Some years ago I had occasion to write to an ex-President of the United States. Up to that time our correspondence had been one-sided and formal, consisting of an embossed letter of thanks from him on the occasion of my discharge from the Army Air Forces. On the basis of this one letter and my vote in 1948, I did not feel justified in commencing “Dear Harry.” But on the other hand I did not like the sound of “Dear Mr. ex-President” or “Honored Sometime President” or “Revered ci-devant President.”

Stumped for the moment, I turned to my favorite authority on such matter, the University of Chicago Press’ Manual of Style, but in vain. The book was strong on protocol for Presidents and even for Vice-Presidents, but once a chief executive had moved his private papers from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and had started on his memoirs the editors of the Manual lost all interest.

In a moment of desperation and inspiration I took a quick look at Emily Post’s Etiquette and there it was: “A senator is always introduced as senator, whether he is still in office or not. But the President of the United States, once he is out of office, is merely “‘Mr.’ and not ‘Ex-President.’” I by-passed the gratuitous information relevant to my friend’s earlier career as senator from Missouri and wrote the salutation, “Dear Mr. Truman.”

The edition of Etiquette I used was dated July, 1925. At that time Warren Gameliel Harding and Woodrow Wilson, had passed on to their respective rewards; everyone had forgotten William Howard Taft, and Cal Coolidge had not yet made his Orphic declaration about not choosing to run again, so that a less conscientious author might have overlooked the ex-President just as we all overlooked the Vice-President in those days. But not Mrs. Post, and it was that sort of dependability that had run her book into eighty-nine printings by the time of her death on September 26, 1960.

In other instances, particularly during some absence of my wife, I had turned to Emily Post to settle some small punctilio in the setting of a table, and, being cursed with the sort of wandering mind that gets lost among the illustrations while looking up a word in a dictionary, I had browsed through her book with wonder and admiration. So wide was her knowledge and so final her judgments that Mrs. Post seemed less like a real person than a minor deity or demiurge, such as the Guinness Book of World Records or the voice on Cathedral 8-8000 that pronounces the exact time.

One can imagine that since her passing heaven has been run in a more decorous fashion, with due regard for protocol among the angelic hierarchy, with elegant manners in the serving of milk and honey, and no further revolt of the angels.

Since Mrs. Post did so much to control and improve the form and substance of the social life of her time, it seems not inappropriate to make a few random remarks about her and other authors interested in the improvements of manners. It might even be of interest to the current generation of college students to learn that such a literary genre exists.

Of her mortal life the New York Times gave a full account in one of those classic obits they do for VIPs of all walks of life, spilling over from the front page into the interior and followed on subsequent days by editorials, comments, and a blow-by-blow account of the obsequies. It must be one of the few solid comforts in dying, to have the super deluxe post mortem treatment in the New York Times. Friends have told me that the New Yorker published an excellent profile on Emily Post, but since my barbershop subscribes only to past issues of Look I have not seen that piece.

But within a year her son Edwin M. Post Jr. published a biography, compounded of filial piety and anecdotes about Society (with a capital S). Some of the stories are useful, but the author begins his mother’s biography with his own birth and works back and forth in a style as confusing as Tristram Shandy. The title, Truly Emily Post, should allay any fears about the accuracy of the book, but since the author devotes only one chapter out of eighteen to Emily’s masterpiece, one may question his sense of proportion. I felt, too, a certain lack of precision in the chronology of the heroine’s life, her son being given to such references as “a few years later” or “it was sometime before this.” But this is only a passing objection from an unimaginative historian.

Edwin’s mother was born Emily Price, in Baltimore in 1873. A few years later her family moved to New York. Her father, Bruce Price, was a successful architect. One of his creations was that upstate haven of New York society, Tuxedo Park, which he designed and built. You will recognize this as the place that gave the popular name to the dinner jacket for wear with a black tie—and will realize that no inhabitant thereof ever referred to the garment as a “tux.”

Emily was educated after a fashion by governesses and was topped off at Miss Graham’s finishing school on 12th Street. No less an authority than Ward McAllister said she was one of only three girls in New York who could walk across a ballroom properly. Emily’s family moved in the best of conservative society, and as a beautiful and popular debutante she seemed content with that life. In 1892 she married Edwin M. Post, a promising young businessman who was interested in the stock market, in good living, and in sports. Two sons were born to that union, Edwin Jr. and Bruce.

The couple started out modestly in a house on Staten Island, but they maintained the position expected of both their families. Emily learned the arts of entertainment, leaving the wines to her husband’s expert and tender care, but herself superintending the more solid nourishment.

