Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (12 page)

Typical of these was a letter from a schoolteacher in Chicago who had worked and sacrificed to provide adequate nursing and some comforts for her father during a terminal illness. When her father died, she refused to purchase the elaborate casket urged on her by the undertaker. She shocked him to his boots by insisting that even the “minimum-priced service” at $695 was too high; that if he would not supply a plain wood coffin for half that sum, as specified in her father’s will, she would take the body elsewhere. This threat worked (as it often does) and the reluctant undertaker complied, but she learned later that he had confided to her relatives that “she must be a little off in the head.”

There was the advertising executive who, while arranging for the funeral of his mother, was called on by the undertaker to choose between two materials for the casket lining. “What’s the difference?” he asked. The undertaker explained that the more expensive material was pure silk and the cheaper was rayon: “We find rayon is a lot more irritating to the skin.”

And then there was the report from a TV crew which recently filmed a program in the establishment of one of the largest and most “reputable” undertakers in California. The owner piously assured them that no hard selling was done in
his
place, the choice was entirely up to the family; in fact, they were encouraged to browse around among the caskets without a salesman even present. The TV men were impressed—until one of the sound crew spotted a hidden microphone in the casket selection room, placed there for the purpose of eavesdropping on the conversation of the bereaved family!

A further application of electronics to modern dying was revealed to me in a letter from a former embalmer. As soon as the undertaker, conferring with the family, ascertains the amount of insurance and other death benefits available, he signals by push button to an assistant in the casket sales room. The assistant’s job is then to rush around changing the discreet little price tags on each casket so that the entire range of prices offered will be raised or lowered to fit the appropriate financial bracket.

Some of these revelations—and the extent and depth of resentment felt by people generally over funeral practices—came as a surprise to me. Not so the reactions of the funeral men, of which I had advance notice.

Long before
The American Way of Death
was published, the funeral industry became aware that it was in progress. Headlines began to appear in the undertakers’ trade journals: “MITFORD DAY DRAWS CLOSER!” “JESSICA MITFORD PLANS ANTI-FUNERAL BOOK,” and, on a more optimistic note, “WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG, BAD BOOK?” On the eve of publication of my book, the
Director
, official organ of the influential National Funeral Directors Association, carried a front-page editorial on the subject, advising the nation’s undertakers to “adapt to the situation calmly, to refuse to panic in either thought or action, remembering that the funeral is a custom long established by common consent.”
Mortuary Management
, an undertakers’ monthly voiced the same idea: “These are the days when you must hold steadfast even though you have every right to lash out against the unprovoked attacks with every weapon at your command.”

Sound advice, perhaps, but not always easy to follow, as subsequent reactions showed. The very next week the
National Funeral Service Journal
was adapting far from calmly—was in fact lashing out with every weapon at its command: “A considerable amount of the current epidemic of funeral service criticism might properly be termed ‘the Mitford syndrome,’ evidences of which are vitriolic, vituperative and wholly unjustified attacks on American funeral customs and the dedicated people whose profession it is to bury the human dead with reverence and respect.” And the bulletin of the Minnesota Funeral Directors Association delivered this bewildering judgment: “The Jessica Mitford book is probably the most damaging book of its kind ever written about the funeral profession. The author’s approach is cunning, sly, at times intelligent, deceptive, often crude, completely biased, and sometimes truthful.”

Mortuary Management
said: “Actually, the danger to the equilibrium of funeral service is not in the book per se. It is in the residual use of Miss Mitford’s material.... Newspapers, large and small, are reviewing the Mitford volume, passing and repassing its poisons among the citizenry.”

The undertakers, long accustomed to operating behind discreetly closed doors, their business methods shrouded in secrecy, have traditionally done their best to avoid the spotlight. The focus of their fear is that the “citizenry” will become informed of facts hitherto concealed, facts about the repulsive and unnecessary procedure of embalming, the part this plays in “building up the sale,” and, above all, facts about pricing of funerals. The undertakers are no doubt aware that public ignorance of these matters has long been the major factor in inducing the American public to accept the industry’s funerary offerings without argument. They also know that the more people learn about these things, the greater the danger that they will seek some alternative and that the rebellion will spread.

My book describes a funeral reform movement, the funeral and memorial societies, first brought to national attention by the
Saturday Evening Post
two years ago in Roul Tunley’s article “Can You Afford to Die?” These groups, led for the most part by the clergy, are organizing to guarantee freedom of choice in funerary matters. They help those who prefer simplicity to obtain dignified, inexpensive funerals—a return to the plain wood coffin at a reasonable price, usually between $100 and $200. Emphasis is on the spiritual aspects of death rather than on the beautified corpse in open casket. A memorial service honoring the memory of the deceased, and conducted by a clergyman of his faith, is generally held
after
burial or cremation—without benefit of the ubiquitous offices of the “Funeral Director.”

An example of what one such society has accomplished for its members may explain the terror in the ranks of undertakers. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the minimum-priced funeral package (casket and undertaker’s “services,” including embalming and maquillage) offered in the great majority of establishments is in the range of $450 to $500. This, which covers
only
the undertaker’s charges and does not include grave or burial vault, would be the rock-bottom price for the average individual—unless he could prove he was a charity case. The secretary of the Bay Area Funeral Society tells me that in the past year—June, 1962, to June, 1963—there were 250 funerals of Society members whose families had contracted for the simple funeral costing around $150. He estimates that each of these families saved
at least
$300, for an aggregate saving to the families of $75,000.

While the 250 funerals arranged for the Society members represent only a tiny fraction—a little over 1 percent—of the total deaths in the area, they are nevertheless regarded by the undertaker as a dread portent for the future. He is aware, too, that the influence exerted by the societies on funeral costs and customs extends far beyond the actual membership.

The methods by which the undertakers propose to silence criticism and hang on to their enormously lucrative traffic in the artifacts of death were blueprinted early this year by Mr. Frederick Llewellyn, Executive Vice-President of Forest Lawn Memorial Park. In a series of articles written for the
American Funeral Director
entitled, “Are Funeral Customs Going the Way of the Buggy Whip?” Mr. Llewellyn sets forth for his colleagues the major arguments to be used:

There is a great tide sweeping over America today, washing away at the foundations of decent memorialization.... If the Communists can help undermine one of the most fundamental of religious rites, the way in which we care for our dead; if they can get more and more people asking, not “Is it right?” but “Is it practical?” they can undermine religion and along with it the laws of the land. Then, as Mr. Khrushchev said, “America will fall like a ripe plum!”

Elsewhere in the series he quotes the famous Khrushchev remark “We’ll bury you!”—perhaps fearing that Khrushchev was actually intending to move in and give Forest Lawn competition in this respect.

The lesson was further driven home by Mr. Wilber Krieger, Managing Director of National Selected Morticians, who states in his press release about my book:

A determined effort is being made today to strip the American funeral of all of its religious significance by the memorial society movement and substitute the funeral service, as we now know it in this country, with that practiced in communistic countries such as the Soviet Union.

The latest in this particular vein to come to my attention is an advertisement in an Oakland newspaper sponsored by the “Renowned Abbey Memorial Gardens” of Vallejo. A well-dressed father is pictured talking to his well-dressed little boy: the heads of both are bowed in sorrow. “My dear son,” the father is saying. “I am so sorry you are going to have to live under Communism. It seemed to come so quickly. I didn’t think their lies could win....” Follows the punch line: “No nation has ever turned to Communism, Socialism or Fascism until the leaders have first been able to destroy MEMORIALIZATION. The dignity of man, the freedom of life and the worship of God—these principles on which our nation was founded—throughout all ages and in all lands have never been any greater than the MEMORIALIZATION shown in death. Many so-called ‘memorial societies’ are trying to destroy this MEMORIALIZATION....”

