The Death of Etiquette

Once upon a time during my semi-misspent youth as an activist I found myself at a luncheon on Mackinac Island. My table companion, a patrician elder lady sat across the table from me, protected by a barrier of a pair of matching table settings.  My setting included, and I know because I counted, four forks, three spoons, three knives, 7 pieces of china and 3 pieces of stemware.

I was duly intimidated.

Now, I’d heard the old silverware rule of “start at the outside and work your way in,” but one of the knives was at the top of the setting, and I had no clue what to do about the three goblets.

Rather than panic, I decided to pretend I was Jane Goodell, and as the lady across the table and I conversed I observed her very carefully.  She seemed very comfortable in this environment. I didn’t touch a single thing on my side of the table until after she did.

At the end of the luncheon, she complimented me on my manner, that I had been a perfect gentleman, allowing her to set the pace for lunch and that I was very attentive during our time together, a habit she thought had been lost on the younger generation. I thanked her, wished her a good afternoon and thought to myself  “Lady, if you only knew!”

I have always been somewhat fascinated by etiquette and social customs. For years I have been collecting and reading books on “how to be a gentleman” from different eras.  One of my most treasured books on the subject came to me as a gift from a cultural historian that I had worked with during our time as historians at Jane Addams’s settlement house, the Hull House.

At the end of my time with the project Ellen handed me a package that clearly contained a book. Of course I love books, so I was pretty happy to receive this. It wasn’t until I opened it that I saw what a treasure it was.  The book is called “The Golden Censer: the Duties of Today, The Hopes of the Future,” written by a Mr. John McGovern, published in Chicago in 1891.

It is a book written in1881 on how to be a modern gentleman. How to navigate the waters of the shifting of America from the rural to the urban landscape.

There are chapters on governing oneself, and also chapters that explain the duty that a man owes to his parents and his sister, which include your not falling in with a bad crowd because it will damage her reputation, and how to be sure that she marries a man who will treat her with the respect she deserves.

Nine years later, Theodore Drieser will publish a book called “Sister Carrie,” a cautionary tale of a young woman, who unsatisfied with her rural life, follows her sister, safely married, to Chicago to pursue a more exciting life. I won’t tell you the whole tale this morning, but let’s just say that the trouble begins when she takes a position as a sales girl in a downtown department store, which leads to inferences that because she works outside the home, she might have some questionable morals.

Oh, Sister Carrie is in for some wild times, with all that talking to male customers who are buying gifts for their wives.

A more universal exposure to etiquette for many might be the story of Pygmalion, the play by George Bernard Shaw.  In the play, Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.

The story was also popularized in song as “My Fair Lady,” which is how I first heard of it.

Shaw’s commentary on class system and etiquette, softened up a bit by Lerner and Loewe’s treatment, still presents the idea that nice manners, a nicely presented exterior, is morally bankrupt without an interior life that matches it.

I guess it could be stated, from the lessons learned there, that it is better to be gold on the inside, that’s a little scruffy, than to be all polished on the outside, and hollow.

And that’s what I think most of us think of when we hear the word etiquette.

That it’s a way, a very stiff and rigid way, to appear polished on the outside, no matter how disordered things are inside. I think that we have found this way wanting, and have frequently and consistently rejected it.

For some of this, I’d like to lay the blame on President John F. Kennedy.

That’s right, John F. Kennedy.  You won’t often hear him criticized from Unitarian Universalist pulpits, but you will today.

In his book “Hatless Jack: The President, The Fedora, and The History of American Style,” Neil Steinberg lays partial blame of the demise of the fedora squarely on the head of John Kennedy’s fear of being photographed wearing a hat, lest he should look like an old man.

With presidents doing kooky things like not wearing hats at their inauguration, the social fabric of the nation began to unspool.  Now, this is an obvious, and hopefully humorous oversimplification, but there’s apparently some truth to it.

Etiquette and social graces are not only suffocating and empty rituals. They are also guidelines for safety in uncertain situations.

These rules were devised in part to smooth over the rough edges of community life. Now, yes, it’s true that some people went a little overboard and got all persnickety, but at their core these guidelines are a help, not a hindrance to society.

Amy Vanderbilt wrote her book on etiquette, as Sarah shared with you earlier, in 1958, compiling many social and societal norms.  She knew that norms would change with time, and said so in her introduction, but still she wanted to produce a helpful guide to navigate the “modern” world of the 1950’s.

We have become a world wherein we travel more than ever. In the song titled “The Long Way ‘Round,” the trio known as the Dixie Chicks sing “My friends from high school married their high school boyfriends. [They] moved into houses in the same zip code where their parents live, but I, I could never follow. I hit the highway in a pink RV with stars on the ceiling. Lived like gypsy, six strong hands on the steering wheel.”

More and more of us do this.

Maybe not in a pink RV, but how many here in this room no longer live in a house in the same zip code as your parents?

