With obvious excitement, she detailed the technological wonders of the fair, including the assembly-line production of Ford automobiles, an exhibit that left Ned agog as well. She was also fascinated by the 250-foot-long replica of the Panama Canal, which dramatized the ships passing through its locks. Some citizens felt that for a national feat of this scope, engineered by the United States Army, the nation’s homage was “strangely scanty,” with the canal’s recent opening almost staged to appear as if dug primarily for the Golden State. Such antagonism didn’t affect Emily at all. She was far more interested in the showy presentation than the politics behind it.
Even so, a theatrical presentation had to be grounded in reality in order to impress her these days. She barely noted the darling of the newspapers: a futuristic space-battle fantasy set in New York City in 2000, with Asians and Africans arriving in battleships and airplanes, eventually destroying the city under siege. She clearly preferred the nonglamorous Sperry Flour demonstration, “quite as ingenious and if anything more interesting,” she believed, than everything else at the fair. The Sperry exhibit included specially built sample kitchens from all over the world, each one illustrating a foreign nation’s use of flour in its diet. More than she herself was quite aware, Emily thrived on comparing cultures and the ways they differed from one another.
At the conclusion of her travel reports, Emily wrote a tribute to the country she felt she had just begun to know:
New York dominates the whole of the Western Hemisphere and weights securely the Eastern coast of the map, and because of all this weight and importance, New Yorkers fancy they are the Americans of America, but New York is not half as typically American as Chicago. . . . Chicago is American to her backbone—active, alive and inordinately desiring, ceaselessly aspiring. . . . I feel as if I had acquired from the great open West a more direct outlook, a simpler, less encumbered view of life. You can’t come in contact with people anywhere, without unconsciously absorbing a few of their habits, a tinge of their point of view, and in even a short while you find you have sloughed off the skin of Eastern hidebound dependence upon ease and luxury, and that hitherto indispensable details dwindle—at least temporarily—to unimportance.
For a woman who always bet on the detail, who preferred to be in control of every aspect of her life, this was extraordinary homage to the unknown world outside her own. As she traveled West on her car trip to California, Emily Post became a watchful, even vigilant student of American culture. Europe had arrived ready-mixed, a formula for her to memorize as a child. America, it seemed, was a land of opportunity.
Back home, she believed her stalled career to be recharged. On September 18, 1915, Collier’s trumpeted the second of her three-part travel series on its cover. Even as she was editing the essays that fall for publication as a book, Dodd, Mead wrote her that its editors would like to submit a select group from the company’s catalog to “various moving picture concerns,” and they wanted to include two of Emily’s novels, The Title Market and The Eagle’s Feather. She, however, would have to accept a commission of 50 percent on any deal their time-consuming efforts might achieve. She answered enthusiastically, appending to the bottom of their inquiry, “With pleasure! O.K., Emily Post.”
CHAPTER 36
NATHAN AND IDA HANDWERKER’S NEW CONEY ISLAND HOT DOG stand excited average New Yorkers in the spring of 1916 almost as much as the events overseas concerned them. The war in Europe was already looming over America, and many families had relatives trapped abroad. To aggravate citizens’ worries, in March President Wilson had amassed troops out West, eventually sending ten thousand soldiers into Mexico to avenge the raiding of a border town by Pancho Villa, a Mexican revolutionary terrorizing parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Emily and her friends soon began raising funds for the European war effort in earnest, collecting pledges, selling tickets to Allied bazaars, pushing one-dollar chances on a Niagara Falls honeymoon trip, and bartering postcards of Henri the War Dog, Emily’s talisman from the trip abroad in 1914. The volunteer headquarters at 120 Broadway announced that Mrs. Emily Price Post was one of three women who had secured an unusually “large sale of tickets.” As part of the promotion, she had ridden in a motorcade of cars ferrying along Fifth Avenue women “prominent in society,” including well-known actresses—a sure sign that the times had changed.
