"Purified by Fire" by Stephen Prothero

Denounced as "heathen," then touted as tasteful, cremation in America has lately taken a turn for the tacky.

By Laura Miller

Mar 7, 2001 | Up until the late 19th century, the vast majority of Americans believed that it was better to bury than to burn. Yet by 1999, a quarter of all those who died were cremated, some half a million people annually. How we went from being a society in which incinerating the dead was considered "heathen" and heartless to one in which the fiery furnace is seen as just another "memorial option" is the subject of Stephen Prothero's readable new history. It's a peculiar, heroless yarn, since cremation's proponents were often their own worst enemies, insensitive or even oblivious to the powerful emotions people attach to the rituals of death. As a nation, we half-consciously stumbled, unguided, toward the flames, carrying a whole lot more baggage than just the corpses of our dead.

The first American champions of cremation were, according to Prothero, "by and large, genteel elites ... white, well-educated, middle-class ladies and gentlemen from the Northeast to the Midwest." The Gilded Age, when their campaign flourished, fostered legions of idealistic reformers, from suffragettes to free-love advocates, all ready to bring the concentrated energy of the Protestant work ethic to bear on their chosen causes. Cremationists included members of "liberal Protestant denominations such as Episcopalianism and Unitarianism" who also embraced the modern ethic of sanitary science. Burial, they argued, meant not eternal sleep, but a long, repulsive, gooey process of decay in which corpses seeped a dangerous "miasma" into the atmosphere, spreading disease. Cremation, on the other hand, was quick and dry and far more tidy, a purifying transformation. Those who opposed it could only do so on account of ignorance and superstition. And cremation's most avid supporters published no fewer than three different periodicals in the late 1800s saying as much.

Though well intentioned, these people, like most zealous reformers, were terrible snobs: "It is a pity that our neighbors do not know as well as we do what is best for them," sniffed the Modern Cremationist. Often, "superstition" worked as a code word for "Catholicism," the faith of many of the new immigrants, whom reformers saw as recalcitrantly "primitive" and "dirty." And while quite a few of the cremationists were Christians, some of the kookier elements of 19th century religious life -- Theosophists and spiritualists, basically the Victorian equivalent of today's New Age fringe -- flocked to their ranks as well. The first person to be cremated in modern America was one Baron De Palm, an Italian who was reputed to be both a Freemason and a Rosicrucian, and his cremation turned into a media circus, with raucous crowds and a cheeky reporter lifting the baron's shroud to check out his "private parts." One writer likened it to a "pig roast."

Even sympathetic observers complained that the Pennsylvania crematory where the baron was transformed into ashes looked depressingly utilitarian and shabby. The lack of ceremony didn't stop there. An English cremationist, Sir Henry Thompson, argued that cremating the people who died in London each year "would yield 200,000 pounds of high-grade 'bone-earth' worth approximately 50,000 pounds sterling," while a New Yorker suggested that human corpses could be rendered into "fat substances" to fuel the city's gas lights. This kind of attention-getting "reformism" branded the movement, in many people's eyes, as shockingly irreligious and crass.

Nevertheless, the cremationists got in a few shots at the interment industry, harrowing the public -- who believed their buried loved ones to be resting in peace -- with stories of grave-robbing medical students, necrophiliacs, cadavers unearthed by floods and civic construction projects, premature burial and the mixing of blacks' and whites' bones in supposedly segregated graveyards. Cremation's foes had their own versions of these stories (race mixing seems to have been a particular bugaboo) and raised the cremationists' tales of worms and rot with vivid descriptions of flesh crackling and scorching in the furnace. Plus, they had the pope on their side, Leo XIII to be precise, who called cremation a "detestable abuse" and cemented Catholic resistance to the practice.

Religious opposition to cremation referred to the doctrine of the resurrection, the belief that on Judgment Day, God will unite each soul with its risen and perfected body. That was in turn grounded in the Jewish and Christian notion that the body and soul are inextricably linked in the "mixed" -- that is, physical and spiritual -- nature of humankind. To deliberately destroy the body was considered blasphemous. The idea, often held by cremationists, that human beings consist of a pure spirit imprisoned in a material and ultimately disposable body was associated with the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as with "Hindoos" and other Asians -- godless "pagans."

Next Page: Cremation today: A big business with plenty of kitsch

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