How a 1960s communist exposed the funeral industry’s greed
It’s not clear that much has changed
By the 1960s, the United States had entered the rhythm of postwar life, and consumerism had become a pastime for anyone who could afford to participate. Thanks to a burgeoning middle class, numerous industries enjoyed expanded markets, including that of death. When the average family went to book a funeral, they were provided with options for floral arrangements, caskets, burial plots, and more — all of varying luxury and finesse. It was no accident that the price went up as well.
One woman, a British-born leftist from an aristocratic family, suspected a ruse. She found that funeral directors and undertakers had become adept at advertising and up-selling to the grieved. But a wall of silence around the topic of death protected this booming industry and its methods. In 1963, when Jessica Mitford published her landmark work of investigative journalism, The American Way of Death, all that changed.
Jessica Mitford exposed the particular and often dubious ways the funeral industry had made the average service more expensive. The details remain relevant more than fifty years later. The cost of a modern funeral is still significant, and it’s kept pace with average national income. (In 1963, a funeral would cost about $1,000; average income was then $5,600. In 2015, the average funeral ran for about $10,000 and average salary was just shy of $52,000.) For a family in Mitford’s time, a funeral was likely to be the third largest expense in their lifetime, following only a house and car. This had been made possible, Mitford concluded, because funeral directors had perpetuated “a huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public.”
Jessica was known as the “Red Sheep” of her wealthy Mitford family for being the lone Communist among her siblings. As a leftist, Mitford was perceptive to capitalism’s flaws, but originally the misdeeds of the funeral industry were far from the top of her mind. When approached by her husband about the issue, she wrote: “Why pick on the wretched undertakers? Are we not robbed ten times more by the pharmaceutical industry, the car manufacturers, the landlord?”
But Mitford’s husband, Robert Treuhaft, a lawyer who frequently represented labor unions, wouldn’t let her brush the issue aside. Treuhaft noticed how funeral directors operated with seeming omnipotence when it came to how much sudden cash the bereaved could afford to spare. They would estimate how much the deceased had left and price their services accordingly. Treuhaft suspected the industry of manipulation, deceit, and self-delusion.
Mitford remained uninterested until she began to peruse trade magazines. There she found copy that so highfalutin and inflated by self-importance it would make Don Draper blush. Mitford realized she was looking at an industry that had begun to sell itself as a puffed-up ideal of service — and had begun to profit significantly.
Mitford directed her satirical gaze at the many euphemisms of the funeral industry. She preferred to use the term undertaker to funeral director. She noted the mortuary business’ talent for re-branding — bury became inter, coffins became caskets, morgues became preparation rooms. Funeral directors began to offer clients “memory pictures,” which they created by embalming and making up the deceased. It was but part of a grander, nebulous service they esteemed as “grief therapy.”
Yet the rise of the funeral business had to do with more than revamped language. The factors that allowed this shift, Mitford wrote, includes
The disorientation caused by bereavement, the lack of standards by which to judge the value of the commodity offered by the seller, the need to make an on-the-spot decision, general ignorance of the law as it affects the disposal of the dead, the ready availability of insurance money to finance the transaction.
Writing the book, Mitford discovered the quirks and tricks of the trade. Trade magazines advertised shoes with laces on the back and front to cover the swollen feet of the dead. She found funeral directors worked deliberately to organize their casket showrooms to ensure higher sales. When she posed as a grieving relative to undertakers, many, if not all, mislead her in saying that embalming was mandatory by law (it wasn’t). All at once, Mitford tackled an issue no one had thought much about, made it funny and interesting, and sold copies in numbers far beyond what she or her publisher imagined.
Advance press for The American Way of Death was enthusiastic. As interest mounted, the publisher stepped up the print run. It was not enough: all 20,000 copies sold out the day of release. Soon, Mitford began appearing on radio, television, and in magazines. The funeral business, which was at first nonplussed (no one wants to read about burial and embalming, they thought), began to get worried, and attempted to defame her based on her communist and radical sympathies. Mitford’s press drowned them out.
In the ’90s, Mitford began work on a revisited edition of her landmark work, believing that her message was still relevant. Indeed, many of the conditions that permitted these alarming funeral costs — the need to act quickly, the vulnerability of the grieving customer — are no less common today. If any significant ground has been gained, it has been the result of the increased popularity of cremation. In 1963, only 3% of remains went the way of ash; today, cremation accounts for 43%.
Mitford passed away in 1996, before the updated book saw publication. Her funeral cost her husband a little over $500, an appropriate measure in accordance with her famous crusade. Also fitting was a final practical joke: her friends chipped in to have her casket toured around San Francisco, drawn by six black horses, in a carriage filled with Jessica Mitford memorabilia. She probably would have laughed.
