Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking Page 5

  Questioned about the relationship between crime news and circulation, he answered that there is indeed a most important relationship. He cited the fact that the day of Abbott’s execution had been the second biggest circulation day of San Francisco’s history, exceeded only by the day of the recent earthquake.

  He pointed out that, in the absence of crime news, there would be many fewer newspaper readers, and thus many would be denied the opportunity to read about such worthy activities as those of the United Crusade.

  A New Zealand judge had taken a different view of the matter. Commenting on pre-trial discussion of sensational cases by the press, Mr. Justice Blair said: “It is idle for such newspapers to claim they adopt such practices in the public interest. Their motive is the sordid one of increasing their profits, unmindful of the result to the unfortunate wretch who may ultimately have to stand trial ...”

  The Messinger case disappeared speedily from the pages of the city’s newspapers, but it had thrown into sharp relief some disquieting questions.

  How reliable is eyewitness identification? The girl’s positive accusation, to which was added that of the manacles saleslady, was the heart of the case against Messinger. Yet the young victim, it turned out, had not the slightest idea of what her attacker looked like.

  Should police be permitted, prior to indictment and trial, to feed the press step-by-step details of their work?

  Should the scramble for headlines, in turn, be permitted to build up such pressure on police to “produce” that careful, dispassionate, scientific investigation of the facts becomes a near impossibility?

  Should U.S. courts be given power of contempt over the press such as exists in England where all pre-trial comment on evidence is forbidden? English law is very clear and extremely severe on this subject. “To speak of an accused person as a rogue ... is wrongful, and is certain to be followed by a fine ...” (Harvard Law Review, Vol. 48). Presumably, the same penalty could be expected to apply in England with even greater force to one who spoke of an accused person as a “fang fiend”.

  Americans, traditionally zealous in defense of freedom of the press, may be reluctant to accept such drastic curbs.

  But there is a growing awareness of the menace of trial by headline.

  What happened to Messinger could have happened anywhere in the U.S.

  Indeed, two cases—those of Abbott and Dr. Sam Sheppard in Cleveland, Ohio—already had stirred consideration of the problem in the ranks of the legal profession.

  Joseph A. Ball, President of the California Bar, writing in the State Bar Journal (May-June, 1957) comments:

  “The controversy between free press and fair trial continues ... It is an undeniable fact that freedom of the press or the freedom of lawyers to discuss pending trials in newspapers has resulted in trial on the front page rather than in the courtroom.

  “The disgraceful episode in Cleveland during the trial of Dr. Sheppard received the criticism of bench, bar and the conservative press.

  “Said the Toledo Blade:

  ‘The press never left any doubt of the verdict it expected, which was not surprising in view of its having plunged so deep into the processes of administering justice by its own rules.’

  “Then followed the Burton Abbott case in Oakland, California, where the news stories outdid the prosecution in prejudging the result ...”

  He proposes “a code of civilized restraints which would insure a fair trial for all accused of crime” as an objective of both lawyers and press.

  He states in conclusion, “No freedom is more important than that of personal freedom, and no right more sacred than that of due process of law. Unfair trial is a social evil. Practices which threaten the fairness of a trial must be curbed ...”

  The story of the Messinger case illuminates the urgent need for the press to take strong action to police itself.

  Short of some pretty drastic measures on the part of news editors to end the evil of trial by headline, it seems not unlikely that courts and public may demand legal sanctions like those used in England to end the prejudging of cases in the newspapers.

  end

  COMMENT

  To put this in context: in 1957, when this article was taken by the Nation, I was plugging away at my autobiography, Daughters and Rebels, various drafts of which had already been turned down by at least a dozen distinguished American publishers. This freezing reception discouraged me, so I put the book aside; it was anyway a bit late, I thought, at the ripe age of forty to embark on a writing career. However the Messinger story, for several days an ongoing newspaper drama, caught my eye and I thought I would try my hand at writing an article about it.