An early example of her taste was the christening dinner for her first born, done with recipes culled from a $15 book by Delmonico’s chef, Alessandro Filippini, The Table, How to Buy Food, How to Cook It, How to Serve It. She served:

Doxie Rockaway Oysters
Consomme Imperial
Olives
Celery
Braised Sweetbreads
Sauce Duxelles
Spinach
Roast Canvasback Duck with Hominy
Celery Salad
Apple Fritters
Coffee

Emily’s southern background may explain the hominy but not the accent on celery. We are not told what Edwin Sr. did for his guests in the way of wine, but I have an idea it was not Mogen David or Ripple.

Their life was divided between Staten Island, Tuxedo Park, New York, and Europe. In Europe they spent a leisurely honeymoon, and thither Emily returned summer after summer with the boys.

Time showed that the couple shared few common interests beyond a love for dancing, some mutual friends, and the boys. Edwin Sr. liked hunting, fast cars, and fast boats, eventually owning a steam yacht, Taro, which he skippered with a crew of eight seamen, two stewards, and a cook. Emily was a bad sailor and had some literary and artistic interests. She became a yacht widow.

She was a brilliant conversationalist and a correspondent whose letters were witty and charming, so much so that her mother-in-law, not given to fulsome praise of Emily, thought them better reading than Elinor Glyn’s latest novel. I have seen only a few specimens of Emily’s letters, but when I was in high school I read Miss Glyn’s Three Weeks out behind our barn, and I am inclined to agree with Mrs. Post Sr.

So was the novelist F. Hopkinson Smith, a sort of honorary uncle to Emily, who showed sample letters to the editor of Ainslie’s Magazine, who in turn commissioned her to do a novel for his then-popular monthly. This she did, turning in a story about a lively American widow in European society which appeared serially in Ainslie’s and in book form in 1904. It was called The Flight of a Moth.

Between Emily’s writing and Edwin’s boating—both innocent amusements if not carried too far, but potentially lethal—the Post marriage began to crumble. He found more and more occasions to stay overnight at his club or on board the Taro, and it now became evident that he had added to his fast boats and fast cars a taste for fast ladies, some of the theatrical calling. In the summer of 1905 the editor of a scandal sheet called Town Topics, a person named Col. William D. Mann, tried to blackmail him for $500 on the basis of a showgirl’s jealous charges and maybe a friendly letter or two.

The colonel had been levying on the rich and indiscreet for much heavier sums, and perhaps the niggardly assessment of Edwin’s love balm hurt his pride. At any rate, he showed great moral courage in helping trap, not the colonel, but a go-between, and incidentally he came to figure as defense witness in a libel suit the colonel was conducting against Collier’s Magazine.

But soon thereafter his wife secured a divorce, with custody of the two boys, and the father being then in a financial slump—even without the loss of the $500 charge—Emily was faced with the need for economies and gainful employment.

The economies did not interrupt her yearly visits to Europe nor deprive her of other customary necessities; and indeed since her livelihood, outside some inherited income, came from her writing, these costs today would certainly be considered tax deductible, for her stories and novels done for Ainslie’s, Everybody’s, and other popular magazines, dealt with Society, both American and European. Her son is not the most precise of bibliographers, but a little research in Books in Print found these tides: Purple and Fine Linen (1905); Woven in the Tapestry (1908); The Title Market (1909); The Eagle’s Feather (1910); and much later, Parade (1925).

I blush to confess I have not read all these. Regenstein Library with all its virtues has a stodgy distaste for popular fiction unless it is either too old to be interesting or written in some language unfamiliar to undergraduates, and none of Emily’s novels appear in the card index. Indeed, we do not even have a file of Ainslie’s, once a lively periodical, or Edwin’s Truly Emily Post. Happily one of my students found a couple of Emily’s novels and gave them to me. After a rapid scanning of them I came to a conclusion rare enough in my case—that here the library’s economy was justified.

In Mrs. Post’s favor one may say that when she speaks of a man making love to her heroine, all she means is that he is sending her flowers and whispering dainty compliments into her shell-like ear—and nothing more. Her situations and characters provide examples of good etiquette, but none of her books will make the best ten pornographic novels.

In August, 1914, Mrs. Post and the boys were caught while touring in France by the outbreak of World War I, but escaped with their car. The following summer she was hired by the editor of Munsey’s Magazine to motor from New York to the twin world fairs at San Diego and San Francisco to publicize the newly planned but as yet un-built Lincoln Highway. This trip she and Edwin accomplished with many adventures, related in the magazine, then in a book, By Motor to the Golden Gate (1916). Later she put another hobby to advantage in what may be called literally “homemaking”—working over old houses or planning new ones, and designing the furnishings—a profession somewhere between that of the architect and that of the interior decorator. Something of her methods may be seen later in her book, The Personality of a House: The Blue Book of Home Design and Decoration (1930).

