Audio Slideshow: Wisconsin Death Trip

Much of the following transcription comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode – our interview with Kate Sweeney was a new segment for this 2014 broadcast, and is newly transcribed. There may be slight differences in wording in later sections.

NARRATOR: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh and I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey Brian.

BRIAN: And Ed Ayers is with us.

ED: Hi Brian.

BRIAN: So I’m looking at a few pages here from the kind of book that I think you guys really could have benefited from had you been alive when it was published. It was from the year 1881. And it’s called, hold your breath, Our Deportment: or The Manners, Conduct, And Dress Of The Most Refined Society; including forms for letters, invitations, et cetera, et cetera, also, valuable suggestions on home culture, and training.

ED: I’m sorry Brian, could you repeat that?

BRIAN: Right. Who needs to read the book when you finish the title? Anyway, this was basically a guide book for etiquette. A genre that proliferated in the late 19th century, when the middle and upper classes in the US became well, kind of obsessed with manners. They prescribed a whole range of behaviors for social decorum, including what to do when people close to you die.

So for instance, if your husband dies, you’re supposed to wear mourning clothes for at least two years. The first of those years going heavy in the black wool department. And in the second year, moving to a little more silky with a somewhat shorter veil.

It goes on to describe in incredible detail mourning rules for parents, siblings, even friends who leave you an inheritance.

KATE SWEENEY: There were rules for every one. In one place, I saw rules for the second wife of a man whose first wife’s parents had died.

BRIAN: This is Kate Sweeney, a reporter in Atlanta who got very interested, as you can tell, a few years ago in death.

KATE SWEENEY: I’m a pretty cheerful person, I’m not really the sort who hangs out in cemeteries wearing crushed Velvet and smoking clove cigarettes.

BRIAN: But she did notice how little people around her seem willing to talk about the inevitable fact of life’s end, until it was too late. She ended up writing a book about death and mourning. One thing she discovered in her research was how different things looked back in that earlier era when grieving was the fact of everyday life and didn’t need to be hidden from the people around you.

KATE SWEENEY: Maybe if you acted a little wacko or a little off, it was sort of the one time you were excused from it. I mean, you were in mourning, and you were in this sort of special time in your life. But you weren’t really a part from society, you were still part of it.

BRIAN: And what surprised Kate was how suddenly all that changed.

KATE SWEENEY: One etiquette guide that I found by this woman named Lillian Eisler from 1923, really struck me especially because it said the rules now emphasize a lack of dramatic demonstration of grief, as if grief is just another fashion. And grieving 20 years ago looked like this, but today we’re not doing that anymore because we are sophisticated.

BRIAN: That’s so 19th century.

KATE SWEENEY: So 19th century. This book went so far as to urge people who couldn’t quote “control their grief” to avoid their friends for fear of making those friends uncomfortable. And even maybe to avoid the funeral if you thought you were going to have sort of this emotional outpouring that was inappropriate now.

NARRATOR: With the growing taste for privacy and simplicity, many of the foolish demonstrations of grief expressed in outward display have been eliminated. For people are beginning to realize that it is not so much a manifestation of grief, as a display of vanity.

BRIAN: I asked Kate what accounted for this dramatic shift? One reason was that by the 20th century, people were simply living a lot longer. Germ theory and other advances in medicine were making common diseases a lot less deadly. And the staggering carnage of the Civil War was fading from people’s memories.

What had been impossible to avoid 50 years earlier, was increasingly becoming well, avoidable. Especially because more and more people were spending their final days in the hospital. Death was leaving the home.

KATE SWEENEY: One example that I think reflects this change in a really major way centers around a room in the home called the parlor. It was a room for all stages of life. So you might court your sweetheart in the parlor, you might get married in the parlor. And then you could expect to have your funeral in the parlor once life was over.

BRIAN: Sweeney told me that standalone funeral businesses, which were starting to emerge in this period, made this savvy move of calling their businesses funeral parlors to gain the trust of people used to watching their loved ones die at home. And at the very same time, real parlors were beginning to seem a little outdated, maybe even gloomy.

KATE SWEENEY: And so at one point in the 19-teens, homemaking magazines actually decried this gloomy room and said, we’re going to rename the parlor the living room. We’re going to declare this new room–

BRIAN: As in not dying.

KATE SWEENEY: As in not dying. Like, could you please be any more crystal clear about what you’re trying to say here.

BRIAN: That is amazing. That is just amazing.

KATE SWEENEY: We’re going to move away from this idea of this Victorian Age of everybody having bric-a-brac everywhere and these airless rooms with no light in them, we’re going to have the living room. And what I think is kind of interesting is that funeral businesses themselves kind of followed suit. You don’t see very many funeral parlors anymore.

They became funeral homes.

BRIAN: Right. Why have a parlor when you can have an entire home.

