Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  She continued to promote accommodation to change, though obliquely, in her September article “What! No Chaperones?” America’s economy had forced young women to work outside the home, mixing with men on a daily basis. This new reality made the very question of a chaperone irrelevant. “The things that she existed to prevent,” Emily pointed out, “are no longer banned; girls are free to go about with boys as much as they please—even to go after them to a reasonable degree. The restraints of formality and superficial conventions have been exchanged for unselfconscious frankness.” By and large, Emily Post thought this was all for the better.

  BUT THIS EXHILARATING new world, negotiated by young and old alike, was stopped short in its tracks by the stock market crash. Tuxedo Park denizens, excitedly putting finishing touches on late- season events, frantically canceled their plans. On October 24, 1929, which would become infamous as “Black Thursday,” 12,894,650 shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange—a record that made the previous high of 3,875,910 shares from a year and a half earlier seem modest. This time, however, everybody was selling, nobody was buying, and the market came tumbling down. The next week, on an even darker day, “Black Tuesday,” October 29, many who were fabulously rich the day before suddenly became the infamous poor. By three P.M., when traders heard the gong (later replaced by a less Gothic- sounding bell), 12,880,900 shares had been traded. The ticker tape was so backed up that it took another two and a half hours after the doors closed just to print it.

  Within a few weeks, $30 billion had evaporated. Thousands throughout the nation lost their massive fortunes as stock prices crumbled. Emily herself was barely affected; she had already been too badly burned by Edwin’s gambling to invest much in stocks and bonds anymore. Her closest friends—Juliet Morgan Hamilton, Minnie Gray Coster, Katharine Delano Collier—were also free of husbands whom Wall Street had mesmerized, even as the women themselves were supported by hefty family inheritances. They rightly considered themselves among the lucky ones.

  No fireworks exploded over Times Square when the New Year shrugged its grim way into the city. Over the next five years, one- third of the nation’s banks would close. In 1930, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents seemed to document culture’s reluctant capitulation to repression, the severe price civilization exacted in order to sustain the social order. Individuals would be forced, inexorably, to sacrifice the personal, existential freedom the 1920s had encouraged. At times it felt as if Americans were paying for the decadent excess of the preceding decade. At Tuxedo Park, houses stayed closed for the season. Some of the cottages were torn down or fell prey to arson, the fires assumed to be the desperate acts of owners unable to pay their taxes.

  During the worst periods of the Depression, about one- third of the male labor force was out of work. Over the next five years, the lack of jobs for the traditional family breadwinners motivated laws in twenty- six states that forbade the hiring of married women. When both sexes did work, the yearly salaries averaged $525 for women and $1,027 for men. Yet in spite of the lack of jobs, as the Depression deepened, new opportunities for women arose—just as in wartime. The American Woman’s Association, determined not to see females devalued again as soon as the hard times receded, quickly created a series of talks centered upon safeguarding women’s employment. Anne Morgan and Alva Vanderbilt sponsored seminars where attendees could meet motivational leaders, with Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the New York governor, occasionally chairing a panel. Such earnest mingling substituted for the dances that Emily’s crowd had enjoyed when they were young.

  Emily believed that the current emphasis on women taking whatever jobs they could find would serve them and their families well in the end. Ten years later, in 1940, she would write a newspaper article on how to get ahead in the modern- day workplace. Urging women to make their own way, she recalled her experiences of working hard without a clear sense of the forthcoming rewards. Whether she was thinking of her first novel or her manual of etiquette, she concluded, “I can write from first hand knowledge that there is a great joy to one who, expecting little, finds much. To undertake to do a job because it is offered and then to do the very best one can do with it because of one’s obligation to what one has undertaken, and in the end to find that one has really made something of it, is a story with a very happy ending.”

  At the end of 1930, professional women were still learning about the extra roadblocks they faced on their quest to be taken seriously in their jobs. That December, for instance, speakers tackled the stigma that the marketplace attached to aging. Anticipating by over fifty years AARP: The Magazine and the plethora of articles on midlife careers, business executives confronted the problems women over forty faced in the professional world in 1930. An industrial relations expert theorized that although “gray” increased men’s power, it inevitably diminished women’s, whose maturity was thought detrimental to the workplace. Because of such discrimination, women should feel justified in lying about their birth dates when applying for jobs, he said. But at least age did give the advantage to the female in one field: longevity. The overall life expectancy for American women was 61, while men lived an average of 58.1 years. Emily was 58.

  CHAPTER 49

  PUBLISHED IN APRIL 1930, THE PERSONALITY OF A HOUSE , IN SPITE of moderate sales figures, was among Emily’s proudest achievements. Several professors around the country would adopt the architecture volume for classroom use, a fact proudly noted by the woman who never considered attending college herself. Its initial run proved too small for its audience, and between January 1933 and January 1937, Personality, newly revised, would be reprinted four times. That the dense volume was ready for spring publication confounds the imagination still: while she was constructing her literary edifice, Emily was also writing occasional pieces for Collier’s as well as finishing her Debutante book.

