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Mark Caldwell is a literary critic and the author of an acclaimed sociomedical history of tuberculosis in America, The Last Crusade. He teaches at Fordham University and lives in Manhattan and New York's Hudson Valley.

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A Short History of Rudeness

Picador USA

Chapter One

Colonel Mann and Mrs. Post: Manners,
Morals, and Class in Modern America

The rudest man of the twentieth century was a master of every socialgrace.

    A paradox? Not entirely: as Amy Vanderbilt wrote in the firstedition of her enduringly popular etiquette guide, "some of the rudestand most objectionable people I have ever known have beentechnically the most `correct'." And Colonel William d'Alton Mannmight have been born to prove her point. He appeared in New Yorkin the 1890s, at the dawn of a turbulent era of world war, boom,and depression. Yet if one could believe his Who's Who entry, Mannwas everything turn-of-the-century Americans most admired: CivilWar hero, entrepreneur, business tycoon, millionaire, inventor, editor,publisher. He presided daily over his own table at Delmonico's,the grand restaurant at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 26th Street.Like most real and would-be metropolitan aristocrats, he kept severalresidences?a Manhattan brownstone, a country house in Morristown,and a private island retreat on Lake George in theAdirondacks, where he dispensed seigniorial hospitality to friendsand employees alike. He was a family man, with a faithful, dowdywife and a daughter on whom he doted.

    Yet by 1905 he was being roundly vilified by every respectablenewspaper in the city and several national magazines as a socialmenace, a coarse criminal mocker of every bond that united theprivileged world of New York's elite. And for this hurricane of civicoutrage, Mann, if he had to trace the blame to a single person, mightwell have pointed to a then obscure and deeply unhappy youngsociety matron?the thirty-three-year-old Emily Post, a decade anda half before she launched her public career as the century's leadingdoyenne of manners and protectress of etiquette.

    Mann's origins were shadowy and probably humble (his life wasthoroughly and entertainingly chronicled in 1965 by New Yorkerwriter Andy Logan). Born in Sandusky, Ohio, on September 27,1839, to a family of thirteen children, he studied engineering for awhile, then earned first a captain's and finally a colonel's commissionin the Civil War, ultimately distinguishing himself at Gettysburg.He also raked in a fortune in royalties by inventing an equipment-totingrig for infantry troops, then licensing it to the U.S. and Austrianarmies. After the war he settled in Mobile, Alabama, where hemanufactured cottonseed oil, dabbled in railroads and oil swindles,founded the Mobile Register (which still publishes today), ran forCongress, and invented a luxury railroad car, the "Mann BoudoirCar" (the prototype design for the Wagons-Lits still in use onContinental European railroads). In appearance portly, white-haired,snowy-bearded, he might, depending on his mood and the state ofyour relations with him, appear as either a beaming Santa, thundervoicedJehovah, or swaggering Falstaff.

    In 1891, his brother, E. D. Mann, vanished in the aftermath ofan obscenity conviction and left his business?a soon to be notoriousNew York weekly named Town Topics?leaderless. The magazinehad begun life some years earlier as The American Queen,edited by Louis Keller, the founder of the Social Register, and"dedicated to art, music, literature, and society." Under E. D. Mann,however, while preserving a tone of strict propriety, it ripened intoa scandal sheet, faithfully reporting high-society peccadilloes andoften identifying perpetrators by name.

    With his brother now incommunicado at a location unknown,Colonel Mann came to New York, assumed the editorship, andgradually raised Town Topics to a hitherto unmatched mastery in theart of scandal. The gossip was personal, vicious, salacious. But thesophistication with which Mann served it up was a world above thatof latter-day tabloids like the National Enquirer or the Globe.Mann himself rewrote and edited the magazine's opening "Saunterings"feature. The prose was refined, funny, elegant, and razor-sharp, aclear precursor of The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" in its soigne'tone, but with a hidden payload of brutal satire underneath the polish.As the Saunterer, Mann became a celebrity in his own right,and apparently an intimate of the very elite he took delight in savaging."When mature spinsters take it into their heads to indulgethemselves in a little souse party," a typical item commenced,

they should do it in the privacy of their house. I thought this at the reveillon at a certain hotel on New Year's Eve, when I saw the hennaed head of a fair but fat and fully forty maiden vainly striving to direct her uncertain feet on a zigzag course around the tables. Ordinarily she is a very handsome lady, but youth?sweet, sweet youth?is the only period at which one may be drunk and still retain some degree of attractiveness.

    Nor were all Mann's targets left thus mercifully nameless. Whenher 1915 charity ball at Sherry's slid into rigor mortis at the intendedheight of the festivities, and an exasperated Mrs. AlexanderBlair Thaw, the Pennsylvania Railroad heiress, hurled herself in atantrum upon the balalaika orchestra (which had donated its servicesfree of charge), "Saunterings" gleefully identified her.

    In 1904, the Saunterer unleashed a scathing attack on the twenty-year-oldAlice Roosevelt, just beginning her controversial social career:

From wearing costly lingerie to indulging in fancy dances for the edification of men was only a step. And then came?second step?indulging freely in stimulants. Flying all around Newport without a chaperon was another thing that greatly concerned Mother Grundy. There may have been no reason for the old lady making such a fuss about it, but if the young woman knew some of the tales that are told at the clubs at Newport she would be more careful in the future about what she does and how she does it. They are given to saying almost anything at the Reading Room, but I was really surprised to hear her name mentioned openly there in connection with that of a certain multi-millionaire of the colony and with certain doings that gentle people are not supposed to discuss. They also said that she should not have listened to the risqué jokes told her by the son of one of her Newport hostesses.

     Mann typically wrote "Saunterings" items up from notes suppliedby eavesdropping servants or hired spies disguised as ball musicians.But the unsavory side of this information-gathering systemhardly fazed him. "There is no feature of my paper of which I ammore proud," he wrote, trumpeting Saunterings' "reformative andregenerative influence. To save the sinner by rebuking the sin is anachievement over which the angels rejoice." Mann ducked lawsuitsby a clever device: describing the scandal without naming names inone item, then following it with an apparently innocuous social notethat just happened to identify the miscreants. Readers quicklycracked the code; Town Topics was never successfully sued for libel.

    The colonel stoutly maintained?and from all the evidence reallyseems to have believed?that he was...