Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955

As the twentieth century began, Black and white southerners alike dealt with low life expectancy and poor healthcare in a region synonymous with early death. But the modernization of death care by a diverse group of actors changed not only death rituals but fundamental ideas about health and wellness. Kristine McCusker charts the dramatic transformation that took place when southerners in particular and Americans in general changed their thinking about when one should die, how that death could occur, and what decent burial really means. As she shows, death care evolved from being a community act to a commercial one where purchasing a purple coffin and hearse ride to the cemetery became a political statement and the norm. That evolution also required interactions between perfect strangers, especially during the world wars as families searched for their missing soldiers. In either case, being put away decent, as southerners called burial, came to mean something fundamentally different in 1955 than it had just fifty years earlier.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: Death and the South Part One. Death and the New South Chapter 1. Selling Our Dead: Evolving Rural Burial Practice Chapter 2. Heavenly Reunions and Progressive Reform Chapter 3. Life Extension and the Emergence of a Death Commerce System Part Two. World War I and Challenging Southern Death Care Chapter 4. Lonely Coffins: World War I and the Spanish Influenza Epidemic Chapter 5. Remembering the War, Forgetting the Flu, Burying the Military Dead Part Three. Death Care in the 1920s South Chapter 6. Purple Coffins and Cadillac Hearses: Purchasing a Good Death Chapter 7. Indifference, Shame, Selfishness and Wrong Living: New Ways to Grieve and Comfort Chapter 8. “Health is just everything”: Expanding Healthcare in the South in the 1920s Part Four. Death and the New Deal Chapter 9. Making Deadly Landscapes Healthier: The First New Deal Chapter 10. Revitalizing a Sick South: The Second and Third New Deals Part Five. Dying in World War II Chapter 11. Flying and Dying as Americans Chapter 12. Muddy Roads and Sacred Duties: Bringing Home the World War II Dead Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Kristine McCusker is a professor of history, folklore, and ethnomusicology at Middle Tennessee State University. She is the author of Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio.

Review :
“The history of death in the South during the twentieth century is much more complex, much more dynamically connected to modernizing trends, and much more revealing of social realities than previously imagined. McCusker not only explores historical change, but also the racial and political dimensions of changing attitudes toward death in the context of transformations in notions of health care and life extension.”--Gary Laderman, author of Don’t Think about Death: A Memoir on Mortality