The American Way of Death Revisited

Funeral people are always telling one another about the importance of ethics (not just any old ethics but usually “the highest ethics”), sentiment, integrity, standards (again, “the highest”), moral responsibility, frankness, cooperation, character. They exhort one another to be sincere, friendly, dignified, prompt, courteous, calm, pleasant, kindly, sympathetic, good listeners; to speak good English; not to be crude; to join the Masons, the Knights of Columbus, the Chamber of Commerce, the Boy Scouts, the PTA; to take part in the Community Chest drive; to be pleasant and fair-dealing with employees and clients alike; not to cuss their competitors; and, it goes without saying, so to conduct themselves that they will be above scandal or slander. In short, they long to be worthy of high regard, to be liked and understood, a most human longing.

Yet, just as one is beginning to think what dears they really are—for the prose is hypnotic by reason of its very repetitiveness—one’s eye is caught by this sort of thing in Mortuary Management: “You must start treating a child’s funeral, from the time of death to the time of burial, as a golden opportunity for building good will and preserving sentiment, without which we wouldn’t have any industry at all.” Or this in the National Funeral Service Journal: “Buying habits are influenced largely by envy and environment. Don’t ever overlook the importance of these two factors in estimating the purchasing possibilities or potential of any family…. Envy is essentially the same as pride…. It is the idea of keeping up with the Joneses…. Sometimes it is only necessary to say, ‘…Here is a casket similar to the one the Joneses selected’ to insure a selection in a substantially profitable bracket.”

Merchants of a rather grubby order, preying on the grief, remorse, and guilt of survivors, or trained professional men with high standards of ethical conduct?

The funeral men really would vastly prefer to fit the latter category. A discussion has raged for many years in funeral circles around this very question of “professionalism” versus a trade or business status, and the side that contends that undertaking is a profession is winning out in the National Funeral Directors Association.

Once again, it is apparently expected that the mere repetition of the statement will invest it with validity. Sample speeches are prepared and circulated among association members: “I am not an undertaker. He served his purpose and passed out of the picture. I am a funeral director. I am a Doctor of Services. We are members of a profession, just as truly as the lawyer, the doctor or the minister.”

In 1951 Mortuary Management reported another example of successful pioneering on this front by National Selected Morticians: “Leave it to NSM to come out with new names for old things. We’ve passed through the period of the ‘back room,’ the ‘show room,’ the ‘sales room,’ the ‘casket display room,’ the ‘casket room.’ Now NSM offers you the ‘selection room.’ ”

A 1949 press release issued by the NFDA on a survey of public attitudes towards the funeral business hopefully asks, “Please Do Not Use the Term ‘Undertaker’ at the Head of This Story.” As late as 1962, the American Funeral Director was moved to chide the New York Times for its “continued insistence upon using the relatively obsolete and meaningless words ‘undertaker’ and ‘coffin’ to the exclusion of the more generally accepted and meaningful ones, ‘funeral director’ and ‘casket.’ ”

Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word “mortician”—first used in Embalmers Monthly for February 1895—was barred by the Chicago Times in 1932, “not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven’t the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly.” “Casket,” dating from Civil War days, was denounced by Hawthorne: “a vile modern phrase which compels a person to shrink from the idea of being buried at all.” Emily Post uses it, albeit reluctantly: “In spite of the fact that the word coffin is preferred by all people of fastidious taste and that the word casket is never under any circumstances used in the spoken language of these same people, it seems best to follow present-day commercial usage and admit the word casket to these pages.”

A network of trade associations reflects the complexity of ambitions and viewpoints within the industry. While one undertaker may (and often does) belong to more than one association, and while the various associations may (and often do) join forces on a specific issue, the associations are not always in accord, for on many questions they represent conflicting economic interests.

The names of the associations are in some cases merely descriptive of the membership they represent: National Funeral Directors Association, Jewish Funeral Directors Association, National Funeral Directors & Morticians Association. Others have chosen more imaginative and even lyrical names: International Order of the Golden Rule and National Selected Morticians.

The associations with the high-sounding names generally limit membership to one funeral establishment to a community, to enable members to display the insignia on their advertising material and letterheads. To the public, it might seem that to be “Selected” denotes some sort of official certification by an outside agency; actually the members Select one another.

National Selected Morticians is a go-ahead concern numbering among its members some of the largest and most successful firms in the country. “You have to be sponsored by a member and you join by invitation,” one of them explained to me.

While all the trade associations like to refer to undertaking as “the Profession,” their understanding of that term varies widely. NSM seems to use it because it sounds nice, rather than for its full implications. The NSM emphasis is on merchandising, sound business methods. They are in favor of prearranged, prefinanced funerals, and price advertising because their member establishments depend primarily on big volume.

Mr. Wilber Krieger, managing director of NSM, was also the director of the National Foundation of Funeral Service in Evanston. Here a school of management is maintained, where courses are offered in advertising, market analysis, credit and collection, ethical practice, letter writing, sales techniques in funeral service, and so on. The Foundation is housed in a two-story ersatz-Colonial mansion. Among its facilities is a “selection room for Merchandising Research to improve merchandising, to demonstrate lighting (more than five different types in the room), to show arrangements and decoration through the twenty-five-unit balanced line of caskets.” The Avenue of Approach and Aisles of Resistance, Mr. Krieger’s own brainchildren, are here laid out for all to see. There is also a vault selection room aimed at helping the funeral director “create a ‘Quality’ atmosphere, conducive to better vault sales,” and at showing him how to “increase his burial vault profits by encouraging better sales through better merchandising.”

The oldest, largest, and most influential of the funeral trade associations is the National Funeral Directors Association, founded in the 1880s. From the beginning, the NFDA has campaigned for professional status; from the beginning, their dilemma, still unresolved after the passage of years, was evident. The first code of ethics, adopted in 1884, says, “There is, perhaps, no profession, after that of the sacred ministry, in which a high-toned morality is more imperatively necessary than that of a funeral director’s. High moral principles are his only safe guide.” But a corollary objective of the organization—that of keeping prices pegged as high as possible—was expressed in a resolution passed in the previous year: “Resolved, that we, as funeral directors, condemn the manufacture of covered caskets at a price less than fifteen dollars for an adult size.”

The National Funeral Directors Association serves its affiliated state groups through bulletins, keeping watch on legislative developments, lobbying activities, advising member firms on methods of cost accounting, and other business procedures. It conducts an annual convention at which casket manufacturers, burial-clothing firms, vault men and embalming-fluid supply houses exhibit their wares. It sends speakers to state conventions. It conducts surveys among its members on operating expenses, income, etc., as well as on such apparently far-afield subjects as reading habits—a 1958 survey reveals with pride that 56.7 percent of funeral service personnel read “newspapers, trade journals, magazines and books,” compared with only 40 percent for the population as a whole.

The NFDA concerns itself deeply with public relations. It has produced a couple of films: Funeral Service—A Part of the American Way and To Serve the Living, prepared in conjunction with the Association of Better Business Bureaus, Inc. Two of the most important public relations aids, the use of which have been constantly urged upon its members by the NFDA, are a pamphlet, Facts Every Family Should Know About Funerals and Interments, issued by the Association of Better Business Bureaus, and Funeral Service Facts and Figures, issued annually by the NFDA.

The Association of Better Business Bureaus is held in high esteem by many people, who regard it as a watchdog organization designed to protect the public from unscrupulous and crooked businessmen. Its stamp of