  Dedicated “in memory of the architects of my family,” the book was a lanyard linking her accomplishments with those of her two Bruces. Edith Wharton’s 1897 The Decoration of Houses had been written with an architect, and so had Emily’s book, in a manner of speaking. Candidly, she wrote a sympathetic interviewer, “This book is different. I’ve written all my other books calmly enough, but this subject is so utterly bound up in the memories of those who were dearest to me—my father and my son—that I was on edge with nerves! Terrified lest critics make fun of me for daring to attempt such a subject, as the principles of beauty in architecture—yet how could I leave the foundation out? My other books—oh well, if kind things are said—then that is very pleasant; if rude things—then try to do better next time, but in writing this my heart was on my sleeve.”

  She explained that until recently she had taken her knowledge of building and decorating for granted, as though it was her birthright. One day, however, the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal and she found themselves talking about houses “for three hours,” she said, adding,

  and he asked me to write a series of articles on the principles of architectural beauty, the theory of color, and the details which produce— charm!

  I answered—“oh, but I couldn’t! The subject is more near to me than any other, but I don’t know enough!”

  Mr Schuler [the editor] smiled. “You may not know as much as your father and the other architects of your family did, but you know far more than I do and I’ve always thought I knew a great deal! I’d like you to write out exactly what you have said—you’ve outlined a whole book on the personality of a house.”

  “That’s a perfect title,” I exclaimed.

  “All right,” he said, “call it that.”

  An in- depth, meticulously detailed five- hundred- page book, The Personality of a House ambitiously sought to address the novice and the professional at the same time. Its twenty- two chapters began by urging that every house must, most of all, express its owners’ personalities. To help novices decide upon structure and interior design, several chapters then set out a history of architecture and, specifically, of
houses in America. Suggesting that her artist readers skip the chapter titled “Principles of Color Harmony,” Emily detailed a highly technical explanation of everything from color theory to mixing paints: the “colorlessness. . . [of “neutral gray”] is made by mixing equal portions of your original primary red, yellow, and blue. . . . To prove it, take a small circle of paper painted yellow, red and blue in three equal divisions, like a pie cut into three pieces, and fasten it on a child’s top. When it is spun, three colors thus fused but not mixed will turn to white.”

  The book contained an extraordinary 171 small pen- and- ink illustrations and sixty- three full- page cartoons and photographs. Whether of a Palladian window or a wrought- iron New Orleans balcony or her own Cape Cod–style house, photographs that she believed would be educational for her mostly novice audience filled the book.

  Samuel Graybill, the Yale architecture student who, in the 1950s, wrote his dissertation on Bruce Price, believes Emily’s book “odd and offputting,” though, he admits, his impression is skewed because he disagreed so radically with her aesthetic. “When I met her, she and her house were dressed the same—somewhat grotesquely, all flowers and prints. And cabbage roses,” Graybill recalled, gently but disdainfully, fifty years later. But Emily’s rose chintz, however dated, was true to her message. “The personality of a house is indefinable, but there never lived a lady of great cultivation and charm whose home, whether a palace, a farm- cottage or a tiny apartment, did not reflect the charm of its owner. Every visitor feels impelled to linger, and is loath to go. Houses without personality are a series of rooms with furniture in them.”

  Unobjectionable to architecture critic Christopher Gray, The Personality of a House is nonetheless, he believes, “uninspired.” All the same, the book is stamped with Emily’s own personality and concerns, especially her attention to the pragmatic. She even devoted five pages to financing, distinguishing for first- time buyers the difference between an “amortizing” and a “permanent” mortgage. True to form, the author lavished attention on the nuts and bolts of the business. “Above everything,” she instructed, “you must notice whether every working part of the house is practical.”

  She meant her book to be used by people who would truly inhabit their homes, emotionally as well as physically, as she did hers. Regarding the formal aesthetics of the new residence, she advised; “When rules hamper— discard.” The “qualifications” of an “enchanting” house are “suitability to situation and to purpose. . . . Its personality should express your personality, just as every gesture you make . . . express[es]. . . whichever characteristics are typically yours.” The thesis was well suited to a Depression era forced to create its aesthetic out of the affordable, leftover materials at hand.