Mrs. Post was almost at her half-century mark when her great opportunity came, and, if we may believe the story as her son tells it, she did her best to discourage the man who came offering her fame and fortune. According to Edwin, she was working on a house design when her maid reported a Mr. Duffy on the phone who wanted to come to talk to her about an encyclopedia. You and I who have to double-bar our doors to discourage the high-pressure salesmen for Encyclopedia Britannica can sympathize with Mrs. Post’s firm refusal to see Mr. Duffy. Her son says she did not know the name, though Duffy had been recently on the staff of Ainslie’s. At any rate, it took great perseverance on Mr. Duffy’s part to gain an interview. He had not come to sell but to buy. He wanted her to do a book on etiquette for Funk and Wagnalls.

Mrs. Post demurred. Her experience with that sort of book had been confined to Manners and Social Usage (1884) by Mrs. John Sherwood, a prolific writer in the field, who had produced also for Harper’s Bazaar such companion pieces as Amenities of Home (1881) and The Art of Entertaining (1892). Mrs. Sherwood apparently had the art of entertaining inadvertently as well as consciously, for Edwin says that her manners book “had been a laughing stock” among Emily’s debutante friends. I find it amusing in spots myself, but if I may offer one personal comment on etiquette, I question Emily’s good taste in ridiculing a successful professional in a field she was to enter as a novice. I wonder if she laughed later when the great Will Rogers poked mild fun at her own Etiquette.

Anyhow she was eventually won over by an ingenious device of another editor-friend, Frank Crowninshield. He sent her for inspection another current etiquette book with some clippings of its advertisements. These were all based on fear—the embarrassment and ridicule that result from ignorance of accepted norms of social behavior. The ads and the condescending tone of the book disgusted Emily and offered a challenge. She accepted Mr. Duffy’s offer, saying she would write “a sensible book ... a small book ... the whole subject can be reduced to a few simple rules.” That’s what she thought!

Her small book, numbering 627 pages, was published in July, 1922, under the title, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home.

This at any rate is Edwin’s story. As usual he gives no dates and he omits the name of the rival manual of etiquette. After looking over the field I judge the book must have been the Book of Etiquette by Lillian Eichler (Mrs. Lillian Eichler Watson), copyrighted in 1921 by Nelson Doubleday. This was the leading book of the sort at the time, and the ads for it were of the sort Edwin described: for instance, the New
York Times book section carried, from July, 1921, on, at intervals, a whole-page ad in which Nelson Doubleday frightened people into buying Eichler.

There are some curious problems which I have not had time to investigate, but which throw some doubt on Edwin’s account. If Eichler’s book was not published until 1921 and the advertisement campaign began the same year, how did Emily get time to do a long book which was announced in the Publisher’s Weekly as a spring book and actually appeared by July, 1922?

Even more interesting is Eichler herself. She was born in 1902; her Etiquette, then, was published when she was nineteen, written earlier. Maybe this had more to do with Mrs. Post’s annoyance than the advertisements.

I haven’t had time to find out much about la Eichler. Her Etiquette isn’t much good, though it sold well. But imagine a Chicago undergraduate writing such a two-volume work!

The famous ads say that she gives not only rules for conduct, but also some account of their origins. This is a vast exaggeration, but later Lillian Eichler did publish The Customs of Mankind (London: William Heineman, 1924), in which she does attempt to trace origins and development of the mores which we have inherited in our social structure.

The introduction is one of the most pretentious bits of self-advertisement I have seen; the gal is still, say; twenty-three and she talks about her original discoveries in behavior patterns that go back 500,000 years. Also she refers often to her Etiquette and once to the advertisement campaign. Her bibliography is less learned than her boasts about it, and what she has to say about the Middle Ages is absurdly bad for an undergraduate. But let’s get back to Emily.

Published under the title, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, the modest edition of 5,000 copies was soon sold out. Within a year seven more printings had been issued and, to the surprise and delight of Funk and Wagnalls, Etiquette had supplanted such well-known books as H. G. Wells’ Outline of History and Papini’s Life of Christ at the top of the best-seller list in nonfiction. Sometimes these reissues are called “editions,” but I believe the first serious revision was in November, 1927, which would be the second edition and the 14th printing. The 1960 copy, Emily’s last, is the 1Oth edition and 89th printing.

The title was simplified, partly by popular habit. It became Etiquette, the Blue Book of Social Usage, reminiscent of medieval times when color was a legitimate factor in identifying a book, as in The Red Book of the Exchecquer, or the Black Book of the Admiralty.

