The American Way of Death Revisited (22 page)
Read The American Way of Death Revisited Online
Authors: Jessica Mitford
Did the presidential aides feel that one had been put over on them, albeit discreetly? We do not know.
In one important respect, Mr. Roosevelt’s instructions were observed: there was no lying in state. Mrs. Roosevelt felt sure that he would not have wished it. She said, “We have talked often, when there had been a funeral at the Capitol in which a man had lain in state and the crowds had gone by the open coffin, of how much we disliked the practice; and we had made up our minds that we would never allow it.”
Failure to carry out certain of his other instructions can only be laid to the unlucky circumstance that they were found too late. It is, however, interesting to compare President Roosevelt’s words with accounts given by participants in the funeral:
MR. ROOSEVELT
: That the body be not embalmed.
MR. FRED PATTERSON
: All three assistants worked incessantly five hours to give the President the proper appearance, and to be certain of proper preservation.… We had a difficult case, did our best and believe that we pleased everyone in every
respect.… Saturday morning Mr. William Gawler (a Washington undertaker) phoned me stating that the tissues were firm, complexion was fine and those who saw him remarked, “He looks like his old self again and much younger.”
MR. ROOSEVELT
: That the body be not … hermetically sealed.
MR. WILLIAM GAWLER
: The casket was closed and the inner top bolted down at 8:30 p.m. Saturday night. The outer top was sealed with cement.
MR. ROOSEVELT
: That the grave be not lined with brick, cement, or stones.
MR. JAMES ROOSEVELT
: The casket was placed in a cement vault.
MR. ROOSEVELT
: That a gun-carriage and not a hearse be used throughout.
MR. PATTERSON
: As the caisson did not arrive at the last minute the casket was taken in our Sayers and Scoville Cadillac hearse.
In November 1963, three months after the first edition of this book was published, it became once more the unhappy task of presidential aides to supervise the obsequies of a president. Two writers give particulars of negotiations with undertakers in Dallas and Washington over arrangements for John F. Kennedy’s funeral.
In
Robert Kennedy and His Times
(Houghton Mifflin, 1978), Arthur Schlesinger describes RFK’s arrival at Bethesda Hospital:
There were so many details. The funeral home wanted to know how grand the coffin should be. “I was influenced by … that girl’s book on (burial) expenses … Jessica Mitford (
The American Way of Death
).… I remember making the decision based on Jessica Mitford’s book.… I remember thinking about it afterward, about whether I was cheap or what I was, and I remembered thinking about how difficult it must be for everybody making that kind of decision.”
While Yours Truly was, needless to say, most gratified to learn that her message had been absorbed in high places, further exploration
reveals that—much as in the case of FDR’s funeral—the best-laid schemes of Robert Kennedy and his assistants went agley. The undertakers prevailed after all.
William Manchester in
The Death of a President
(Harper & Row, 1967) goes into far greater detail when discussing this situation. Of the Dallas undertaker who supplied the coffin in which JFK’s body was transported to Washington, he writes:
Vernon B. Oneal of Oak Lawn funeral home is an interesting figure in the story of John Kennedy. Squat, hairy and professionally doleful, with a thick Texas accent and gray hair parted precisely in the middle and slicked back, he was the proprietor of an establishment which might have been invented by Waugh or Huxley. It had a wall-to-wall carpeted Slumber Room. There was piped religious music, and a coffee bar for hungry relatives of loved ones.… (p. 291)
Instructed by a member of JFK’s entourage to bring a coffin to Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital, Oneal ran into his selection room and
chose his most expensive coffin, the Elgin Casket Company’s “Britannia” model, eight hundred pounds of double-walled, hermetically sealed solid bronze.
The scene now shifts to Washington. Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh told Robert Kennedy that the solid bronze casket had been badly damaged in transit: “It’s really shabby. One handle is off, and the ornaments are in bad shape.” RFK decided that “he could scarcely permit a state funeral to proceed with a battered casket.” Four aides were dispatched to Gawler’s, the selfsame old, established Washington firm that had supervised President Roosevelt’s funeral. They reported their findings to RFK.
