Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  After the United States officially entered the war at the end of the year, Funk and Wagnalls, deciding that their bestseller needed to be revamped to fit the times, suggested that Emily plan an amended version of Etiquette, to be published in 1942. Relieved to have the assignment distracting her from worrying constantly about Bill and his friends, Emily revised the 1940 edition by adding a thirteen- page “War-Time Supplement” to the book’s conclusion. Ernie Pyle, the popular journalist who was in London describing the unimaginable for Americans back home, suggested in one of his newspaper columns that British officers in training be required to read Etiquette— thus they would become officers and gentlemen at the same time. The plucky trainees subsequently adopted as their nickname the “Emily Posters,” with Betty Grable and Emily Post the military’s new favorite pinup girls. When the Chicago Daily News picked up the story and embellished it, orders flooded Funk and Wagnalls’s office within hours. After Pyle’s remark, requests to USO clubs for Etiquette ran second only to orders for the Rand McNally Atlas. Ninety military chaplains, endorsing Emily Post’s marriage of etiquette with ethics, would use the book “to advise men under their guidance.”

  The new supplement was, above all else, pragmatic, explaining that it was not only acceptable but necessary at times to ignore certain conventions on the nation’s behalf. “Etiquette,” Emily stressed, “is not a fixed subject.” Unexpected drama called for improvisation. From permitting women to write to anonymous soldiers, to girls dancing with strangers, to weddings performed on furlough and marriage reunions held “at [military] camp,” etiquette, she explained,

  like our living language is seemingly rigid but actually fluid. The times in which we live are constantly producing new and, therefore, puzzling situations. We gladly accept forms that are helpful but we have little patience with those whose purpose is the preservation of form for form’s sake. It has long been my particular occupation not only to urge keeping those precepts and customs of practical use and to discard those which no longer serve, but also to meet the new problems constantly arising. It is this increasing fusing together of the new with the old, that has kept this book from becoming a collection of dry- dust maxims, to which “Finis” might otherwise have been written twenty years ago.

  Of all the revisions of Etiquette since its initial publication in 1922, the 1942 version bore the most specific marks of its moment in American history. Where else would she discuss the returning veteran? If the soldier was an old friend, “tell him how glad you are to see him back; and show that you are, not only by looking glad but by paying enough thoughtful attention to adjust your mood to his.” He might seem “absent- minded, untalkative or tense: try to realize what he has been through and be patient.” Don’t badger him about a job: let him find his own way back. “Try to follow his lead with friendly but uninquisitive interest in anything he has to tell you. But whatever you do don’t ask him questions about what the war was like, or what he thinks or feels about getting home—unless he himself brings up these subjects.”

  Emily also warned—carefully—against subversive activity that endangered the country. Acknowledging the inherent dangers a nation at war faced, she nonetheless cautioned against suspecting aliens unfairly. Stressing consideration for recent immigrants, Emily tried—with her usual tact and a bit more circumlocution than normal—to urge citizens to be fair and patriotic both. Her opening is worth quoting:

  Because in us Americans flows the blood of every race and creed, there is no country in the world where there is so great a need of wise appraisal, of sensitive understanding of our countrymen.

  The Janus- faced difficulty of this most important aspect of [wartime] etiquette is, on the one side, the need for alertness lest subversive elements take us unawares, and on the other the equally great need to avoid mistrusting those who are completely loyal to the principles of our Founding Fathers.

  When we encounter one whose behavior causes doubt of his loyalty, censorship of our impulses is only fair play, both now and in the years after the war. There is, however, this warning which must be given: IF someone does or says something definitely threatening to our government, write a letter to the F.B.I. or to the governor of your State, or the mayor, or to the sheriff of your township. Or, if you prefer, you can telephone. In any case make your evidence definite and brief.

