Autocrat of Etiquette

Formal adult education involving any form of school discipline has never appealed to the grown-ups of any nation. But U. S. adults have long been gluttons for any form of education provided they can choose its subject, take it or leave it, play it as a sort of game in which every one can win by giving himself a higher rating than he gives to his contemporaries. Hence among best sellers not of a year but of a generation, the Boston Cooking School Cook Book and Emily Post's Etiquette rate close to the Bible. According to the modest estimate of its publishers, Funk & Wagnalls, since its first printing in 1922, Etiquette has sold "many more than 500,000 copies." Last week this 15-year-old youngster among best sellers came from the presses in its first completely revised edition, a new 860-page book on social ceremonial.

Like Samuel Johnson, the first great English lexicographer, Emily Post, the first great lexicographer of U. S. manners, had the opportunity of imposing many of her personal prejudices as rules for contemporary and future generations to follow. Emily Bruce Price Post--who 30-odd years ago married and divorced Edwin Main Post, Manhattan banker and socialite--was but a comely divorcee somewhat in need of cash, a woman whose horizon was largely bounded by Newport and Park Avenue when she unwittingly wrote a book which was to make her fame and fortune. Today, at 64, she is a prosperous businesswoman whose horizon has been considerably broadened by her responsibility as autocrat of U. S. etiquette, by the impact of 6,000 questions a week which pour in upon her from millions who have never seen Newport or Park Avenue.

Thus, while some of her judgments remain arbitrary and personal, educators and historians can compare her new book with her old for a picture of changes that have come over U. S. manners during the 15 years in which Prohibition had its heyday and departed, in which the jazz age ran its course, in which women's skirts rose and fell and rose again like the curtain on a play, in which radio, automobiles, airplanes, and divorce altered the tempo of U. S. life. Examples of the new Etiquette's changes and additions:

P: New Chapters: "Modern Man and Girl"; "Modern Exactions of Courtesy" (smoking, radio, punctuality, telephone manners); "Etiquette in Washington and State Capitals" (An Ambassador precedes the Chief Justice and a Cardinal comes before both); "American Neighborhood Customs" (rules for the hinterland); "Restaurant Etiquette"; "The Vanished Chaperon and Other Lost Conventions."

P: Divorcee Post's opinion on divorce 30 years after: "The epidemic of divorce which has been raging in this country for the past 10 or 15 years must be rated with floods, dust-storms, tornadoes and other catastrophes."

P: A man need not on all occasions pay the check for a woman.

P: An unmarried girl over 18 may go unchaperoned to the theatre with a man, even to dinner in his apartment if it will not stir comment in her circle. She no longer leans upon a man's arm in the city, may invite him to a game or the theatre.

P: "Hello, everybody, this is Sally" is an acceptable introduction at the country club, but use of first names outside one's own circle is not good form.

P: Corn-on-the-cob may now be eaten (neatly) at a formal dinner, an entire ear in both hands. Cigarets at the dinner table are all right but Mrs. Post still does not approve.

P: To the lexicon of permissible slang Mrs. Post, who was once heard to describe a table layout as "lousy," adds such expressions as "O.K.." "swell," "divine," "and how!" "so what?" "you betcha." But she never hears "colyum," "ottawobile," "eggsit," "tomayto," "cult-your" (which she pronounces "cultcha")* in good society. Her pet hate: pretentious circumlocutions such as "permit me to assist you" instead of "let me help you."

Mrs. Post agitated for Prohibition's repeal but she has not changed her 15-year-old paragraph on drinking: "No gentleman goes to a lady's house if he is affected by alcohol. A gentleman seeing a young man who is not entirely himself in the presence of ladies quietly induces the youth to depart. An older man addicted to the use of too much alcohol need not be discussed, since he inevitably ceases to be asked to the houses of people of distinction."

Persisting Post prejudices:

P: "The Great American Rudeness," i.e., the custom that a hostess serves herself first--at which Mrs. Post hurls a five-page jeremiad, denouncing it as a vulgar survival from the poisoning Borgia era.

P: Children should be "seen and not heard."

P: A debutante should not hold hands in public. "Petting is not a practice in best society."

P: No lady smokes in the street ; no gentleman smokes when he is walking with a lady.

Statistic

Last week the U. S. Office of Education in Washington estimated elementary school enrollment this fall at 20,206,000 pupils--1,000,000 fewer than at the 1930 peak. The downhill trend whose start accompanied a rapid fall in the birth rate during Depression is expected to continue at least until 1941.

*A higher authority on pronunciation, Webster's New International Dictionary, rules on culture: kultur, the second u as in unite.

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