Manchester’s description of the casket-price negotiations roughly parallels Schlesinger’s, but with elaboration:
Robert Kennedy had read Miss Mitford’s carefully documented exposé of the gouging of bereaved relatives, and so had
Dr. Joseph English, the Peace Corps psychiatrist who stood at Sargent Shriver’s elbow Friday afternoon. Robert Kennedy … believes he spoke to O’Donnell … (special assistant to the President) about price … and he has a clear memory of a girl who told him … “You can get one for $500, one for $1,400, or one for $2,000.” She went on about water-proofing and optional equipment. Influenced by the Mitford book, he shied away from the high figure. He asked for the $1,400 coffin, and afterward he wondered whether he had been cheap; he thought how difficult such choices must be for everyone.… (p. 432)
This, as Manchester points out, was already almost twice the average bill for “casket and services” only two years earlier … $708 in 1961. But there was worse to come, as he discovered on further investigation.
In the end, Gawler put one over on the White House staff members. He sold them a “Marsellus No. 710, constructed of hand-rubbed, five-hundred-year-old solid African mahogany,” for which he charged $2,400. He then slipped in the most expensive vault in the establishment, for a total bill, rendered and paid, of $3,160.
And what about Oneal? His bill to the Kennedy family was finally settled, after some haggling over “services rendered”—spotted by a sharp-eyed CPA—for $3,495. Thus, despite Robert Kennedy’s laudable efforts to avoid a price-gouging, he was outmaneuvered; the family ended up paying a total of $6,655 into the coffers of undertakers.
His curiosity piqued by these nefarious transactions, Manchester pursued the subject further, visiting Vernon Oneal in his Dallas establishment:
Actually, as he conceded to this writer, he was hoping for a return of the coffin. He made two trips to Washington in the hope of retrieving it. Word of this reached the right quarters, and to avoid an exhibition he was paid. The wholesale prices of coffins are a closely guarded trade secret, but at the request of the author a licensed funeral director and a cemetery manager made discreet inquiries at the Elgin Casket Company
about its Britannia model. Both were quoted an identical figure: $1,150. Thus Oneal’s fee represents a markup of $2,345.
Lastly, William Manchester records some reactions to the embalmer’s art as practiced by Gawler’s:
Arthur Schlesinger and Nancy Tuckerman went in through the Green Room. “It was appalling,” Arthur reported. “When I came closer it looked less and less like him. It is too waxen, too made-up.” Nancy echoed faintly that the face resembled “the rubber masks stores sell as novelties.” He urged Bob to “close the casket.” … Walton [William Walton, artist, friend of Kennedy’s] looked as long as he could, with a growing sense of outrage. He said to Bob, “You mustn’t keep it open. It has no resemblance to the President. It’s a wax dummy.”
And closed the coffin did remain. UPI commented as follows:
When Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy decided that President Kennedy’s casket would remain closed while his body lay in state, she acted as many religious leaders wish that all bereaved families would.… They feel that it is pagan rather than Christian to focus attention on the corpse. It is worth noting that in other particulars as well, the conduct of the Kennedy funeral represented a departure from the prevailing funerary practices fostered by the American death industries. There were no flowers, by request of the Kennedy family. At no point did a Cadillac hearse intrude; the coffin, covered by a flag, was transported by gun carriage.
*
Today such a funeral would cost $8,000 or more. Bronze sealers begin at $4,000 and run up to $25,000 for the heavier gauges.
Fashions in Funerals
Disposal of the dead falls rather into a class with fashions, than with either customs or folkways on the one hand, or institutions on the other
…
. [S]ocial practices of disposing of the dead are of a kind with fashion of dress, luxury and etiquette
.
—A. L. KROEBER
, “Disposal of the Dead,”
American Anthropologist
, July-September 1927
O
ne of the interesting things about burial practices is that they provide many a clue to the customs and society of the living. The very word “antiquarian” conjures up the picture of a mild-eyed historian groping about amidst old tombstones, copying down epitaphs with their folksy inscriptions and irregular spelling, extrapolating from these a picture of the quaint people and homey ways of yore. There is unconscious wit: the widow’s epitaph to her husband, “Rest in peace—until we meet again.” There is gay inventiveness:
Here lie I, Master Elginbrod
.
