Death, American Plan

THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FUNERAL DIRECTING (636 pp.)--Robert W. Habenstein & William M. Lamers--Bulfin Printers ($5).

Death on the American Plan is practiced in a temple of make-believe known as the Funeral Home. The shrine is constructed, as often as possible, along the lines of a country club and rectory combined. Outside, there are gracious plantings of evergreens--designed to "create favorable public sentiment." Inside, there is a sumptuous succession of music rooms, chapels, lavatories, storerooms, and, of course, "slumber rooms." The decoration is "subdued but cheerful," which enables many funeral homes, when their business is lagging, to rent space to wedding parties. And here, where the reek of euphemism mingles with the chemical deodorant and the recorded hymn, has been perfected "the new aesthetic of death," a specifically American response to the handwriting on the wall.

If it is true, as Mark Twain once remarked, that a community can be known by the funerals it holds, then The History of American Funeral Directing, by Sociologist Robert W. Habenstein and Historian William M. Lamers, may reveal more about America than many Americans want to know. Though the style of the authors is as dry as Aristotle's ashes, their history of the social, commercial, sanitary, sexual, artistic and religious relations between the living and the dead has a great and gruesome fascination.

Grisly Jollity. Before entering the American slumber room, the authors sketch the millennia of funeral customs that led up to it.

Confronted with the dead body, men have asked themselves at various times: "Shall we lay it in a boat that is set adrift? . . . Shall we expose it to wild animals? Burn it on a pyre? Push it into a pit naked to rot with other bodies? Boil it until the flesh falls off the bones, and throw the flesh away and treasure the bones?" Primitive peoples discovered that, by devouring a dead body, they did not acquire its spirit; with that insight, as myths tell it, the original oneness of spirit and body, heaven and hell, was torn asunder. The ancient Egyptians spent half their lives preparing for the afterlife (some lucky corpses were sent to eternity in a glass shaft carved to represent the phallus of Osiris); at times it seemed as if only the grave robbers, who returned a large percentage of buried wealth to circulation, saved the nation from bankruptcy. The Macedonians did things more simply (Alexander the Great was transported to his burial in honey).

The Christian Middle Ages at first simply and starkly re-enacted Christ's burial. Later, the ceremonials of death became complicated, e.g., many families employed a "sin-eater" who took the dead man's sins upon himself by eating a loaf of bread and drinking a bowl of beer over the corpse. Embalmers, whose craft the book covers in the most intimate detail, advanced steadily (one notable medieval corpse was preserved in olive catsup). It was Leonardo Da Vinci, the father of modern embalming, who developed the method of intravenous injection which was adopted in 17th century England. There were setbacks, of course. One Richard Hull, of Scotland, in accordance with a notion that on Judgment Day the world will be tipped the other way round, had himself buried upside down on his horse.

By the 18th century there had emerged in England a demi-reputable tradition of the "dismal trader," although for a long time the undertaker used to inspire communal shudders (in ancient Rome he was barred from politics). Now he had become "a strong, presentable man with a good suit of black clothes of his own"--and the scene was set for The Great American Funeral.

In the earliest colonial days, funerals were a Saturnalian safety valve. "They were the only class of scenes," wrote Hawthorne, "in which our ancestors were wont to steep their tough old hearts in wine and strong drink and indulge in an outbreak of grisly jollity." When a man died, in-laws and out, friends, neighbors and creditors descended on the sobbing widow, who was expected to welcome them with all kinds of vittles--beef, ham, turkeys, oysters, fruit, cheese and sweets--as well as gallons of the local mulekick. After the corpse had been volleyed to Kingdom Come by the customary funeral fusillade, there was bowsing and bundling sparking and frisking on the green And in addition to the hospitality, the bereaved family was expected to provide mementos, usually rings or gloves (one clergyman, in 32 years of funeral-going received 2,940 pairs of gloves).

Answer to Body Snatchers. As the towns began to grow, the tradesmen began to chase the corpses. Before long advertisements like that of Z. Cotton & Son of Cambridge, N.Y. ("Dentists. Undertakers. Picture Frames a Speciality") were a common sight. Sometimes the commercial combinations had a sinister sound as in the case of one Hollis Chaffin of Providence, R.I., an undertaker who ran an old folks' home on the side.

One of the first things the America undertaker changed was the old "wooden overcoat." In an age when the grave robber and the medical student were supposedly working hand in glove, "safe" coffins, made at first of iron, came in vogue. Soon there were models in zinc, glass terra cotta, papier-mache, hydraulic cement and vulcanized rubber. The coffin torpedo, marketed in 1878, was the final answer to body snatchers--it featured a bomb that was triggered to go off when the coffin lid was lifted. However, the triumph of sepulchral gadgeteering was the "life signal," which offered mechanical surcease for the widespread terror of being accidentally buried alive. In such devices the victim was provided with a bell rope a speaking tube, an air vent or even a ladder.

Gingerbread & Root Beer. When technology had run its gamut, the "aesthetic movement" began. The word "coffin" was suddenly offensive, and undertakers spoke in hushed tones of the "artistic casket." Scrolls proliferated, along with cut glass sculptured silver and Venetian lace. A few years of this and a poet prayed: "Mother dear, when I lie dead / Bury me not in gingerbread!"

The most complex development in the 19th century funeral business came in the treatment of the remains. Probably the first man to practice intravenous embalming in the U.S. was Thomas H. Holmes of New York, a flashy individual who made $400,000 during the Civil War by embalming war dead, lost it all and went to live in Brooklyn, where he manufactured embalming fluid as well as "a tasty root beer." Competitors soon came out with "Crane's Electro-Dynamic Mummifier," "Professor Rhodes' Electric Balm," and a popular fluid known as Utopia." In 1882 the first embalming school offered a three-week course.

In less than a century, the hasty funeral jobber became something like a theatrical producer, and with proper pride he set about rouging away his social stigma He changed his title from "undertaker" "mortician" and later to "funeral director." The "curbstone undertakers" were curbed by their colleagues, and sanitary standards were generally set up before the law got around to it. In some states it now takes three years--two in college and one in a school of "mortuary science''--to get an undertaker's diploma.

The Black Book. The body business, however, is one of the few in the U.S. today that are not booming. Though the U.S. birth rate has been fairly constant since 1900, the death rate has been cut in half. In 1888 an average undertaker could expect to handle almost 100 funerals in twelve months; nowadays, he is lucky to beat 60. Few funeral directors today are so unseemly as to chase an ambulance themselves, but most of them have "personal contacts" in hospitals.

But as regards credit, at least, the business is on sound footing--a fact foreshadowed in the 19th century by a trade practice known as "the black book," which operated to the effect that no undertaker would provide a funeral for a family that still owed another undertaker for another. Today most funeral directors have to write off less than 2% of their income to bad debts.

Turning from the financial to the psychological ledger, the book suggests one conclusion: the funeral ethic of 20th century America makes the most serious attempt in history to blink the ultimate fact. With its primped remains and imitation-grass-carpeted graves, it sets out to pull death's sting and all too often removes its significance, too. In "modern mortuary method," the funeral sermon is frequently nothing more than God's commercial, grooved in, as the authors explain, to "expedite the mourning process," and grief is classified as a "problem of bereavement." Instead of eternal life, the customer is more apt to be promised that in his final resting place he will receive, upon payment into a small sinking fund, "perpetual care."

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