In our travels, vacation or career inspired, we have encountered social norms. Some of those norms are deeply ingrained and important. Such as never show the bottom of your shoe to ANYONE in an Arabic culture. Others are also important, but lack the insult of the shoe sole, for example, when I went to England for the summer and my backpack was stolen. I had no idea how to call the police. There wasn’t a sign at the Manchester airport that said “Welcome to Manchester, in case of emergency dial 999 on your mobile phone.” No, it just said “Welcome to Manchester.” Now a stolen, second-hand backpack, or rucksack as they kept calling it, is not a big deal. But what if I had witnessed someone having a heart attack, or a serious car accident. I would have stood there helpless.

Or social norms can be as harmless and amusing as the whole “Pop” or “Soda” divide. I’ve lived on both sides of that divide, and tried using “sodapop.” I still get funny looks.

In fact someone here at social hour corrected me when I asked for a “soda.”  You mean a pop, don’t you they said with grin.

So much for diversity. ;-)

To get back to President Kennedy for a moment, all kidding aside, his refusal to wear a hat can easily be seen as him taking part in the modernist movement in America.  In Modernism, the past was eschewed as unnecessary, irrelevant and in some ways extremely harmful.

You can see this Modernist movement in all manner of disciplines. You can see it starting with Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1900’s, but really it’s extremely visible in the work of Meis Van der Rohe’s buildings, a style called “New Internationalism.”

In church music, you can hear this movement anytime you listen to work by Randall Thompson.

In gentleman’s wear, you can see it by the lack of a hat.

People have been wearing hats since the dawn of time and there are often good reasons to wear them. There are religious reasons, status reasons and weather reasons to wear them. But the Modern Man tossed them aside, along with his father’s Oldsmobile.

It’s true that not all things from the past deserve to be dragged forward into the life of today. I can think of a number of classifications of people whose lives are easier and better off then they were in the past. One of my favorite quotes illustrates this quite nicely.

Beth Lapides said "I was at a party where somebody was talking about 'The Good Old Days.' I was like, 'Which Good Old Days? During the McCarthy Blacklist? Or when blacks couldn't vote? When they burned women at the stake because they were herbalists? THOSE Good Old Days?'"

But to throw aside all of the past is a bad idea.

Because the past had ideas and rules with which we knew to, or learned how to, interact.

Worse yet is to paint, with a broad brush, the idea that old ways are universally bad and oppressive. Without social expectations we have come to a place where store clerks, like our dear old friend and lost soul Sister Carrie, no longer strive toward customer service, but rather, they spend time at the counter texting on their phones and talking with one another, ignoring the store’s customers.

I heard a story about an event like this just this week.

When the remove our cultural context completely, as Modernism has tried to do, we are left swimming in a turbulent lake of unknowns.

This fall, in a new show called #selfie, the story of Pygmalion is once again reconstituted. The series follows the life of Eliza Dooley, a woman obsessed with the idea of achieving fame through the use of social media platforms, including Instagram where she posts selfies. She begins to worry that "friending" people online is not a substitute for real friendship, and she seeks help from Henry Higgs, a marketing image guru.

It seems that every thing old might indeed be new again.

In pretty much every one of the books I read on the art of being a gentleman the advice given is that it the responsibility of a gentleman to set the stage so that each person in his presence is comfortable. One cannot make another feel comfortable, of course, but there is a responsibility to think of others first, to consider the needs of your meeting-mates, your date, the random person that you encounter on the street.

This idea is etiquette at it’s finest.

Some rules may feel antiquated to us, and perhaps they are. After all, Amy Vanderbilt herself wrote as the dictionary changes over time to reflect the malleable English language, so too must the book of etiquette. 

Like the dictionary, though, it ought not be tossed out completely because it feels like something from a by-gone era.

It’s true, gentlemen don’t wear hats anymore, well they’re starting to start again, thankfully!  I mean, a hat is cool!  (Though I don’t know about fezzes…) And ladies certainly don’t wear gloves and carry matching bags anymore. In fact, many women bristle at the very term “ladies.”

There are many examples of what happens as the guidelines of etiquette shift. One of them happens right here in this sanctuary every Sunday. 

It is conundrum of clapping.

We clap at concerts, right? But do we clap at church? If by showing either our exuberance, or our delight, are we turning church into a performance? Some would have us never clap in church because to do so would be breaking the spirit of the gravitas of church, and some would clap in church, demonstrating how fully they are moved by the experience of church.

We can either see rules of etiquette as things that strangulate us, or we can see them as helps along the way to navigating a life wherein the people you meet are more likely to feel comfortable in your presence.

As Unitarian Universalists we strive to be more welcoming to those around us. The new comer to our church, the new comer to our neighborhood, and the new comer to our nation.

A common etiquette makes it easier to be a new person in a new situation.

If you forget all the rest of the funny rules about how far a stamp should be from the corner of your letter, or how one should introduce a baroness to a duchess, don’t worry! I mean those things are kind of fun to know, but no one should sweat that kind of stuff, let alone be offended by the misapplication of such rules. But always, always let kindness be your guide in your interactions with others.

Be kind to the stranger.

Be kind to your friend.

Be kind to the store clerk, who may not be as attentive or kind to you in return as you like.

Be kind to those you love
Even those who you used to love.

And be kind to yourself.

Blessed be.

© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry

October 19, 2014

Written for and Presented to

The Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland