approval on the line of conduct of any enterprise is bound to allay doubts and suspend criticism. I was surprised to find how many of the “facts” every family should know had the familiar ring of NFDA propaganda, and that the pamphlet, which has been distributed by funeral directors in the hundreds of thousands, closely follows the NFDA line in all important respects. I asked the BBB where they got the “facts” for the pamphlet; they replied, from the National Funeral Directors Association and other (unidentified) sources. For example, the “fact” given in the pamphlet that “there is an adequate service available in every funeral establishment for every purse and taste” is given “on the basis of information furnished by the NFDA.” The “fact” that “most funeral directors do not consider it ethical to advertise prices… and [that] this view is shared by a majority of the public” is again reported as “the official position of the NFDA.”
By the mid-1990s, the most persistent advertisers, to the consternation of the conventional mortuaries that maintain elaborate establishments on Main Street, were the low-cost, low-overhead cremation providers. The majority of funeral homes still refrain from public disclosure of their prices—let alone price advertising—although FTC rules require them to make price information available when asked.
In recent years, the NFDA and other trade associations have provided their members with annual estimates of “average prices” currently charged for mortuary services and vaults. The estimates of the NFDA and FFDA (Federated Funeral Directors of America) vary very little. FFDA’s average for 1995 was $4,211 for “services plus casket,” plus $770 for outside container. Industry observers have no doubt that the dissemination of these numbers within the trade serves to establish uniform price minimums, in violation of the antitrust laws. Hence the caveat, “The NFDA sponsored this study to give you statistics with which you can compare data from your funeral service operation. However, you should not take any or all of the findings as a suggestion for funeral service pricing in your establishment.” This caveat is reminiscent of a legend printed in prominent letters on the wine bricks sold for a time during Prohibition: “Do not under any circumstances place this brick in one gallon of water and let it stand at room temperature for one week, since this will cause it to turn into wine, an alcoholic beverage, the manufacture or possession of which is illegal.”
In 1930 the NFDA established an academy of funerary erudition with the scholarly-sounding name Institute of Mortuary Research—the actual function of which was, according to the NFDA’s official historians, “to disseminate information favorable to organized funeral directing to the various media of communication… and to ‘trouble-shoot’ points of hostility and attacks on the occupation.”
Throughout its history, the NFDA has generally acted to boost the educational requirements for the licensing of embalmers. The time required for completion of an embalming—or mortuary science—course has crept up by stages from six weeks in 1910 to about two years. At such lofty-sounding institutions as Carl Sandburg College, Malcolm X College, or Vincennes University, one may earn an Associate in Applied Sciences degree.
Or one may get a diploma in funeral service in just forty weeks at the National Education Institute of New England; among the sixteen ten-week courses one must take there are “Issues and Concerns for Modern Professionals,” “Marketing and Merchandising in Funeral Service,” and “Restorative Art.”
But the educational requirements vary from state to state. The qualifications for licensing an embalmer—who is, after all, usually an underling, an employee of the funeral establishment—are generally more stringent than those for the funeral director who employs him. Wyoming has no educational requirements for a funeral director’s license. Six states require only a high school diploma and a year or two of apprenticeship. Just what meaning the term “profession” can have when applied to this calling is hard to conceive.
The NFDA itself sets no educational, moral, or ethical standards for membership. In fact, the only qualifications appear to be the payment of dues and a state license.
A major reason for the existence of most professional organizations is the maintenance of standards of ethical practice among its members, and the disciplining of members who deviate from these standards. Here the NFDA is in some difficulty, because the practices that have led to the severest public criticism—tricky selling methods and overcharging—are nowhere condemned in its official policy pronouncements.
The NFDA, not to be deterred by a little thing like the realities of a situation, in 1961 issued a ringing cry for professional status: “Before this decade is completed, professionalism will be a standard for funeral service.” There was more behind this yearning than just the desire for gentility and recognition. The achievement by undertakers of professional status would, it was hoped, be a convenient way to secure legal sanction for a ban on price advertising, long an objective of the NFDA. Restrictions on advertising by professions as well as by businesses have long since gone by the boards, invalidated by the courts on constitutional grounds. Members of the learned professions, on the other hand, have codes of ethics, at one time enforced by law, which prohibit advertising.
Possibly the vast gap between desire and reality on this question of professionalism—the contradiction between the high-flown talk of Ethical Values and vexatious commercial necessities—accounts in good measure for the painful sensitivity to criticism evidenced by the funeral men. The slightest suggestion of opposition to any part of their operation, the slightest questioning of their sincerity, virtue, and general uprightness, produces howls of anguish and brings them running like so many Brave Little Dutch Boys to plug the holes in the dike.
It is as though generations of music-hall jokes, ribald cartoons, literary bons mots of which the undertaker is the butt had produced a deep-seated persecution complex, sometimes bordering on an industry-wide paranoia. The very titles of their speeches reveal this uneasy state of mind. Topics for addresses at one convention were: “What Are They Doing to Us?” and “You Are Probably Being Talked About Right Now.”
In their relations with the community as a whole, the funeral men carry on a sort of weird shadowboxing, frequently wildly off the mark. There is an old act—possibly originated by W. C. Fields?—in which a bartender is trying to get rid of a bothersome fly. He goes after it with his bar towel, knocking down bottles as he swings; soon the bar is a shambles. Finally the fly settles on his nose and the bartender takes a last swipe, this time with a full bottle, and succeeds in knocking himself out while the fly unconcernedly buzzes off. The funeral industry’s approach to public relations is frequently reminiscent of that bartender.
Enemies seem to lurk everywhere—among competitors, of course, but also among the clergy, the medical profession, the tissue banks, the cemetery people, the press. There is hardly an issue of the many funeral trade publications that does not reflect some aspect of this sense of bitter persecution, of being deeply misunderstood and cruelly maligned.
14. THE NOSY CLERGY
“To the avaricious churchman there must be provided proof that a funeral investment does not deprive either the church or its pastor of revenue.” This extraordinary statement appeared in the
The same idea is expressed a little more fully in another issue of the same magazine: “The minister is perhaps our most serious problem, but the one most easily solved. Most religious leaders avoid interference. There are some, however… who feel that they must protect their parishioners’ financial resources and direct them to a more ‘worthy’ cause. Some of these men, after finding more dimes than dollars in the collection plate, reach the point of frustration where they vent their unholy anger on the supposedly affluent funeral director.”
These are salvos fired in a rather one-sided battle which rages from time to time between some of the clergy and some sections of the funeral industry—one-sided because, while the funeral men are always ready with dukes up to go on the offensive, the average minister is generally unaware that war has been declared.
The issue boils down to this: The morticians resent the intrusion into their business of clergy who take it upon themselves to steer parishioners in the direction of moderation in choice of casket and other matters pertaining to the production of the funeral. Many of the clergy, for their part, deplore what they regard as the growing usurpation of their role as counselors in a time of grief and need, and the growing distortion of what they view as an extremely important, solemn religious rite.