The American Way of Death Revisited

Assemblyman Clayton A. Dills, must have been cause for much rejoicing and self-congratulation in funeral circles. What a relief to read, after the months of nagging uncertainty, “The funeral industry of California is unusually well organized for the public interest…. Criticisms of retail prices overlook the high operating costs, many of which are mandatory under the public health laws, while others are required under social and religious custom and the stress of emotion…. It is the considered opinion of the committee that no further legislative action is needed in this matter.”

The report has a strangely familiar ring to anybody versed in the thought processes and literary style of funeral directors. There are phrases that could have come directly out of the proceedings of a National Funeral Directors Association convention: “Embalming is first and foremost an essential public health measure. A concomitant function, which developed with the evolution of embalming and funeral directing as a distinct vocation, is to restore the features of the deceased to a serene and natural appearance. Both functions demand a high degree of professional skill based on specialized education and training.” There is mention of the “evolution of the funeral director as a part of the American way of life”; there is praise for the funeral home with its “special features planned and furnished to provide facilities and conveniences to serve the living and reverently prepare the dead for burial.” The Association of Better Business Bureaus pamphlet Facts Every Family Should Know (itself based on material furnished by the NFDA) is reproduced in its entirety as part of the report.

Was this report really written by a subcommittee of the California State Assembly? Apparently not. A more plausible explanation of how it came to be written is contained in a letter that came into my possession. The letter—dated July 24, 1953—is from J. Wilfred Corr, then executive secretary of the California Funeral Directors Association, and is addressed to Mr. Wilber M. Krieger, head of National Selected Morticians:

Dear Mr. Krieger,

Thank you for your letter dated July 21 congratulating us on the Dills Committee Report and requesting 12 copies. The 12 copies of the report will be mailed to you under separate cover.

I want to correct a possible wrong impression as indicated in the first sentence of your letter. You congratulated us on “the very fine report that you have prepared and presented to the Dills Committee.” Although this may be one hundred percent correct, it should be presumed that this is a report of and by the Dills Committee, perhaps with some assistance.

Actually Warwick Carpenter and Don Welch wrote the

report. I engineered the acceptance of the report by Dills and the actual filing of the report, which was interesting. One member of the committee actually read the report. He was the Assemblyman from Glendale, and Forest Lawn naturally wanted the report filed. He approved the report and his approval was acceptable to the others.

Sometime when we are in personal conversation, I would like to tell you more about the actual engineering of this affair. In the meantime, as you realize, the mechanics of this accomplishment should be kept confidential.

Cordially yours,

J. Wilfred Corr

Mr. J. Wilfred Corr later became the executive director of the American Institute of Funeral Directors. He contributed occasional articles to Mortuary Management in which he made ringing appeals for ever-higher ethical standards for funeral directors: “Perhaps we will live to see the triumph of ethical practices, born of American competition, fair dealing and common honesty.” Mr. Donald Welch was one of California’s most prosperous undertakers and the owner of a number of Southern California mortuaries. Mr. Warwick Carpenter was a market analyst who prepared the statistics on funeral costs used in the legislative committee report. According to Mortuary Management, the statistics were originally developed by Mr. Carpenter for Mr. Welch, “to illustrate an address he made before a national convention of funeral directors.” Mortuary Management opines that Mr. Carpenter “performed a very helpful service to funeral directors in California now under investigation.” The assemblyman from Glendale who actually read the report was the Honorable H. Allen Smith, who went on to Congress.

The report itself was liberally circulated by the undertakers, who rather naturally saw it as a first-rate public relations aid.

The ten years following the Collier’s article were relatively tranquil ones for the funeral industry, at least so far as the press was a matter of concern to it. Mr. Merle Welsh, at the time president of the National Funeral Directors Association, was able to report to the 1959 convention: “By our constant vigil there is a lessening of the derogatory and sensational in written matter. Several articles of which we have been apprised have either not been written or were watered down versions of that which they were originally intended.”

A year later, Casket & Sunnyside made the same point: “For many years only a very few derogatory articles about funeral service have been printed in national publications…. Many times the information that an author is planning such an article is leaked to a state association officer or to NFDA, so that the proper and accurate information may be given such writer without his asking for it. In practically all such instances, such proposed articles either never appear or appear without their ‘sensational expose,’ entirely different articles than were at first planned.”

The funeral men were far from easy in their minds, however, for a new peril was appearing on the horizon. Said Mr. Welsh, “I could speak for hours on the problems and rumors of problems besetting funeral service as a result of the times…. There are memorial societies and church groups trying to reform funeral practices. There are promoters telling funeral directors to take on a plan or plans or else. There are writers who would like to reduce the American funeral program to a $150 disposal plan…. While it is true we have patches of blue in our sky through which shines the light of professionality, there are also dark clouds involving crusades, promotions, unjustifiable attacks and designs to replace the American funeral program of to each his own with a $150 disposal plan.”

There is a semifictional character, who often crops up in lawyers’ talk, known as the “man of ordinary prudence.” He is a person of common sense, able to look at transactions with a normal degree of sophistication, to put a reasonable interpretation on evidence, to apply rational standards to all sorts of situations. He has, down the ages, often given the undertakers trouble; but never, it would seem, so much trouble as he is giving them in America today. He is, in fact, their worst enemy.

It is he who grins out at the funeral men from the pages of magazines, frowns at them from the probate bench, speaks harshly of them from the pulpit or from the autopsy room. It is he who writes nasty letters to the newspapers about them, and derides them in private conversation. The burden of his criticism has changed little over the years. He thinks showy funerals are in bad taste and are a waste of money. He thinks some undertakers take advantage of the grief-stricken for financial gain. He thinks the poor and uneducated are especially vulnerable to this form of exploitation when a member of the family dies. Lately, he has begun to think that there are important uses to which a dead body could be put for the benefit of the living—medical research, eye banks, tissue banks, and the like. More significant, he is taking some practical measures to provide a rational alternative to the American way of death. Over the years, funeral societies (or memorial associations) have been established in the United States and Canada, devoted to the principle of “simple, dignified funerals at a reasonable cost.”

This is, from the undertaker’s point of view, a particularly vile form of sedition. the National Funeral Service Journal (April 1961) denounced funeral society advocates as “the burial beatniks of contemporary America… far more dangerous than the average funeral director realizes, for they are fanatics; they are the paraders for human rights, the picketers of meetings and institutions that displease them, the shouters and hecklers and demonstrators for any number of causes.” Whether the mild-mannered clergymen, professors, and social workers who form the backbone of the funeral societies would recognize themselves in this word picture is uncertain, but it is a fairly typical funeral trade reaction to any suggested deviation from their established procedures.

The funeral society people were not the first critics of American funeral practices, nor are they indeed the harshest; they were merely the first to think in terms of an organization through which an alternative to the “standard funeral” might be made available to the public. It is the organizational aspect that terrifies the undertakers, and that gives rise to purple passages in the trade press: