The American Way of Death Revisited

by Jessica Mitford

  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 th
e 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 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. Mortuary Management commented on this difficulty: “[The NFDA] has little or no control over who belongs. It has to accept any member of an affiliated state association, and that includes everyone from the desk and telephone curbstoner to the 5,000 case a year corporation.… True, NFDA has a Code of Ethics. But there are no minimum standards for membership.… There is no restriction whatever on the curbstoner.”

  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.

  * This journal later merged with The Casket. The result: Casket & Sunnyside.

  * Sometime after publication, I met Francis Gladstone, a direct descendant of the erstwhile Prime Minister. When I asked him about his illustrious forebear’s comment, he became interested and wrote to scholars of his acquaintance at Oxford. Lengthy correspondence ensued, but no one was able to identify William Gladstone’s alleged statement. In the course of their research, one of th
eir number did come up with the dying words of another Gladstone, Sir Joseph, the father of the Prime Minister, who died in Liverpool, aged eighty-seven. His last words—“Bring me my porridge”—while not earth-shattering, have at least the merit of being historically accurate.

  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 National Funeral Service Journal for April 1961, together with the opinion that the three most important reasons for the mounting rash of criticism of funeral service are “religion, avarice, and a burning desire for social reform.”

  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.