Mr. J. Wilfred Corr later became the executive director of the American Institute of Funeral Directors. He contributed occasional articles to Mortuary Managementin which he made ringing appeals for ever-higher ethical standards for funeral directors: “Perhaps we will live to see the triumph of ethical practices, born of American competition, fair dealing and common honesty.” Mr. Donald Welch was one of California’s most prosperous undertakers and the owner of a number of Southern California mortuaries. Mr. Warwick Carpenter was a market analyst who prepared the statistics on funeral costs used in the legislative committee report. According to Mortuary Management, the statistics were originally developed by Mr. Carpenter for Mr. Welch, “to illustrate an address he made before a national convention of funeral directors.” Mortuary Managementopines that Mr. Carpenter “performed a very helpful service to funeral directors in California now under investigation.” The assemblyman from Glendale who actually read the report was the Honorable H. Allen Smith, who went on to Congress.

The report itself was liberally circulated by the undertakers, who rather naturally saw it as a first-rate public relations aid.

The ten years following the Collier’sarticle were relatively tranquil ones for the funeral industry, at least so far as the press was a matter of concern to it. Mr. Merle Welsh, at the time president of the National Funeral Directors Association, was able to report to the 1959 convention: “By our constant vigil there is a lessening of the derogatory and sensational in written matter. Several articles of which we have been apprised have either not been written or were watered down versions of that which they were originally intended.”

A year later, Casket & Sunnysidemade the same point: “For many years only a very few derogatory articles about funeral service have been printed in national publications…. Many times the information that an author is planning such an article is leaked to a state association officer or to NFDA, so that the proper and accurate information may be given such writer without his asking for it. In practically all such instances, such proposed articles either never appear or appear without their ‘sensational exposé,’ entirely different articles than were at first planned.”

The funeral men were far from easy in their minds, however, for a new peril was appearing on the horizon. Said Mr. Welsh, “I could speak for hours on the problems and rumors of problems besetting funeral service as a result of the times…. There are memorial societies and church groups trying to reform funeral practices. There are promoters telling funeral directors to take on a plan or plans or else. There are writers who would like to reduce the American funeral program to a $150 disposal plan…. While it is true we have patches of blue in our sky through which shines the light of professionality, there are also dark clouds involving crusades, promotions, unjustifiable attacks and designs to replace the American funeral program of to each his own with a $150 disposal plan.”

There is a semifictional character, who often crops up in lawyers’ talk, known as the “man of ordinary prudence.” He is a person of common sense, able to look at transactions with a normal degree of sophistication, to put a reasonable interpretation on evidence, to apply rational standards to all sorts of situations. He has, down the ages, often given the undertakers trouble; but never, it would seem, so much trouble as he is giving them in America today. He is, in fact, their worst enemy.

It is he who grins out at the funeral men from the pages of magazines, frowns at them from the probate bench, speaks harshly of them from the pulpit or from the autopsy room. It is he who writes nasty letters to the newspapers about them, and derides them in private conversation. The burden of his criticism has changed little over the years. He thinks showy funerals are in bad taste and are a waste of money. He thinks some undertakers take advantage of the grief-stricken for financial gain. He thinks the poor and uneducated are especially vulnerable to this form of exploitation when a member of the family dies. Lately, he has begun to think that there are important uses to which a dead body could be put for the benefit of the living—medical research, eye banks, tissue banks, and the like. More significant, he is taking some practical measures to provide a rational alternative to the American way of death. Over the years, funeral societies (or memorial associations) have been established in the United States and Canada, devoted to the principle of “simple, dignified funerals at a reasonable cost.”

This is, from the undertaker’s point of view, a particularly vile form of sedition. the National Funeral Service Journal(April 1961) denounced funeral society advocates as “the burial beatniks of contemporary America… far more dangerous than the average funeral director realizes, for they are fanatics; they are the paraders for human rights, the picketers of meetings and institutions that displease them, the shouters and hecklers and demonstrators for any number of causes.” Whether the mild-mannered clergymen, professors, and social workers who form the backbone of the funeral societies would recognize themselves in this word picture is uncertain, but it is a fairly typical funeral trade reaction to any suggested deviation from their established procedures.

The funeral society people were not the first critics of American funeral practices, nor are they indeed the harshest; they were merely the first to think in terms of an organization through which an alternative to the “standard funeral” might be made available to the public. It is the organizational aspect that terrifies the undertakers, and that gives rise to purple passages in the trade press:

What, then, is the “concept of the memorial society” against which these ounces of decency must be mustered? It was originally set forth in a pamphlet issued by the Cooperative League of the USA, entitled Memorial Associations: What They Are, How They Are Organized: