The American Way of Death Revisited (14 page)

He acknowledges the funeral director’s pioneering role in conditioning the market:

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 and everyone else dedicated to
the care and memorialization of the dead have genuine cause for alarm.”

The sentimental gentlemen who rallied to the Symposium on Sentiment (they were in fact the only ones summoned) were an elite group, the top executives of the funeral industry’s major trade associations. The names of the associations describe their respective areas of concern: National Funeral Directors Association, National Selected Morticians, American Cemetery Association, National Association of Cemeteries, Florists Telegraph Delivery Association, Monument Builders of America, and Casket Manufacturers Association.

The symposium heard a “Statement on Memorialization” prepared by the florists, who had quite a lot to say about the Dignity of Man, the United States as champion of freedom and leader of the democratic nations of the world, the importance of the individual, the profound traditions of the centuries, and so on: “The final rites, memorial tributes, the hallowed pageant of the funeral service all speak for the dignity of man.… Memorialization is love. It records a love so strong, so happy, so enduring that it can never die. It is the recognition of the immortality of the human spirit, the rightful reverence earned by the good life. It is the final testimony to the dignity of man.” Just what else went on at the Symposium on Sentiment is a little hard to say, for those participants in the hallowed pageant of the funeral service who attended the meeting have not told us what was said. I asked Mr. Howard Raether, who represented the funeral directors, what sort of agreements were reached. “No agreements.” And are copies of the proceedings available? “No.” Which is a pity, because from what one can learn of the florists and their ways, the symposium must have been a most colorful meeting.

Funeral flowers accounted for 65 to 70 percent of the cut-flower industry’s revenue in 1960, and many funeral homes either had an ownership interest or a commission “arrangement” with the local florist. By 1970 the market share had dropped to 40 percent, and it has, according to trade sources, gone down steadily since then. By 1995 sales had further declined to 14 percent of what was now a $14 billion industry (up from $414 million in 1960). While the floral industry has no statistics on how many flower shops are owned by undertakers, one can assume that the “arrangement”
(or a markup) continues to be a sideline source of income for the mortuary.

A current survey of newspaper death notices (and yes, Virginia, there is a trade publication called
Obits and Pieces
) confirms the rout of the “please omit” rubric. One-half to two-thirds of the notices contain requests such as “Donations to (charity) preferred.” As before, among the major dailies only the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
will accept the proscribed words. The
San Francisco Chronicle
will accept “in lieu of” in lieu of “please omit.”

What then was achieved by the florists’ huge advertising campaign and massive deployment of forces in the War of the Roses? Having won the battle and lost the war, whom can they blame for the distressing decline in sales of funeral flowers?

“Donations to … preferred,” a formulation devised by the florists themselves to curtail the use of “please omit,” must certainly have played a part. “Preferred to what?” is inescapably suggestive.

There are other culprits, of course—no doubt the major ones are the parallel decline of the “standard” open-casket funeral and the sixfold increase in cremations since 1960. These are developments which the florists, with all their resources, have been unable to influence.

T
here’s gold in them thar verdant lawns and splashing fountains, in them mausoleums of rugged strength and beauty, in them distinctive personalized bronze memorials, in them museums and gift shops.
Concept: The Journal of Creative Ideas for Cemeteries
—the very title vibrates with the thunder of progress—circulated in 1963 to America’s five thousand then operating cemeteries, to whom it imparted many an idea on how the gold can best be mined and minted.

The cemetery as a moneymaking proposition is new in this century. The earliest type of burial ground in America was the churchyard. This gave way in the nineteenth century to graveyards at the town limits, largely municipally owned and operated. Whether owned by church or municipality, the burial ground was considered a community facility; charges for graves were nominal, and the burial ground was generally not expected to show a profit.

Prevailing sentiment that there was something special and sacred about cemetery land, that it deserved special consideration and should not be subjected to such temporal regulation as taxation, was
reflected in court decisions and state laws. A cemetery company is an association formed for “a pious and public use,” the United States Supreme Court said in 1882, and more recently the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that a cemetery, even if privately owned, is a public burial ground “whose operation for purposes of profit is offensive to public policy.” Other rulings have affirmed that land acquired for cemetery purposes becomes entirely exempt from real estate taxes the moment it is acquired, even before a dead body is buried in it.

This traditional view of cemetery land proved a blessing to the land speculators who began to enter the field, and whose handiwork can now be seen on the outskirts of thousands of American communities.

The major premises which, evolved over the years, lie behind modern cemetery operation are all, on the face of it, sound and intelligent enough. Cemetery land is tax-free, which is as it should be, since in theory the land is not to be put to gainful use. Cheap land which for one reason or another does not easily lend itself to such needs of the living as housing and agriculture is commonly used for cemeteries. The purchase of a grave for future occupancy is, surely, a rational and sensible act, showing foresight and prudence on the part of the buyer who wishes to spare his family the trouble and expense of doing so when the need arises. Innovations which result in more economical upkeep of cemeteries, such as dispensing with upright tombstones to facilitate mechanical mowing, seem practical and commendable; so does the establishment of an endowment fund for the future upkeep of the cemetery.

Economies achieved by new and efficient operating methods, tax exemptions such as only schools and churches enjoy, dedication to “pious and public use”—these would all seem to point in the direction of continuously reducing the cost of burial. The opposite has been the case. The cost of burial has soared, at a rate outstripping even the rise in undertakers’ charges. The winning combination that has transformed the modern cemetery into a wildly profitable commercial venture is precisely its tax-free status, the adaptability of cheap land to its purposes, the almost unlimited possibilities of subdividing the land, the availability for reinvestment of huge “perpetual care” resources, and the introduction of “pre-need” installment selling.
Given these propitious conditions, there is really no end to the creative ideas that can be put to work by the cemetery promoter.

A very creative idea for cemeteries is to establish them as nonprofit corporations. In California and in many other states, virtually all commercial cemeteries enjoy this privilege. At first glance it would seem an act of purest altruism that somebody should go to all the trouble, at absolutely no profit to himself, to start a cemetery wherein his fellow man may be laid to eternal rest. A second glance discloses that the nonprofit aspect removes the necessity to pay income tax on grave sales. And a really close look discloses that the profits that are now routinely extracted by the promoters of “nonprofit” cemeteries are spectacular beyond the dreams of the most avaricious real estate subdivider.

There is nothing actually illegal about the operation. It works like this: Foreverness Lawn Memory Gardens, Inc., is organized as a nonprofit cemetery corporation, closely controlled by the promoters. Foreverness owns not a scrap of land. The acreage it will use for burial plots is owned by the promoters, either in their own names or, more commonly, in the name of a closely held land company. They enter into a contract with themselves—that is, the land company has a contract with Foreverness which provides that Foreverness will operate the cemetery and sell the graves, the promoters to receive for each grave sold 50 percent of the selling price, and for each mausoleum crypt, 60 percent. Since Foreverness out of its half of the income must bear all of the cemetery’s operating, sales, and maintenance costs, there is little danger that it will lose its chaste nonprofit character. The promoters, for their part, rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre for their low-cost land.
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Modern transportation has made it possible for the cemetery, like the supermarket, to be at some distance from commercial centers and high-priced residential sections; therefore land for the vast new “park” cemeteries can often be acquired for a modest cash outlay—sometimes for as little as $300 an acre, more commonly for $500 to $1,500 an acre. (Sometimes, of course, particularly when a mausoleum sales program is planned, the promoters will go higher. A California cemetery announced the purchase of “100 acres of ocean
view property” for a reported $5,000 an acre, for the development of “patio-style” mausoleum crypts.)

Having acquired his tax-free, bargain land, the cemeterian (as he likes to be called) starts to get his property ready for occupancy. It is here that creativity begins to come into play.

A real estate promoter who subdivides land for live occupancy may be quite pleased if he can break an acre of land into 50-by-100-foot lots suitable for resale to people who can afford to buy and build. He counts himself lucky if he can squeeze six such lots out of an acre. But consider the cemetery promoter, who routinely breaks his acreage into easy-to-own little packages measuring 8 feet by 3 feet, fifteen hundred or better to the acre, each parcel guaranteed tax-exempt. Fifteen hundred burial spaces per acre is an estimate that errs on the conservative side and would today be considered old-fashioned. For one thing, it allows space for the accommodation of the now outmoded headstone, and it allows 15 percent for drives, walks, and little spaces between graves so that the fastidious or reverent may avoid stepping on the graves to get from one to another. The modern “lawn-type” cemetery, the most creative idea of all, utilizes all this wasted space by simply eliminating footpaths between graves (the paths of glory now lead but to the gift shop and museum) and by banning tombstones altogether, thus making possible unbroken rows of snugly packed 7-by-3-foot graves. The tombstone is replaced by standard bronze markers set flush with the ground—a creative idea which (a) enables the cemetery owners to appropriate from the sale of the plaques profits that formerly went to the monument makers for tombstones, and (b) by opening up the area to huge power mowers,
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eliminates all need for hand-trimming of grave plots and saves 75 percent of the maintenance cost.