Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  Marion herself boasted a family renowned for its small-town achievements: she was the granddaughter of the first president of Cumberland’s First National Bank and the niece of Allegheny County’s first circuit court judge. She was even prouder to inform her already convinced suitor that her father, a Scotsman who had settled in the region twenty or thirty years earlier, was a first cousin to Francis Scott Key.

  The agility of a Renaissance lawyer like Price (who would write a novel and build his own house) was in short supply at the time. Still in his twenties and fresh from school, he was elected a member of the Maryland State Senate in 1825. William Price enjoyed debating hard questions. Perhaps inevitably, many considered the complex man a contrarian. His moral allegiance was to the North, but his heart never deserted Dixie.

  The lawyer came honestly by his often eccentric ways of doing things. After William’s father died, you could practically hear the townspeople gasp at the idiosyncratic terms of Josiah Price’s will. Josiah left behind a creative document; everyone agreed on that. He had bequeathed his four sons a choice: to attend college or to own real estate. Either/or. William, along with his older brother, chose an education. William’s granddaughter Emily, who loved recounting the story, would always emphasize the proper decision her shrewd grandfather made: through his canny judgment, he got it all. The two brothers who chose property died early, their misfortune ensuring that William Price and his favorite brother, Benjamin, acquired both the land and the academic degrees.

  Without a doubt, wealth and education proved a vigorous coupling. In the 1830s, William parlayed his inheritance into a law firm in nearby Hagerstown, Maryland. In spite of Price’s somewhat confusing persona as an erratic gentleman farmer, the man’s intellectual dexterity as he nurtured social connections led him quickly to become one of the lawyers sought out by the local powers. He knew about the art of doing people favors—sometimes just from kindness, but often out of expedience.

  This was the lay of the land that would shape Emily Price’s father, William’s talented son Bruce. This was a family that believed in passing down its wisdom along with its genes. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when Bruce was two or three years old, William moved his family from Hagerstown to Baltimore. They lived at 27 Washington Street, across from a severe, newly constructed Greek Revival library. Inspired by the chance to enhance the aesthetic harmony in his still raw neighborhood, William Price, though untrained in the arts, designed his family’s house to harmonize with the library. The self-taught architect created a one-story Greek Revival building whose enormous wide hallway ran through the entire house to the rear garden door. It takes no great leap of imagination to connect William’s mildly chaotic vision with the bold design that informed Bruce Price’s Gilded Age aesthetic. Or the panoramic view of the machinery driving her own age that would inspire his daughter.

  AS THE LAST FEW YEARS of the 1850s teetered to a nervous conclusion, the prospect of war took up a permanent residence among William’s legal cronies. The signs around him were hardly subtle: he could sense tectonic plates shifting beneath his family’s feet, and he wanted to be ready.

  The 1860s opened upon the heels of an unusually cold December, the thermometers shivering at zero. Nothing so frivolous as weather ruled the household of William Price, however, as agonized loyalties played out in his family, reflecting the schism at the heart of the city itself. Seaport or not, Baltimore was a southern town with a northern manifesto, its leaders primarily Union men. In more ways than one, Maryland lay on the fault line, geographically in the middle of the nation’s coast.

  Openly pro-Union, Maryland’s official position was not without risk: in reality, Maryland was a border state. Though the state contributed men and matériel to the Union’s efforts, the Baltimore southern sensibility was no small thing. Many secessionists pushing to legitimize the Confederacy resented the local abolitionists. In a telling paradox of the whole sorry debacle, the 7th Regiment United States Colored Troops and the 9th Regiment U.S. Colored Troops were heavily represented by Baltimoreans, in spite of the city’s collusions with slave-owning states. But on April 19, 1861, as northern troops passed through the city on their way south to defend Washington, D.C., the first blood of the Civil War was officially shed. The Baltimore Riots claimed the lives of four soldiers in the 6th Massachusetts Infantry. Several civilians were killed, and many more were injured.

  Thomas, William’s and Marion’s firstborn, was barely mentioned in family chronicles. But Bruce’s adored older brother Benjamin joined the Yankee forces, while Adrian, four years younger, sided with the Rebels. It was a scene invading every neighborhood. Tangled loyalties rebounded in the anguish echoed across the city. Perhaps such misery motivated William to take the route open to upper-class men of his times: he paid authorities to ensure that young Bruce would not be drafted to fight, regardless of the nation’s needs.

