Mark S. Schantz: What the "death-denying" culture of the contemporary United States might learn from the "death-embracing culture" of our nineteenth-century forebears
[In Awaiting the Heavenly Country (2008), Mark S. Schantz takes account of "the Civil War and America's culture of death."]
Are American attitudes toward death and dying on the move again? Ever since the publication of Philippe Ariès's highly influential Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (1974), it has been canonical to see much of the West, and particularly the United States, as engaged in an effort to make the presence of death "forbidden" in public discourse and practice. Despite the work of historians such as Gary Laderman (see particularly his work Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth Century America [2003]), it is still possible to imbibe deeply the notion that we Americans are death-deniers without peer. We embalm our dead to make them appear alive. We cloak the language of death with terms such as "passed away," the "loved one," or "the departed"—conducting funerals as though we could have a "memory picture" of the deceased without the end of life. There are developments afoot, however, that might suggest a more complicated dance with death is emerging in contemporary America.
A few weeks ago my wife and I saw the 2009 HBO film Taking Chance. Based on the reflections of United States Marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl (played brilliantly and painfully by Kevin Bacon), the film is both restrained and enormously powerful, a reflection on soldierly death for a modern age. It follows Lieutenant Colonel Strobl as he accompanies the body of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps home to the majestic landscape of Wyoming from the desert warfare of Iraq. This is a modest film, tightly constructed and narrowly focused. But it works because it captures so many small details with accuracy. A body packed in black ice bags before being nestled in a metallic transfer case that is flown home to Dover Air Force base in Delaware. The work of compassionate military mortuary technicians who scrub each finger nail; who clean with a jeweler's precision a watch, dog tags, and a Saint Christopher's medal; and who dress the dead soldier in crisp dress blues. At each stage of the prepared body and its casket's flight home, we catch a glimpse of the honor the corpse receives and of the psychological cost paid by Lieutenant Colonel Strobl who tenders it. Here is a film that insists on a reality many Americans continue to ignore: our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan necessitate that soldiers die.
Until a recent policy shift signaled by the Obama administration, it was a matter of Defense Department policy (upheld by administrations Democratic and Republican alike) that the public be shielded from this obvious fact. Implemented on February 2, 1991, in the context of the first Gulf War, the Department of Defense issued what has since become known as the Dover Ban: "Media coverage of the arrival of remains at the port of entry or at the interim stops will not be permitted …" (Public Affairs Guidance—Operation Desert Storm, Casualty and Mortuary Affairs, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Arlington, Virginia, February 2, 1991). Fearing massive numbers of American casualties during Desert Storm and the fallout this might wreak on home-front morale, the Defense Department was understandably concerned to keep the dead soldiers from public view. The history of the Dover Ban itself is a tortured affair, subject to deep misunderstanding (including the notion that the ban itself was an executive order issued by President George H. W. Bush, which it apparently was not), dotted with peculiar exceptions (such as the Defense Department's decision to distribute to the press photos showing the caskets bearing the remains of those killed on the USS Cole in 2000), and punctuated by legal actions challenging its legitimacy. Often these debates hinge on issues of family privacy, government expediency, and the language of individual or constitutional rights: we have a First Amendment right to see these caskets—so the arguments run—the right to report on military families, the right to understand. This is mostly an abstract conversation about the rights of individuals understood in relationship to the rights of nation states. It is not primarily a discussion about the certainty of death in warfare, nor does it consider the proper way to treat "the honored dead." Ironically, even the debate on the Dover Ban skirts the fundamental issue that drives it—the reality that warfare kills.
Given what I have learned in the process of researching and writing Awaiting the Heavenly Country, I suspect that our Civil War ancestors would have been profoundly perplexed by the Dover Ban and its attendant debate, and they would be even more puzzled by our modern skittishness about death. While our own culture shields itself from the prospect of death, our nineteenth-century forebearers embraced it. They lived in a world afflicted by high infant mortality rates and by life expectancies closer to those of medieval Europe than to our own day. The scourges of smallpox, yellow fever, and consumption demanded that antebellum Americans confront their own mortality. The Civil War generation engaged, too, in serious and learned speculation on the heavenly realms that would await them—filled with friends, family, awe, wonder, and transcendent beauty. The rural cemeteries they built ensured that posterity would remember the great deeds of their lives, as their descendents strolled with "melancholy pleasure" (as Justice Joseph Story phrased it) along meandering and romantic paths. Death percolated as the major subject of interest in the arts as well, celebrated in poetry and literature, painting, and of course, postmortem photography. Aspiring folk of means, both Northern and Southern, posed with their deceased relatives (particularly their children), marking the first large-scale use of commercial photography in American culture....
