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In a somewhat more egalitarian age, today's self-styled arbiters of elegance do their best to disavow the slightly embarrassing equation of good manners and money. While Emily Post's original guide was full of such now esoteric information as what color livery the footmen should wear, Elizabeth Post insists that she and her grandmother-in-law both regard etiquette as "a code of behavior, based on kindness and consideration." Says Ann Landers: "Good manners are important because they show how you care about another person. Bad manners indicate a lack of caring." Marjabelle Stewart maintains that "manners will take you places money never could." All the etiquette books now talk of being friendly, kindhearted, relaxed. Use common sense. Avoid snobbery.
Nobody supports this humanitarian thesis more strongly than Judith Martin. "Good manners are not just for the very rich," she says. "Good manners are for everyone. Good manners are free." She was correspondingly appalled when Reagan's first protocol officer, Leonore Annenberg, curtsied to Prince Charles on his 1981 visit to Washington. "If there is any basic principle of American life, it is that we do not recognize that anyone is born at a higher level than anyone else. We do not bend the knee to anyone except God, or in some cases his representative. I found it incredibly offensive to see an American official doing so to royalty. We fought a war over that and we won."
Martin was hardly less appalled to hear that there are now etiquette camps where children learn practices like kissing hands. "That is just a perversion of the idea of etiquette," says Martin. "Hand kissing is not an American custom. It's incredibly pretentious for Americans to do it, and for toddlers to do it is unspeakable. I mean, this is just disgusting. These etiquette schools were done solely to teach snobbery, which is against everything I believe in."
What Martin believes in—and her book on children encompasses the full range of adult behavior as well—is that "we are all born ignorant and oafish," and it is the duty of all parents to teach their younger selves how to behave properly. The only way to do so, she says, is by providing a good example plus tireless nagging. "It takes 18 years of constant work to get [a child] into presentable enough shape so that a college will take him or her off your hands," she announces. The child must be taught not just to say thank you, not even just to treat other people with consideration, but to see that the world is organized in a certain way, and that the rules were created to make life more bearable.
One of the main reasons for the confusion in manners, Martin believes, is the blurring of the line between public life and private life. In public life there are hierarchies of money, power and talent because that is the practical way to get things done. In private life, everyone can be equal. To blur the distinctions causes pain. To let money govern private relations is immoral. And to the child's traditional question "Why?", Miss Manners proposes the traditional answer "Because."