The processes by which the deceased are laid to rest are littered with complexities. The rituals and traditions surrounding the final resting place of the deceased lend themselves to social, cultural, and psychological rituals. In
The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, historian Thomas W. Lacquer asks if the dead matter at all?
[1] According to Lacquer, the dead constitute a symbolic system that defies cultural nihilism and carries within itself a long, iterative, slowly changing history.
[2] In other words, Lacquer argues that in honoring the dead the living remain civilized. According to James T. Farrell, interest groups such as cemeteries, life insurance companies, and Funeral Directors all played a significant role in the social changes that took place during the early twentieth-century.
[3] Notably, the reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries came on the heels of the American Civil War and before World War I. As a consequence, the physical and psychological effects of death on the bereaved and the national psyche were transformed. These changes influenced the professionalization of the funerary industry and changed the way in which Americans buried their dead.
While some sought the help of an undertaker for the transfer and disposition of the body, most nineteenth-century services were planned and presided over by family members or clergy. By the end of the century, these practices were transformed and the more established and professional sounding Funeral Director supplanted family members and clergy as funeral providers. The establishment of the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) in 1882, began the arduous task to professionalize the industry.
[4] In doing so, the moniker of undertaker would be replaced in the American lexicon. Unlike an undertaker, Funeral Director’s provided much more than body disposal and in doing so, the director has become the “great man” of the funeral industry, providing families with stability during a time of chaos.
It is within this framework that American burial rites took shape.
[1] Thomas Walter Laqueur,
The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
[3] James J. Farrell,
Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
[4] Farrell,
Inventing the American Way of Death, 214.
