(7 of 10)
DEAR Miss MANNERS: Some months ago, I was mugged . . . Everywhere I go [people] ask me for the details of what happened. Why do they do this? It was a nasty experience and I would like to forget it.
GENTLE READER: Because they are dying to know if you were raped. Do not tell them.
Criticisms and arguments on American manners are among the nation's oldest traditions. As early as 1795, a would-be colonist named Isaac Weld went to live in the New World and then returned to England complaining of Americans that "civility cannot be purchased from them on any terms; they seem to think that it is incompatible with freedom." By the time Frances Trollope came to write The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), she was scandalized by, among other things, "the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter the mouth, and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket knife." Charles Dickens, in his American Notes, deplored the national pastime of chewing tobacco, spitting toward spittoons, and often missing—"odious practices . . . most offensive and sickening . . . an exaggeration of nastiness."
Americans liked to defend their forthright manners in those heady early years by insisting that they represented the new democracy's rejection of class-ridden Europe. Thomas Jefferson made a point of receiving foreign diplomats and all other White House visitors without any distinctions of rank, which led to a scramble for seats that he called the "rule of pell-mell." "When brought together in society," Jefferson wrote in a memo to his Cabinet, "all are perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office." ("Nowadays," Judith Martin observed in the course of giving a lecture on philosophy at Harvard in May, "he might have worn a tag: 'Hello! My name is Tom. What's yours?' ")
The myth of a classless society did not last long. In the three decades before the Civil War, more than threescore guides to manners appeared—written, then as now, mainly by women—and their message was best summed up in one title, The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility. Throughout the century, a dominant class that felt threatened by raucous immigrants and the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution saw etiquette as a means of establishing and maintaining a hierarchy. The up-and-coming aped the manners of the rich, the new rich aped the old, and everyone looked yearningly back toward aristocratic Europe.
Miss Jennie Jerome, daughter of a Wall Street broker, married one of the Churchills of Blenheim Palace, and a whole generation of debutantes sailed across the Atlantic in hopes of doing as well. By contrast, one of Ring Lardner's social-climbing heroines went to stay in an extravagantly expensive Palm Beach hotel in the hope of meeting a grandee like the Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago. When she finally did encounter her in a corridor, Lardner's narrator relates, the great lady only said to her: "Please see that they's some towels put in 559."