The American Way of Death Revisited Read Free

There, tucked between Plato and Sir Thomas Browne, was the very description of embalming upon which my book had almost foundered. Furthermore, as of this writing, some fifty textbook editors in the past four years alone have chosen this selfsame passage for inclusion in their anthologies. Is there a moral here for the neophyte writer in his dealing with editors?
    For me, most rewarding of all was the response of the funeral industry. The trade journals reacted with furious invective, devoting reams on how to combat “the Mitford syndrome,” as one put it.
Mortuary Management
was of the opinion that “actually, the danger to the equilibrium of funeral service is not in the book per se. It is inthe residual use of Miss Mitford’s material.… Newspapers, large and small, are reviewing the Mitford volume, passing and repassing its poisons among the citizenry,” which I thought was a good point.
    Month after month, the funeral mags fulminated against “the Mitford bomb,” “the Mitford war dance,” “the Mitford missile,” “the Mitford blast,” and “the Mitford fury.” They condemned the movement for cheaper, simpler funerals as a Red plot, and found an ally in Congressman James B. Utt of Santa Ana, California. He read a two-page statement about my subversive background into the
Congressional Record
. As for the purpose of my book, “she is really striking another blow at the Christian religion. Her tirade against morticians is simply the vehicle to carry her anti-Christ attack.…” His statement ended with the ringing words, “I would rather place my mortal remains, alive or dead, in the hands of any American mortician than to set foot on the soil of any Communist nation.” (In 1970 Mr. Utt exercised that option. His obituary in the
New York Times
, with subhead “Attacked Mitford Book,” records that during his ten terms in Congress “his most newsworthy action came when he called Jessica Mitford a ‘pro-communist anti-American.’ ”) The Utt utterance had backfired when the
New York Times
ran an editorial captioned “How Not to Read a Book.” The
Times
derided Utt’s “McCarthyite attack” and noted that the book had “evoked high praise from Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergymen, as well as from reviewers and other commentators in all parts of the country,” and declared that Utt’s “credentials as a book critic can safely be dismissed as nil.”
    Nor was the subject neglected abroad. German television asked me to go on camera in a documentary they wanted to produce. “But I don’t speak German.” “No matter, we will send a text for you to study.” They sent a camera crew as well, and so it was that I found myself reciting,
“Ein teures Begräbnis
[a costly funeral]
ist ein status symbol, wie ein luxus Auto, ein schwimming pool im Garten, oder ein weekend in Miami Beach für hundert Thaler pro Tag.”
    Enjoyable though it is to look back nostalgically at the immediate aftermath of publication of
The American Way of Death
, the basic question remains: Did it result in any fundamental improvements, any alleviation of the lot of the funeral purchaser? For a while, the answer seemed to be a qualified “Yes.” In 1977, fourteen years after
The American Way of Death
was published, I did further research on the funeral scene for an afterword entitled “Post Mortem” to a new paperback edition. Although the average cost, nationwide, of a funeral exclusive of burial plot had risen from $750 in 1963 to $1,650, in 1977, two major developments offered some hope for those who preferred a less cluttered and expensive send-off. The Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Protection Bureau had promulgated a “trade rule” which promised to go far to protect the unwary funeral buyer in his dealings with undertakers. Cremation had almost doubled in thirteen years; seeing the potential profitability in this trend, an enterprising businessman founded the Neptune Society, a for-profit