The American Way of Death Revisited

than two hundred years. Until the eighteenth century, few people except the very rich were buried in coffins. The “casket,” and particularly the metal casket, is a phenomenon of modern America, unknown in past days and in other parts of the world.

As might be expected with the development of industrial technique in the nineteenth century, coffin designers soared to marvelous heights. They experimented with glass, cement, celluloid, papier-mache, India rubber; they invented Rube Goldberg contraptions called “life signals”—complicated arrangements of wires and bells designed to set off an alarm if the occupant of the coffin should have inadvertently been buried alive.

The newfangled invention of metal coffins in the nineteenth century did not go unchallenged. An admonition on the subject was delivered by Lord Stowell, judge of the Consistory Court of London, who in 1820 was called upon to decide a case felicitously titled Gilbert v. Buzzard. At issue was the right to bury a corpse in a newly patented iron coffin. The church wardens protested that if parishioners were to get into the habit of burying their dead in coffins made proof against normal decay, in a few generations there would be no burial space left.

Said Lord Stowell, “The rule of law which says that a man has a right to be buried in his own churchyard is to be found, most certainly, in many of our authoritative text writers; but it is not quite so easy to find the rule which gives him the rights of burying a large chest or trunk in company with himself.” He spoke approvingly of attempts to abolish use of sepulchral chests “on the physical ground that the dissolution of bodies would be accelerated, and the dangerous virulence of the fermentation disarmed by a speedy absorption of the noxious particles into the surrounding soil.”

The inexorable upward thrust towards perfection in metal caskets was not, however, destined to be halted by judicial logic. Just one hundred years after the decision in Gilbert v. Buzzard, a triumph of the first magnitude was recorded by the D. H. Hill Casket Company of Chicago, and described in their 1920 Catalogue of Funeral Merchandise: “A Study in Bronze: When Robert Fulton said he could propel a boat by steam his friends were sure he was mentally deranged—that it could not be done. When Benjamin Franklin said he could draw electricity from the clouds his acquaintances thought he was crazy—that it could not be done. When our designing and manufacturing departments said they could and would produce a CAST BRONZE CASKET that would be the peer of anything yet developed, their friends and associates shook their heads sympathetically, feeling that it would be a hopeless task. All three visions have come to be realities—the steamboat, electricity, and the Hilco Peerless Cast Bronze Burial Receptacle.”

The production of ever more solid and durable metal caskets has soared in this century; their long-lasting and even “eternal” qualities have become a matter of pride and self-congratulation throughout the industry—and this in one area of manufacture where built-in obsolescence might seem (as Lord Stowell pointed out) to present certain advantages. As we have seen, the sales of metal caskets now exceed sales of the old-fashioned wooden types. A brand-new tradition has been established; how deep are the roots, Messrs. Habenstein and Lamers?

Mourning symbols have run the gamut. In medieval England and in colonial America, the skull and crossbones was the favored symbol, making its appearance on everything connected with death, from tombstone to funeral pall to coffin maker’s sign. Funerary extravagance took the form of elaborate mourning clothes, the hiring of mutes (or paid mourners), tremendous feasting sometimes of many days’ duration, and gifts to the living, who were showered with rings, scarves, needlework, books, and, most customarily, gloves.

Funeral flowers, today the major mourning symbol and a huge item of national expenditure, did not make their appearance in England or America until after the middle of the nineteenth century, and only then over the opposition of church leaders.

From colonial days until the nineteenth century, the American funeral was almost exclusively a family affair, in the sense that the family and close friends performed most of the duties in connection with the dead body itself. It was they who washed and laid out the body, draped it in a winding sheet, and ordered the coffin from the local carpenter. It was they who carried the coffin on foot from the home to the church and thence to the graveyard, and who frequently—unless the church sexton was available—dug the grave. Funeral services were held in the church over the pall-covered bier, and a brief committal prayer was said at the graveside. Between the death and the funeral, the body lay in the family parlor, where the mourners took turns watching over it, the practical reason for this being the ever-present possibility that signs of life might be observed. The first undertakers were drawn mainly from three occupations, all concerned with some aspect of burial: the livery-stable keeper, who provided the hearse and funeral carriages; the carpenter or cabinetmaker, who made the coffins; and the sexton, who was generally in charge of bell-tolling and gravedigging. In some of the larger cities, midwives and nurses advertised their services as occupational layers out of the dead, and were so listed in city directories. The undertaker’s job was primarily custodial. It included supplying the coffin from a catalogue or from his own establishment, arranging to bring folding chairs (if the service was to be held in the home, which was often the case), taking charge of the pallbearers, supervising the removal of the coffin and loading it into the hearse, and in general doing the necessary chores until the body was finally lowered into the grave.

Shortly before the turn of the century, the undertaker conferred upon himself the title of “funeral director.” From that time on, possibly inspired by his own semantics, he began to direct funerals, and quietly to impose a character of his own on the mode of disposal of the dead.

Some of the changes that were in store are foreshadowed in The Modern Funeral by W. P. Hohenschuh, published in 1900. Hohenschuh may have been the first to put into words a major assumption that lies behind modern funeral practices: “There is nothing too good for the dead,” he declares. He goes on to advise, “The friends want the best that they can afford…. A number of manufacturers have set an excellent example by fitting up magnificent showrooms, to which funeral directors can take their customers, and show them the finest goods made. It is an education for all parties concerned…. It is to be commended.” Hohenschuh’s injunctions about funeral salesmanship, although vastly elaborated over the years, remain basic: “Boxes must be shown to sell them. By having an ordinary pine box next to one that is papered, the difference is more readily seen than could be explained, and a better price can be obtained for the latter.” And on collections he warns, “Grief soon subsides, and the older the bill gets, the harder it is to collect.”

In 1900 embalming was still the exception rather than the rule and was still generally done in the home— although Hohenschuh mentions a new trend making its appearance in California: that of taking the body to the funeral parlor after death for dressing and embalming. He proposes an ingenious approach to selling the public on embalming: “It may be suggested that bodies should be embalmed in winter as well as in summer. It may be a little difficult to have people accept this idea, but after having tried it a few times, and people realize the comfort to themselves in having the body in a warm room, this preventing them against colds, besides the sentimental feeling against having the body in a cold room, it is an easy matter to make the custom general.” However, the most profitable aspect of the modern funeral—that of preparing the body for the public gaze—seems to have escaped this astute practitioner, for he opposes the open casket at the funeral service, and remarks, “There is no doubt that people view the dead out of curiosity.”

It was still a far cry from these early, hesitant steps of the emerging funeral industry to the full-fledged burlesque it has become.

13. THE NEWEST PROFESSION

Funeral directors are members of an exalted, almost sacred calling…. [T]he Executive Committee believed that a cut in prices would be suicidal, and notified the manufacturers that better goods, rather than lower prices, were needed…. A $1,000 prize was offered for the best appearing corpse after 60 days…. A resolution was passed requesting the newspapers in reporting the proceedings to refrain from flippancy.

—Sunny side, 1885[17]

These observations are culled from an 1885 report describing the proceedings of one of the earliest National Funeral Directors Association conventions. A century later, the problems they reflect continue to occupy the attention of the undertaking trade: how to be exalted, almost sacred, and at the same time be