Edwin rates this with the select list of books which have profoundly influenced the social structure while changing radically the pattern of the author’s life. Of that first claim I shall speak directly, but here it is useful to show what happened to the author. Mrs. Price Post, a writer for a limited public and one who valued her privacy, became Emily Post, a public figure. For a long generation she was the unofficial supreme court of things mannerly, her advice sought by total strangers who wrote or wired her as today one might communicate with one’s congressman or Ann Landers.

Her book sold well and steadily, but not fantastically. Alice P. Hackett, in Fifty Years of Best Sellers, 1895–1945, estimated her sales by that latter year at 660,000; those of her chief competitor, still Lillian Eichler’s Book of Etiquette, at 1,000,000. In her edition of 1955, Miss Hackett reverses her statistics: Post leads with 1,000,000, and, in some unaccountable fashion, Eichler has dropped from 1,000,000 to the precise number of 756,432 copies. However one interprets these confusing figures, the point is that they are of the same order of magnitude; Eichler was either somewhat more popular or somewhat less popular for a while than Post, but who of you ever heard of Eichler? I hadn’t.

Anyhow, it was inevitable that Mrs. Post should be asked to do a column on manners, which she did first for McCall’s Magazine, then in syndicated form for some 200 newspapers. It was a surprise for me, not too pleasant, to learn that Mrs. Post was a devoted patron of the radio, with special reference, as we say in our thesis titles, to Charlie McCarthy and Amos and Andy. So when, again inevitably, she was invited to do a radio program, she accepted. She asked for the same wage scale as Amos and Andy, but settled for something less. When young she had dreamed of being an actress but had been frustrated by family prejudice; the radio opportunity, by sublimating this early wish, gave her great satisfaction.

But she never quit writing. To those books and articles I have named should be added several important items. In 1928, again at the instance of Crowninshield, she wrote for Vanity Fair a series of sketches that appeared anonymously, but were later published under her name in a book called How to Behave Though a Debutante. The illustrations by John Held Jr. of flapper fame, enhanced the value of the book without dominating Mrs. Post’s lively style.

In 1940 she published Children Are People and Ideal Parents Are Comrades, drawing on her own experience as child, parent, and grandparent. There are persons who deny both the propositions contained in this title, but these cynics lack Emily Post’s authority.

The cookbook that bears her name (and her distinctive blue color) was edited, whatever that means, by her son. She did some other books not unconnected with the problems of conduct—Bridal Silver and Wedding Customs (1929); Letters of a Worldly Godmother (19??); and The Secret of Keeping Friends (1938). In 1959 she published a series of articles on motoring manners which must have tested her every skill, for there, is nothing that brings out the worst in a man quicker than liquor except a new car on a crowded freeway. A combination of the two is very likely to be fatal.

Probably I have missed some items, but even so hers was a bibliography that would demand serious attention on the university campus had she been nominated for a distinguished service professorship or to head a research institute on human relations. Indeed, in 1946 she did found the Emily Post Institute, dedicated to the study of gracious living. But long before that she herself had become an American institution, and she remained one until her death.

In sheer bulk her writings are impressive, and bespeak both a hard and efficient worker. She did most of her writing in bed in the early morning hours; but I do not know where or when she did her research. But some she did. I had originally thought that all her Etiquette came spontaneously from her intuitive graciousness and wide social experience, and indeed these were the factors that helped make her work different. But Edwin says, “Seven-eights of what ultimately went into the book [Etiquette] was information she had to gather from other sources.”

At worst, this method might have been plagiarism, at best creative scholarship. Certainly Emily borrowed from her own works—one has only to check the chapter headings in successive editions of the Etiquette against the titles of her books to see that—and if one checks those chapter headings against the table of contents in a rival work one may readily see a likeness in the formal structure of the book.

What she did was to lend both dignity and a sense of the value of simplicity and unaffectedness to a form of advice that might easily have become bombastic. With rigid standards in matters of principle, she showed a spirit of compromise in unessentials; the successive editions of her book reveal how aware she was of the changing scene in America and how she sought to accommodate herself to the changes. But perhaps the test of her significance is the degree to which she herself was responsible for these changes in the mores.

It would be an interesting task to investigate her use of sources, and not too difficult, I’d wager, for I doubt that her own researches were very profound. Yet indirectly she shared with us all a long tradition, deeply rooted in every literate culture—that of the conduct or courtesy book. For ultimate origins I suppose my colleagues in Far Eastern studies could show Chinese rules about the polite burp in praise of a well-cooked meal that go back several millennia. But I need go no farther than the early cultures of the Mediterranean to cite the precepts of Ptahhotep of fifth dynasty in Egypt, the Greek gnomic poetry, and the later and more sophisticated writings of the Greek philosophers, or the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, or the writings of such Romans as Cicero, Seneca, Quintillian, or the satirists. The early Middle Ages were dominated by the Disticho Catonis, a vastly popular little schoolbook that aspired to teach reading and inculcate good behavior.

Much of this early literature is in the nature of precepts, much of it directed toward the young. In general its content does not differ radically from time to time or culture to culture: Moses said, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” and Cato said, “Love thy parents.” And other old folks have been urging the same, from the· time of Methuselah to Medicare, though of late with little success, if we can believe some of the graffiti of the young.

During the high and late Middle Ages there was a flourishing body of so-called facetus literature, handbooks on urbanity that drew alike from the classical tradition and Christian teachings. Many are addressed to the young—”How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” “The Babees Boke,” “Stans Puer ad Mensam”—short on theory but strong on pragmatic rules of how to behave at table without getting clouted by some adult: be silent and tell no nasty stories; eat your broth with a spoon, don’t slurp it up; don’t lean on the table or dirty the cloth; don’t eat with a full mouth or pick your nose or teeth or nails; don’t stuff your mouth so you can’t speak; don’t spit over or on the table or belch as if you had a bean in your throat; don’t throw bones on the floor; break wind quietly.

Other treatises addressed to adults are somewhat fuller, though the same sound items of advice are included, along with directions for running a household, with much learned discussion on diet and menus for all occasions.

As a sample I give, in abbreviated form, a menu called “A Dinner of Flesh” from John Russell’s Boke of Nurture (ca. 1440–’50). First course: Brawn of boar with mustard; potage du jour; beef, mutton, stewed pheasant, swan, capon, pig, leche Lombard (a terrible concoction cooked in a bladder like a Scotch haggis), meat fritters. Second course: two potages, blanc manger, jelly; roast venison, kid, fawn or cony; bustard, stork, crane, peacock with feathers on, bittern, partridge, woodcock, plover, egret, rabbit suckers, larks, bream; doucet (custard), payne puff (pie), poached fritters. Third course: cream of almonds and mawmeny; curlew, brewe, snipes, quail, sparrows, martins; perch in jelly, crayfish, pety perveis (fish pies?); baked quinces, sage fritters. Dessert: white apples, caraway cakes with hippocras to drink. I omit the elaborate decorations with each course, and some of the dishes I cannot identify, but this should keep you going until the next coffee break.

In the 15th and 16th centuries the vogue for such books increased tremendously. One might hazard the opinion that the need for such reference works becomes more acute with a rapidly changing society, where persons moving from one class to another lack cognizance of the social norms the older society had known almost instinctively. What Huizinga called the “Waning of the Middle Ages” saw the passing of the old ideals of feudalism and of functional chivalry; the new ideals of the Renaissance were to be found in the concept of the gentleman. The newly literate classes furnished a wider audience, the invention of printing a technological means of catering to those readers.

A quarter-century ago Virgil B. Heltzel published a Checklist of Courtesy Books in the Newberry Library, including only books published before the appearance of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son in 1774), which started a new vogue. The list contains 1,471 numbers. Some works are on conduct or religion, rather than courtesy in a narrow sense—such as Vegetius, De re militari, or the Pseudo-Bernard, Method of living well in the Christian Religion. Other titles sound more promising, as William Prynne, Healthes Sicknesse. Or, a Compendious and briefe Discourse; Proving, the drinking and pledging of healthes, to be sinfull, and utterly unlawfull unto Christians (London, 1628); another, The amorous gallant’s tongue tipp’d with golden expressions; or, The art of courtship refined, being the best and newest academy. (13th ed.; London, 1741).

It is not without interest that two of England’s most famous early printers, William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde, wrote and printed such works. Gertrude E. Noyes lists some 477 courtesy and conduct books published in England in the 17th century alone. To repeat, I doubt that Mrs. Post read much of this vast literature, but there was at hand an impressive body of lore native to her own country.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, père, not fils, once reviewed this literature in America from the earliest colonial days until 1947, showing how such special factors as the lack of a hereditary aristocracy, the constant frontier, the repeated waves of immigrants, and the scarcity of women in new settlements all made difficult the establishment of a high standard of civil deportment; and how the American became both a user and a producer of courtesy books. These reflect regional differences and successive changes in our society.

It was Emily Post’s fate to be born in the American equivalent of the Victorian era, but to have done her most important work in a period of rapid flux, of post–World War I disillusion, of new wealth, of Prohibition, of new standards of morality. How she met the changes we may see in a brief look at her Etiquette. But certainly she had help from her predecessors in the field of manners, and as a proud member of the University of Chicago and friend of its recent President I like to think that she might often have had occasion to consult Beadle’s Dime Book of Etiquette, a Practical Guide to Good Breeding, first published in 1859 and often reprinted.

It is needless to remark that breeding here has no reference to George W. Beadle’s studies of genetics.