KATE SWEENEY: You could have the whole home. And then now-a-days, you’re likely to see funeral services. So it’s ever more distant from this idea of being at home. And sort of more professional and buttoned up, and we’re pro’s, we’re going to take care of it and we’re going to take it out of your life.

Brian: That’s Kate Sweeney, she’s the author of American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning.

Peter: A few years back, we produced an episode that explored some of the pivot points in the story of how Americans have lived with the dead. To mark Memorial Day, we’re re-playing that episode today. For the rest of the hour we’ll be considering the extent to which we’ve lost touch with death, and asking whether we may be coming to terms with it today.

Ed:  It’s hard to think of a better place to ponder those sorts of questions than among the dead themselves.  And so on a rainy afternoon a few weeks ago, I headed up to a hillside overlooking the James River in the city I call home, Richmond, Virginia.  It’s the site of Hollywood Cemetery, opened back in 1849, and made famous a decade later, when the remains of former-President, James Monroe, were dug up in New York, shipped down to Richmond, and re-buried there.  A few years later, of course, the Civil War came, and with that war, Hollywood Cemetery became a busy place indeed.  Many thousands of soldiers were brought across the battlefield to be buried there, along with 28 Confederate generals, and later, Jefferson Davis himself.  My tour guide for the afternoon was local historian, Hunter McGuire, Jr.  We started at Presidents’ Circle, the spot where Monroe and his fellow Virginia-born President, John Tyler, are both buried.

Ed:  So this is a pretty eminent spot here, and what would make this such prime real estate that two United States Presidents would want to be buried here, to the extent that anybody wants to be buried.

Hunter McGuire: Well, the geography is what makes it outstanding.  Let me say a word about the garden rural cemetery tradition.  It began in Paris in a site of a monastery, the Perre LaChez [?], and city cemeteries were getting overcrowded, so they decided to make a cemetery in suburbs of Paris.

Ed:  When was that?

Hunter McGuire: That was in 1804.  To attract people, they went off to get celebrities, and they first dug up Moliere and moved him there, and then Abelard and Eloise, they dug them up and brought them there, and with that, everybody sort of rushed in.  The people of Paris loved coming and walking through these beautiful grounds.  So people in Boston copied that with Mt. Almond Cemetery, which was another rural, pastoral cemetery, a beautiful one that overlooked the City of Boston.  That was, in fact, copied by Frederick Law Olmsted when he developed Central Park, because they then discovered that people in cities needed public walking spaces.

Ed:  But the idea of a park in a city began with a cemetery, then.  Wow.  OK.

Hunter McGuire: And then, up and down the East Coast, New York developed Woodlawn Cemetery; and Philadelphia, Laurel Hills Cemetery.  The architect of Laurel Hill came to Richmond and designed this cemetery.

Ed:  And perhaps our listeners who would be interested in just hearing –  this is on a tombstone, a little more explication than we’re used to today.  “Endowed with extraordinary intellectual powers, he touched life at wide varying points:  scholar, soldier, author, a commanding figure in industrial affairs, from prime of youth to the kindly winter of old age, he kept in violet, the chastity of a pure and stainless life.  Peace well earned.”

Hunter McGuire: Wonderful.  And that’s one of the beauties of a garden pastoral cemetery of this era.  In the Victorian times, people wrote beautiful epitaphs all over the place; most of them beautiful, sometimes they were a little snippy about their former wives, but for the most part, they were wonderfully romantic Victorian things.

Ed:  Are there black people buried in Hollywood Cemetery?

Hunter McGuire: Very few I know of.  A few clergy, and a few servants, but cemeteries tend to be segregated for the natural reason people want to be buried with their families.  Once a family tradition starts, people will flock to be there.

Ed:  So was this cemetery for the well-to-do?

Hunter McGuire: I think they were happy to sell lots to anyone who could pay for them.  And that was not easy at first.  What really sort of turned it on was, well, President Monroe helped, but then when the Civil War came . . .

Ed:  . . . by dying.

Hunter McGuire: By dying, yes.  When the Civil War came, and this flood of casualties started coming in, then Hollywood really became popular, and there were people floating in and out for funerals all the time, lots of flowers, and lots of flags.

Ed:  I think, in fact, that I’d like to go over to the Confederate part of the cemetery, if we could, and talk about that a little.  [The sun’s kind of coming out…] So we’re standing in front of a very important monument that, in some way, signals the beginning of the Memorial Day movement after the American Civil War.  If you can imaging a pyramid 90” tall, 45” wide, made of really rough-hewn granite from down along the James, brought here, stacked without mortar, in 1869. All around this statue, this giant pyramid, are buried 18,000 Confederate veterans.  That’s because many of them died in Richmond because we had a giant hospital based here, so others were shipped by railroad from the battlefields all across the state, where we saw about half the battles of the Civil War within a hundred miles or so of here.  So this was the best monument that they could think of to make with materials at hand, in the immediate wake of the war when the city had been burned to the ground and was devastated. It’s kind of a haunting place.

Hunter McGuire: At the early Memorial Day and for many Memorial  Days after that, really up until WWI, Memorial Day would bring 5,000 people from Richmond with their picnic lunches to listen to the bands play, to the oratory of Confederate veterans, some with empty sleeves and peg legs, but they all came out to celebrate.  Some of them felt like it was the lost cause, and they wanted people not to remember what they’d sacrificed, and others felt like what they contributed to, along with their northern  brethren, was the birth of a new nation that could win WWI and WWII and those sort of things.  Memorial Day’s a great event, whichever way you look at it.

Ed:  That was Hunter McGuire, Jr., a former board member at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond Virginia.  He also happens to be the great, great grandson of the surgeon who amputated the arm of General Stonewall Jackson.

[music]

Brian:  We’re going to take a short break now, but when we get back, historian Drew Gilpin Faust will explain how widespread death of the Civil War altered Americans’ attitudes about life.  We’ll also hear from some of you listeners.

Peter:  More BackStory coming up in a minute.

[music]

Peter:  This is BackStory, the show that looks to the past to explain the America of today.  I’m your 18^th century host, Peter Onuf.

Ed:  I’m your 19^th century host, Ed Ayers.

Brian:  And I’m your 20^th century host, Brian Balogh.  We’re talking today about how political, social and technological changes over the course of our history have shaped the way we remember the dead.

Ed:  So here on Memorial Day, you think of places you go to celebrate Memorial Day, and if you think about it, there’s really quite an array of different ways we memorialize those who’ve given their lives for this country, and Peter, I wouldn’t know, frankly, where to go if I wanted to memorialize the dead of the American Revolution.

Peter:  It’s a great question.  You wouldn’t go to battlefields; you’d actually go to churchyards all over the country, particularly to Colonial cities that have survived in the heart of the great modern American metropolises, old Trinity Church in New York, and churches in Boston and Charleston, and in a way those places would be, I think, where we would evoke the memory of the Revolution.  I think that’s the way they function in American culture.

Brian:  So when did one place that symbolized one war.  When did that start?  That must have been the 19^th century.

Ed:  Well I think it’s Gettysburg.  We sometimes forget that the Gettysburg Address was given at the inauguration of a national cemetery at Gettysburg which was created in the immediate wake of the war.  So what Lincoln was doing.  Think about this – the Gettysburg battle was in July, he’s giving this talk in November, and when he came to Gettysburg, there were coffins stacked up at the train station.  So I think that’s the beginning of that.  It was building of the old ideas of park-like cemeteries, but here they’re making one on purpose, instantaneously, for massive numbers of bodies, and I think that lays the foundation for Arlington.

Brian: And the irony is that from that point on, up until today, our soldiers die elsewhere.  So we almost  have to have centralized places to commemorate this from then on, because our soldiers are dying in foreign lands.

Ed: Here’s a quiz:  Where do you guys think this first emerges?  Where did we start seeing the first centralized monuments to sacrifice for the nation?

Brian:  Civil War.

Ed:  Nope.  Even if you go to Gettysburg now, all the statutes and monuments are state based, and they kind of vie with each other and who has the biggest state monument.  I never would have thought about this.

Brian: I don’t know.

Ed: The War with Spain in 1898.

Brian: Bingo.

Ed: Because, there’s a couple of things:  one, the North and South are so happy to be fighting on the same side, so you can start having these monuments; but also, in the meantime, you’ve had the Franco-Prussian War and the emergence of these big nation states in Europe, and all the guys are putting up big monuments to the nations.

Brian:  Plus, we kicked butt.

Ed:  Exactly.  And it was our time, so if you look at proportion of the monuments to the actual war, the Spanish-American War is the biggest, and it turns out to be sort a rehearsal, unfortunately, of the great wars to follow.

Brian:  Do we have a monument for our invasion of Grenada?  Because that would be the ultimate test.  A gigantic, the largest monument for our smallest war.

Ed:  It’s an action item for our listeners.  Brian, it’s interesting if you think about the array of war memorials in Washington, D.C.  If you think about when they were built, you have the strange thing of the Vietnam War Memorial being built first, and then Korea, and then only most recently, WWII, how do you explain that?

Brian:  I think this proves, Ed, that they don’t teach enough history in high school.  That’s my first point.

Peter:  It’s post-modern chronology.

Brian: Chronology matters.

Ed:  Chronology is phrenology.