  The Baltimore schism was in many regards a kinship dispute that would run its course. But the repercussions of the deepest confusions about race, class, and nationality that the feud reproduced would resurface repeatedly. On June 10, 2006, the Ku Klux Klan rallied at the Antietam battlefield, where some believe William Price’s rebellious third son, Adrian, lost his life on the bloodiest day of the war.

  BALTIMORE—“CHARM CITY” was its later nickname—was not a place where people with options chose to live out the nation’s crisis. William Price decided that the early 1860s would be a good time to send his family to the country to stay with other relatives who shared their pro-Union sentiments. Price himself stayed in the city. Long respected for his prudence, he was soon appointed by President Lincoln as U.S. district attorney for Maryland.

  Emily’s grandfather dealt directly and effectively with the president throughout the war. Buttressed by his reputation as a sentinel of sanity, he could count on receiving an almost immediate response from an otherwise overwhelmed leader. If William Price was a prisoner’s supplicant, Lincoln granted the pardon. And when William Price implied that he’d uncovered incendiary information, the president took notice. On October 22, 1864, Price telegraphed Lincoln: “Information has this moment come into my possession which I think ought to be communicated at once to the Govt. I will leave Baltimore in the three thirty (3 30) pm train for Washington & be accompanied by three (3) persons. Can we have an interview with the Prest [sic] in the evening & what hour.” The president responded at once: “Yours received. Will see you any time when you present yourself. A. Lincoln.”

  In 1868, when William Price died, Baltimore’s courts were officially adjourned so that legislators could attend his funeral. The lawyer bequeathed no sumptuous assets to his family, though his wife and two children at home could live comfortably on their inheritance. Still, the lack of wealth enabled Bruce Price to create a mythology that excused him from the classroom, which he had never enjoyed anyway. Newly matriculated at what is now Princeton, he dutifully dropped out during his first year to help support the family his father had forgotten to indemnify with a fortune.

  From now on, Bruce’s education would come from on-the-job training. He took a low-paying position as an apprentice with Niernsee and Neilson, one of Baltimore’s most prestigious building firms, and, to better train his eye, he apportioned his inheritance so that he could undertake a yearlong tour of European capitals. Even when lack of money made it difficult, he kept to the standards of his class. Bruce Price would bequeath this talent to his daughter, Emily Post, a southern girl manqué, trailing wherever she walked the potent scent of lush magnolias tastefully tamped down by a life under tight control.

  CHAPTER 3

  RIGHT UP UNTIL WILLIAM PRICE DIED, IN 1868, HE WAS STILL more interested in politics than fortunes. In contrast, Josephine Lee’s father, Emily’s maternal grandfather, was a cheerful coal baron gleefully taking the measure of the monied men of his wild new age. All that earlier laying of railroad tracks—thirty thousand miles already in place by 1860—had been stymied by the four-year break, and
now it resumed with a vengeance. Men who had not inherited great wealth were nonetheless developing their own massive fortunes. Only four years after the war’s end, the economy and mores that had shaped the men of William Price’s generation already felt outdated and irrelevant. Life hereafter was to center on banking, commerce, transportation, coal, and steel—like the railroad, enterprises interrupted by the war and now in full gear, making up for lost time. Baltimore, the city to which both of Emily Post’s grandfathers had returned, would become a new crossroads for this apparently endless proliferation of trains, charged with rushing crops and commodities to market. It was a new day and a new world, where speed ruled as much as anyone or anything.

  Josephine Lee would always be envied—and, some say, her favor curried—for her rich family, wealthy from the staggering number of coalfields they owned. Like any commodity, anthracite had its ups and downs, but everyone knew that the Lees had invested well. Beyond the mines, Josephine’s father had capitalized on the railroad investors eager to buy up the deposits and work the land themselves. A year before the war started, Washington Lee showed assets of $50,000, versus William Price’s $10,000. And it wasn’t as if Lee were unlettered: after earning his law degree from Dickinson College in nearby Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he was elected district attorney of Luzerne County.