Have mercy on my soul, O God
,
As I would have if I were God
And thou wert Master Elginbrod
.
There is pathos: “I will awake, O Christ, when thou callest me, but let me sleep awhile—for I am very weary.” And bathos: “ ’Tis but the casket that lies here; the gem that fills it sparkles yet.”
For the study of prehistory, archaeologists rely heavily on what they can find in and around tombs, graves, monuments; and from the tools, jewels, household articles, symbols found with the dead, they
reconstruct whole civilizations, infer entire systems of religious and ethical beliefs.
Inevitably, some go-ahead team of thirtieth-century archaeologists will labor to reconstruct our present-day level of civilization from a study of our burial practices. It is depressing to think of them digging and poking about in our new crop of Forest Lawns, the shouts of discovery as they come upon the mass-produced granite horrors, the repetitive flat bronze markers (the legends, like greeting cards and singing telegrams, chosen from an approved list maintained at the cemetery office), and, under the ground, the stamped-out metal casket shells resembling nothing so much as those bronzed and silvered souvenirs for sale at airport gift shops. Prying further, they would find reposing in each of these on a comfortable mattress of innerspring or foam-rubber construction a standardized, rouged, or suntanned specimen of Homo sapiens, USA, attired in business suit or flowing negligee according to sex. Our archaeologists would puzzle exceedingly over the inner meaning of the tenement mausoleums with their six or seven tiers of adjoining crypt spaces. Were the tenants of these, they might wonder, engaged in some ritual act of contemplation, surprised by sudden disaster? Busily scribbling notes, they would describe the companion his-and-her vaults for husband and wife, and the approved inscription on these:
TOGETHER FOREVER
. For purposes of comparison they might recall the words of Andrew Marvell, a poet from an earlier culture, who thus addressed his coy mistress:
The grave’s a fine and private place
,
But none, I think, do there embrace
.
They might rashly conclude that twentieth-century America was a nation of abjectly imitative conformists, devoted to machine-made gadgetry and mass-produced art of a debased quality; that its dominant theology was a weird mixture of primitive superstitions and superficial attitudes towards death, overlaid with a distinct tendency towards necrophilism.
Where did our burial practices come from? There is little scholarship on the subject. Thousands of books have been written describing, cataloguing, theorizing about the funeral procedures of ancient
and modern peoples from the Aztecs to the Zulus; but about contemporary American burial practices almost nothing has been written.
The National Funeral Directors Association, aware of this omission and anxious to correct it, commissioned two writers, Robert W. Habenstein and William M. Lamers, to explore the subject and to come up with some answers. The resulting studies,
The History of American Funeral Directing
and
Funeral Customs the World Over
, bear the imprint of the National Funeral Directors Association and were the subject of a continuing promotion campaign by that organization: “Buy one for each clergyman in your community!” “Place them in your libraries!” are the slogans. The campaign has had some success. In fact, in most libraries these volumes sponsored by the undertaking trade are the only ones to be found on the subject of the American funeral.
The official historians of American undertaking describe the origin of our burial practices as follows: “As a result of a long, slow development, with its roots deep in the history of Western civilization, it is the common American mind today that the dead merit professional funeral services from a lay occupational group. These services include embalming, the preparation of the body for final viewing, a waiting period between death and disposition, the use for everyone of a casket that is attractive and protects the remains, a dignified and ceremonious service with consideration for the feelings of the bereaved, and an expression of the individual and group beliefs.…” Elsewhere they assert: “The roots of American funeral behavior extend back in a direct line several thousand years to early Judaeo-Christian beliefs as to the nature of God, man and the hereafter.… Despite the antiquity of these roots their importance as regards the treatment of the dead in the world that commonly calls itself Christian today cannot be overemphasized.”
In two misinformation-packed paragraphs, we are assured not only that American funerals are based on hallowed custom and tradition, but that they conform to long-held religious doctrine. There is more than a hint of warning in these words for the would-be funeral reformer; he who would be bold enough to make light of or tamper with the fundamental beliefs and ancient traditions of a society in so sensitive an area as behavior towards its dead had better think twice.
