The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [46]
The cemeteries fight back by making things as rough as possible for both vault and monument companies. They may charge an arbitrary toll for use of their roads in connection with vault installations. They may require that all vaults be installed by cemetery personnel. They won’t permit monument makers to install the foundations for their Smiling Christs, Rocks of Ages, and other Items of Dignity, Strength, and Lasting Beauty; instead, they insist that these be installed by the cemetery, which sets a stiff fee for the service.
The backstage squabbling among the various branches of the funeral business has long been a matter of concern to some of the more farsighted industry leaders, who are understandably fearful that the customer will eventually catch on.
These leaders believe that, rather than engage in such unseemly quarrels over the customer’s dollar, they should instead concertedly strive to upgrade the standard of dying. A cemetery spokesman, decrying the friction between cemetery and undertaker, writes:
How simple it is to sell a product or an idea if we but believe in it. If we have the opportunity to foster the sentiment behind the funeral service, we must not fail to do so. Strengthen the idea behind the funeral customs, committals and the like. The family will receive additional mental satisfaction and comfort when the service is complete and in keeping with the deceased’s station in life; and from a strictly mercenary angle, it will pay big dividends in establishing the thought of perpetuity and memorialization in the mind of the family.
He acknowledges the funeral director’s pioneering role in conditioning the market:
Without question, the tremendous advancement in funeral customs in America must be credited to the funeral director and not to the demands of the public, not even ourselves. He has carried on assiduously an educational campaign which has resulted indirectly in a public desire for funeral sentiment and memorialization.
The lesson to be learned, then, is to promote harmony backstage for a smooth and profitable public performance. Another cemetery writer, reproving his fellow cemetery operators for their jealousy of “the success and dollar income of the funeral directors,” suggests one good way in which the cemetery men can effect a rapprochement with these rivals: “Have a yearly meeting with them. Feed them a good dinner, distribute a small token. Last year, we gave them all a set of cuff links made of granite from our mausoleum. Last but not least set up a memorial council. It won’t cure all ills, but I can assure you it will help. I believe it can control legislation.…”
The memorial council idea actually originated in another quarter, with the flower industry, which had long been urging that industries that profit from funerals unite in common cause. As the president of the Society of American Florists said, “Funeral directors, as well as florists, are in danger of being swept away along with sentiment and tradition by those who do not realize the true value of the traditional American funeral practice.… Cooperation between florists and funeral director is essential as it is only one step from ‘no flowers’ to ‘no funeral.’ ”
The florists, whose language is often pretty flowery, convened the first meeting of the allied funeral industries under the alliterative designation “Symposium on Sentiment.” The announced purpose of the symposium was “to combat the forces which are attacking sentiment, memorialization and the rights of the individual in freedom of expression”—in blunter words, to combat the religious leaders and the memorial societies who advocate simpler, less expensive funerals. As the editor of the American Funeral Director, weightiest of the industry’s trade journals, put it, “The present movement is broad and sweeping. It threatens not only funeral directors, but the entire American concept of memorialization. This means that the supply men, cemeteries, florists, memorial dealers