Beyond these orbital flights of rhetoric, attempts on the part of industry leaders to refute the facts set forth in my book have been rather vague and obscure. For example, I estimate that the funerals of adults who died in 1961 cost an average of $1,450—including everything, undertaker’s charges, burial vault, grave, marker, and so on. Howard C. Raether, Executive Secretary of the National Funeral Directors Association, says he thinks this estimate is high, but he does not attempt to supply one of his own; he says, “It is difficult if not impossible to estimate an average funeral, taking all expenses into consideration.”

Discussing the memorial service of the type advocated by the funeral societies, held after the funeral with the body not present, he quotes a clergyman as saying: “It sets up a psychological detour around the reality of what has happened by encouraging a refusal to view the remains.... A memorial service does not furnish the surroundings that make it easy to express deep feelings, nor does it furnish the opportunity to give group support to the bereaved.” This peculiar statement is not explained further. We are not told why a memorial service, which is generally held in a church or a home and is attended by friends and family of the deceased, fails to “furnish the surroundings that make it easy to express deep feelings,” nor in what way it fails “to give group support to the bereaved.”

Mr. Krieger of National Selected Morticians gets more specific. In refutation of my charge that in most communities it is impossible for the average person to buy a funeral for less than a fixed minimum of several hundred dollars, he says: “Families faced with the responsibility of arranging funeral services will find that every established and reputable funeral director can offer them a wide range of prices covering their services and the necessary merchandise beginning less than $200.” This is the same Mr. Krieger who a few months before said in a speech to the members of his organization: “I am greatly disturbed at what I am seeing across the country. Where many funeral directors today are showing a minimum over $600, that is not defensible.”

Is there such a thing as manipulation of the bereaved family to induce them to spend more than they might have intended? Of course not, says Mr. Krieger: “No reputable funeral director would attempt to influence the survivors on such a personal matter, or take advantage of their emotional state at such a time. It would be unthinkable.” This is the same Mr. Krieger who developed an elaborate and clever scheme of casket arrangement in the Selection Room (where the customer is taken to make his purchase) designed to extract the maximum amount of cash from each sale. According to Mr. Krieger’s plan, the higher-priced caskets should be placed in a nice, roomy part of the Selection Room which he calls the “Avenue of Approach” leading off to the
right
(because, he says, most people are right-handed and if lost they tend to turn to the right). The cheaper units can be crowded together off to the
left
in an aisle he calls “Resistance Lane.” He warns his colleagues against displaying a “heavy concentration of units under $300, which makes it very easy for the client to buy in this area with complete satisfaction.”

Unfortunately for the undertakers, it would seem that there is little popular support for the theory that a “fine funeral” is America’s first line of defense and the highest expression of patriotism. “We should welcome a heavy concentration of units under three hundred dollars,” the funeral customers seem to be saying. “We should even prefer to decide for ourselves whether we want to be transformed by the embalmer’s art into Beautiful Memory Pictures, decked out for public exhibition in trappings we couldn’t afford in life, or whether we should prefer to return quietly to dust after the fashion of our forefathers.”

It may be that the emerging consumers’ revolt against the Dismal Trade will restore meaning to the traditional (and poignant) epitaph, “Rest in Peace.”

MY WAY OF LIFE SINCE THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH

NOVA /
1964

In England, the name Mitford is no doubt associated in most people’s minds with my sister Nancy’s novels and biographies. In America, like it or not (and I am not sure all the Mitfords
will
like it), our name has suddenly become synonymous with cheap funerals.

By way of illustration: At a New York cocktail party a woman related her conversation with the undertaker who was arranging her aunt’s funeral. She said to him, “We want the plainest and least expensive funeral available,” whereupon he replied, “Oh, you mean the Mitford style?” A Midwestern manufacturer sent me plans and specifications for a simple, low-cost coffin—which he proposes to market as the “Jessica Mitford Casket.” A total stranger came up to me in a dress shop and with knowing wink asked, “Are you shopping for a shroud?”