  One of the book’s first major reviews appeared in the magazine section of the New York Herald Tribune, entitled “The Etiquette of Home Decoration.” Uneasy initially over the technical chapters that alternated with “intimate experiences and suggestions,” the journalist concluded that the book perfectly merged advanced and beginner skills. The Personality of a House was “one of the best books on planning and decorating a home which has appeared in a decade,” he opined. Everything was presented “in a delightful personal style, garnished here and there with humor.” Instead of the stage settings of Mrs. Toplofty and Mr. Gilding that she used in Etiquette, Emily had created scenarios for real people, whatever their tastes or income. Most impressive was her ability to apply a “sweet reasonableness” to “period dec-oration, principles of line, mass, balance and color and the fundamentals,” the reviewer noted. There was nothing theatrical about this book; instead, it at times hovered on the academic.

  The New York Times also addressed the book promptly. “Mrs. Post puts as much personality into her book as she wants her readers to make evident in their homes,” the journalist said, declaring her work “wholly unlike” the “scores” written by architects or designers of late and “in a class by itself. . . . The vigor and the individuality with which the author invests each theme and makes it warmly and appealingly expressive give the volume a distinction and an interest unusual in books of this sort.” But the review that meant the most to her appeared in the American Architect. “Seldom has anything been written which so delightfully tells just how the person- about-to- build thinks as this book by Emily Post, the daughter of the late Bruce Price and quite evidently an inheritor of his architectural flair,” that journal averred. The following year, in a rare confessional moment, she told a Better Homes and Gardens interviewer, “I wish my life were at its beginning, instead of being on the down slope, that I might be a really professional architect and not just a halfway one. . . . [I] finally wrote about the personality and comfort and charm of a house. . . . I don’t know why I ever wrote about anything else.”

  THAT MAY, EMILY was the subject of a popular Boston Globe column, “Meeting the Big Names.” However selectively, she was now using her clout with the public to campaign openly for causes she believed important to everyone. In Chicago, the labor reform advocate (and the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize) Jane Addams censured all proposals to end Prohibition, embracing complete abstinence instead, hardening Emily’s attitude toward what her mother had considered radical women activists. As if assuming Bruce Price’s crusade against restricting civil liberties, she volunteered to help rescind Prohibition. Particularly because Emily herself rarely used alcohol, her protest proved powerful. She wrote proudly to the Jefferson County Union, “I think the repeal cause is going splendidly, and the people of the United States are beginning to understand that prohibition is not encouraging temperance.” At the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, she joined “eight prominent women of New York” to reject a Main Line socialite’s suggestion to officially ban alcohol from all social register gatherings.

  In spite of being bothered by a noticeable lack of energy, Emily could afford to push herself hard in the city, as long as she knew that her island retreat lay ahead. By July, the rituals and more leisurely pace of Martha’s Vineyard had clearly revitalized her. She even joined other seasonal residents to fête the yachts arriving at the island for the warm months. Invigorated, she hosted a reception for Garden Club members following the summer opening. After visits to seven luxuriously manicured grounds, participants ended the afternoon by drinking tea among Emily’s begonias and hydrangeas. Increasingly vivacious and buoyant, the invigorated amateur gardener proved in high spirits these days. She knew that the New Yorker was soon to publish an extensive interview with her.

  That reporter, however, proved as gullible as others who had been seduced by Emily’s charm. Helen Huntington Smith swallowed whole Emily’s favorite chestnut: Writing about etiquette “was an accident in [Emily’s] life,” Smith authoritatively proclaimed. Now, eight years after Etiquette’s publication, the colleges at “Cambridge and New Haven,” she said, were ordering copies of the preternaturally famous blue book on behavior— surely an exaggeration that referred more accurately to the university libraries.

  While Emily tried to keep Smith focused on her professional life, the journalist kept returning to the class difference between author and readers: most of Emily’s audience, Smith pointed out, though they “belong to the flower of American womanhood . . . would not find their names” in the social register. “In a way,” Smith concluded, Emily Post was “a link between two worlds.” While with the one hand she reached back “to the redoubtable Mrs. William Astor and Ward McAllister,” with the other hand she touched modernity itself. “Her talents and energies have led her to the edge of that extraordinary modern world which is half- social, half-professional.” When Smith urged her subject to talk about society matters, Emily dutifully rehashed the Canadian train trip Bruce Price took with the Duke of Connaught, Queen Victoria’s son, forty years earlier. Probably boring herself with the overused anecdote, she embellished her previous accounts. Now, not at just one stop but at every train station, the crowds had
mistaken the gallant, princely Bruce Price for royalty.

  Deeply disappointed when she saw the New Yorker article, Emily scribbled furiously in the margins of the published interview. At the bottom of a page detailing tedious points of official State Department protocol that she had helped to construct, she scrawled, “I mind this more than any other mistake [the interviewer] made because it presented me as exalting the silliness which I most detest.” She added, “All of this is offensive, very quaint,” and “This is where M. C. Harrison [another journalist] got that stupid mistake.” She snorted indignantly through a series of flamboyant exclamation marks, the pages practically crackling with her disdain.