Brian:  A more serious answer, I think, is memorials represent what’s going on at the time that these memorials are planned.  It often takes them decades to actually build and complete them.  I’m guessing that if the WWII Memorial was opened in 2004, I’m guessing it started maybe 20 years earlier.  I associate that period in American history with a re-militarization of society, with Ronald Reagan increasing defense budgets, but more importantly, appealing to Americans’ patriotic sense, a sense of self-sacrifice, and surely, this is when the all volunteer Army was beginning to take off in the United States.  I also would add that how could we possibly have a memorial to one of the nation’s most unpopular wars, Vietnam, and not have one for, perhaps, the Nation’s most popular war, at least in retrospect, WWII.

Peter:  The great leveling thing about Vietnam, though, in the sense of making it a kind of good war in the sense that the people that gave their lives deserve to be memorialized, and that we should never forget that. That really abstracts sacrifice from particular contexts and that’s a really transcendent notion beyond time, beyond the occasional war, beyond what the war was about, for us to take a moment and reflect on the sacrifice.

Brian:   And didn’t that happen in the Civil War, Ed, I mean that abstraction, isn’t that one of the things that helped bring together North and South eventually?

Ed:  Yeah, in the early 20^th century.  It took a lot of time.  And I think it’s parallel to Vietnam, in that there’s a sense of why don’t we memorialize WWII. We memorialize it every day.

Peter:  Because it was a good war.

Ed:  Exactly.  And nobody questioned that, so the Vietnam War Memorial comes along, it seems almost like an oxymoron at the time, to memorialize something that a lot of people wanted to forget, and I think when the Vietnam Memorial came, not only are we not going to forget it, but here are the individual young people that died.

Brian:  We’re not going to forget these individuals, which is why the names are listed.  Whereas, you guys know, we’ve talked to WWII veterans, their first reaction when you thank them for their service is, in essence, to say “Gosh, I never even thought about it.”

Ed: Right, we were all sacrificing.

Brian: We were all sacrificing, whereas, in Vietnam, by then, Americans were thinking very carefully about whether to make that sacrifice or not.

[names of dead Vietnam War soldiers being read in the background]

Brian:  That’s tape from the reading of the names ceremony at the 20^th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in November, 2002.

Peter:  If hindsight is 20/20, then foresight can often be flat-out blind.  Such was the case in the years, months and weeks leading up to the American Civil War.  One South Carolina senator was so confident that war would not break out, that he promised to drink all the blood that might be shed as a result of secession.

Ed:  Four years and more than 600,000 deaths later, that war finally came to an end.  More Americans had been killed than had died in all the nations’ wars combined, from the Revolution to the early years of Vietnam.  The dead had amounted to nearly 2% of the nation’s population, the equivalent of 6 million people today.  Last year, historian Drew Gilpin Faust published a devastating book about the consequences of all that dying, called “This Republic of Suffering, Death in the American Civil War.”  She begins her book with that vignette about the South Carolina senator, and goes on to talk about how death on that scale not only created many of our modern funeral practices, but also altered fundamental notions about group and national identity.  I recently had a chance to speak with her about her book.

[music]

Ed:  Drew, welcome to BackStory.

Drew Faust: Thank you Ed, for inviting me, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Ed:  Now you talk about the idea of the good death, which is the way that people in mid-19^th century America imagined the way the things were supposed to be.  Could you tell us about that a little bit?

Drew Faust: The idea of the good death was not a new one in the 19^th century.  There were books as early as the 1500s about good dying, holy dying, the good death; how to learn to die was something you could find advice books about.  By the 19^th century, by the time of the early days of the war, this had evolved into a widely-shared set of cultural assumptions that I found very similar North and South, across different religious denominations, and really, across the United States, as a whole.  What it consisted of, by the mid-19^th century, was a set of precepts about what it took to die well.  One precept was you needed well was to be ready to die, and willing to die, because how you acted in your last moments would, in many ways, reflect what your afterlife might be like.  You prepared for that moment for your whole existence.  Another aspect of the good death, is that your good death was a witnessed death.  It was a death among loved ones, it was a death at a home.  I think the Victorian domesticity of the 19th century had invaded this notion of the good death.  I’m sure you’ve seen many portraits or drawings of someone dying with all kinds of people standing around them, and that was so that your loved ones could be certain that you had died a good death, and therefore, they would know that they’d be reunited with you in heaven, but also, you could give them important last words, important messages as you parted from them.

Ed:  It sounds like the Civil War was bound to challenge all those things as people died so often alone, so often instantly, so often without time for preparation, so I can see why the war would be a crises in the notion of the good death.

Drew Faust: That’s absolutely right.

Ed:  Could you have a good death on the battlefield?

