{"id":64578,"date":"2017-10-19T16:15:25","date_gmt":"2017-10-19T20:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=64578"},"modified":"2017-10-19T18:34:43","modified_gmt":"2017-10-19T22:34:43","slug":"new-yorker-what-do-we-do-with-our-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=64578","title":{"rendered":"(New Yorker) Jill Lepore–What Do We Do With Our Dead?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Throughout the nineteen-forties, most American cemeteries were subject to the same racially restrictive covenants as housing, and were just as resistant to integration, even after courts deemed this practice a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Black graves were more likely to be unmarked, their occupants buried in the old ways, a traditional \u201chomegoing.\u201d In the fifties, consumer conformity drove the conventions of burial; the rising cost of dying outpaced the rising cost of living. Black funeral directors sold the same wares. \u201cNegro undertakers gross more than $120 million for 150,000 funerals each year,\u201d Ebony<\/em> reported in 1953, in an article titled \u201cDeath Is Big Business.\u201d \u201cIf a person drives a Cadillac, why should he have a Pontiac funeral?\u201d one funeral director asked Jessica Mitford, as she reported in \u201cThe American Way of Death<\/a>,\u201d in 1963. What sounded like a hoax worthy of Barnum had become by then the way a great many Americans buried their dead\u2014on satin sheets in stainless-steel caskets, with hymns piped in their crypts through high-fidelity stereo, beneath vast, manicured lawns. \u201cThe desirable crypts are now in the new air-conditioned section,\u201d another funeral director told Mitford when she updated the book.<\/p>\n

There were, nevertheless, dissenters, a cadaver counterculture. In 1971, the \u201cLast Whole Earth Catalog\u201d offered instructions for a \u201cDo-It-Yourself Burial\u201d that you could arrange for fifty dollars. Cremation is generally cheaper than burial, and it makes a certain sense if you have no intention of maintaining the geraniums on the family plot. Long forbidden in the Jewish and Muslim faiths, and disparaged by Christians, it slowly became more acceptable. By 1980, the cremation rate in the United States, which had been virtually zero, had risen to nearly ten per cent. For people with no religious faith, cremation proved particularly appealing. (That number is growing, fast: one in three younger millennials has either never or rarely attended a religious service.) In the Gilded Age, the rich were the ones who wanted to be cremated; in the Second Gilded Age, cremation is the only kind of end the poor can afford. Stagnant wages and the financial crisis of 2008 appear to have accelerated the flames: people who\u2019d lost their homes could hardly afford mahogany coffins. In 2013, Time<\/em> declared cremation \u201cthe new American way of death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ashes scatter. In 2016, for the first time, more than half the American dead were cremated, marking a change to the landscape of every city and town\u2014tombstones uncarved, graveyards abandoned\u2014and a weakening of the ties that bind the living to the dead. The dead are a people and the past is a place that half of Americans no longer visit, except to topple stones.<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Throughout the nineteen-forties, most American cemeteries were subject to the same racially restrictive covenants as housing, and were just as resistant to integration, even after courts deemed this practice a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Black graves were more likely…<\/span><\/p>\n

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