“glad to congratulate him”: “Two American Soldiers Cited by French Army,” New York Times, December 28, 1917.
“besides, The Title Market”: Flying, February 1918, p. 50.
the following world war: Barry, The Great Influenza, 130.
in twenty-four years: Ibid., 92. Many scientists believe that the “bug” scientists discovered in fall of 2005 was the genealogical precursor to the avian flu many epidemiologists predict will be the next international bug to sweep society; see: “Avian Virus Caused the 1918 Pandemic, New Studies Show,” by Betsy McKay, Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2005, p. B1.
400 of whom died: “War Records of the Town of Tuxedo, NY,” compiled by Susan Tuckerman, Tuxedo Park historian, 1923; Gina Kolata, “Experts Unlock Clues to Spread of 1918 Flu Virus,” New York Times, October 6, 2005. At least the epidemic led to one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, one that resonates powerfully to this day: in seeking to stop future devastations, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.
reign at Tuxedo Park: Property maps and records courtesy of Chris Sonne, Tuxedo Park Realty.
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one of their daughters: United States Census, 1920.
charming six-footer: Pony Duke, phone conversation with the author, July 18, 2005; throughout the years of interviews Emily gave, whenever she recounted her childhood, she’d often invoke the nasty-tempered German nanny who didn’t like the French.
man in New York City: The New York Times included him, along with John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie, among the six richest men in the country, based on income tax recorded a decade before. The Times reminisced about how it was customary to speak of George Baker, J. Pierpoint Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller as the “The Big Three.” His funeral at Tuxedo Park included lengthy readings from condolences from presidents Hoover and Coolidge and every business titan alive. “Funeral of Baker at Tuxedo Today,” New York Times, May 5, 1931, p. 20; and “Simplicity Marks G. F. Baker Funeral,” New York Times, May 6, 1931, p. 23.
late Bruce Price: “In the Social World, California Tech,” New York Times, February 22, 1920, p. 23. Edwin Sr. was making a successful if muted life for himself; he had served as a lieutenant commander of reserve troops during the war. According to his daughter-in-law Marguerite Post, he never had enough money to live the way he wanted to.
Following the war, in order to gain additional income, Edwin’s wife, Eleanor, resumed her stage name, Nellie Malcolm, and started acting again. “Edwin had a small brokerage, and he was happy with a much simpler life than he had known as a wealthy socialite,” according to Post (Marguerite Post to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, early 1998).
“extant in whites”: William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff, New York Modern, 136.
sex education: Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds., Battleground of Desire, 92.
“midwife of 1885”: Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, 199 and 197.
just as men did: Ibid., 201.
for five hundred: “Society Throng Sees Miss Loew Married,” New York Times, May 7, 1920, p. 11, and “Easter Monday Nuptials,” New York Times, April 12, 1898, p. 5. George Baker’s status had been emphasized years before, at his daughter’s wedding. The guests included President and Mrs. Benjamin Harrison among a list of equally illustrious officials. Florence Baker had married a Loew, a family that spent the majority of their “in-between season” time on Jekyll Island and in Tuxedo Park. The couple had become good friends of Emily’s, and their children spent summers together—even though Ned’s parents were divorced. Florence’s sister wed B. St. George; Katharine Collier’s daughter married into the St. George family as well. Florence Loew, Barbara’s mother and Emily’s friend, left over $4 million to her children and husband when she died in 1937—worth over $50 million today.
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“couldn’t see straight”: “She Was Leading Lady in American Life to Millions,” Vineyard Gazette, September 30, 1960.
“made me do it”: Sue Erikson Bloland, interview with the author, January 20, 2005.
“hundred years hence”: Etiquette, 303.
being “in society”: Stephen Birmingham, “Our Crowd,” 75–76; and James Lea Cate, “Keeping Posted,” p. 26. Arthur Schlesinger, in Learning How to Behave, asserts that the “lack of a hereditary aristocracy, the constant frontier, the repeated waves of immigrants, and the scarcity of women in new settlements” worked against a codifed behavior for the vibrant middle class. The challenge created the spectacle of etiquette books being published ever more frequently, as publishers tried to keep pace with the settlers’ need for instruction (viii).
“of democracy” itself: Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave, vii.
“ ‘Emily Post’ was sufficient”: Quoted in Deborah Felder, A Century of Women, 126.