Drew Faust: I found many instances of soldiers trying to have good deaths on the battlefield, trying to replicate some of the precepts of the good death.  One of the most striking and poignant was soldiers who surrounded themselves with photographs of their family as they were dying.  That, to me, represented an effort to replicate the death bed at home with the loved ones standing around.  Soldiers also talked about anticipating death the night before battles, they would right into their diaries or in letters to loved ones, that they were ready, that they were prepared.  I also found many instances of military hospitals where soldiers turned to nurses or doctors to try to set up a version of the good death at home, and nurses and doctors were often willing participants, even to the point of, in the case of a delirious soldier, for example, letting him think that a nurse was his sister or mother, because they too shared this common attitude about the importance of the good death and what a good death comprised.

Ed:  Now, of course, only a very small portion of soldiers’ bodies would have been shipped back home, so whose job was it to bury Civil War soldiers on the battlefield?

Drew Faust: One of the most extraordinary things I discovered, and maybe other people took it for granted, but I did not until I started this project, was that there was no formal identification procedure for soldiers. They didn’t wear dog tags and there was no formal notification of next of kin when soldiers were killed or wounded.  This all happened more or less informally through your comrades writing to your wife or mother to say, “I stood by so and so as he died, and this is how it happened,” and often trying to communicate to the mother or the wife or the sister, whoever you were writing to, that this soldier had indeed died a good death, trying to put the circumstances of the soldier’s death into the framework of the ideas of the good death.  So that was an important part of the whole communication system, this series of condolence letters that were really letters informing as much as consoling families.

Ed:  Well there must have been enormous numbers of men who were just lost, that no one ever really knew when and where they died.

Drew Faust: Probably about half of the Civil War dead remained unidentified.

Ed:  So how did the people back home live with that lack of knowledge?

Drew Faust: I find that stunning.  I’ve never been able, since I began doing the research on this book, to think about the late-19^th century in the same way, because if you do think about it in the context of this information, it means that the United States was a nation of mourners, it was a nation of people who were left with incomplete stories about the lives of people who mattered enormously to them.  We’ve seen in our own lifetimes the strength of the MIA movement after Vietnam and the inability of individuals to grapple with not knowing, of not being able to find out information and even recover the bodies of their loves ones.  But hundreds of thousands of families were in that situation after the Civil War.

Ed:  Did they devise means to live with that lack of knowledge?

Drew Faust: There were a number of ways that people tried to cope.  One was religion, and the consolation that eventually you would know what had happened to this person because you would be reunited with them in heaven.  Another dimension of coping with this very difficult situation was the growth and interest in spiritualism, which said you didn’t have to wait until an afterlife, indeed, you could, under certain circumstances, actually communicate with the dead loved person, and he was not gone, he was just around a corner or behind a veil.  So I think belief was a very important way of coping.  I think another way of coping was memorials, and those memorials were often tangible, physical embodiments of memory that in many cases took the place of an actual body that you might be able to bury. Instead you could erect a monument or in some other way have a physical remembrance of the person whose body you were unable to reclaim and inter.

Ed:  Now, it strikes me that maybe by the 1880s and 1890s, people seemed to have been forgetting how terrible the Civil War was, that the memorialization seems to take on more of an abstract quality as people passed on.  Does it seem to you that Americans seemed to want to forget about the suffering of the war?

Drew Faust: I think that was probably true. When I started my project, one of the questions that was foremost in my mind was how is it that we have seen WWI as the turning point in the introductions of the real horror of modern warfare and mass loss into human existence, and yet if you go back and look at the Civil War, for the South certainly where the loss was enormous because of the smaller scale of the southern population, and because so much of the war took place on southern soil, and arguably for the United States as a whole, the Civil War should have been that moment of the horror of mass killing and the horror of such a level of loss, and so I’ve been puzzled by how, in many ways, this experience of war was something we shied away from, that we didn’t entirely metabolize into our understanding of what it means to be human, of what it means to be able to kill others with the instruments of technology on a mass scale.  And so questions, issues were raised by the Civil War, but they weren’t fully engaged, I think, until we had another mass killing in the early years of the 20^th century.

Ed:  Well, thank you so much, Drew, for joining us and helping us understand this really intractable and, yet, enduring problem in human life.

Drew Faust: Thanks, Ed.

Ed:  Drew Gilpin Faust is the author of “This Republic of Suffering, Death in the American Civil War.”  She’s a Professor of History, and in her spare time, also the President of Harvard University.  We’ll post an extended version of our interview on our website, www.BackStoryRadio.org.

Brian:  I got to tell you guys, that interview has changed the way I think about what we’ve been saying about death, you know, a lot of what we’ve had to say is American’s deny it, we ignore it, we hide it, but half the people not identified and all those family members for a lifetime living with that unresolved issue.  That means they’re living with death just about every day, and that really changes my conception of the 30 years after the Civil War.

Peter:  But Brian, I’d suggest that the notion of the good death that Drew introduced early on is very important.  There’s an element of denial in that notion of the good death, and I think it culminates in reunion and reconciliation in the years after the war between northerners and southerners, and it does involve extraordinary denial, because what you’re bring to the fore is not the senseless slaughter, but rather the heroic lives of the brothers who destroyed each other and ravaged the land, and in a way, that’s not the same thing as modern mass wars.

Brian:  Nor is building these stone monuments the same thing as standing around your relatives’ bed.

Ed: I wouldn’t want to say that things are abstracted is somehow wrong, I don’t think that people can live with . . .

Peter:  It’s a way of dealing.

Ed: In the same way as people try to live with loss by letting it slowly fade away, I guess, so do cultures, and ours is no exception.

Brian:  Well, there’s nothing abstract about my producer telling me we have to take another break.  But don’t go away.  When we get back, we’ll be hearing from some of you listeners.

Peter:  If you’d like to be a caller on a future episode of BackStory, have a look at our website to see the topics we’re working on.  We’re at BackStoryRadio.org.  We’ll be back on a minute.

[music]

Peter:  This is BackStory, the show that takes a topic in the here and now and puts it in historical context.  I’m Peter Onuf, 18^th century history guy.

Ed:  I’m Ed Ayers, 19^th century history guy.

Brian:  And I’m Brian Balogh, 20^th century history guy.  Today on the show, memorialization.  How do we Americans live with our dead, and how has that changed over time?  So far, we’ve been focusing mostly on war dead, but we’re going to open up the discussion now to include ordinary, non-war death as well.  As we do with all of our shows, we’ve been soliciting your ideas about today’s topic on our website, BackStoryRadio.org., and our producers have invited a few of you to join us on the phone.

Peter:  Hey guys, we have a call from the great State of Vermont, in Burlington, we have Josh on the line.  Josh, welcome to BackStory.

Caller Josh: Good morning.

Peter:  Hey, death, a cheery subject.  What’s on your mind?

Caller Josh: Well, I work for a consumer education organization, called Funeral Consumers Alliance, and what we do is try to help people understand what their legal rights and options are.  It’s always interested me when I talk to people what they consider to be, what they call funeral traditions.  A lot of what people consider to be traditional, they seem rarely to be purely organic, but we often say that what the contemporary funeral industry calls a traditional funeral is largely a commercially-created tradition, and I’d love to hear what you guys think about.

Peter:  Josh wants to know if funerals are simply another product that high capitalism has produced with a veneer of tradition – what a cynic you are, Josh.

Caller Josh: I’m a realist.

Ed:  Let me give you an example of something I just recently discovered.  The United States is unique in the ritual of dressing up the dead person with make up and all, which would suggest to me that it’s hardly a tradition if we’re the only people who do it, because the whole idea is that we’re doing this in some universal human trait, but that’s not the case at all.  Where did that come from, do you know?

Caller Josh: Well, yes, I mean the short history of what I call the modern American funeral after the Civil War, really came about because chemical embalming was invented during the Civil War and proved very useful for getting soldiers home from the battlefield.  It was in the last quarter of the 19^th century that it was the first time there was an professional industrial class of undertakers that began to be called “funeral directors”.  As I understand it, before that time, funerals were a much more family centered event, insofar as the person would be cared for, washed, dressed and laid out at home, often by women in the family, and the family would take a more direct role.

Ed:  Ironically, I’m not usually much one for technological determinism, but here’s a case where the embalming process made possible and even suggested that it would be appropriate to string out the funeral process, and you could actually have the viewing and all that.  Not to be morbid, but the clock is ticking otherwise without that process.

Brian:  Josh and Ed, embalming is very important, but also, the rise of the modern hospital and places where more and more people die, is a factor too.  To just cut against the grain a little bit, Josh, that’s not just trying to make a buck, that’s more and more people are not dying in the home in the 20^th century.   So we need to do a bit of reinventing, or recreating, the notion that the family is there and they have been surrounded by loved ones when they die, even though that’s not the case.

Ed:  Do you find that there’s a swelling wave of resentment against these things, or are people coming to you, Josh, with increasing regularity.

Caller Josh: Oh, we have always, the organization had a huge number of inquiries from the public.  But, interestingly, in this economic down turn, something is happening, I think culturally, that our organization has been trying to get people to think about, but the economy is doing a better job, maybe then we have, which is people are not only finding ways to save money on the funeral, it’s an opportunity to rethink the values that we associate with funerals.  People are rediscovering that old traditions can be reinterpreted in ways that don’t cost them a mortgage payment.

Peter:  But to be fair about old traditions, Josh, we go back to the Colonial period, my time, at funerals, it would be required to give out gloves and such; it’s a form of what anthropologists call “pot latch”, gift giving in order to establish and reaffirm social status.  So funerals were very, very expensive in the Colonial period, and this conspicuous display, and one of the austerity measures that Revolutionaries and Patriots promoted was to chill it on the big death deal.