Read entire article at Common-Place.org
Are American attitudes toward death and dying on the move again? Ever since the publication of Philippe Ariès's highly influential Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (1974), it has been canonical to see much of the West, and particularly the United States, as engaged in an effort to make the presence of death "forbidden" in public discourse and practice. Despite the work of historians such as Gary Laderman (see particularly his work Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth Century America [2003]), it is still possible to imbibe deeply the notion that we Americans are death-deniers without peer. We embalm our dead to make them appear alive. We cloak the language of death with terms such as "passed away," the "loved one," or "the departed"—conducting funerals as though we could have a "memory picture" of the deceased without the end of life. There are developments afoot, however, that might suggest a more complicated dance with death is emerging in contemporary America.
A few weeks ago my wife and I saw the 2009 HBO film Taking Chance. Based on the reflections of United States Marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl (played brilliantly and painfully by Kevin Bacon), the film is both restrained and enormously powerful, a reflection on soldierly death for a modern age. It follows Lieutenant Colonel Strobl as he accompanies the body of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps home to the majestic landscape of Wyoming from the desert warfare of Iraq. This is a modest film, tightly constructed and narrowly focused. But it works because it captures so many small details with accuracy. A body packed in black ice bags before being nestled in a metallic transfer case that is flown home to Dover Air Force base in Delaware. The work of compassionate military mortuary technicians who scrub each finger nail; who clean with a jeweler's precision a watch, dog tags, and a Saint Christopher's medal; and who dress the dead soldier in crisp dress blues. At each stage of the prepared body and its casket's flight home, we catch a glimpse of the honor the corpse receives and of the psychological cost paid by Lieutenant Colonel Strobl who tenders it. Here is a film that insists on a reality many Americans continue to ignore: our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan necessitate that soldiers die.
Until a recent policy shift signaled by the Obama administration, it was a matter of Defense Department policy (upheld by administrations Democratic and Republican alike) that the public be shielded from this obvious fact. Implemented on February 2, 1991, in the context of the first Gulf War, the Department of Defense issued what has since become known as the Dover Ban: "Media coverage of the arrival of remains at the port of entry or at the interim stops will not be permitted …" (Public Affairs Guidance—Operation Desert Storm, Casualty and Mortuary Affairs, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Arlington, Virginia, February 2, 1991). Fearing massive numbers of American casualties during Desert Storm and the fallout this might wreak on home-front morale, the Defense Department was understandably concerned to keep the dead soldiers from public view. The history of the Dover Ban itself is a tortured affair, subject to deep misunderstanding (including the notion that the ban itself was an executive order issued by President George H. W. Bush, which it apparently was not), dotted with peculiar exceptions (such as the Defense Department's decision to distribute to the press photos showing the caskets bearing the remains of those killed on the USS Cole in 2000), and punctuated by legal actions challenging its legitimacy. Often these debates hinge on issues of family privacy, government expediency, and the language of individual or constitutional rights: we have a First Amendment right to see these caskets—so the arguments run—the right to report on military families, the right to understand. This is mostly an abstract conversation about the rights of individuals understood in relationship to the rights of nation states. It is not primarily a discussion about the certainty of death in warfare, nor does it consider the proper way to treat "the honored dead." Ironically, even the debate on the Dover Ban skirts the fundamental issue that drives it—the reality that warfare kills.
Given what I have learned in the process of researching and writing Awaiting the Heavenly Country, I suspect that our Civil War ancestors would have been profoundly perplexed by the Dover Ban and its attendant debate, and they would be even more puzzled by our modern skittishness about death. While our own culture shields itself from the prospect of death, our nineteenth-century forebearers embraced it. They lived in a world afflicted by high infant mortality rates and by life expectancies closer to those of medieval Europe than to our own day. The scourges of smallpox, yellow fever, and consumption demanded that antebellum Americans confront their own mortality. The Civil War generation engaged, too, in serious and learned speculation on the heavenly realms that would await them—filled with friends, family, awe, wonder, and transcendent beauty. The rural cemeteries they built ensured that posterity would remember the great deeds of their lives, as their descendents strolled with "melancholy pleasure" (as Justice Joseph Story phrased it) along meandering and romantic paths. Death percolated as the major subject of interest in the arts as well, celebrated in poetry and literature, painting, and of course, postmortem photography. Aspiring folk of means, both Northern and Southern, posed with their deceased relatives (particularly their children), marking the first large-scale use of commercial photography in American culture....