Content provided in partnership with
Why Jessica Mitford was wrong
Theology Today, Jan 1999 by Long, Thomas G
It cost only $475 to cremate Jessica Mitford.
She would have been pleased by that, of course, delighted to know that in death as well as in life she had deprived the local undertakers of their usual profits. Indeed, when Mitford died at 78 in July, 1996, she was working on a new edition of her journalistic pipe bomb, The American Way of Death, a savagely witty and enormously influential blast of the American funeral industry. Mitford's book, which this year observes its thirty-fifth anniversary of publication, left morticians with concussion shock and dramatically impacted both industry practices and general cultural attitudes toward death and funerals. People would ask her what she planned to call the revised version. "Death Warmed Over," she would say.1
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
Jessica Mitford was part aristocrat, part fellow traveler, part comedian, part crank, part revolutionary, and a full-blooded, thoroughly delightful eccentric. Her quirkiness came honestly. Born in 1917 in Gloucestershire, England, she was the fifth of six daughters of a pair of dreary, right-wing aristocrats, Lord and Lady Redesdale, who somehow managed to breed a gaggle of colorful social noncomformists. One sister, Diana, in a masterpiece of bad timing, married the leader of British Fascists just in time for the outbreak of World War II and was imprisoned for Nazi enthusiasm. Another sister, Unity, known as "the Nordic goddess," emigrated to Germany where she became a passionate disciple of Hitler, attempting suicide when her romantic entreaties to him went unrequited. Sister Pamela spent her childhood yearning to be a horse. By contrast, yet another sister, Deborah, glided through a fairy tale life as a duchess, having wed the Duke of Devonshire. Nancy Mitford, the oldest of the sisters, turned the bizarre inner workings of the Mitford household into a series of quirky novels, and the family peculiarities were on full display in The Mitford Girls, a wacky musical comedy that played London's West End.
Jessica, or "Decca" as she was known by her family and friends, was the most defiant of the "Mitford Girls." Though her father leaned toward fascism, Jessica ran away from home at age nineteen to fight fascists in Spain. She was the child of aristocratic privilege but eloped with a nephew of Winston Churchill to escape the confines of nobility and, consequently, was disowned by her parents. Shunned by family in Britain, Decca, with her husband and young daughter, left England for America in 1939 to make a new life. After her husband was killed in the war, she married Robert Treuhaft, a left-leaning California labor lawyer, drifted into the American Communist Party, and was rewarded by being hauled in front of the California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities. (Ever the wit, Jessica refused to say whether she had been a member of either the Communist Party or the Berkeley Tennis Club.) A woman of regal bearing who never lost the British lilt in her voice, she nevertheless lived in a modest, middle-class home even after her public success. (To snobbish sister Nancy, who was scandalized that Jessica preferred plebeian Oakland to fashionable Berkeley, Jessica snorted, "We live on Regent Street. Does that make you feel better?")
She was at various times in her life a clerk in a dress shop, a door-to-door hawker of silk hosiery, a Miami bartender, a union organizer, a reporter for the Soviet-sympathizing People's World, an investigator for the federal government, a member of the Black Panthers' defense team, an actress in Woody Allen's movie "Play It Again, Sam," and, in her seventies, lead warbler for a band dubbed "Decca and the Dectones," whose last madcap album included Beatles' tunes and was called "Inappropriate Songs for Special Occasions."
But mainly Jessica Mitford was a muckraker. In fact, she loved the label, embraced it, and was openly pleased when a critic sniffed that she was "the queen of the muckrakers." Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking was the proud title of a collection of her essays. She said she took up writing because, "I figured the only thing that requires no education and no skills is writing." She took up muckraking because, as San Francisco columnist Herb Caen noted, "Like Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris before her, she was merely reporting the truth about abominations waiting to be exposed."
Abominations were waiting to be exposed everywhere, it seemed, and Jessica smoked them out-in the practice of medicine, in prisons, in the celebrated political trial of Doctor Benjamin Spock, to name a few places. But nothing else she wrote rivals the stunning effect of her masterpiece, The American Way of Death. Rejected by several publishers as "too morbid" and viewed as a certain flop, the book instead touched a social nerve. It sold out its initial print run the day of publication, became a runaway best seller for months, and staggered the funeral industry by landing punch after punch on its ethical glass jaw.
Decca pummeled away at every vulgarity, cheap sentiment, and greedy manipulation she saw in the funeral establishment, and she saw plenty. Morticians in America were the robber barons of death, she was convinced, mercenary bottom feeders preying on the vulnerabilities of the griefstricken. She attacked "Beautiful Memory Picture" euphemisms for embalming, cosmetically treated corpses, caskets with innerspring mattresses, the hawking of "comfortable" burial footwear, and especially the price gouging commonplace among funeral homes. Almost singlehandedly, Mitford roused the moribund Federal Trade Commission to examine funeral service practices, and the slate of Federal Trade Commission regulations of funeral homes in place today is, in significant measure, a legacy of The American Way of Death.2
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: News
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »