I thought Laurens might have been an atheist or agnostic only because Americans’ long-standing aversion to cremation was based primarily on their Christian beliefs. Many feared that it was eternally irrevocable and would prevent their corporal resurrection on Judgment Day, and the whole idea of having one’s body cast into flames evoked unsettling thoughts of hellfire. Orthodox Jews deemed the practice sacrilegious and still reject it, as do most Muslims.
European attitudes began to shift during the 1870s, roughly 1,550 years after Rome’s first Christian ruler, Constantine I, had banned cremations throughout the empire. In 1873, Queen Victoria’s personal surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson, was roaming the World Exhibition in Vienna when he came upon a crematorium displayed by an Italian professor of anatomy named Bruno Brunetti. Convinced that corpses emitted “deleterious” gases and leaked infectious fluids into wells and groundwater, Thompson had already been pondering ways to hygienically dispose of human bodies after death, and Brunetti’s brick-encased furnace seemed to offer the perfect solution. Thompson returned to England and wrote a lengthy treatise advocating for the widespread use of crematoriums as a public health measure, and he suggested that there would be an economic bonus, too: Not only would funerals be less expensive, but the ashes could be sold as fertilizer. Thompson’s 1874 essay garnered international attention and helped kick-start the cremationist movement in England and America.
Among those influenced in the States was a Washington, Pennsylvania, philanthropist and doctor named Francis Julius LeMoyne, who shared Thompson’s conviction that rotting corpses caused “the graveyard pollution of air and water.” Wealthy but frugal, LeMoyne believed that funerals and their accompanying expenses (coffins, flowers, undertaker’s fees, et cetera) were becoming unnecessarily extravagant and wasteful, and he was drawn to cremation’s simplicity and cost-effectiveness. So, during the summer and fall of 1876, LeMoyne spent $1,500 of his own money to construct America’s first crematorium. He originally wanted to place the thirty-by-twenty-foot red-brick structure inside Washington’s main graveyard, but town trustees dismissed the idea out of hand, leaving him with no other option but to build it on his personal estate.
An article about LeMoyne caught the attention of Henry Steel Olcott, a well-known Manhattan lawyer and U.S. Army colonel who had served on the commission responsible for investigating Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Raised Presbyterian, Olcott had turned to Eastern faiths in his early forties and found special comfort in the idea that cremation freed one’s soul after death. Olcott didn’t care that LeMoyne’s intentions were based more on health and economical reasons than religious ones. What mattered to him most was that once LeMoyne finished his crematorium he would need a body to burn, and Olcott, as luck would have it, already had one on hand.
Baron Joseph De Palm was over seventy years old and ailing when Olcott first met him in 1875. The two New Yorkers held similar views on religion and became such close friends that De Palm made Olcott executor of his will, which stipulated that his funeral would be organized “in a fashion that would illustrate the Eastern notions of death and immortality” and would culminate in his cremation. De Palm passed away on May 20, 1876, and Olcott had his body injected with arsenic, a short-term preservative, until LeMoyne was ready for him. That took longer than expected, so Olcott brought in a mortician named August Buckhorst to keep De Palm from wasting away. Embalming was a relatively new practice in the States, with no set standards or regulations, and undertakers pretty much winged it. Buckhorst smeared De Palm’s skin and replaced most of his innards with a potter’s clay and carbolic acid mixture that proved surprisingly effective.
Six and a half months after De Palm died, LeMoyne’s crematorium was at long last finished, and on December 5, 1876, Olcott escorted his old friend’s withered but still presentable corpse by train to Washington, Pennsylvania. The next morning, invited guests crammed into the viewing room as Olcott meticulously prepared De Palm for the furnace. First he doused the white sheet around De Palm’s body with water and alum to keep the fabric from instantly burning off and exposing anything that might scandalize the more genteel folks in attendance. Then, to mask the inevitable stench of burning skin, he sprinkled De Palm with spices, flowers, and evergreen sprigs. With the aid of four other men, Olcott and LeMoyne carried De Palm across the room and placed him headfirst into the retort. No eulogies or prayers were offered, but to show their respect the gentlemen did doff their hats.
For all intents and purposes the event went off without a hitch. Olcott and LeMoyne didn’t set the building on fire. Nobody fainted, freaked out, or tried to disrupt the proceedings. And De Palm’s body didn’t explode (as one New York Times correspondent predicted) or end up as a grotesque clump of unevenly cooked flesh, bone, and hair.
Journalists on the scene were, nevertheless, unanimously critical. The kindest dubbed the affair a “disappointment” and “folly,” while the harshest blasted it as a revolting desecration of everything holy, more “pig roast” than civilized ceremony. The story generated ample coverage but had to compete with the news that two hundred Manhattan theatergoers burned to death in a fire that same day. “The greater cremation weakened public interest in the lesser,” Olcott later pouted in his journal.
Henry Laurens’s cremation eighty-four years earlier didn’t exactly prompt a craze of copycats (Laurens was, however, an inspiration to nineteenth-century cremationists), but De Palm’s actually threatened to derail the movement for years. Despite their respectable titles, Dr. LeMoyne, Colonel Olcott, and Baron De Palm were depicted in the press as a bunch of wackos. LeMoyne had already been pegged an “eccentric” and “radical” for his progressive social positions—for example, his belief that women and African Americans deserved the same rights as white men—but he did have his peculiarities. Ironically, the man who espoused cremations on public health grounds wasn’t big on personal hygiene himself. LeMoyne abhorred taking baths and purportedly cleaned his body by gently scraping it with a table knife.
Olcott and De Palm were considered crackpots for their unorthodox spiritual beliefs and because of their association with New York’s Theosophical Society, which Olcott had cofounded to promote interest in paranormal and mystical phenomena, particularly mediumistic communication—that is, conversing with the dead. There’s no word, alas, on whether or not Olcott tried to chat with De Palm in a post-cremation séance.
De Palm remains the most mysterious of the three. He introduced himself as Baron Joseph Henry Louis Charles De Palm, an affluent Austrian-born nobleman. Whatever wealth and status he once enjoyed in Europe, if any, apparently did not survive the journey to America; reporters discovered that he died bankrupt and nearly homeless. Although De Palm’s aristocratic persona was probably nothing more than a harmless exaggeration, it further linked all cremationists, in the eyes of the public, with foreign kooks and practitioners of “black magic.”
More than a year passed before LeMoyne had any other takers. Then, on February 15, 1878, he burned the body of Jane Pitman from Cincinnati, making her the first American woman to be cremated. Another cremation had occurred since De Palm’s, but Lemoyne wasn’t involved. Utah doctor Charles Winslow had been incinerated in a small crematorium hastily erected on a vacant lot in downtown Salt Lake City on July 31, 1877. Builders assembled the temporary structure in a matter of days and tested it by tossing a forty-pound bag of calf meat into the flames. It worked and, with the scent of cooked veal still lingering in the air, Winslow’s corpse went next.
Except for Henry Laurens, the first American to incorporate Christian rituals and readings into his cremation was Dr. Julius LeMoyne himself. Two days after he died from diabetes-related complications on October 14, 1879, LeMoyne became the third individual (out of an eventual forty-two) cremated in his own facility. To those already opposed to cremation, LeMoyne’s more traditional ceremony was undone by his request to have his ashes sprinkled under a rosebush. “The great difficulty [with] this reform,” the Philadelphia
Inquirer editorialized with unabashed elitism after LeMoyne’s death, “has been the impracticable character of those persons who have been foremost in urging its adoption.… They [are] the very last class of men and women who should have been picked out to introduce a reform of any kind among a sober and intelligent people.”
The Inquirer might have been more impressed with Dr. Samuel Gross, cremated on May 8, 1884. The name wasn’t ideal from a publicity standpoint, but Gross was an eminent surgeon and past president of the American Medical Association. That same year the nation’s first public crematorium was built in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and by the end of the century, two dozen were up and running in fifteen states.
Other highly regarded Americans began offering their support, although not always their bodies, to the cause, including Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, Harvard president Charles William Eliot, William Waldorf Astor and Andrew Carnegie (two of America’s richest men), sculptor Daniel Chester French, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the abolitionist minister and literary mentor to Emily Dickinson. Distinguished religious leaders also stepped forward to present a theological defense of cremation, noting that there wasn’t one Bible verse forbidding it and that if being incinerated prevented resurrection, then every Christian martyr who had been burned at the stake was doomed as well. They also pointed out that God, being omnipotent and all, could just as easily reassemble a cremated body as he could a putrid corpse infested with worms and maggots.
Both religious and secular proponents harped on the relative tidiness of cremation compared with nature’s messier and more prolonged process. “Shall [bodily decay] be done in sixty minutes or less, through the influence of, and with all the grandeur, and beauty, and brilliancy, of the cumulative heat of an imprisoned and condensed sunbeam, with harmless and beneficial results,” one cremationist, C. N. Peirce, asked rhetorically, “or shall [a corpse] through a period of fifteen or twenty years moulder in the earth, polluting everything with which it comes in contact[?]”
This line of reasoning also resonated increasingly with Sanitarians, a formidable citizens group whose passion for encouraging public and personal cleanliness bordered on the obsessive-compulsive. These self-described preachers of purity crusaded against spitting in public, launched community-awareness campaigns on the importance of washing oneself with soap and water, and lobbied for better trash-removal services, street sweeping, and improved sewer systems. And nineteenth-century America, to be honest, was in need of a good scrubbing. Horse and human waste streamed down city gutters. Rancid garbage piled up on sidewalks. Slaughterhouse butchers dumped bloody animal carcasses in open lots. And many urban cemeteries were run-down and emitted a revolting stench from improperly interred corpses. Sanitarians became convinced that this foul-smelling miasma, as they called it, harbored diseases and spread epidemics, a position that LeMoyne and his fellow cremationists had pushed for years. (Sanitarians probably would not, however, have allowed the pungent, bathtub-averse LeMoyne into their ranks.)
Frightening the masses with warnings about poisonous graveyard vapors was just one of several scare tactics used by cremationists. In speeches, letters to the editor, and their own publications, The Urn and Modern Crematist, they highlighted the many indignities suffered by those who opted for a regular burial. Stray dogs had been known to dig up and chew off limbs of the newly dead. Body snatchers and resurrectionists prowled cemeteries for fresh cadavers they could sell to medical schools. Ex-slaves, according to one (almost certainly apocryphal) story in The Urn, had chopped up the bones from a white corpse and carved them into gambling dice. Women also had to consider the possibility that their dead bodies might be defiled in unspeakable ways. Perhaps the most fearful specter raised by cremationists was premature burial, and a surprising number of people who chose to be cremated—including Henry Laurens—cited this as their primary reason for doing so.
“Wasn’t Laurens afraid of being buried alive ever since Martha was mistakenly pronounced dead as a child?” I ask Tom.
“Yes,” he says. “That experience haunted him his entire life, so he put it in his will that he had to be cremated.”
The logic of this escapes me. I can appreciate how terrifying it would be to wake up in a casket six feet underground and realize that you’re trapped and about to die a slow and agonizing death, but opting to be roasted as a precautionary measure seems extreme. I can think of any number of less drastic alternatives I’d like to have tried on me first—several hard slaps to the face, smelling salts, a good tickling—before being set on fire. To each his own, I guess.
Cremations in the States surged from 16 in 1884 to 1,996 in 1899, a 1,250 percent increase. This represented a tiny sliver of Americans overall, but it was progress nonetheless. At the turn of the century, prestigious cemeteries such as Mount Auburn in Massachusetts started building columbaria for urns and setting up their own crematoriums.
In 1913 a small band of crematorium operators joined together and founded the Cremation Association of America, further legitimizing the movement, and by the early 1940s, 3.7 percent of the U.S. population was electing to be cremated, up from about 1 percent in 1920. That number held steady for twenty years but then dipped during the 1950s economic boom, as a “bigger is better” mentality prompted Americans to splurge on everything from fin-tailed Cadillacs to lavish burial arrangements. In an age of conspicuous consumption, few people wanted to be packed inside a measly coffee-can-sized urn for eternity when there were polished steel nuclear-bomb-proof coffins with plush satin interiors to be had.
That mind-set began to change in 1963, when Jessica Mitford, a British-born author living in California, published The American Way of Death. Mitford exposed how funeral homes guilted emotionally vulnerable family members into making excessive purchases well beyond their means. Some undertakers were committing outright fraud, charging for a host of services that were wholly unnecessary or never provided, such as “grief counseling.” Mitford also condemned the bereavement business for so overcommercializing death that it had cheapened the mourning process. Simplicity wasn’t just less expensive, she argued, it was more authentic.
Also in 1963, and this was the real watershed moment, Pope Paul VI reversed the Vatican’s ban on cremations. With conditions. Priests could not perform funeral masses for cremated remains (in 1997 this restriction was itself rescinded) or conduct services at crematoriums. Although not exactly a full about-face, the change represented a huge shift that, virtually overnight, made it possible for millions of practicing Catholics in America to choose cremation over a traditional burial.
From the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, when the nation sank into a deep recession and thriftiness prevailed over profligacy, the trend line in cremations popped up dramatically. Today, approximately 40 percent of Americans are cremated. (To put this in a global context, it’s 69 percent in Canada, 72 percent in England, and 99 percent in Japan, the highest among industrialized nations.) The numbers vary widely within the United States; for Hawaii, Alaska, and Arizona, the rate is over 50 percent, while in Alabama and West Virginia it’s closer to 5 percent. The overall percentages are increasing every decade.
As are the number of businesses offering Americans unique and imaginative ways to transform their ashes or “cremains” into something memorable. Along with being pulverized into diamond jewelry by LifeGem, one can be mixed with concrete to create a realistic-looking coral rock and placed undersea by Eternal Reefs, ground up with gunpowder and packed into a shotgun shell by Canuck’s Sportsman’s Memorials, or “baked” inside vinyl plastic and pressed into a set of 33-r.p.m. records by the British company And Vinyly, which will also personalize the albums with whatever music or audio its customers request.
“I hope this isn’t too personal,” I say to Tom, “but have you decided, you know, when the time comes, if you’re going to be buried or—”
“Cremated,” he says. “It’s in my will. I’m dividing up my ashes into thirds, and some will be
placed here and the rest in North Carolina and Teffont Evias, England, where my ancestors are from.”
That’s another advantage of cremation. You can spread yourself around. People have had themselves strewn along hiking trails, scattered in sand traps on their favorite golf course, or spread across the fifty-yard line of their college football field. Ten years ago the ashes of scientist John Kotowski were exploded over San Francisco Bay as part of a fireworks display, and the gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson went a similar route when his ashes were blown out of a cannon near his home in Aspen, Colorado. Another writer, Mark Gruenwald, convinced his colleagues at Marvel Comics to stir his ashes into the ink used for a special printing of Squadron Supreme. Dr. Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor fired for promoting the psychological benefits (in his opinion) of LSD back in the 1970s, had his ashes distributed among family and friends, one of whom worked for a company that launches cremains into space. On April 21, 1997, seven grams of Leary’s ashes, along with bits of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, were placed in a Pegasus rocket and shot into orbit, where they circled the earth for six years before burning up in the atmosphere. Planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker one-upped them all when some of his ashes were sent to the moon aboard NASA’s unmanned Lunar Prospector probe. Sixty-nine years old when he died in a car crash, Shoemaker was a beloved figure in the space community for having helped train the Apollo astronauts. He is, to date, the only person whose remains are on the moon.
A light rain begins to fall, and I tell Tom I’m ready to leave whenever he is. Tom has been the epitome of a southern gentleman, ever since my first phone call to him months ago, and I especially appreciate his time because I’ve sensed from the start that he’s not thrilled I’m concentrating on this narrow aspect of Laurens’s biography. He hasn’t said this outright, but I’m guessing he’d prefer that Laurens be mentioned alongside America’s other Founding Fathers instead of some guys who had their ashes launched from a cannon or blended into comic-book ink.
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 35
