This year, two of America’s most traditional institutions marked important anniversaries. The Virginia Military Institute commemorated the 25th anniversary of its admission of women, while the Emily Post Institute celebrated the 100th anniversary of its iconic Etiquette by releasing a new centennial edition. VMI and Emily Post might seem to have little in common, until you examine the 1996 Supreme Court decision that opened America’s last all-male military college to women.
Antonin Scalia was the sole dissenter in U.S. v. Virginia (Justice Clarence Thomas had recused himself because his son was attending VMI at the time). Scalia concluded his dissent by quoting VMI’s entire “Code of a Gentleman”—a 15-item list that used to appear in the pocket-sized Bullet, or “Rat Bible,” given to new cadets (called “rats”) each fall. According to this code, a gentleman
Does not discuss his family affairs in public or with acquaintances.
Does not speak more than casually about his wife or girl friend.
Does not go to a lady’s house if he is affected by alcohol. He is temperate in the use of alcohol.
Scalia praised VMI’s code as demonstrating the school’s commitment to “manly honor,” which he felt risked “destruction” with women’s admission. VMI, he believed, was a place apart: a school that taught young men a singular way of being not offered elsewhere. He didn’t realize, however, that the code he admired came from Emily Post’s widely disseminated 1922 Etiquette.
Most people at VMI didn’t realize this either. Last year, when I asked Keith Gibson, a VMI alumnus and executive director of the institute’s museum systems, if he knew when and where the code originated, Gibson replied that he didn’t know, but his cursory search of Rat Bibles from 1917 forward suggested that this 15-item list had first appeared in 1981, which surprised him: “This is a bit curious considering the language—and instructions—of the Code of a Gentleman seem antiquated, much earlier than the 1980s.”
I decided to do some research, and after plugging a few lines from the code into Google, I was led straight to Emily Post. “Well,” said Gibson, “that explains the language!”
The opening paragraph of VMI’s code was lifted verbatim from Post’s “Fundamentals of Good Behavior.” After that, VMI’s 15 guidelines paraphrased her more extensive instructions. At the end, the code added a variation on a line from Stonewall Jackson’s private collection of maxims: “A Gentleman can become what he wills to be.”
Why the code was added to the 1981 Bullet—as the final item at the handbook’s end—remains a mystery. The cadet editor of that booklet, Keith R. Baron, died last year, so we may never know: Was he a fan of Emily Post? Or did someone else suggest the addition? Baron’s classmate, John Holloway, who sketched the handbook’s cover design, explains that VMI had always “stressed and enforced the importance of honorable and gentlemanly conduct,” and he’d assumed the code was around long before 1981—a misconception that still persists. In October of 2022, a writer in VMI’s cadet newspaper claimed the code was “created by the Corps of Cadets themselves in the Institute’s earliest days.”
One clue to its 1981 debut might come from the previous year’s Rat Bible. That Bullet had included, for the first time, the lyrics of a song called “Buckling on My Boots and Spurs” by General Frank McCarthy, class of ’33 (and producer of the Academy Award–winning movie Patton). Written during his cadetship, McCarthy’s song mocked the “pansies” at VMI’s rival school, UVA, for wearing “pink silk underwear,” before proclaiming “I’m a Southern gentleman/ I love my smokes and swill/ And every pretty girl I see/ Gives me a hearty thrill.” So perhaps Keith Baron wanted the 1981 handbook to contain a different definition of a “gentleman,” minus the “smokes and swill.”
Emily Post provided a fitting alternative, since her vision of gentlemanly behavior conformed to the chivalric model popular in Old Virginia. According to the opening lines of Post’s 1922 “Fundamentals,” a gentleman “is the descendant of the knight, the crusader.” This idea had emerged from the fascination with medievalism prominent in 19th-century England and embraced by the South’s planter class. At the turn of the 19th century, England had debated whether the ideal gentleman was defined by politeness (the 18th-century standard), or whether he should match the more militant fantasy of the “gentle knight,” known for chivalry. In other words, did the ideal gentleman resemble Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy (after Elizabeth Bennet reforms his bad manners) or Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe?
Ivanhoe, a fictional crusader, won the contest, since politeness was deemed too feminine for England’s changing ideas about masculinity. Consequently, the South’s Anglophile aristocrats began mimicking the British fad for jousting tournaments and talking constantly about chivalry. Medievalism appealed to the South’s conservative culture. Feudalism, Christianity, and chivalry offered a reactionary alternative to democracy, secularism, and feminism, promising that poverty—and slavery—could be benignly managed through aristocrats’ noblesse oblige, and women didn’t need equality so much as protection. All of this explains why Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, accused Walter Scott of starting the Civil War. According to Twain, Scott’s novels had undermined the democratic achievements of the French Revolution, filling Southern minds with “the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.”