  As she was finishing her revisions, which inevitably engaged profoundly important national issues, Emily fussed privately about what she knew to be trivial by comparison: finding appropriate help for her upcoming summer on the Vineyard. She was apprehensive; the greater she felt the infirmities of age, the more she realized she depended upon others. Worst of all, her beloved Hilda Ogren had died that year, the elderly servant’s cause of death and place of burial unremarked in Ned Post’s memoir of his mother, almost as if he was fighting his own jealousy of this loyal longtime companion. With her passing, Emily’s last full- time, consistent connection with a professional servant ended.

  Even her local help had changed: Natalie (Betty’s cousin) had proved unable to return that spring. Luckily, Edgartown’s librarian heard that Emily Post needed a secretary, and she urged her daughter, about to graduate from high school, to apply for the job. Yvonne Sylvia was hired on the spot, assisting Emily each summer for the next fifteen years. Still a teenager, Yvonne was especially eager to help her employer stay up to date. Soon Emily was quizzing her, just as she did anyone who would indulge her, on everything from current wedding details to the best ways of dealing with wartime privations. “It was kind of exciting to see things I knew were modeled on my wedding appear in Mrs. Post’s writing,” Yvonne remembers to this day.

  “Even though we were several generations apart, you could say we were two women aging together,” she suggests. “Emily Post was always so easy to work for. She was warm, really human, especially with her grandson, Bill. She loved children. After my first child was born, I took my infant with me to work each day, and Mrs. Post bought clothes and furniture for him.” Nor did Emily forget that mothers needed a break. Emily paid for a babysitter on the premises, and sent Yvonne’s children to camp when they were older. “If it was a particularly miserable day, Mrs. Post would give me a check and say, ‘Go buy yourself a hat in a bright color to cheer up your family and yourself while it’s dismal outside.’ ”

  Yvonne found her employer’s lack of ceremony remarkable, both in the 1940s and thereafter. “She was never really formal with me; often she’d dictate into her Dictaphone, that vivid red ‘Suzy,’ while she was still in bed, and I’d go into her bedroom and she would sit there, completely at ease. Half the days, she worked in her bed jacket, but other times she was dressed. Sometimes she used the library- office she kept downstairs. Almost always, though, she had her feet up, on the bed or on a sofa.

  “She really spread out on that sofa—it was wide and comfortable—with Suzy set up beside her, like her best friend,” Yvonne recalls. “She spoke to it in a low voice, but every once in a while she’d burst out laughing, hard, almost a guffaw. She had a great sense of humor and was always smiling.” Asked what, in light of such vivid memories, she considered Emily Post’s most dominant characteristic, Yvonne Sylvia barely paused: “Her sweet-ness . . . she was truly a sweet person. And I could tell she missed Hilda, and that made her even more human.”

  BESIEGED WITH QUESTIONS about state and military protocol, Emily continued focusing on the ever-changing rules and rituals of the American armed forces. That winter, she sent advice about hitchhiking to the Regional News Bureau of the Office of War Information. With gasoline at a premium in 1942, the war effort demanded that everyone, including those working for the Defense Department, wherever they were stationed, endorse conservation measures. In her typically detailed fashion, Emily explained the safest ways for women to “hitch” rides to and from work with men they had never before met. It was crucial, she explained, to follow the Defense Department rules: one must exhibit one’s identification badge prominently, just as poli
ce officers did, so that it would be clear why a girl was thumbing a ride, as well as what direction she needed to take. The badges’ designations, B or C, saved the driver from going out of the way to deliver a hitchhiker in the opposite direction.

  Moreover, as unfeeling as it seemed, hitchhikers should remember that these charitable shared rides were professional, not social occasions. Talk should be confined to a minimum, for everyone’s sake—in part to avoid unintentionally disclosing “dangerous information.” The New York Times reprinted most of the lengthy disquisition.

