Throughout its history, the NFDA has generally acted to boost the educational requirements for the licensing of embalmers. The time required for completion of an embalming—or mortuary science—course has crept up by stages from six weeks in 1910 to about two years. At such lofty-sounding institutions as Carl Sandburg College, Malcolm X College, or Vincennes University, one may earn an Associate in Applied Sciences degree.
Or one may get a diploma in funeral service in just forty weeks at the National Education Institute of New England; among the sixteen ten-week courses one must take there are “Issues and Concerns for Modern Professionals,” “Marketing and Merchandising in Funeral Service,” and “Restorative Art.”
But the educational requirements vary from state to state. The qualifications for licensing an embalmer—who is, after all, usually an underling, an employee of the funeral establishment—are generally more stringent than those for the funeral director who employs him. Wyoming has no educational requirements for a funeral director’s license. Six states require only a high school diploma and a year or two of apprenticeship. Just what meaning the term “profession” can have when applied to this calling is hard to conceive.
The NFDA itself sets no educational, moral, or ethical standards for membership. In fact, the only qualifications appear to be the payment of dues and a state license.
A major reason for the existence of most professional organizations is the maintenance of standards of ethical practice among its members, and the disciplining of members who deviate from these standards. Here the NFDA is in some difficulty, because the practices that have led to the severest public criticism—tricky selling methods and overcharging—are nowhere condemned in its official policy pronouncements. Mortuary Managementcommented on this difficulty: “[The NFDA] has little or no control over who belongs. It has to accept any member of an affiliated state association, and that includes everyone from the desk and telephone curbstoner to the 5,000 case a year corporation…. True, NFDA has a Code of Ethics. But there are no minimum standards for membership…. There is no restriction whatever on the curbstoner.”
The NFDA, not to be deterred by a little thing like the realities of a situation, in 1961 issued a ringing cry for professional status: “Before this decade is completed, professionalism will be a standard for funeral service.” There was more behind this yearning than just the desire for gentility and recognition. The achievement by undertakers of professional status would, it was hoped, be a convenient way to secure legal sanction for a ban on price advertising, long an objective of the NFDA. Restrictions on advertising by professions as well as by businesses have long since gone by the boards, invalidated by the courts on constitutional grounds. Members of the learned professions, on the other hand, have codes of ethics, at one time enforced by law, which prohibit advertising.
Possibly the vast gap between desire and reality on this question of professionalism—the contradiction between the high-flown talk of Ethical Values and vexatious commercial necessities—accounts in good measure for the painful sensitivity to criticism evidenced by the funeral men. The slightest suggestion of opposition to any part of their operation, the slightest questioning of their sincerity, virtue, and general uprightness, produces howls of anguish and brings them running like so many Brave Little Dutch Boys to plug the holes in the dike.
It is as though generations of music-hall jokes, ribald cartoons, literary bons mots of which the undertaker is the butt had produced a deep-seated persecution complex, sometimes bordering on an industry-wide paranoia. The very titles of their speeches reveal this uneasy state of mind. Topics for addresses at one convention were: “What Are They Doing to Us?” and “You Are Probably Being Talked About Right Now.”
In their relations with the community as a whole, the funeral men carry on a sort of weird shadowboxing, frequently wildly off the mark. There is an old act—possibly originated by W. C. Fields?—in which a bartender is trying to get rid of a bothersome fly. He goes after it with his bar towel, knocking down bottles as he swings; soon the bar is a shambles. Finally the fly settles on his nose and the bartender takes a last swipe, this time with a full bottle, and succeeds in knocking himself out while the fly unconcernedly buzzes off. The funeral industry’s approach to public relations is frequently reminiscent of that bartender.
Enemies seem to lurk everywhere—among competitors, of course, but also among the clergy, the medical profession, the tissue banks, the cemetery people, the press. There is hardly an issue of the many funeral trade publications that does not reflect some aspect of this sense of bitter persecution, of being deeply misunderstood and cruelly maligned.
14. THE NOSY CLERGY
“To the avaricious churchman there must be provided proof that a funeral investment does not deprive either the church or its pastor of revenue.” This extraordinary statement appeared in the National Funeral Service Journalfor April 1961, together with the opinion that the three most important reasons for the mounting rash of criticism of funeral service are “religion, avarice, and a burning desire for social reform.”
The same idea is expressed a little more fully in another issue of the same magazine: “The minister is perhaps our most serious problem, but the one most easily solved. Most religious leaders avoid interference. There are some, however… who feel that they must protect their parishioners’ financial resources and direct them to a more ‘worthy’ cause. Some of these men, after finding more dimes than dollars in the collection plate, reach the point of frustration where they vent their unholy anger on the supposedly affluent funeral director.”
These are salvos fired in a rather one-sided battle which rages from time to time between some of the clergy and some sections of the funeral industry—one-sided because, while the funeral men are always ready with dukes up to go on the offensive, the average minister is generally unaware that war has been declared.
The issue boils down to this: The morticians resent the intrusion into their business of clergy who take it upon themselves to steer parishioners in the direction of moderation in choice of casket and other matters pertaining to the production of the funeral. Many of the clergy, for their part, deplore what they regard as the growing usurpation of their role as counselors in a time of grief and need, and the growing distortion of what they view as an extremely important, solemn religious rite.
Not infrequently, the controversy spills over into print. There is a considerable body of church literature on the subject: pamphlets, booklets, and ecclesiastical-magazine articles which explain the religious significance of the funeral as an expression of faith. These stress the importance of ministerial counsel at the time of death, the spiritual nature of the funeral service, the need to face realistically the facts of life and death, the advisability of giving some thought to the type of funeral desired before the need arises.
Sometimes the advice is taken a step further: “Consider the cost in the context of your stewardship. Thoughts of preservation of a body, coupled with the inflationary pressures of our time, have led some people to excessive expenditures for burial vaults and caskets. Yet, we know that the body shall return to the elements from which it came…. This means that we will be conservative in the purchase of casket, burial, and additional services, conserving frequently limited funds to meet the needs of the living. Let us recognize that ordinarily this would also be the desire of the deceased….”