Mrs. Post’s book has an introduction by Mr. Duffy, defining etiquette and offering this interesting bit of etymology:

To the French we owe the word etiquette, and it is amusing to discover its origin in the commonplace familiar warning—”Keep off the grass.” It happened in the reign of Louis XIV, when the gardens of Versailles were being laid out, that the master gardener, an old Scotsman, was sorely tried because his newly seeded lawns were being continually trampled on. To keep trespassers off, he put up warning signs or tickets—etiquettes—on which was indicated the path along which to pass. But the courtiers paid no attention to these directions and so the determined Scot complained to the King in such convincing manner that His Majesty issued an edict commanding everyone at Court to “keep within the etiquettes.” Gradually the term came to cover all rules for correct demeanor and deportment in court circles; and thus through the centuries it has grown into use to describe the conventions sanctioned for the purpose of smoothing personal contacts and developing tact and good manners in social intercourse.

It is embarrassing to admit that I have not checked the accuracy of this derivation, but I am sure it would take more power than that of Louis XIV to protect the lawns on our campus.

Mrs. Post dedicated her volume “To you, my friends whose identity in these pages is veiled in fictional disguise.” The fictional names are those of stock characters, drawn as it were from some 15th century morality play. There are Joneses, Smiths, and Browns, evidently members of the chorus, but the friends who act the principal roles are Mr. and Mrs. Worldly, Mr. Bachelor, Mrs. Younger, Constance Style, Mrs. Bobo Gilding, Mr. and Mrs. Littlehouse, the Kindharts and, unbelievably, the
Titherington de Puysters.

Regional trade is not frowned on—for the Old South there are Mr. and Mrs. Davis Jefferson of Mt. Vernon Square and for the Midwest, the Jameson Greatlakes, with the implausible home address of 24 Michigan Avenue, Chicago, with no N. or S. designation. Emily evidently did not know our city. Often she speaks in abstract generalizations—one always does this, one never does that—but in important matters she tells a little story, and these folk are the actors in it.

Those “never” and “always” dicta bother me. Early in her treatise Mrs. Post declares, “few rules of etiquette are inelastic.” Then she proceeds to lard her book with such rules, only to contradict her own laws of the Medes and Persians with charming feminine inconsistency. “Never speak of your husband as ‘Mr.’ except to an inferior ... Mr. Worldly speaks of Mrs. Worldly as ‘my wife’ to a gentleman, or ‘Edith’ in speaking to a lady. Always.”

No gentleman walks along the street chewing gum, or, if with a lady, smoking a cigar or cigaret. Emily makes no special mention of bubble gum or chewing tobacco or smoking pot, which would suggest that the United States was more civilized in her days than in 1972 or 1852. A lady never sits on the left side of a gentleman in a carriage.

“It is unheard of for a gentleman to ‘take’ a young girl alone to a dance or to dine or to parties of any description…” This was written in a year in which I was industriously attempting to do each of those forbidden acts, and her interdiction ended any illusions I may have had about my being a gentleman, but in old age I have begin to see, without approving, Emily’s point of view, which is a comfortable one for the parent or grandparent.

May I put it this way? Some of Emily’s “nevers’’ I do not ‘like, as for instance her rule that “roast beef is never served at a dinner party.” But as a staunch conservative in everything except political and economic and social (with a little “s”) matters, I share many of her distastes.

She does not like the pretentious nor the pompous, either in persons or their diction. She speaks disparagingly of “the omniscience of the very rich,” illustrating her point with an example. “A professor who has devoted his life to a subject modestly makes a statement. ‘You are all wrong’ says the man of millions, ‘it is this way…’” And in the story the professor lets him get away with it. Mrs. Post certainly knew the very rich better than I do, but this story would suggest she did not know the Chicago type of professor—or instructor or student!

Yet she shows some sense when she advises against seating an octogenarian professor next to “an especially attractive young woman,” perhaps under the shrewd assumption that he might make passes that had nothing to do with a “C” grade in history.

Mrs. Post has a list of words and phrases under “never say” and “correct form” that I agree with pretty well, being a believer in the direct approach, calling a spade a spade if not indeed a goddam shovel. But when she rejects “lovely food” and accepts “lovely clothes” I part with her. Lovely is for a girl only.

Emily’s list of flowery statements to avoid, beginning with, “Pray accept my thanks for the flattering ovation you have tendered me,” could have served as a handbook for the late Senator Dirksen. But she gets a little out of her depth when she enters the field of literary criticism. “None of the words and expressions which are taboo in good society,” she says, “will be found in books of proved literary standing.” I have a long list of classics I would like to have tried out on Mrs. Post had I ever been invited to a formal dinner at Mrs. Worldly’s, beginning say with Aristophanes and ending with Rabelais or Lady Chatterly’s Lover or Ulysses (like Emily, I do not consider Portnoy’s Complaint a classic).