  But though Emily Post endorsed the logic of the age in urging women to hitchhike, she failed to accept that “anything goes.” In December, a gossipy New York Times column, “Heard in New York,” reported the kind of anecdote about her that at least amused the younger press corps, not convinced of etiquette’s value. A soldier, a marine, and two women, waiting for a United Press photographer to shoot scenes of Emily showing them how to conduct themselves at USO canteen dances, did or said something offensive to their earnest instructor. “Mrs. Post suddenly left without being part of the pictures,” the Times announced. The tag line of the newspaper article hinted at the jocular disrespect Emily was continuing to experience as she grew old. “Miss Post,” the photographer shouted after her, “you didn’t even say ‘Pardon me.’ ”

  The year ended with a more solemn reminder of the country’s new reality. Blackout restrictions throughout the East Coast cities meant that no glittering ball would welcome in 1943. Instead, there was one minute of si-lence, followed by a recording of church bells. As far as America was concerned, radio remained the major revolution of the day, in spite of the handicaps hobbling its progress. Only 700,000 radio sets were sold in 1943, due to the wartime ban on nonessential electronic manufacturing, down from the 13 million sets bought in 1941. The scarcity of shellac, a strategic war material, caused the number of phonograph records to decline, the lack causing the Armed Forces Radio Service to distribute vinyl records to its military radio stations. In spite of the temporary restrictions, radio remained a racehorse just waiting for the gate to lift, television right on its heels.

  CHAPTER 63

  SHOWN ACCEPTING A HEAVY BAG FROM A GROCER, THE SEVENTY-year- old Emily Post explained to the readers of the Washington Post, “I carry my own parcels home . . . . A bulky parcel is a woman’s badge of wartime service.” Exhibiting the same self- assurance she had used to describe Mrs. Three- in-One a decade and a half earlier, now, on behalf of the war effort, she was photographed for the newspaper’s February 2 edition to illustrate “Emily Post’s Wartime Rules.” One picture showed her repairing a worn outlet plug on an electric beater, confidently teaching a young woman to restore the damaged product herself, rather than discard her appliance. Had her sight not been impaired, Emily undoubtedly would have actually carried her own packages and made her own repairs. Instead, she used her celebrity clout, urging readers to do so, as well as to donate books for the “boys at the front”; she herself was photographed giving the Office of Civilian Defense “as many books” as she could.

  She fed several well- rehearsed anecdotes to those older reporters who knew they could depend upon Emily Post for intelligent domestic news. Of recent note, she recounted, she had felt terribly irritated when an officer had suggested that military women, the Waves and the Waacs, address all superiors—male and female—as “Sir.” “There’s nothing that denotes masculinity so much as ‘sir,’ ” Emily insisted. “Holding out for ‘ma’am,’ ” the reporter wrote, “she scoffs at women officers who think the word isn’t stylish.”

  Newsweek noted that the Bell Syndicate was now distributing Emily’s daily column to ninety- eight newspapers, with 5.5 million readers, “said to be at its highest popularity in its twelve- year history.” The Office of War Information and army and navy officials practically badgered her for information about manners. Etiquette’s recently enlarged wartime edition had been selling a steady one thousand copies weekly throughout the war, its greatest popularity in army camps, “where soldiers want to know how to act on blind dates” the Newsweek journalist opined, amused, in spite of her indisputable popularity, at Emily’s status.

  It may have been Emily’s undiminished success that caused envious or resentful editors to feature her as such an amusing anachronism. In May, adjacent to the New York Times’ Letters to the Editor page, headlining “Punishment for War Guilt” as the day’s weighty subject, and under the title “Topics of the Times,” appeared “Etiquette and the War,” a reprint of a recent article Emily had published. “To knit or not to knit when one is part of a large audience listening to an important speech” was its topic. Recently Emily had been besieged by women who worried that they appeared rude while knitting socks for the troops: “Even in these days when one should not waste a minute, does it not seem disrespectful for a number of the women in an audience, listening to a speaker, to continue their knitting?” her readers questioned. Emily waffled: she herself wouldn’t mind listeners knitting while she spoke, but ideally, one would simply ask speakers their preference before the lecture began. Whatever the answer, the newspaper’s trivialization of her topic, by printing it side by side with a discussion of war guilt, seemed newly mean- spirited.

