post, my boy! We are with you, for we’ve all been through that mill ourselves!’”
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