I have spoken of Mrs. Post’s spirit of accommodation to the needs of a changing society. This may be found in such small matters as the removal of a gentleman’s hat in an elevator or in such important matters as the chaperon. In the early editions the chaperon is spoken of as a very necessary evil, with some face-saving stuff about the only girl who is really free is she whose chaperon is never far away.

In subsequent editions the chapter once called “The Chaperon and Other Conventions” becomes “The Vanished Chaperon and Other Lost Conventions” and one may wonder if Emily had in mind a convention of the DAR. She finally comes to the radical conclusion in her last edition that “a girl is her own best chaperon.” This I must remind you was years before heterosexual occupancy of college dormitories or the widespread knowledge of the Pill.

Other additions or modifications show how Emily changed with the times. In the early editions, for instance, there is no mention of hospitals. People in those primitive days were born, were sick, and died in the privacy of their own homes, and Emily tells how the visitor there should act. But in her last edition there is a section entitled “At the Hospital,” done, I suspect, in collaboration with the AMA or Blue Shield, for it goes right down the party line with such sentiments as, “Visitors kill more patients than do operations” and “Doctors and nurses are people, too.” Maybe Emily had never been a patient in a hospital, waiting anxiously for a bed pan.

Or take so simple a matter as a dinner date. In her first edition Mrs. Post wrote about customs in New York City: “Absolutely no lady (unless middle-aged—and even then she would be defying convention) can go to dinner or supper in a restaurant alone with a gentleman ... A very young girl may motor around the country alone with a man, with her father’s consent, or sit with him on the rocks by the sea or on a log in the woods; but she must not sit with him in a restaurant.” Before you get scornful of Emily I hasten to remark that she wrote this because she objected to this rule as silly, just as you and I do. And in time she made amends, for the last edition has a whole chapter on “Entertaining at a Restaurant” with a special section on “A Girl and a Man Dining Alone” without undue moralizing but with some sage advice to the girl about going easy on her date’s pocketbook—an obvious ploy for the male trade.

Similarly, her views of traveling and of hotels softened. In 1922 the young girl traveling alone was beset with dangers: “She should never—above all in a strange city ... take a taxi on the street.” But Emily, who with her son had pioneered US 30 before there was a ladies’ rest room along the route, says to her lady readers, if “you are of sufficient years, well behaved and dignified in appearance, you need have no fear as to the treatment you will receive.” (Provided you tip well.)

But, “A lady traveling alone with her maid [or without one—can you imagine that?] has her meals alone in her own sitting-room, if she has one.”

By 1960 Emily has loosened her stays: “There is not the slightest reason why a woman—even though she be very young and very pretty—may not stay in a hotel by herself and have men come and see her and be invited by her to lunch or dine.” This is all too true and is why most hotels have house dicks. Emily raises one difficult problem. “In some hotels,” she comments, “they send a maid as well as a bellboy upstairs with each woman guest. Whether the guest is to be protected from ... a bellboy, or the bellboy protected from ... the guest, has never been explained.” Like Emily, I still am confused.

It is strange that Mrs. Post, even in 1960, has nothing to say about the motel, which by that year had certainly found its way to the eastern seaboard she inhabited. I do not believe that was from squeamishness. She handled forthrightly other morals questions, and after all, lots of people stay all night in motels.

The later editions do deal with other current problems unheard of or unimportant in the roaring twenties, with sections on “Travel by Airplane,” “Going Steady,” “At the United Nations,” and the like. One good example may be seen in the eighth edition (1945). It contains a chapter “Concerning Military and Post-War Etiquette,” some of the contents being similar to the longer treatment in the Officer’s Guide that was the bible of the civilian turned soldier during World War II.

But the post-war climate is shown best by one piece of advice: “If someone does or says something definitely threatening to our government, write a letter to the FBI or the governor of your state, or the mayor, or to the sheriff of your township [sic!]. Or if you prefer you can telephone. In any case make your evidence definite and brief. For example, say ‘A group called the Junior Revolutionists who meet regularly Monday evenings at 40 X Street is distributing handbills (enclose samples).’ This can hurt no one, and may help an innocent person.’’

This was five years before Joe McCarthy inaugurated a new era in political witch burning. That era has passed, and it is perhaps significant that the advice about what to do with the Junior Revolutionists was lacking in the last (1960) edition of Etiquette. What she would say about the current equivalents of the Junior Revolutionists one can only guess. Perhaps in light of Mr. Hoover’s death she would advise the patriotic citizen to check with the CIA before calling the FBl. But I have an idea that Emily would be less concerned with their regular meetings on Monday nights or the content of their handbills than with their slovenly appearance and their boorish manners.