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hairstyles was abbreviated: Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, 197.
to their core: Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station, 65.
Ned remembered: Truly Emily Post, 208.
or fashion consultant: Mark Caldwell, A Short History of Rudeness, 7 (see, too, pp. 60 and 21), makes the point that “civility and rudeness” are subjects that must be submitted to the resources of multiple disciplines: “history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, communications theory, language, and linguistics” as well as “the hard sciences.” To this catalog could be added philosophy and women’s studies, the latter because of the preponderance of women working in the field of etiquette, at least throughout the twentieth century.
genteel Tuxedo Park: New York Times, September 30, 1921, p. 11.
January 27, 1922: Courtesy of HarperCollins, from Funk and Wagnalls archives. Drawn up on behalf of Mrs. Emily Price Post, State of New York, and Funk and Wagnalls Company of the City of New York, the original contract, dated January 27, 1922, states that Mrs. Post “has a certain book . . . the subject or title of which is Etiquette” (courtesy of e-mail from Helen Moore, HarperCollins, October 4, 2005). The publishers agreed to pay the author 10 percent of the retail price of every copy sold. In five years, Funk and Wagnalls would be allowed to drop the contract or buy it out, if the writer would purchase the remainder of any leftover stock. Instead, when that five-year deadline arrived, Funk and Wagnalls would publish a second edition, after Emily Post had negotiated an entirely new contract first. And “Emily Post Is Dead Here at 86,” New York Times, September 27, 1960.
“Society is incidental”: Etiquette, xvii.
“changes in the mores”: James Lea Cate, “Keeping Posted,” p. 34.
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more than money: The bestseller list was firmly established by 1902 (Michael Korda, Making the List, xvii).
“its chosen members”: Etiquette, 3.
Emily’s vivid characters: Quoted in Edmund Wilson, “Books,” New Yorker, July 19, 1947; the essay also appears in Wilson’s A Literary Chronicle, 1920–1950 (New York: Anchor, 1952), 380–89.
“the right thing”: Pankaj Mishra, “The Unquiet American,” review of Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, by Lewis M. Dabney, New York Times Book Review, January 12, 2006, p. 31. Wilson, eventually to be termed a “national cultural institution” just like Emily Post, sought hard to reconcile “the aggressively commercial culture of post–Civil War America” with the “genteel idealism” he believed had ruled until then.
“California, and Nevada”: “Men About Town,” Vogue, October 1, 1937, p. 155.
“to the heart”: Etiquette, 373.
were close friends: Truly Emily Post, 97–99.
to her servants: Etiquette, 510.
“throughout his life”: Letter to the Post Institute from Elizabeth Tocher Peck, Sandia Park, New Mexico, 2006.
“glass is nothing”: Etiquette, 218.
“in proper mourning?”: Ibid., 405.
“are bad form”: Ibid., 58–64.
“my grandmother wince”: William G. Post interview with the author, Naples, Florida, April 22, 2002.
<
br /> until she died: Etiquette (1937), 8.
were still absolutes: James Lea Cate, “Keeping Posted.”
“your house again”: “Formal Dinners,” Etiquette, chapter 24. For comparisons of their treatment of the same issue, see Mrs. John Sherwood, Manners and Social Usages, chapter 30, “The Modern Dinner Table,” and Lillian Eichler, The Book of Etiquette, “Planning the Formal Dinner,” vol. 2, chapter 2.
Homberger maintains: Eric Homberger, e-mail to the author, November 1, 2005.
its initial publication: Display ad, New York Times, October 1, 1925.
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celebration as well: Life, fall 1990 Special Issue, “The 100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century,” and April 1950 Pageant magazine, “The Most Powerful Women in America: Who Are They?”
“the money appeals”: Anne Whitney Hay, “Mrs. Price Post, Her Book on Etiquette,” Morning Telegraph, August 1922.
“sign of the times”: “How to Watch Your Behavior,” Literary Digest, August 19, 1922, p. 33; “How to Be Happy Though Decent,” Literary Digest, September 1922.
“instruction from it”: New York Times Book Review, December 17, 1922.
“convincing and entertaining”: Literary Digest International Book Review, March 1923, and Alice Payne Hackett, Sixty Years of Best Sellers, 96.
“the newspaper business”: Nevada State Journal, September 29, 1922.
American manners: The Library of Congress bibliography of Lillian Eichler Watson lists nineteen books.
Edmund Wilson remarked: Edmund Wilson, “Books of Etiquette and Emily Post,” Classics and Commercials, 375–76.
“back in the 20’s”: Letter from Lillian Eichler Watson, May 2, 1946, Schlesinger papers, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
another one claimed: Display ad, New York Times, August 27, 1922; Philadelphia Inquirer, n.d.
explain the abstract: “Advertising News and Notes,” New York Times, August 20, 1941, and May 30, 1962. To some extent, Emily Post’s lifelong silence on things Jewish issued from her confusion over class.
cultured manner: Recounted in several dozen interviews, this version is most thoroughly aired by Edmund Wilson in the Post essay in Classics and Commercials. That the literary Wilson would take on a mere etiquette book as one of his subjects was considered so singular that mention of his essay on Etiquette was included in his New York Times obituary.
“ doesn’t really matter”: Etiquette, 183.
biggest rival: Internal Notes and Contracts, Doubleday/Garden City Publishers, August 18, 1923, to November 19, 1957, courtesy of Doubleday.
that September: See, for instance, “Etiquette by Emily Post,” Boston Globe, September 18, 1922, p. 12.
sold in six months: Display ad, New York Times, February 21, 1923.
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the new woman: “Many Tourists Sail for Europe Today,” New York Times, April 25, 1923, p. 26.
he quipped: Boston Globe, September 9, 1923, p. 41. Thanks to Donna Halper for pointing out that “of course you knew you had ‘made it’ when humorist Will Rogers joked about your work in his stage routine”; e-mail to the author, April 8, 2006.
festivities as well: “Debutantes Out at Tuxedo Ball,” New York Times, October 28, 1923, p. 22, and “Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Main Post Jr.,” New York Times, December 14, 1923.
at the same age: William G. Post, e-mail to the author, June 5, 2004.
from Bruce’s side: Nanette Kutner, “Emily Post Is Only Human, Too,” Family Circle, November 1955, p. 14.
“of her day”: Delight Evans, “Mrs. Price Post,” New York Times, January 6, 1924.
back to Juliet: “Hamilton’s Remarriage Reveals Divorce From the Late J. P. Morgan’s Daughter,” New York Times, January 4, 1924, p. 1.
“please explain”: “Society Youth Weds Cabman’s Daughter,” New York Times, November 14, 1924; “Rhinelanders Flee Glare of Publicity,” New York Times, November 15, 1924; “Rhinelander Sues to Annul Marriage: Alleges Race Deceit,” New York Times, November 27, 1924; “To Drop Mrs. Rhinelander: Social Register Will Omit Her Name,” New York Times, March 16, 1925, p. 19.
“who knows?”: The landmark case Perez v. Sharp made California the first state to overturn a miscegenation statute when a “white” woman and a “Negro” man successfully sued to marry in 1948.
whatever that meant: “Mrs. L. Kip Rhinelander in Social Register, Despite Race Assertions in Husband’s Suit,” New York Times, March 11, 1925, and “To Drop Mrs. Rhinelander,” New York Times, March 16, 1925. See also Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone, Love on Trial. The Jones family had emigrated to the United States from England, where the parents were born; their ancestors were from the West Indies. In the language of the period, their daughters were at best mulattos, which meant that marriage to white men was illegal. Until 1948, laws prohibiting marriage between races preempted interracial romance throughout the country. New York State, notoriously conservative in its marriage laws, at least proved consistent by disallowing race alone as grounds for divorce. Injured parties had to prove fraud, and even the all-white male jury agreed that Kip Rhinelander had known he was marrying a “mixed blood” woman. No annulment could be granted. Kip would file for divorce later in Nevada, and neither he nor Alice would marry again.
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Olympic games: Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday, 104 and 105.
members were listed: Christopher Gray, New York Times, November 14, 1999, p. 197, and “Women Will Erect Apartment Deluxe,” New York Times, May 14, 1925, p. 10. According to Dau’s New York Social Blue Book 1930, the tenants included, in addition to Emily, Mrs. Price Collier, Mr. and Mrs. J. O’Hara Cosgrave, Mr. and Mrs. Curtis Bean, Miss Katharine Gandy, Mr. and Mrs. C. Godwin Goddard, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hopkins, Mrs. John Torrey Linzee, Mrs. Horace H. Martin, Mr. and Mrs. Victor Morawetz, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Carbery Ritchie, Mr. Alexander M. Stewart, Mr. and Mrs. Albert Tilt, Mrs. Stanford White, and Mrs. Frederick W. Whitridge.
living room: See also Jeanne Perkins, “Emily Post,” Life, May 6, 1946, p. 59.