  JUST AS EMILY POST was feeling the insults of what would be called “ageism” in the twenty- first century, American women were forging ahead in her own. Visibly needed, they proved irreplaceable cogs in a successful national endeavor to safeguard the nation. And with their centrality to the war effort came respect. There was nothing frivolous about being female these days. In 1942, Westinghouse for War Production had published a poster, We Can Do It, by J. Howard Miller, in which a physically strong and relentlessly cheerful young female assumed a mythic persona. As part of the government’s ambivalent campaign to encourage paid work for women, the character Rosie the Riveter began to appear everywhere after a song in early 1943 saluted the working woman of the age as “loyal, efficient, patriotic, and pretty.” On May 29, 1943, the Saturday Evening Post published on its cover what would become the most widely circulated visual image of Rosie, by Norman Rockwell. After Rockwell’s illustration appeared, Rosie images became ubiquitous, and soon ads were created showing women competing to drive the most rivets into bombers.

  Rosie the Riveter was in many ways the kind of woman Emily had been promoting all her adult life. It was as if the model Emily had endorsed since 1922 suddenly, finally, commanded center stage. If she was too old to take the leading role, by rights Emily should have received credit for the script. Independent, cheerful, hardworking, socially responsible to one’s community: Rosie was even attractive, beauty a quality that Emily had never denied made life easier. It was as if Emily Post’s intuitive version of the capable, modern woman had come to life. She had believed in her even before Rosie had a name. Now, as the number of women working outside the home increased over 50 percent from 1940, numbering 20 million by 1944, she was pleased, even if it had taken a war to prove that women were capable beings.

  Emily and an ever more infirm Katharine Collier each pitched in for the war effort as best they could, contributing money to charitable causes and lending their names whenever someone they deemed worthy asked. According to Yvonne Sylvia, Emily seemed slightly dejected during this period. From the spring to the fall, Edgartown’s distance from the city made Ned reluctant to visit his mother, and she rarely saw Bill these days, Washington demanding most of his attention. Many of her friends were living with their own offspring, and even Katharine was spending more time at Tuxedo Park, with the St. Georges. “Maybe that’s one reason Mrs. Post was so naturally kind to the servants,” Yvonne suggests. “They were like her surrogate children.”

  That summer, the Saturday Evening Post paid Emily what turned out to be a double- edged compliment by selecting her to be part of a series of cartoons. In “People You Know,” Emily’s caricature showed a woman caught dunking a doughnut in her coffee. Accompanied by whimsical, good-natured doggerel, the la
st four lines implied a stuffiness that had never conveyed what Emily Post stood for.

  Gravy- soppers, table hoppers,

  Swear off while you’re able!

  He who dunks may dine in heaven,

  But not at Emily’s table.

  As usual, the truth about etiquette was otherwise: Emily considered it fine for knowing adults to “dunk,” if the circumstances were informal. Dinner parties, of course, were something else entirely. So were the rules for children who were still learning basic good manners.

  In September, widely syndicated maverick journalist Henry McLemore, the gadfly who had already written off Emily Post as an artifact two years earlier, now penned a column sarcastically but half- seriously proclaiming that her rules for gracious living had damaged the war effort. The parodic article, entitled “Doughboy Etiquette for Occupation of Italy,” began: “I am beginning to believe that courtesy is the secret weapon of the Allied invading forces. Our boys kill the enemy with kindness. If you doubt me, then you haven’t read that guidebook to social behavior issued to the members of the British Eighth Army just before they took off from Sicily for a landing on the Italian mainland. It lays down the rules for almost everything except how to eat spaghetti and the proper use of the finger bowl. Let me quote a few of the paragraphs of instructions, and then you try to figure out whether Eisenhower, Montgomery, Alexander or Emily Post is in charge of the occupation.” He then cited what he considered extraneous rules aimed at adapting to local customs: “don’t consider that you have the right to be served before any civilian” and “don’t drive furiously down narrow village streets, scaring pedestrians and livestock in all directions.” The wisdom of honoring the conventions of the defeated escaped him entirely.