Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America

Christian Century, Jan 30, 2002 by Thomas G. Long

Prothero sees this positive turn toward cremation as the sign of a major shift in social and religious consciousness. Unlike some other commentators, though, who discern in the climbing cremation rates yet another sign of secularization and the erosion of ritual, Prothero finds evidence to the contrary. He sees it as an indication that Americans are hungering for more spiritual meaning, not less, and denser, more personally rich ritual practices. Not finding what they need in conventional funeral patterns, Americans are shopping around for something new, more suited to this deeply personalized, flexible and informal cultural moment. Cremation fits the bill. Seen this way, the 19th-century eccentrics and freethinkers who advanced the initial arguments for cremation were the first troops on the beach in a battle, as Prothero puts it, "by ordinary Americans to take back authority over the rites of death from professionals (undertakers and clergy included) and to reinvest those rites with meaning and purpose."

Procremation efforts in America began, Prothero observes, as a part of a larger movement toward purity and sanitation in public life. In the last half of the 19th century, the germ theory of disease was replacing the miasma theory in the popular mind just when American cities were becoming crowded, garbage-strewn, foul-smelling and cholera-infected. Every social reformer had a scapegoat. The religious blamed sinners for the diseases of society, isolationists blamed unwashed immigrants and the cremationists blamed the dead.

Cemeteries, the cremationists argued, were festering grounds for bacteria from which germ-ridden seepage leaked poison into the ground water. One physician, pointing at Laurel Hill, Philadelphia's lovely garden cemetery located beside the Schnylkill River, warned, "When you drink Schuylkill water you are sampling your grandfather." Cremation was then the pet idea of elite radicals, who portrayed it as a logical, enlightened, pure alternative to the nonhygienic and superstitious corruptions of the past. "The crematory is the only never-failing germicide," argued the president of the New York Cremation Society. By the early decades of the goth century, however, the idea that cemeteries were factories of contagion was largely discredited, and the cremation movement lost one of its key rationales. "Stripped of its prime justification in sanitary science," notes Prothero, "cremation after World War I became a rebellion in search of a cause," and the cause it seized was aesthetics.

Now the desire was to make cremation beautiful. Elaborate, architecturally pleasing crematories were built during the first half of the goth century, and the rhetoric of the movement shifted to more elegant language. Furnace retorts became "cremation vaults" and ashes became "cremated remains," or even "cremains." Cremation was presented not primarily as logical and sanitary but as lovely and natural. As one 1916 procremation pamphlet claimed, "Nature has loaned to your soul, for its time upon earth, the use of the materials of which your body is made.... And in return what is your debt to nature?" Why, of course, it was to submit to cremation in order to "give it all back to the forests, the earth, the water, the air."