“suggest you”: The Personality of a House, p. 2.
“would be unhappy”: Courtesy of Laura Jacobs, interview with Christopher Gray, May 22, 2001.
case for courtesy: see “Books & Authors,” New York Times, August 16, 1925, p. BR15, and also New York Tribune, July 26, 1925; “A Professional Beauty,” New York Times, August 1925, p. 2; review of Parade, New York Times; “Funk and Wagnalls’ Latest Volume,” Yorkshire Herald; “Book Reviews in Tabloid,” Atlanta Constitution, September 27, 1925, p. D3.
“her at once”: Parade, 92. The sexual attitude of Geraldine is oddly akin to that of the heroine in Ian McEwan’s 2007 novel On Chesil Beach.
“from the elect”: Katherine Anne Porter, “Etiquette in Action,” New York Tribune, December 26, 1925.
hairstyles for women: “Is the Bob Here to Stay?” Washington Post, September 27, 1926, p. SM7.
semester before: C. J. Furness, ed., The Genteel Female, 39.
just as irritating: “They Who Are Fat Must Suffer to Be Thin,” McCall’s, March 1926.
funded by love: Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, 200–201.
“of everyday life”: Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriage (New York: Brentano’s, 1926; Maxwell Reprint, 1969), 177.
so completely: Katharine Brooke Daly, “Emily Post Points Out Success Factor,” Morning Star, February 7, 1926. The enneagram was sometimes referred to as the “Enneagon.”
“Who knows?”: “The Young Woman of Forty,” McCall’s, April 1926, pp. 54–55.
competitor had made: “Books and Authors,” New York Times, May 16, 1926.
“linen damask”: Vanity Fair, December 1926.
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magical island: Pony Duke, phone interview with the author, July 18, 2005.
“so forth”: William G. Post, e-mail to the author, September 6, 2004.
she bought it: “Edgartown House Exemplifies Real Hobby of Emily Post,” Vineyard Gazette
, May 1939, and T.N.J. Dexter, “What Mrs Post Has Done with an Old Place,” p. 8, in Historic Notes on Vineyard Houses, Envelope MS, Box 24B, Archives of Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, internally dated.
“in 1828”: “She Was Leading Lady in American Life to Millions,” Vineyard Gazette, September 30, 1960.
“weather-beaten and squatty”: “Edgartown House Exemplifies Real Hobby of Emily Post” and T.N.J. Dexter, “What Mrs Post Has Done with an Old Place,” p. 8.
ruptured appendix: Bruce Price Post, death certificate 5121, Department of Health, City of New York.
he quietly observed: Truly Emily Post, 231.
went unmentioned: “Bruce Price Post, Architect, Dies: Son of Novelist a Victim of Acute Appendicitis,” New York Times, February 26, 1927.
can be offered: Etiquette, chapter 24. During the last minutes spent by persons in the World Trade Center on September 11, when they knew death was imminent, they quickly passed around the only cell phone operating, so that everyone would have a chance to say good-bye. As authors Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn somberly note, “Even in a time of confusion and coursing fear, small courtesies survived” (102 Minutes [New York: Henry Holt, 2005], 126).
World War II: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 57–59.
“out of twenty-four”: Margaret Case Harriman, “Dear Mrs. Post,” Saturday Evening Post, May 15, 1937, p. 18. Emily’s determination to function alongside of her tragedy recalls Rose Kennedy’s diary entry soon after President Kennedy’s assassination: “My reaction to grief is a certain kind of nervous action. . . . I just keep moving, walking, pulling away at things, praying to myself while I move, and making up my mind that it is not going to get me. I am not going to be licked by tragedy, as life is a challenge and we must carry on and work for the living as well as mourn for the dead” (Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston).
“ ‘Yes, Mrs. Post’ ”: Margaret Case Harriman, “Dear Mrs. Post,” p. 52.
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