  Pictures of Emily Post’s mother suggest a pleasingly plump, good-natured woman, possessed of a certain bland sturdiness. Not quite pretty, even at sixteen Josephine carried herself with the self-possession of privilege. She had attended one of Baltimore’s uninspiring girls’ schools, which functioned primarily to supply the female quotas for the next town ball or dance at Johns Hopkins. Academics formed little of her education; school was a waiting station for upper-class young ladies tutored to catch the right train. In their photographs, in contrast to Bruce Price’s air of dreamy distraction, Josephine’s canny attention to the moment inhabits her every likeness.

  When Josephine Lee debuted in Baltimore, 180 miles from her family’s gritty Pennsylvania ore, she found Bruce Price at her side within minutes. The marriage of the Lee and Price families would be an equitable swap, great lineage for great wealth. Josephine’s parents, eminently practical people, saw no advantage to a long engagement. The marriage would take place four months after they met, on April 10, 1870. From the outside, it looked as if the match granted the advantage to the struggling architect, a suggestion his daughter, Emily, would forever dispute.

  In fact, Josephine staked her own proud ancestral claims through two shrewd, hardworking pilgrims, Priscilla and John Alden, who had disembarked from the Mayflower in 1620. Half a century later, having learned how to survive in their new country, the Aldens’ descendants acted on a rumor they’d heard about coal blanketing faraway fields. Gathering up their sparse provisions, they migrated a few hundred miles west, where they picked quality ore by hand.

  Great-grandchildren of the Mayflower Aldens built their own forge on Nanticoke Creek in 1778, a simple unit consisting of just one hammer and one fire. Even moving that weighty mallet had been an arduous ordeal: the miners brought it from Philadelphia to Harrisburg in a wagon, then on to Nanticoke in a Durham boat, a sixty-foot-long flatbed, the style made famous after Washington’s troops used one to cross the Delaware River on Christmas Eve two years earlier. At least such effort proved worthwhile: not until Emily’s great-grandfather spent a few years in the 1820s cursing his way around its peculiarities was the fifty-year-old tool retired.

  A few generations later, in expansive gestures that would prove extremely beneficial to his future son-in-law, the canny and kind Washington Lee remembered to endow the township with the rewards of their quality coal, even as he prepared to live out the rest of his own life in larger cities. He donated an entire lot of prime real estate on Hanover Street for a church building, helping to lay the cornerstone himself in 1869. By the time St. Clement’s was consecrated, in June two years later, Bruce Price and Josephine Lee would already be married.

  IT IS HARD NOWADAYS to envision the mix of frothiness and gloom of the decade after the Civil War, the years when Emily Post’s parents became adults. The exuberant North celebrated success even as the vanquished South mourned the loss of its empire. During the 1865 fall and winter seasons alone, Yankee socialites attended six hundred balls and spent $7 million in the process. The costumes averaged $1,000 each, excluding the jewelry. Fancy dress balls had defined New York City from the 1820s at least, and their stark absence during the Civil War created a rebound.

  Precisely because they had forfeited so much, upper-class Baltimore citizens also felt the mandate to celebrate hard. Internecine warfare had cost their divided city heavily, and now the defeated compensated for their losses accordingly. Following the war, there was an overspill of everything that figured in southern society, from terrapin suppers to invaluable gossip. Properly credentialed couturiers would enter the ladies’ boudoirs and chatter nonstop while they draped their customers’ dresses and designed their hats. It was important to be happy again.

  ON OCTOBER 8, 1871, the year after Emily Post’s parents married, Chicago ignited. The great fire burned down a city but gave birth to an architectural race that would shape Bruce Price’s career. First, however, the novice needed to position himself, and that meant forming connections. He would reap the rewards of Chicago’s tragedy in due time, but for now, the nearly twenty-five-year-old Bruce gratefully entered a new familial world, one gloriously covered with soot.

