The American Way of Death Revisited

The debate on how to handle the memorial society problem, what action to take, what stance to assume, reflected some basic differences of approach within the undertaking trade. Casket & Sunnyside called repeatedly for united action:

We firmly believe that there is one best way to meet this threat as well as to counter the mushrooming growth of the memorial societies and the actual or threatened religious encroachments on our concept of funeral service. That is through the efforts of a highly skilled public relations firm to conduct an extensive public relations program on a national basis. Thus, purely unselfishly on our part, we have called on all funeral service and trade organizations to join in this common endeavor.

Mortuary Management advised lying low and saying little:

We think a serious mistake has been made in parading around over the nation the figures of NFDA’s economist, Eugene F. Foran. His average adult funeral service charge has been used for the purpose of telling the public that funerals are not too high. It is fine for the funeral director to possess this information for study but it is dangerous to spread it before the public…. Don’t make the mistake of engaging in public arguments with memorial society representatives on television or radio to defend the present day American funeral program. That’s like shooting craps with the other fellow’s dice.

To the extreme annoyance of NFDA officials, the Post article was seized on by insurgents within the industry who had found price advertising and solicitation of prearranged funerals to be profitable. In defiance of NFDA, some of these rushed into print with advertisements substantially agreeing with the Post article, offering “dignified funerals” at low costs and prearrangement programs. “Enemies from within!” cried the NFDA leadership, and a convention speaker, flourishing one of the advertisements, said, “The ad says that prearranging a funeral protects the family against sentimental overspending. Yes, there are funeral directors who go further than the most critical writers when they tell the world through their ads and brochures that the family must be protected against itself during the emotionally difficult funeral period.”

The NFDA’s line was essentially to hold fast, to refuse to have anything to do with the memorial societies, and above all to maintain price levels based on the Foran concept of “overhead per case.” There are others who saw it differently. Mr. Wilber Krieger of National Selected Morticians, while yielding to none in his opposition to the funeral societies, thought that the industry had brought this development on itself by its lack of flexibility in “serving people as they wish to be served” and by its failure to meet a growing demand for prearranged and prefinanced funerals. In an address to the selected ones, he said, “Please don’t go out and start shouting before the world, ‘My cost per funeral is XXX dollars.’ Who cares? More funeral directors do more damage in the public mind by talking all the time about this cost-per-funeral fallacy. Who cares about your costs?… I am greatly disturbed at what I am seeing across the country….”

If the funeral industry was astir over the Post article, no less so were the funeral societies—and particularly the Bay Area Funeral Society. The board members had naturally been pleased that the society was to be the subject of a national magazine article, and had expected there would be some response from readers. But they were completely unprepared for what followed. The headquarters of the society, consisting of a desk and telephone in the building of the Berkeley Consumers Cooperative, was inundated with letters which poured in at the rate of a thousand a week. Volunteer crews were hastily assembled to help with the huge job of answering the letters and processing applications for membership. The editor of The Saturday Evening Post reported an equally astonishing flood of letters to the magazine. He commented, “The article seems to have touched a sensitive nerve.” The three members of the Bay Area Society who were mentioned by name in the Post, Dr. Josiah Bartlett, Professor Griswold Morley, and I, received several hundred letters apiece within the first few weeks; more than a year later, letters were still arriving, sometimes apologetically prefaced, “I only just read ‘Can You Afford to Die?’ in an old copy of the Post at my barber’s….”

Even more surprising than the quantity of letters was their quality. Those who are by the nature of their work on the receiving end of letters from the general public—newspaper editors, radio commentators and the like—have told me that a good percentage of the letter writers are crackpots of some kind, that all too seldom does the solid citizen trouble himself to set down his views on paper. The opposite was true of these letters. In tone, they ran the gamut, some bitter, some funny, some reflective; but they were almost without exception intelligent—in many cases deeply thought out—comments on a subject about which the writers obviously felt most strongly. They were indeed evidence of a widespread public revulsion against modern funerary practices, the extent of which even the funeral society advocates had never fully realized. Another extraordinary thing about the hundreds of letters I received was that only one took the side of the funeral industry. It was full of invective, it bore no name, it was signed simply “An American Funeral Director.” The Bay Area Funeral Society reported but three hostile letters out of the first eleven hundred.

Some of our correspondents had long since taken matters into their own hands. It seems that a variety of ingenious solutions to the problem were being tried. We learned of the “plain coffin” offered by the St. Leo Shop in Newport, Rhode Island: “For those who would not like to be caught dead in a plush-lined coffin, we offer the traditional plain box of pine, cedar or mahogany, with strong rope handles. Covered with cushions, it doubles as a storage chest and low seat, until needed for its ultimate purpose.” And we learned of “the world’s first do-it- yourself tombstone kit” offered by a South African inventor—“selling for a sum that is expected to shock traditional monument makers, whose prices generally start at ten times this figure.”

We learned of two burial committees connected with Friends Meetings, one in Ohio, the other in Burnsville, North Carolina. When a member dies, the committee supplies a plain plywood box, places the body in it, and delivers it by station wagon to the crematory or medical school. The next of kin pays for the cost of the lumber in the box plus crematory charges and obituary notices. There is no charge for the committee’s services, which include making the box. The total expense is generally under $250. The committee arranges for “help with the children or with food, a lift with the housework, hospitality for visiting relatives—a rallying of friends in a quiet coordinated way.” A memorial service is generally held three or four days after death.

In the wake of the Post article, several other publications took up the subject of disposal of the dead, evoking in each instance spirited response from the funeral industry. The Reader’s Digest of August 1961 ran an article, “Let the Dead Teach the Living,” which pointed to a critical shortage of cadavers for anatomical study in medical schools. Said the Reader’s Digest, “Every individual who bequeaths his remains to a medical school makes an important contribution to the advance of human knowledge.”

Medical Economics, a national physicians’ journal, carried a piece describing the participation of doctors in the funeral society movement. A Kentucky pediatrician is quoted as saying, “We should encourage people to use educational, health, or welfare funds as a memorial to the dead rather than throw a lot of money into a barbaric funeral ceremony complete with gussied-up bodies, expensive caskets, parades, and regalia.” Said Mr. Howard C. Raether in a speech delivered to the NFDA convention: “The ultimate of all these programs is to give the entire body to medical science. With no body there is no funeral. If there are no funerals, there are no funeral directors. A word to the wise should be sufficient.” Said the National Funeral Service Journal, “This is a practice that cannot openly be opposed without branding the funeral directors as being indifferent to the health and welfare of mankind…. The loss of a casket sale will create a financial blow in those cases where the body is contributed to a medical school. Fortunately, such cases are infrequent at the present time; unfortunately, they may become more frequent in the future.”

After Words

Now again the funeral folk are gazing hopefully into a clouded crystal ball. By 1996 more bodies, not fewer, were being donated for medical research, leading those in the trade once more to spread untruths. Thomas Lynch, a Michigan undertaker, wrote in The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (Norton, 1997): “The supply of cadavers for medical and dental schools in this land of plenty [has been] shamefully but abundantly provided for by the homeless and helpless, who were, for the most part, more ‘fit’ than Russ.” Russ—after being discouraged from body donation—fit quite nicely in one of Mr. Lynch’s caskets, the author was pleased to report. A quick check with the three medical schools in Michigan indicated that Wayne State and the