But the most important differences in the 1945 edition are those describing and condoning a more informal pattern of social behavior and entertainment. Thus there is a chapter on “Neighborhood Social Customs” with sound counsel about Showers, the Surprise Party, and the Golden Anniversary Party; a section on “Society Moves into the Kitchen,” with some restrained comments on “Chef-Hosts Cook, the Ladies. Look On”; and a chapter on “Simple Party-Giving” which ends with the equivocal admonition, “If you want to go to bed, don’t begin games.”

Mrs. Post is fully aware in 1960 of these changes in behavior and in her attitude, and of the possible dangers therefrom. She introduces Chapter 28 in this fashion:

Although today the formal dinner—or dinner of ceremony—has almost ceased to exist and the trend is toward the informal or friendly dinner, it is necessary that this chapter be left nearly as it was originally written because its every detail is a definite part of the complete set of patterns from which all details of even the simplest dinner giving are chosen.

So she goes on to describe in detail a “Dinner in a Great House,” that of Mrs. Worldly: We get the full red-carpet treatment, with butler (under no circumstances may he sport a mustache); footmen; silver and fine linen; a six-course dinner (and Mrs. Worldly has a heavenly chef); distinguished guests seated with due regard for rank, present marital status and serious feuds; and conversation that sparkles like the crystal ware. Professor Bugge was invited, though the hostess thought him something of a bore; after reading the menu I can only wish it had been Professor Cate.

Mrs. Post is right; the chapter on formal dinners in the edition of 1960 does seem very familiar to an avid reader of the earlier editions. But in at least one respect the more recent version shows a vast improvement, the result equally of a change in the national constitution and of Emily’s continuing education. You will remember that during her married life she had been in charge of the solid refreshments, her husband of the liquid. When she first wrote Etiquette our nation had begun its noble experiment with Prohibition and from her account one would guess that the bootleg industry had not yet been efficiently organized. So she writes in the 1925 edition: “But the temperature and service of wines, which used to be an essential detail of every dinner, have now no place at all. Whether people will offer frappéd cider or some other iced drink in the middle of dinner, and a warmed something else to take the place of claret with the fish, remains to be seen.” Her husband Edwin would have been shocked that Emily could conceive of serving warmed claret with fish, or that “most people put on at least two wine glasses, sherry, and champagne, or claret and sherry, and pour something pinkish or yellowish into them.”

What follows shows even worse taste. She writes: “Those few who still have cellars, serve wines exactly as they used to, white wine, claret, sherry and burgundy warm, champagne ice cold ... “ Perhaps by “warm” Mrs. Post meant room temperature or cave temperature, and perhaps her preference for warmed white wine was a slip of the pen, but she certainly must have wasted a lot of time in France if this passage is the sum of her lore about wines.

By contrast, the comparable section in the 1960 edition is sensible, though with too much attention to champagne. In one detail the two accounts agree. The gentleman should be given his choice of whisky—scotch, bourbon, rye—which should be served in a tall glass with only one piece of ice. When, she says, “The whisky is poured by the servant until the guest makes a gesture to stop.” One hopes that the gentleman had read the whole of Etiquette before confronting this challenge.

The latest edition of Etiquette (12th) was done by Elizabeth L. Post, Emily’s granddaughter-in-law, in 1969. It includes some changes from its predecessor—for instance she includes the rules for a bar mitzvah as well as a christening. The reference librarians at Regenstein tell me there is about equal call for Post and Amy Vanderbilt, who is somewhat more liberal.

I read Elizabeth’s chapter on college life. On our campus I think student manners have improved since 1969, but not from her influence. She gives no rules for conducting a sit-in or what terms may be used in addressing a policeman. And she thinks clothes may be casual but “should always be neat and clean.” What college did she visit, and when?

In her chapter on formal dinners Emily ends with a section on public dinners or luncheons—a very useful item in this year of political campaigns with $100 (or plus) dinners—with a diagram of the seating at the speakers table. With President Nixon’s visit to China and his trip to the USSR. in progress as I write this, I can hope he consulted Emily’s book as well as Kissinger. Toasts seem to be of vast political importance at the summit dinners and I find Emily’s discussion of toasts most enlightening.

One of the examples she cites is of no use to the President, but I should like to quote it in closing: “To the Professor! May he live to be a hundred and his teaching endure a thousand years.” I can only add, “Hear, hear!”

James Cate, professor emeritus of, medieval history at the University, is known professionally for his work on those high and far-off times, but in this issue of the Magazine he gives readers a glimpse of a phenomenon of considerably more recent vintage. Known with affection by generations of Midway students, Professor Cate joined the University in 1930; he received his PhD in 1935.