  At the time this now musty old piece was published, I was inordinately proud of it: my first article ever to be accepted by a national magazine. I loved writing it and I adored seeing it in print. As my firstborn, I still feel some maternal affection for it; but rereading it, I detect all sorts of lapses of style and content. For that reason I reproduce here the original typescript, just as it was submitted, so that the reader can pick it to pieces as an exercise in editing.

  Why those oddly short paragraphs, having nothing to do with change of subject, which I have since learned is the whole point of paragraphs? Because at the time my chief mentor and volunteer editor was a newspaper reporter, the only professional writer I knew; he loathed long paragraphs as anathema to daily news writing, and was forever cutting mine into minuscule (and, as I now see, illogical) bits. Also, I regret those exclamation marks, which strike me as a form of unnecessary emphasis.

  Why did I not seek to interview the principals in the story—police, prosecutor, Messinger, the victim, and above all those culpable newspaper editors whose comments would doubtless have made excellent copy? I suppose I assumed they would rebuff me and refuse to answer questions. I now know better. It is the rare and exceptional individual, in almost any line of work, who will decline the opportunity to expound his views to a reporter.

  Despite these shortcomings, the story itself was, I think, of intrinsic interest at the time; in any event, the Nation liked it enough to accept it from an unknown writer.

  The Nation’s editors fixed it up considerably, beginning with the first sentence; they struck out that silly phrase “if slightly un-grammatical” (after all, who but some hoary grammarian would exclaim “That is he!” when identifying the person who assaulted her?), they brought order and logic into the paragraphing, they improved many a laboriously constructed sentence, they deleted all those boring dates of newspapers which I had put in as evidence of my meticulous research, and corrected the misspelling of “non-sequitur.”

  But also, to my annoyance, they left out the whole conclusion, presumably because they did not agree with my point about the need for judicial restraints on the press. As the main purpose of the exposé type of article is to generate corrective action—in this case, to alert courts, legislatures, and the general public to the evil of trial by headline—excision of these proposals robbed the piece of much of its intended thrust. Thereafter I have tried (not always successfully, as we shall see in the comments on some of the other pieces in this collection) to extract an agreement ahead of time from magazine editors that no changes will be made without consultation.

  Looking back, I realize that publication of this slim effort was for me a turning point. It gave me encouragement to continue struggling with my book despite rebuffs—it made me, for the first time, begin to think of myself as a “writer.”

  * Not his real name. I’ve changed it to a fictitious name in order to protect his privacy.

  ST. PETER, DON’T YOU CALL ME

  FRONTIER / November, 1958

  The American Way of Death, though not extolled in song, story, and news articles to the same extent as its more popular counterpart, the American Way of Life, has nevertheless come in for a fair share of attention in recent years. Sometimes it is the subject of an uneasy kind of humor. Thus, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen sugg
ests a slogan for mortuaries who desire to compete with the auto industry’s recent anti-recession campaign: “You Auto Die Now.” The New Yorker ran a cartoon of a mortuary decorated with signs announcing, “We Give Green Stamps.” Evelyn Waugh based his best-selling novel The Loved One on the romance between the head cosmetician of an ornate Los Angeles mortuary and an employee of a pet cemetery.

  In a more serious vein, Hugo Gernsback, writing for the American Funeral Director, points the way to the funeral of the future: “The loved one will be quick-frozen, encased in a light metal casket, and placed aboard a space ship, which will take off for Outer Space. When the gravitational pull decreases, the casket will be ejected from a tube, in direct polarity from the sun. The casket will disappear in a few seconds to fly for eternity and a day, in perfect preservation, in the infinite void.” Presumably, arrangements could also be made for the quick-frozen loved one to orbit, Sputnik fashion, thus allowing the bereaved to catch an occasional glimpse of Uncle Ned as he flashes by on course in the heavens.

