THE 'MORTICIANS' VS. THE 'UNDERTAKERS'
McMillin, Miles
The 'Morticians' vs. The Undertakers' By MILES McMILLIN THE efforts of the organized profit undertakers in this country to stop the development of cooperative burial societies has reached the...
...The funeral racket is one that has no standards of price...
...So around the country the organized morticians have been pushing various kinds of legislation, designed ostensibly to raise the standards of the profession...
...Along with tombstone makers, the undertakers are fattening on human grief, the survey declared...
...Any old horse dealer can be an undertaker...
...Why, a big elephant could be completely embalmed for $1.50...
...The Undertakers' By MILES McMILLIN THE efforts of the organized profit undertakers in this country to stop the development of cooperative burial societies has reached the stage of becoming a war of the "morticians" against the "undertakers...
...The racket raised has not been too loud, but it has been loud enough to get some people interested...
...Few Caskets Sell For $10,000 But the co-ops are not the only ones being hit by this type of legislation...
...The findings have not been distinguished for their fragrance...
...Any ordinary man or woman, who cannot even read or write, with proper teaching can be made an expert embalmer in less than a year...
...They also demand that a full time embalmer be on the job in an undertaking parlor, on call at all times...
...In a good year the average cost of burial is $410...
...The public is at the mercy of an organized funeral business supervised by state boards and needless laws and regulations...
...The men of the profession, however, are far sighted...
...Highly Specialized Racket' A committee of the Maryland legislature, which has before it some of the restrictive legislation referred to above, also looked into the burial business...
...The average funeral director might charge as much as $100 for a casket the material in which did not cost more than $5...
...W. W. Chambers, a millionaire mortician of Washington, D. C, who embalmed his first body in a livery stable 37 years ago, appeared before the committee...
...The average cost of co-op burial ranges from $84 to $165, the report declared...
...The Federal Council of Churches, for example, looked into this question of the high cost of death...
...They know what they've got and they intend to keep it...
...The embalming process costs but 50 cents' for materials and not more than a dollar or 2 for labor and time...
...Some undertakers base their fees on the amount of insurance carried by the deceased...
...My profession, he said, is "the most highly specialized racket in the world...
...An average funeral, he told the committee, need not cost more than $95, "to include every essential care of the dead...
...Morticians were outraged at the report's conclusion that "competition in the funeral business is not in terms of price and quality, but competition for the possession of bodies...
...Super-salesmen, the survey showed, have worked out tactics to high pressure the bereaved into spending 3 or 4 times the deceased's monthly income for burial...
...It issued a glowing report on co-ops...
...Some of these bills flatly prohibit undertakers from mixing embalming fluid and furniture polish...
...Most funerals cost less than $500, was the indignant reply of the undertakers, and only a few caskets ever cost more than $10,000...
...The real purpose, it has become all too obvious, is to make it difficult if not impossible to organize burial cooperatives...
...Legislation restricting this activity has found its way into the Wisconsin and Iowa legislatures and the co-ops have been fighting it...
...Hair-dos and face treatment materials, also amounting to but a few cents, are apt to appear as multi-dollar items in the funeral bill...
...Many of the small co-op groups depend upon this type of service...
...The result has been that a lot of curious people have begun to pry open the coffin lids...
...The "morticians," which is what an undertaker is when he hits the big time, after he gives up the furniture business and filling station and begins paying exclusive attention to corpses, have been gunning for the co-op burial groups for a long time...
...These restrictions, of course, would raise hob with the small undertakers, who do quite a brisk business riding out on the circuit to small towns which do not have their own establishment...
...It also presented some damning charges against the profit undertaker, after a survey...
...The small "undertaker," who is not yet a "mortician," is also feeling the squeeze...
...Whatever can be charged and gotten away with is the guiding rule...
...Not that the co-ops have become dangerous in this field, as yet...
...Door crepes, reclining pillows, and shrouds, whose materials are worth less than 35 cents, and when made up not more than 75 cents, have been charged out at from $5 to $15...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 18
