1933: Emily Post caricatured in Vanity Fair.
For most of the last century the person who best manifests a code of good form and correct conduct was Emily Post, whose treatise Etiquette, debuted in 1922 as Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home. Well versed in the ritualized nomadic and herd-like conformity of her time and class, Mrs. Post certainly knew her subject. For nearly 40 years she exposed a common-sense approach to 'how to be'. Ultimately, for all its delineation of eating implements, calling cards and hierarchical deference, her credo was rooted in a biblical-inspired courtesy based on local precedent and ordinary kindness. Hers' was a way of comporting oneself in which good intentions mattered so much that they trumped established procedure or the empty observance of mere form.This was what gave Emily Post such a far-reaching and authoritative appeal. With the success of her book she regularly spoke on radio programs. After 1932 Emily Post wrote a column on good taste which appeared daily in some 200 newspapers.
Establishing a dynastic industry in 1946 with her son Edwin M. Post, Mrs. Post founded The Emily Post Institute. Continuing her work it's now headed by her great-granddaughter Ms. Anna Post. Peggy Post, wife of Emily Post's great-grandson, wrote etiquette advice for Good Housekeeping magazine, succeeding her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Post. Peter Post, Mrs. Post's great-grandson, writes the Etiquette at Work column for the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. Cindy Post Senning, Ed.D. another great-granddaughter, is a director of The Emily Post Institute. Great-great-granddaughter Lizzie Post addresses life and etiquette for the young at her blog Not Gonna Lie. Like their ancestor, all these Post descendants have written a raft of books related to exemplary behavior.
The chapter headed Formal Dinners presented a photograph of the sumptuous dining table at Mortmar, at Tuxedo Park, the resort where Mrs. Post lived in season as a child and as a young adult. Demolished in 1938, this was the country house created for Amanda Burden's great-grandfather, Standard Oil partner Richard Mortimer. Completed in 1903, the baronial house with 28 rooms was a skillful re-working of a Victorian mansion. It was not an example of the work of Emily Post's father, the architect Bruce Price however, but a design by Hunt & Hunt. Originally from Baltimore where Emily was born, Price, who designed Tuxedo's gate lodge and earliest houses, had a long and distinguished career.
In such a traditional interior as this, apart from shades on the candles, very little changed from the 1922 first edition of Etiquette and the edition published on the eve of the Great Depression.
Completed in 1903, Mortmar, at Tuxedo Park was designed by the partnership of Richard Morris Hunt's two sons, Hunt & Hunt. Demolished in 1938, this was the country house created for Amanda Burden's great-grandfather, Standard Oil partner Richard Mortimer.
Bruce Price: 1845–1903
One of the residential works which helped to make Emily Post's father famous was his design and laying out of Georgian Court, the neo-Georgian residence on the estate of indulgent father George Jay Gould. Surrounded by a woodland of pines at Lakewood, New Jersey, it was completed in 1896.
Price's friend John Massey Rhind's monumental 'electrical' fountain was a birthday gift in 1902 from Gould to his wife.
Price joined with Clarence Luce to design a yellow and white row house group combining neo-Georgian and Renaissance ornament for David King's innovative model development. Still prized as Harlem landmarks they were completed in 1893.
One of a series of hotels and train stations Bruce Price built for the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Château Frontenac in Quebec City of 1893 is his best known work.
Completed in 1903, Price's Francis Robert Schell house at Northfield, Massachusetts, was demolised 60 years later.
One migh mtistakenly imagine that Mortmar was the sort of house where Emily Post, the author of Etiquette, might have lived. Indeed, in 1892, she had married prominent banker Edwin Main Post, with whom she had two sons and he certainly would have enjoyed living so lavishly.
The early roles of Emily Post: As an infant in her mother's arms in 1874. Ca. 1888, Miss Emily Price, daughter of Josephine (Lee) Price of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and noted architect Bruce Price, as a debutante. Mrs. Edwin Main Post, a dotting mother to her sons Edwin Main Post, Jr. (1893) and Bruce Price Post (1895), and as a budding author. Mrs. Price Post, the worldly divorcee, in1905, painted by Emil Fuchs, painter to King Edward VII.
Had it not been for business collapses exacerbated by affairs with chorus girls, leaving him the target of blackmail and leading to the Posts' divorce in 1905, they might well have abided by the former yachtsman's love of fashionable flamboyance. But opulence and ostentation were not Emily Post's style. Declining alimony in acknowledgment of her ex-husband's reversal of fortune, inhabiting a milieu where a woman's identity was either an extension of her father's or her husband's, she helped to codify a new convention, by calling herself Mrs. Price Post. Emulating the example of her acquaintance Edith Wharton, who was also divorced, to supplement her parents' allowance, she also turned her hand to writing.
