The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [99]
Undertakers would be prohibited from misstating the law specifically with reference to embalming. They must inform the buyer that this dubious and expensive procedure (the “financial foundation of the funeral profession,” as one industry spokesman put it) is nowhere required by law. They must not tell the buyer that a casket is “required by law,” likewise untrue.
The cheapest casket must be displayed with the others. Typically, the cheapest casket would be discreetly tucked away in a closet or in the basement, where only the most persistent buyer might discover its existence.
Funeral providers would be prohibited from telling the customer that the “eternal sealer” casket will preserve the embalmed corpse for a long or indefinite time.
Arthur Angel, an FTC lawyer from 1972 to 1978 who was the main author of the rule, gave me a mini-history of its genesis. “For many years, during the fifties and sixties, the FTC had been a quiescent bureaucracy largely populated by hack lawyers from second-rate schools, and cronies recommended by politicians, mostly Southern,” he said. “This changed dramatically around 1970 or 1971 as a result of the Ralph Nader report on the FTC which roundly criticized the agency for failing to carry out its mission as watchdog in the marketplace, and the protection of consumers from abusive practices.”
It so happened that President Nixon’s son-in-law Ed Cox was a “Nader’s Raider.” He brought the report to the President, who said somewhat testily that he could not take any action on the basis of a report by Ralph Nader, but he did agree to appoint a blue-ribbon panel of American Bar Association lawyers to examine the FTC’s performance.
The panel confirmed Nader’s findings, whereupon Miles Kilpatrick, head of the panel, was appointed chairman of the FTC and its counsel, Robert Pitofsky, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, with the mandate to revitalize the agency.
“Beginning around 1970, and over the next four years or so, the FTC began hiring lots of new lawyers, activists from the top law schools in the country,” Angel said. “I was hired in 1972 as part of that effort.”
His description of the newcomers—“young, aggressive, disdainful of and removed from political and lobbying pressures”—was to me reminiscent of the New Dealers of the 1930s, as was the dedicated way they set about doing battle for the beleaguered consumer. First, they tried to identify especially vulnerable groups, which included the poor, the bereaved, the handicapped, the elderly. The next step was to devise projects responsive to the abuses that affected them. “One item on the list was the word ‘funerals,’ ” Angel told me. “We then read your book, Ruth Mulvey Harmer’s The High Cost of Dying, trade journals, and the like.” Out of this emerged a pilot survey of funeral prices in the District of Columbia, which led eventually to the trade-regulation rule.
To the average reader, the FTC’s proposed rule might seem mild and unobjectionable; all it sought to do was to bring the funeral transaction into line with standard fair-business practices, and to require undertakers to refrain from lying about the law concerning embalming and caskets. But the industry responded with characteristic belligerence, as to a call to arms. IT WILL BE A COSTLY WAR, declared the American Funeral Director, which described the FTC hearings as “a Soviet-style set piece staged by FTC.” The rhetoric got pretty wild. Howard C. Raether, at the time the industry’s most influential spokesman, writing in the house organ of the National Funeral Directors Association, lambasted the proposed rule as “a veiled attempt by the FTC staff to reverse the philosophy of American funeral customs, which have been historically developed within our society by the American public to effectively meet their needs when confronted by a death in the family.… There is an implication that these rules may bring about that which will be revolutionary.”
Mr. John C. Curran, past president of the New York