  However, if the conversation of ordinary citizens chances to drift to the subject of funerals, a tone of bitterness is likely to creep in. At best, complaints will be voiced about the high cost of dying; at worst, there will be a chorus of horror stories about fleecings at the hands of unscrupulous undertakers.

  Perhaps it is not surprising that dissension has begun to spread in the ranks of the living. There are growing up in dozens of communities, scattered throughout the United States and Canada, consumer cooperative groups dedicated to the principle of “dignified funerals for a reasonable cost.” Their philosophy may be summed up in the blunt preamble to the Chico, California, Burial Society’s by-laws: “Every funeral is a pagan funeral when based on show only money can buy. The costliest of caskets decays with the body, and cannot make a home for the soul.” According to literature issued by the Memorial Association of Seattle, the funeral cooperatives have declared war on “materialistic display, showing of the corpse which necessitates embalming, the sending of expensive floral pieces.”

  The Battle of the Bodies has been joined. A clue to some of the practices opposed by the funeral co-op movement may be found in the pages of funeral trade magazines. For instances, Mortuary Management, a flossy, glossy funeral industry publication located (appropriately) in Los Angeles, announces this revealing offer from the National Casket Company: “$5 each for experiences, stories or anecdotes that illustrate where a $50–100 better sale was made because the casket had qualities, features or demonstrable values that made it a better buy than the offering at the lower price.”

  As in a table-d’hôte restaurant, where the price of the entrée determines the price of the dinner ($2.25 for halibut, $7.50 for filet mignon), so in the burial business the price of the casket usually determines the cost of the funeral. According to Warren J. Ringen, past president of the Funeral Directors of San Francisco, “In keeping with our high standard of living, there should be an equally high standard of dying. The cost of a funeral varies according to individual taste and the niceties of living the family has been accustomed to” (quoted from the San Francisco News, September 20, 1955). A bewildering assortment of the niceties of dying is described in Mortuary Management: “Solid copper—a quality casket which offers superb value to the client seeking long-lasting protection,” “Hand Grained Artistic Designs for the Discriminating Purchaser,” “The Colonial Classic Beauty—18-Gauge Lead Coated Steel, Seamless Top, Lap-Join Welded Body Construction ...” In addition to the casket, which is the pièce de résistance, innumerable other frills are offered. The Cheney casket-lining people provide “magnificent and unique masterpieces—more than 60 color matched shades—you’ll find that the extra pennies mean more profitable dollars.” Chrisette will supply “Handmade Original Fashions—Styles from the Best in Life for the Last Memory—Dresses, Men’s Suits, Negligees, Accessories,” while Hydrol Chemical Company offers “Nature Glo—the ultimate in cosmetic embalming.”

  THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN AD MAN

  Honors for a truly imaginative approach to their lugubrious wares must go to the vault men. An advertisement in the 1957 souvenir edition of Mortuary Management reads:

  Deep sea fishing off Mexico can’t be beat! When you feel that old tug on your pole and that line goes whistling into the deep, that’s it brother! And, there is nothing quite like the way I feel about Wilbert burial vaults either. The combination of a ” pre-cast asphalt inner liner plus extra-thick, reinforced concrete provides the essential qualities for proper burial. My advice to you is, don’t get into “deep water” with burial vaults made of the new lightweight synthetic substitutes. Just keep “reeling in” extra profits by continuing to recommend WILBERT burial vaults....

  A two-page spread in a recent issue of the same magazine presents the reader with this startling thought: “DISINTERMENTS—RARE BUT REWARDING. It needn’t be a problem. It can lead to repeat business.... Prove your wisdom in recommending the trusted protection of a Clark Metal Grave Vault.”

  Is a new folklore being created—a specifically twentieth-century American form of funeral rite which may seem as out-landish to the rest of the world as the strange burial customs of the past revealed by anthropological studies?