Shrewd as always when it came to business, Emily was aware that her visibility helped promote her forthcoming book even as it genuinely contributed to the war cause. On June 11, 1916, when the New York Times Review of Books section listed on its front page “Important Books for Summer Holidays,” Emily’s By Motor to the Golden Gate led off its list of perfect leisuretime reading. Though no critical opinion was rendered, the book’s inclusion signaled recognition and respect for its author that she found most gratifying.
But the hopes such publicity raised would soon be dashed. In other years, when global urgencies weren’t so pressing, Dodd, Mead’s By Motor to the Golden Gate might have sold well. Now, however, caught in the crucible of war fever, the book met with little interest. In the midst of anxieties about troops deploying overseas, a lady’s (already serialized) account of life with her Mercedes during a costly cross-country vacation seemed frivolous and ill-timed. It also lacked the novelty such a narrative would have carried just a few years earlier, before several dozen men had individually motored coast-to-coast. Even worse for Emily’s implied singularity, a twenty-two-year-old housewife and mother from Hackensack, New Jersey, had already chauffeured three women companions from her state to San Francisco five years prior to Emily’s trip. Shrewdly, Alice Ramsey, driving a stolid Maxwell, one of the early successes of the car industry, had arranged for a Boston Globe reporter to drive ahead, so that he could record the women’s journey for his newspaper.
In short, Emily’s book failed to find an audience. Stories of the torrential spring rains that had dramatically turned the phantom Lincoln Highway into “mud wallowing agony” through much of the Midwest took a back seat to the torrents of gunfire that rained down on real muddy battlefields. Yet even today, Emily’s detailed account provides a rich cultural foray into the prewar era. By Motor to the Golden Gate was reissued in 2004; it proved oddly fresh, still exuding the vibrant voice and vitality of its author.
IN THE TRADITION of other well-heeled young gentlemen of their day, Ned and Bruce Price were eager to help lead their country through the war, both joining elite corps almost a year before President Wilson enacted the draft. While they awaited training assignments, Ned with an ace flying unit, Bruce with a select National Guard regiment, they joined Emily in the Berkshires to escape the polio epidemic sweeping through New York City that summer. On July 9, 1916, after Bruce had left for the Massachusetts cavalry, Emily drove with her older son to Buffalo, where he was due for pilot training. Recently, Ned had been finding Emily’s attention smothering, and now he was especially irritated when she found an excuse to follow him around like a mother hen, even in Buffalo. Eventually she compromised and took a hotel room in Albany for the six months he was in flight school. Consistently deferential and sweet toward his mother, Ned suffered silently for the most part rather than complain. He knew, he would later explain, that she was nervous about his safety, and lonely besides.
By October, with Ned fully credentialed, Emily moved on to Texas, where her younger son was stationed. Bruce, “galloping away on the border,” was now guarding El Paso, according to his mother’s latest interview. “He doesn’t mention college in his letters, but talks of his horse, his pets, horn toads, a goat, an armadillo, a tarantula,” she reported. Even though he assured Emily that he planned to return to Harvard that fall, she knew her son: he was Bruce Price’s heir in every way.
The years traveling back and forth to Pomfret had helped reassure Emily that her mothering skills were still needed. But recently, both in upstate New York and during her quick trip out West to see Bruce, she had sensed her sons’ frustration. As she ente
red middle age with no strong sense of where she was going, she realized it was time to find a purpose to her life other than depending on her children to need her. Still, letting go slowly, she circled around the issue of losing them.
When asked by a reporter from New York’s Morning Telegraph how it felt to have both her sons in harm’s way, especially now with her younger boy involved in the dispute with Mexico, Emily answered ambiguously, in part claiming responsibility for her children’s lives. “The only ‘consolation’ I had all summer was the thought it would be my fault if the boys were killed,” she said. “I brought them up to give what they could to life, and to get what they could from it. And the feeling I have for them isn’t a bit short of worship. Whatever happens to Bruce, he lands on his toes, and he has dancing feet”—with this last phrase, she referred to the bond mother and son shared.
Emphasizing that she stayed in constant touch with her sons, Emily grew pensive, explaining that she had recently grown “close to real things.” Currently she was exploring “things that mattered,” no longer scared “to look into the texture of the spirit.” The alert journalist cannily remarked that “there is a certain sadness in the author.” Although she noticed that Emily was good at hiding any negative emotions, she herself dared not probe her subject further.
The interviewer quickly switched subjects: “But through it all you never neglect your dressmaker,” she commented, a feint to which her grateful subject immediately yielded. Taking comfort in her familiar routines, Emily managed to emphasize the efficiency she valued, whatever the subject. In only a half hour, for instance, she had recently planned and ordered her entire upcoming winter wardrobe from her seamstress, Bertha. “That is something of a record for New York, isn’t it?” she asked proudly.
MAYBE IT WAS her awareness that she could no longer protect her sons from danger that made Emily unusually irritable when she dealt with the Paul Reynolds agency these days. She hadn’t been pleased with the publicity for By Motor to the Golden Gate, and her relationship with the agency had chilled as a result of the poor sales, the notes back and forth stiff and charmless. Even while sequestered at Buffalo’s Hotel Statler during Ned’s training, Emily had scribbled a churlish response to a mismailed letter about payment that she’d accidentally received: “What are you talking about? Wrong name and address somehow.” Reynolds had hastily apologized for his new secretary, who hadn’t recognized Emily’s signature. The explanation hardly reassured her about her status within the agency. Now, at the end of the year, she wrote to Reynolds: “I’m up in the back roads of Connecticut working on the book. A novel of N. Y. Society!!! Hurray!”
Back in New York, as if to will herself into the right mind-set to write such fiction again, she participated in one of the many relief projects organized by Edith Wharton while she lived abroad. Emily gracefully spearheaded the fund drive to benefit Belgian children displaced by the war. In newspaper photographs, she looked serenely preoccupied, teaching the smiling children (clearly mesmerized by their patron), how to make sure their shoes fit properly. As if to match the identity Reynolds believed marketable, she was soon photographed for the Times as a beautiful society woman in fur neckpiece and muffler, outfitting four starstruck waifs. The boys’ benevolent but clearly efficient patron busily selected boots to help the children brave the cold weather. She had a purpose again, no matter how temporary it proved.
CHAPTER 37
ON JANUARY 31, 1917, GERMANY GAVE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS’ NOTICE of its new commitment to “unrestricted warfare” in the seas; neutral or merchant vessels would no longer be allowed free passage. Though infuriated, members of the United States government resisted going to war until early March, when the public learned of the “Zimmerman note,” which revealed a secret plan the German foreign minister had offered to Mexico’s government. Berlin’s official had made the ill-advised suggestion that the two countries join in declaring war on the United States, appropriating for Mexico a few of the western states in the process. On April 6, the nation’s headlines were uniform: President Wilson had declared war against Germany. State laws soon forbid teaching the German language. In New York City, Columbia University’s president fired faculty who had disparaged the American government. The purportedly liberal Wilson through the Espionage Act, amended the following year by the Sedition Act, even went further: he ensured that citizens could be jailed for criticizing the government, whether the accusation was true or false.
Now that the country was officially at war, Emily continued her limited charity work, though she didn’t feel the need to step it up. Privately, she believed that contributing both of her sons to the military paid much of her own debt to her country. In March, she traveled to Albany on behalf of the Actors Fund, which her own Authors League sponsored. At the state capitol, Emily and her close friend, the editor George Barr Baker, along with the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and the novelist Gertrude Atherton, successfully argued the case for increased funding for the arts.
By early spring, she was redirecting her energies to national causes. On May 9, the New York Times featured a photograph of J. P. Morgan Jr. buying a $10,000 Liberty Bond from his childhood friend Emily Post. Then, in June, after Congress had enacted the first national draft law since the Civil War, she pitched in at Tuxedo Park, where 254 men from the town and the park reported for military duty.