Shown in her carriage in New York and at the Newport Casino with her daughter Mrs. Edwin M. Post, Jr., Mrs. W. Goadby Loew was the daughter of Morgan banker George Baker. She was also Emily Post friend from Tuxedo. In 1920 Miss Barbara B. Loea Loew had married First Lieut. Edwin M. Post, Jr. at St. Thomas' Church on Fifth Avenue. An aviator serving with General Pershing's Expeditionary Force he had been cited for gallantry. After his brother Bruce Price Post's death in 1927, Edwin Post with his son William Goadby Post, became the primary focus of Emily Post's affection.
Once she decided to abandon her family's Washington Square and Tuxedo houses, Emily Post was unsatisfied with the apartment suites she was shown. So over lunch at the Coleny Club she induced friends to join her in developing their own co-op apartment building at 39 East 79th Street on Madison Avenue. Carefully collaborating with architect Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison, who had worked with her father, Emily Post planned her home at number 9B exactingly to meet her perfectionist requirements. Architectural historian Christopher Gray explained in a piece in the Times how every resident of the 14-storey venture was listed in the New York Social Register. Mrs. Post's neighbors, Gray relates, in some cases gave up rather nice digs to live here.
"Bessie White, Stanford White's widow, moved from an old brownstone at 25 East 81st Street; Victor Morawetz, a railroad lawyer who took the massive 12th- and 13th-floor duplex with double-height windows, moved from the apartment building at 907 Fifth Avenue; Murchison moved from his own town house at 49 East 63rd Street."
Furnished with well proportioned old family furniture, Mrs. Post's apartment perfectly reflected her philosophy about dress. Of its time, it is nonetheless not exactly typical. A profusion of flowers, both ever-changing cut bouquets, floral chintzes and wall paper, the quality of interesting ornaments, Chines jade lamps from Edward Farmer, Bow china figurines, and old silver urns and candlesticks, the generosity of the untrimmed silk curtains, two fireplaces in constant use during cold weather, the contrasting colors of her bed hangings, all these things contributed to a subtle distinction, in the same way that Post recommended fine tailoring, elegant jewels and perfect grooming could.
Deciding around 1925 to abandon her family's Washington Square house, Emily Post found no apartments that suited her. she was shown. With friends she developed her own cooperative building at 39 East 79th Street on Madison Avenue. Carefully collaborating with her architect son Bruce Price Post and his employer Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison, who had worked with her father , Emily Post planned her home at number 9B to meet exacting requirements.
Afternoon tea as a formal reception, with candles lighted and curtains drawn.
Two of Emily Post's lunch tables. The one at top features roses in a silver vase as a centerpiece. More economically, the Depression era table below displays silvered fruit in a silver bowl.
Dying at home in bed in 1960 at the age of 87, Emily Price Post perhaps exemplifies the adage of Logan Pearsall Smith, "There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail." Both in stories and with Etiquette, Post applied the lessons and heartache of a lifetime of good living to amusing her fellows and enlightening the uninitiated. Birth, betrothal, death, a night at the opera: one reads with rapt fascination of both the travails and moments of triumph lived by all Emily Post's friends, brilliantly encapsulated into her fittingly named protagonists and supporting players, Hastings, the Worldlys' butler, Mrs. Three-in-one, who has no servants, Bobo Gilding, Mrs. Highbrow, the Wellborns, Onceweres, Toplofties, the Oldnames and the Kindharts. To one degree or another, most were the beneficiaries of adequate incomes and could spare $4.00. But if faced with some situation of moment, what did handsome incomes and good manners avail them?
Beyond its appeal as a useful analogy of humankind's heedlessness, brazenly steaming along, ignoring warnings of icebergs ahead, it is these poignant juxtapositions that most attract one to Titanic's tragedy. For all the ways, good and bad, in which human behavior, custom and manners have evolved over the past century, Titanic shows how, fundamentally, people remain the same.
But can one blame these men for wanting to live, anymore than wives and mothers, sisters and lovers, who refused to row back once the Titanic had disappeared to rescue submerged loved ones, for fear of being swamped? Faced with the temptation of Bernard Madoff to so effortlessly enrich ourselves beyond our wildest dreams, would we demur? Who can truly say, given a chance to be a Nazi, a slaveholder, or an African, Middle Eastern or an American dictator, that they would walk away from absolute power? Surely, faced with certain death, the stakes are raised. Most people, I think, facing such situations, might experience a quandary at least for a moment or two. But I hope, were it a matter of my life or that of a poor child's, I'd recall all that my mom, grandma, Mama Willie, Aunt Cora and Emily Post had taught me and be able to do the right thing.
Images provided courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Emily Post Institute, and Georgian Court College. All others comprise the author's collection...
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