Caller Josh: Interesting.  Does it cut across socio-economic levels?

Peter:  Well, no, because only the rich could do this, and it would be an opportunity to reaffirm it.

Caller Josh: Interesting, because another thing that a lot of us frequently toss around is the poor pay more, and what we mean by that, is we find that people who are middle-class and with higher incomes, more college education, tend statistically to be the ones who go for the simple cremation, and it’s working-class people who often will try to spend more on the funeral.  Is this a modern phenomenon?

Peter:  I think there’s a long history to it, and you might say it’s sort of a “dying up” [laughter].  When you die, you show respect and the respect that this person is as good as anybody, don’t think that because we’re poor that we don’t die well.  This is a moment in which we’re going to assert, you could say, that in death all men are created equal.  And of course, people who are the favored and the privileged and the very wealthy, they don’t need to make this clear in quite that way.

Caller Josh: They don’t need to show it off.  Interesting.

Peter:  Josh, thanks for calling in.

Caller Josh: Oh, thanks, you guys are fun.  I appreciate it.

Brian:  If you’re just tuning in, this is BackStory. We’re the American Backstory hosts, and we’re marking Memorial Day with a show about the history of death and dying.  Peter, who do we have the honor of speaking with next?

Peter:  It’s Sherry, Brian, from the Town of Marion, Virginia.  Sherry, welcome to BackStory.  We’re talking about death and we’re trying to keep up lively conversation.  What’s on your mind?

Caller Sherry: I have two inter-related questions that I’d like to ask if I may.  How has the replacement of the once-common practice of dying at home with the modern hospital experience affected how we view death and life?   And what has our fear and avoidance of the process of dying cost us in terms of how we understand the world in which we live?

Peter:  These are terrific questions, Sherry, and that is how has the death experience been shaped by modern medicine away from home, and then how do we think about it.  Well, I think this is one of these back to front questions where we start with the 20^th century.

Brian:  Yeah, I think that’s fair enough.  I remember reading some study about the average number of deaths you see in the average Hollywood film.  People are getting blown away in very graphic form, and I think that one of the reasons that we have so much mediated violence, violence that is not real, that comes through the media, is we are not exposed to real death and to the real pain entailed in all of that, as people, I think, in Ed’s century, and Peter’s century, were, and that’s my clever way of handing your tough question over to the other two guys.

Ed:  Well I’m going to be contrarian, here.  There’s no doubt that what Brian just said is the case.  I guess that I would suggest is that people want it to be out of the house, and mediated.  People were glad to have embalming.  It spread quite rapidly in the second half of the 19^th century, which says two things:  one, that people didn’t really want the corporeal experience of death, which is just profoundly unsettling and unpleasant and dangerous; on the other hand, what embalming did was allow people to prolong the act of departure long enough that you could come and pay honor to the lost one, to be able to feel some kind of closure.

Peter:  It’s still dying takes place in the home, of course, unless it’s an accident.  Part of our story is when do hospital clean up their acts sufficiently so that that is the indicated place for people in critical, medical condition at end of life to be there, because even now, of course, hospitals are places where you get a lot of infections, it’s the big scandal of modern hospitals, it’s a great place to go and die.

Brian:  And there’s no question that technology is advanced and it became, starting in the 20^th century, but especially after WWII, a lot safer to go to hospitals. But I think we’ve got to talk about cost here, because even though hospitals became safer, the combination of studies that showed rates of infection with trying to cut costs, have led to a movement of getting people out of hospitals as quickly as possible.  It’s also the hospice movement, and that’s really taken off in the last two decades, and it’s in part, been a very important need to treat people in a humane fashion, to not have them die as vegetables with tubes coming out of them, combined with a great interest on the part of insurance companies to cut down on costs.  All right, Peter, you’ve played out the string, we’re going back to the 18^th century, whether Sherry wants to go there or not . . .

Peter:  Sherry, you can hang up any time.  [laughter].  This is the boring part.  But, no, back to the 18^th century…

Ed: People REALLY died back then.

Peter: People just died, and I think it’s true, it’s not as extraordinary as it seems to us, an individual’s death.  The think is that people die all the time in the home and it’s a fact of life, or I should say, it’s a fact of death, it’s right there in your face, you might say. It happens so often, and the idea of death, it’s in the context of the family, and families replace dead people.  Now that sounds pretty brutal, but if you lose a child, often that name would be used for another child.  That is there’s kind of an inter-changeability, because what comes first is the family, not the individual.  Of course, individuals die; it’s a traumatic thing at any time in history, but we’ve made it our very special kind of drama, and trauma, and we have therefore, paradoxically, insulated ourselves from what we take to be the most devastating and hurtful aspects of it, because we’ve made it into a kind of secularized religious experience, whether or not we’re very religious people.