Idealized visions of chivalrous knights outlasted the war and spread nationwide, with vast numbers of American men, North and South, wanting to imagine themselves as knights (think Knights of Columbus, Knights of Pythias, and, more ominously, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan). In the South, Robert E. Lee was idolized as the perfect gentleman-knight, and VMI’s cadets (who had fought for the Confederacy in 1864) were taught to salute his tomb each time they walked past it on the campus of Washington and Lee University, adjacent to VMI.
Emily Post, whose wealthy grandfather was named Washington Lee (no clear relation to Robert), absorbed both Southern and Northern influences through her family ties to Baltimore, and her 1922 Etiquette was interesting because although she admired knights, she was an advocate of politeness, despite its potentially feminizing influence on American men. In essence, Emily Post’s ideal gentleman combined Ivanhoe with Mr. Darcy.
By the end of the 1980s, Post’s polite gentleman had overtaken McCarthy’s “smokes and swill” caricature in VMI’s Rat Bibles. “Boots and Spurs” was removed in 1991. But while McCarthy had been given credit in the Rat Bibles annually for his lyrics, Post’s work remained without attribution.
It’s perhaps ironic that Justice Scalia included VMI’s code in his Supreme Court dissent, given that it was written by a New York socialite who used “middle-class” as an insult, preferred “born gentlemen” and “thoroughbred” men and women, and explained how “a man whose social position is self-made is apt to be detected.” Scalia was a self-made man, born to Italian immigrant parents who would probably have been excluded from Post’s so-called “Best Society.” Despite Post’s insistence that “Best Society” was a worldwide brotherhood open to all, in 1922 she assumed that certain people—for instance, most people of color—would automatically be excluded from the dinner parties she described.
But Emily Post has come a long way since 1922. Over the past century, new editions of Etiquette have mirrored the changes in American society. In fact, by the time the “Code of a Gentleman” appeared in VMI’s Rat Bibles, the Emily Post Institute had already left it behind. In 1975, their New Etiquette was thoroughly revised to acknowledge women’s changing roles: “Today, with women demanding equal rights in every field, men cannot be expected to treat them as the delicate petals they were supposed to be many years ago.” This word choice hints at some disgruntlement with the “demands” of feminists, and the edition states that “femininity is still more attractive in woman than masculine capability.” But subsequent editions embraced women’s equality with no caveats.
By the 1990s, while VMI and Scalia were looking backward with nostalgia at turn-of-the-century gender roles, Emily Post was marching forward toward the new millennium. Today, in the centennial edition, the word “gentleman” appears in reference to the past, prefaced by phrases like “In times of old.” Instead, the Emily Post Institute emphasizes “kindness” and “courtesy”—language free from social class and gender prejudices. Although Lizzie Post, great-great-granddaughter of Emily and co-president of the Emily Post Institute, has acknowledged that “it’s really easy to paint etiquette and manners as tools for elitism,” she argues that good manners—when rooted in kindness—are more important now than ever, given the increasing harshness in American society. And to show how far etiquette has come from its roots in social conservativism, in 2019 Lizzie Post published Higher Etiquette: a Guide to the World of Cannabis, which includes lessons in “How to tackle pot faux pas such as ‘canoed’ joints and ‘lawn-mowed’ bowls.”
VMI has also been changing. By the ’90s, VMI’s Rat Bibles were co-edited by administrators, and the 1997 handbook for VMI’s first coed class contained a new, gender-neutral “Code of a Cadet” that emphasized broad concepts: “A cadet embodies integrity at all times.” However, that code was included in a “Customs and Courtesies” chapter that still promoted old-fashioned, and heavily gendered, social graces: “If a lady drops something, retrieve it for her.” The “Customs” chapter had been added the previous year, in the Rat Bible for VMI’s last all-male class. In that handbook’s pages VMI had responded to its legal loss to federal authorities by reverting to turn-of-the-century rhetoric, referring to “The War Between the States,” even though Rat Bibles had talked about “the Civil War” as far back as 1922. VMI’s Bullet wouldn’t switch back to the “Civil War” until 2021, when the school’s first Black superintendent took charge. This fall, the “Customs and Courtesies” chapter was also revised.
These changes at VMI have been attacked by some of the school’s most conservative alumni, who’ve formed a political action committee called the Spirit of VMI. Chief among their targets is the institute’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. On Nov. 3 the group published a grotesquely sexist and racist cartoon on Facebook, an event later publicized in the Washington Post. It was paired with a cartoon cover of a mock Rat Bible.
By contrast, Emily Post’s current lessons are all about inclusiveness:
Today we recognize Best Society as being made up of people who are kind, compassionate, and aware. These people speak and act in ways that are inclusive—recognizing that many different lives are lived in each community—and create safe spaces for everyone to be heard and to be themselves.
According to Post, good manners mean making people of all colors, religions, social classes, and gender identities feel equally welcome in one’s community, even if that community was formerly a men’s sanctum. As the centennial edition of Etiquette explains, these days, “anyone who’d like to may head to the study for an after-dinner cigar.”