  The couple—accompanied by Josephine’s parents and much younger brother—would make the Grand Tour for their honeymoon, traveling first-class on a Cunard cruise underwritten by the Lees. They were headed for the Continent, their trip a staple of the newly rich. Bruce, his extravagance justified by professional needs, had just returned the year before from his first exploration abroad. Though he was eager to study sites he’d not had time to visit on his previous trip, he was determined to be politic and manage his time carefully. He intended to show proper appreciation for the luxuries Washington Lee had funded. Crossing the ocean was a major event in itself, and grandly furnished suites sheathed in Victorian flocked wallpaper, as well as an excess of champagne and every culinary delicacy imaginable, made a few weeks of paying up, in essence, quite agreeable.

  A delicate tension nonetheless surfaced. The well-meaning young husband quickly discovered himself unable to spend more than a few hours in the company of his hardy, stouthearted, and eventually stout-figured wife. The enclosed transatlantic voyage made him suddenly mad to explore a newly discovered gold mine in South Africa. As soon as the extended family docked, Bruce took off to make his fortune, abandoning the rest of the family in Paris for over ten months. His daughter, Emily, would gleefully repeat a version of this story to journalists, year after year, the variations depending upon her purpose.

  The only problem with this postscript to the Price honeymoon was that it was largely Emily’s fabrication. Accused, she would have defended herself, her method of viewing reality endemic to her generation; all she did was decorate the truth. Certainly, her version is more provocative than the unembroidered account, especially the way she told it. Nonetheless, the fact of her parents’ honeymoon is that Washington Lee, Josephine’s father—not Bruce Price, Emily’s hero—intrepidly trekked off to Africa to find his (next) fortune. Bruce Price was left behind to babysit his new family.

  A fresh but knowing bridegroom parking his wife on the Continent while he takes off for the wilderness is undoubtedly more exotic than the tale of a rich middle-aged man speculating with a new investment. As if the young bridegroom was above social custom, he was allowed, in Emily’s narrative, to forge ahead, leaving his new family behind. What was so meaningful in this fairy-tale version to his daughter?

  Washington Lee had sold the majority of his coal business by now, the transaction leaving the always restless man searching for a new project. For a decade, the dark continent had been beckoning him. And now he was even a bit ahead of the game: it
would take until the late 1880s for Cecil Rhodes and his brother to gain near-total control over the Kimberley gold mines and the De Beers diamond fields. In 1870, Lee still had reason to try to stake his claim in South Africa. Gold, especially, beckoned him, along with many other eager speculators of the period.

  The shiny rock sometimes seemed to dreamers like Lee to possess supernatural powers. A decade earlier, a hurricane overtaking a ship sailing from California to New York had definitively sunk a million dollars’ worth of the precious commodity. A tidal wave of financial detritus from the disaster pounded the American economy without mercy, converting skeptics to the absolute power of gold. Later, when Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to corner the gold market, everything collapsed, ruining all but the canniest investors. But such wreckage served to romanticize the soft metal more than ever, and Washington Lee was nothing if not romantic.

  Like most important fantasies, the family legend as Emily presented it—with Bruce, not her grandfather, at its heart—is richly overdetermined. Josephine is dumped unceremoniously—on her honeymoon—which is fine by the daughter, who preferred having her father to herself any chance she got and who, privately, always believed her mother unworthy of Bruce anyway. Unfettered by the conventions of matrimony, the bridegroom, refusing to be tied down, is allotted what in real life he had lost by his spousal bargain: freedom. It seems likely that in Emily’s improvisation, she also played out her own yearning to be beholden to no one in an era that rarely allowed women such freedom. She made her father mythically act out the role she would have chosen herself, given the opportunity.

  The surviving records suggest that the extended family stayed abroad for almost six months, several of which evoked panic in the confined architect. Bruce managed to take solitary “research trips” whenever the well-meaning banality of his teenage bride overwhelmed him. For all her immaturity, Josephine Lee would develop into a tonic for her quixotic husband. Already the hearty young woman was quite capable of constructing a family scene to her own specifications. “It’s time to go home,” she apparently told her groom. “I want to have a baby, and I don’t want the child born here, where the doctors aren’t entirely modern.” So Bruce and Josephine, her mother and brother Henry in tow, returned to Baltimore and to Wilkes-Barre, both cities where the Lees owned family apartments. Eventually, Washington Lee would come back as well, determined to figure out an economical way to transport the gold home from Africa.