Brian:  Sherry, I want to ask you what prompts your question?

Caller Sherry: What prompted my question?  I grew up in a nursing home in the mountains of Virginia.  We lived downstairs and the patients lived upstairs, anywhere from 8 to 10 patients.  So my formative years were spent with old people, and it was a very rich and wonderful experience that I really cherish.

Brian:  And what was your reaction to the inevitable likelihood that they died all the time?

Caller Sherry: Well, the first person I saw die, I was 8 years old.  He was a retired mill operator.  He adopted my sister and I as his children, and so when he actually died, I was devastated.  I witnessed other deaths, as well, in this nursing home.  These were people with whom we were intimately connected.  This was not an institutionalized home.  But, these experiences shaped my world view.  I knew early that we leave this world, and without romanticizing death, because there is nothing romantic about the process of dying—there is mystery to it.  There is a moment of peace after the process of death that is sacred ground, whether you’re religious or not.  So how it shaped my world view and my value system is that for one thing, I never really cared about material things, because I knew how empty the pursuit of a false material world was, early on.

Brian:  Let me ask you, Sherry, your story is remarkably idiosyncratic in our age.  Do you have any suggestions for ways in which larger numbers of people might experience that mystery, those mysterious moments that you grew up with on a regular basis, or that Peter’s folks back, and Ed’s folks for that matter, experienced on a regular basis?

Caller Sherry: Well, probably to not be afraid of death for the person who’s dying to help them make the transition from death to the next world if that’s what you believe, or to the end of this life and some sort of peace, because people who are dying need to talk about what they’re going through, and they’re prohibited from doing that because people who are still here are afraid.

Brian:  That’s a great point. Sherry, I think we should just devote this show to you, to tell you the truth, to be perfectly honest.

Peter:  Well, thank you for calling, Sherry, great call.

Ed: That was wonderful.

Caller Sherry: Thank you.  Have a good day.

[music]

Ed:  Well, we’re just about out of time, but I want to play for you, Brian and Peter, one more piece of tape from my visit to Hollywood Cemetery.  You’ll remember sharing that earlier with you in the show, Dr. Hunter McGuire, this one I saved for last because, let’s just say evokes a certain sense of closure.  All I’ll say in the way of set up for this, is that for many years, Hollywood has been reserving space and a special section of cemetery, for those who serve as President of the University of Richmond, and as you guys know, just last year, I took up that job myself.

Ed: Well, I’m having the unusual sensation of standing at the place that’s been reserved for my burial site.  I’m at the University of Richmond section of Hollywood Cemetery.  I’m proud and somewhat relieved to see that we’re on a beautiful knoll that let’s us look off in enormous distances in every direction, and what I’m seeing are remarkable sculptures of everything from a Celtic cross there that could have been a thousand years old, to lilies of the field, to Egyptian obelisks. It sort of reminds you like that American history that I’ve spent my life studying, these things last, that there are marks on the land, and, who knows, maybe one day they’ll be a mark here for me in some way.  I’ll have to remember how to get here. It’s actually pretty close to the entrance, isn’t it?

Brian:  Well, Ed, I want to ask you, since Peter and I don’t have burial plots reserved for us at the University of Virginia, tell me what did that feel like looking at your own grave site?

Ed:  It was a little spooky to think about it.  You look around and you see, if you would have some words attached to you forever, what would they be?  Maybe “he was one of the Backstory hosts.”

Peter:  One of the Backstory hosts, that’s very beautiful.

Brian:  OK guys, it’s time to inter this show.  As always, one hour is barely enough to scratch the surface of things, and we’ll be waiting for you online to continue the discussion.  You can find us at BackStoryRadio.org.  All of our past shows are archived there, and you can sign up for our free Podcast and newsletter as well.

Ed:  You’ll also find a special bonus feature, along with this week’s show post.  It’s an audio slide show featuring Michael Lessy, author of the unusual book of photographs called, Wisconsin Death Trip.

Peter:  Again, that’s BackStoryRadio.org.  Don’t be a stranger.

Brian:  BackStory is produced by Tony Field, Rachel Quimby, and Catherine Moore, with help from Lydia Wilson.

Peter:  Jamal Milner mastered the show and Gabby Alter wrote our theme.  BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

Ed:  Major production support for BackStory is provided by the David A. Harrison Fund for the President’s Initiatives at the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Perry Foundation, Inc., Carrie Brown Epstein and the W.L. Lyons Brown Jr. Charitable Foundation, UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, and an anonymous donor.

Brian:  Support also comes from Marcus and Carol Weinstein, Trish and David Crowe, Claire Gargalley, David Carley, J.M. Weinberg, and Caroline Feeney.

Peter Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

Brian Balogh is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs.

Ed Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond.

BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.