  QUAINT CUSTOMS OF OTHER PEOPLE

  Babylonians were embalmed in honey; Indians required self-immolation of the widow on her husband’s funeral pyre; Vikings were buried with their ships. Are these customs any weirder or more inappropriate than those described in the American funeral industry’s house organ? Etruscans buried the deceased’s treasure at his side—a practice hardly likely to win the approval of the modern funeral director, who generally manages to arrange for a different disposition of the deceased’s treasure. Indeed, many mortuaries provide a form with disarmingly direct emphasis on such questions as, “Location of Safe Deposit Boxes; My Banks Are; Savings Accounts; Location of Insurance Policies.”

  Perhaps some of the frankest testimony ever uttered on the subject of funeral costs was that given by W. W. Chambers, million-dollar operator of four large mortuaries in Washington, D.C., at a 1947 Senate committee hearing:

  “An undertaker never protects anybody but himself. The first thing he asks is, ‘How much insurance have you got, and how much of it can I get?’ ... In dealing with anything you buy, you have the refusal of it, but if your mother dies and you get in the hands of an undertaker, he just soft-soaps you along. You do not oppose him much as to the price.... A $30 casket is generally sold today for $150.” Explaining why he left his job in a livery stable to become an undertaker, Mr. Chambers continues: “What appealed to me mostly was when I saw one of them [undertakers] buy a casket for $17 and sell it to a poor broken widow for $265. I said, ‘This is awful sweet, I can’t let this go.’ ”

  The U.S. Coal Mines Administration, investigating funeral charges demanded of the 111 Centralia mine disaster victims, found the average funeral cost was $732.78; the highest, $1,178.50 (The New York Times, August 3, 1947). To add insult to injury, when Centralia’s businessmen were asked to contribute to an emergency relief fund for widows and orphans the funeral directors made their contribution in the form of a discount on funeral charges—the discounts ranging from $11.85 off a $567 funeral to $22.50 off a $937.50 funeral!

  Not only the survivors of sweeping community disaster feel the financial blows inflicted by the cost of modern funerals. A recent study of twenty-two Probate Court cases taken at random in the San Francisco Bay Area disclosed that the cost of funerals ranged from $344 to $3,027. The average of the twenty-two was $952. A similar study in St. Louis showed average funeral costs were $900.

  It would be wrong to assume from these facts that morticians are a special, evil breed. It should be borne in mind that the funeral industry faces a unique economic situation in that its market is fixed, or inelastic. There are only a certain number of deaths each year and the funeral directors must compete with each other to obtain their share of the business. The television industry touts the adv
antages of a TV set in every room; auto salesmen advocate several cars to each family; cigarette manufacturers urge “a carton for the home and one for the office”—but in the funeral business it’s strictly “one to a customer,” and the number of customers is limited by circumstances beyond the control of the industry. Very likely many a funeral director has echoed with heartfelt sincerity the patriotic sentiments of Nathan Hale: “My only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Some morticians handle as few as twelve funerals a year, and the national average is under sixty a year. From these few funerals enough cash must be realized to meet all the overhead and operating costs of the establishment for a full year. Little wonder that the funeral industry has tended to become one of the most predatory and competitive in the country, that behind the decorous façade of the funeral home lurks some of the slickest salesmanship to be found this side of a Baghdad bazaar.

  A network of legal realities and myths tends to keep funeral costs sky-high. For example, the California Health and Safety Code (Section 9625 et seq.) imposes fantastic requirements for the construction of mausoleums and columbariums. Unlike schools or homes, they must be earthquake-proof, fireproof, waterproof, and their exterior trim must be of “travertine, serpentine marble or Grade A exterior type marble only.” There is an almost universal belief in California, carefully nurtured by the undertakers, that the law requires embalming and the use of a casket in all cases of death. Three Oakland morticians, selected at random from the phone book, assured me that cremation without a casket is illegal. One added, with some truth, “The average person has neither the facilities nor the inclination to haul dead bodies around.” However, a quick check with the State Board of Health revealed that there are no such legal requirements, and that in fact indigents are frequently cremated “as is,” without benefit of casket or embalming.