The American Way of Death Revisited
By Jessica Mitford
Virago, 1998
282 pp., $39.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/19893
It's funerals today, something else tomorrow, warned Mortuary Management in 1961 about the perils of reform of the funeral industry from people seeking simple, cheaper alternatives to the expensive funeral service. Capitalist enterprise across the board, continued the industry mouthpiece in alarm, was in danger from communism and its brother-in-arms, atheism, if Aunt Martha's kin were allowed to decline the thousand dollar coffin and go with a cremation or donation of auntie's body to a medical school.
Jessica Mitford, renegade English aristocrat, former Communist Menace and 1960s muck-raking US journalist, published her exposé of the rapacious funeral industry, The American Way of Death, in 1963, setting off the squeals of the funeral industry. Just before her death in 1996, Mitford returned to the antics of the "dismal trade" and updated her book.
Some things hadn't changed. In 1975, Mortuary Management again rushed to sandbag the industry's defences from another pinko threat, the US Federal Trade Commission's mild proposals to bring the industry into line with fair trade principles, which Mortuary Management saw as "Soviet-style" creeping communism forcing its "agnostic, atheistic ways on God-fearing, traditional, family centred America".
One thing, however, had changed in the thirty years since Mitford's book was first published. Funeral prices and the industry's profits had continued to rise as multinational corporations took over "the death care market" (as they euphemised the undertaking business). The Texas-based Service Corporation International (SCI), for example, had conquered strategic market share in the US and Europe and, by 1994, had captured one quarter of all funeral establishments in Australia.
Sure, there were worrying signs about the "softness" in the death rate from improved medical care, but this was compensated for by cold snaps in Europe which led to an increase in "volume" of trade, helping to maintain an exceptional profit margin for SCI of 25% and a $4.3 million salary for the CEO.
It was bad enough for the bereaved 30 years ago, with the small-time price-gouging undertakers, "merchants of a rather grubby order preying on the grief of the vulnerable", fleecing them of their savings and funeral benefits from government or trade union death funds.
With the multinationals sweeping all before them, the average cost of a funeral in the USA had spiralled to $7800 by the mid-'90s, making it the third largest family expenditure after the house and the car. The average price of funerals in Australia increased by 40% after SCI entered the Australian market.
The death of family, relatives or friends poses stressful problems for the bereaved, who are "forced, generally for the first time, to buy a funeral product of which they are totally ignorant, at a moment when they are least in a position to quibble". Emotionally distraught and unable to "shop around", the bereaved are befriended by the nearest funeral director, who exudes sympathy and purrs compassion all the better to sell an expensive coffin, embalming and all manner of additional "services" — flowers, hearses, headstones and urns.
The new corporate giants turn the screws an additional notch with high-powered sales psychology. Swinging quickly into action (as an SCI memo to its employees put it — "you've got to get 'em before the tears are dry"), expensive coffins and "extras" are forced onto customers by playing on their desire to show respect for the dead by not being seen as cheap. It's the fast-funeral McDeath approach — "would you like embalming with that?" and "flowers to go"?
So SCI in Australia keeps the cheap coffin in the background and flogs the Classic Royal "with rose mahogany gloss finish with fine line gold engraving and a fully satin-lined interior" for a mere $1595. The Classic Regal, "with the versatility of Australian native timber", is a steal at $1995, and the Hanover, at $2995, is a must for the discerning.
Of course, the funeral companies don't engage in anything as commercially crass as "selling". They offer "informed buying choices". It's mere coincidence that "enhancing consumer choice" also happens to "enhance" profits.
Threats to the lucrative coffin sales business have been neutralised. Cremation, once "the best hope for a low cost, simple getaway", and long the preferred body disposal option for radicals and reformers after a struggle against church opposition in the 19th century, is now as expensive as the coffin funeral with the cost of "inurnment" matching the cost of "internment".
Embalming has survived all attacks. The weird US custom of displaying the embalmed body for a few days in a suitably expensive open coffin has been a big money-spinner. Mitford's exposé of what happens during embalming, when the cadaver is "in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged" and generally "transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture" is enough to convince anyone to hand their carcass over to a medical school, where some use can be had from the dead body, and with more dignity.
Having a body to embalm, display, bury or burn remains fundamental to the super-profits of the funeral industry. With no body, there is no need for the funeral director or the funeral industry. People wanting economy and simplicity for funerals, or a memorial service without the morbid sentimentality of the deceased's body, or who want their death to benefit the living by donating their body for medical use, or those who want some other rational alternative to the American Way of Death, need Jessica Mitford's book. Her commitment to social justice, her antipathy to the profiteers who inflict the final robbery from people long exploited when alive, and her understanding of the vital importance of jokes, make for a useful and hilarious read.