Not everyone from backgrounds similar to Emily’s was cooperating with the government. Only a few months later, forty miles from her hometown of Baltimore, picketing by the National Woman’s Party in Washington turned violent. Any criticism of the government was immediately suspect those days, and these protestors, who were marching for voting rights for women, were deemed probable Communist agitators or something similar. Suffragist Doris Stevens, a close associate of Alva Vanderbilt Belmont’s (later her assistant) and a soon-to-be friend of Emily’s, was arrested, stripped naked, and jailed at the Occoquan Workhouse. She was released, but a month later she was rearrested with dozens of other women, including a “frail seventy-three year old” who was “manhandled” and “knocked to the ground,” in what became known as the “night of terror.” A federal court subsequently ruled that every arrest had been illegal.
Emily didn’t like to talk about such distressing matters, or even think about them much. She still maintained that flagrant displays of anger harmed rather than helped any cause, however just. There were less extreme ways to draw upon one’s talents: look at how Juliet Morgan’s brother had enlisted the Morgan bank to facilitate finances between the Allies and their American suppliers. And there was Juliet herself, donating her land near Tuxedo Park as a temporary experimental training camp for women agricultural workers.
But it was Juliet’s sister Anne who took the Morgans’ war efforts to the battlefield. Anne, who had worked indefatigably in New York for women’s causes, now assembled an all-women staff overseas to provide everything from car repairs to medical care. She soon organized CARD, the American Committee for Devastated France, stationed in northern France. Juliet’s little sister, the daughter of one of America’s best-known Gilded Age tycoons, had become the model of a selfless international citizen.
Nor was she alone among the Tuxedo crowd of stellar patriots. On September 25, Ned Post executed a piece of notable legerdemain that made it clear that his summer automobile trip with his mother the year before had been a mere prelude to real adventure. Five months after enlisting as one of fifteen elite aviators chosen as “the nucleus of General Pershing’s aerial corps,” Lieutenant Post found himself in the midst of a fiery chaos. His plane broke into flames above the aviation school in Pau, France, where he was instructing others in how to fly. As flames rose on all sides, Ned landed the plane safely. Ever his mother’s practical son, he even salvaged the instrument panel before lurching his way to freedom as his plane exploded.
His citation was the first award conferred upon an American pilot in World War I. General Pershing’s chief of staff forwarded the letter of commen
dation: “His example . . . should serve as an example for all the aviators. . . . The Commander in Chief is particularly gratified in having an American officer so soon get honorable mention from our French allies and I am very glad to congratulate him.” The Times piece, yet again, ended as if Ned’s father didn’t exist: “Lieutenant Post Jr. is a son of Mrs. Price Post of this city and Tuxedo Park.”
In a subsequent feature that would appear in the paper’s magazine, Ned was hailed as “immensely popular” in New York even before this feat. The lieutenant was said to possess “the natural equipment of calm, steady nerves, good judgment and a sportsman’s keen love of the game.” He even came accompanied by a famous mother, a writer “known for her beauty and well known socially in Tuxedo and New York” and the author of a “best seller besides, The Title Market.”
Over the next six months, Emily accelerated her war relief efforts. She joined the female contingent in Tuxedo Park that was rolling bandages for the Red Cross, which, nationwide, was spilling over with volunteers—more than would help during the following world war. Americans were cautiously optimistic. When, on November 11, 1918, Germany sued for peace, many even believed that the United States had proven itself the most powerful country on the globe. For a few magical weeks, life seemed mythical, good conquering evil once and for all.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR empowered Emily Post just as it did much of America’s female population, granting it a belated respect. As she took the measure of those around her, Emily opened her eyes wider every day: women’s talents had been shortchanged all these years. Belva Ann Lockwood, who had run for president of the United States when Emily was an adolescent, had recently died, and women still couldn’t elect their leaders. Yet, from later comments she made to interviewers, Emily even now was not persuaded that the ballot box held the answer. Though she was not averse to the voting rallies that surrounded her, she believed her sex could best wield power indirectly, through managing the home.
Emily Post Page 28
