Kristine M. McCusker has chosen a large topic and then greatly expanded her work by defining it as capaciously as possible, making herself responsible both for an account of sweeping changes in the most fundamental attitudes toward death in the general population and for the most granular details of death etiquette in individual families. Noting this, I was before all else moved to respect the sheer industry of her research and the organizational savvy that allows her to present so much in such orderly fashion. She accomplishes this in the first place by a rigorous imposition of temporal arrangement and determined focus upon the "South" of her subtitle.
McCusker opens upon a world where death is comprehended as heaven-sent and expected early, often well before the biblically authorized (Psalm 90:10) three score and ten, in a region regarded as an unusually "deadly landscape" (22) in American geography. Death was, in 1900, dealt with in a small world of "local political practice" (9) centered in families and church communities. This book then traces over a half-century the enormous changes wrought by intrusions from the federal government and new business interests (the New Deal, professional funeral directors, life insurance companies) and big-world events (two world wars, a smallpox epidemic, and a Great Depression). Put simply, these larger world entities "took over the physical care of the dead" (1), introduced a professionalized funeral industry, and brought to market products serving new rituals of mourning, condolence, memorialization. These real-world developments were accompanied by cultural changes, summarized by McCusker under the term "life extension" efforts, from strange bedfellows such as church groups and life insurance companies, among others. Churches shifted their emphasis from "expecting death and preparing each parishioner to die sooner rather than later" (35) to investing in hospitals (especially tuberculosis sanitaria—"by 1918 eleven SBC (Southern Baptist Convention) hospitals had been built, mostly in the South" (40) —and updating their devotional guides to reflect changed attitudes. The Episcopal Church, for example, revised its Book of Common Prayer to add new sections on "Visitation of the Sick," including prayers for recovery. McCusker sums up these changes succinctly: "A more just and forgiving God now anchored the Episcopal liturgy, providing comfort rather than judgment, as well as the potential for recovery from illness, a more appropriate symbol for a modern world of death care and life extension" (128). Things were simpler for the insurance companies: they "wanted the insured to pay for a longer time period before cashing in their policies" (55).
These commercial innovations were at least equaled in the area of cultural impact by activities of the federal government's military arm, which in the two world wars unsettled among other things the region's race-based caste hierarchies. Military cemeteries in Europe for soldiers killed in WWI honored the dead by burying them "together, without regard for race" (97), and standardized military mail correspondence addressed family members with the honorific Mr. and Mrs. across racial lines in "a breach of southern racial etiquette" (65). Consistency in an area as byzantine (and oxymoronic) as "southern racial etiquette" was hard to come by, however—McCusker's volume notes that the same federal government segregated the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps (177), and as late as WWII remained deeply divided in its loyalties, when Black pilots flying into combat in "single-pilot P-51 Mustangs allowed the military to integrate its forces without actually integrating them" (205). The famed Tuskegee Airmen, the "Red Tails" of the 332nd Fighter Group, flew this plane escorting the B-24 bomber, called by McCusker "the work horse of the war... where the melting pot met" (201). As the missions took off, each bomber carried a crew of "ten white men of varied ethnic backgrounds" whose "relationships built on those planes became the defining experience for this generation." "Black southerners piloted the single-pilot P-51 Mustangs (no integration here) to keep white southerners back home committed to the war" (201).
And war, despite the wealth of detail about emergent protocols of funeral ceremony aimed at caring for and honoring their dead, is just one among many topics treated with similar efficiency in McCusker's work. The efforts of the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), and the Children's Bureau, founded in the Department of Labor in 1912, addressed problems with living children as daunting as those facing the military during wartime. This reading is not for the faint hearted, but officials urging improvements as basic as sanitary privies (one could be installed for $18.25) in working class homes, reported in a survey undertaken in 1919 that typhoid deaths were certain to flourish in neighborhoods adjacent to an Alexandria, Virginia, shipbuilding plant. "The filth included the dead and rotting carcasses of cats, dogs, fish heads, rats, and chickens" (140), writes McCusker, and the report itself concluded that "people of Alexandria have in recent years been paying a terrible penalty in human life for permitting such conditions" (140).
An additional and perhaps incidental appeal of McCusker's wide-ranging survey is the rich choir of vernacular voices cited in her work discussing topics of surpassing importance. Time and again powerful phrasings stand out–the North Carolina woman who told a Federal Writers Project interviewer, "Yes, I have three children living and I got eight dead. That's enough to kill anybody without anything else." Or the embittered Virginia father of a soldier killed "with the ill-fated and exploited 106th Infantry Div. at the German Bulge" who concluded, "One thing is sure he will not have to face the prospect of selling apples on the St. corner" (215).
It is a challenge for a brief review to approach justice for so capacious and effective a
work as this one–please take it on faith that McCusker covers the Spanish influenza
outbreak, the development of burial insurance, the appearance of Social Security, and
the rise of funeral "homes" with the same efficiency and attention to detail brought to
racial etiquette and military protocols.
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[Review length: 1036 words • Review posted on March 24, 2024]