Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900–1955 by Kristine M. McCusker (review)

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900–1955 by Kristine M. McCusker
• Steven Noll

Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900–1955. By Kristine M. McCusker. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 302. Paper, $28.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08721-9; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04508-0.)

In the past thirty years, much historical work has been done on cemeteries and rituals of death and mourning in the South. These books and articles have tied these rites of passage and commemoration to larger regional concerns of race, class, gender, and disability. Kristine M. McCusker’s new book, Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making [End Page 641] of a Healthier South, 1900–1955, adds to this literature by examining how southerners, both Black and white, dealt with issues surrounding death in the first half of the twentieth century in light of changing patterns of medicine, two world wars, a major pandemic, and the increasing presence of the federal government. She concludes that these changes “fashioned a new citizenship, albeit an incipient one, based on good health” (p. 177).

McCusker starts her book in 1900, describing a region where death was omnipresent and often early, and where southerners struggled “to loosen the strong ties between death and the southern landscape” (p. 29). She examines southerners’ relationship with caring for the dying in light of religion, focusing on the biblical notion of the life cycle being “three score and ten” (seventy years old) and the implications of that for the region (p. 3). By stressing the changes in death rates and what she calls “life extension,” McCusker shows how rituals of death and mourning became tied together (p. 1). It became a “commercial system of death . . . with its elaborate rituals and consumer goods [becoming] . . . a new economic and political concern, not just a social and cultural one” (p. 46).

The Progressive era, World War I, and the flu pandemic radically reshaped the southern death (and life) experience. Federal and private philanthropic interventions drastically reduced deaths from diseases such as diphtheria and hookworm in the first quarter of the twentieth century. McCusker is very good at stressing the importance of these outside involvements in changing not only patterns of death but also southern attitudes toward dying itself. Both Black and white southerners became less resigned to the fate of an early death and more positive about living a longer and more productive life. World War I and the flu pandemic produced differing responses, however. For white southerners, war deaths brought back memories of that allegedly valiant generation who fought to protect an idealized way of life. War deaths had a different meaning for Black southerners. They viewed their dead as symbols of a worthy citizenship—a different form of idealized life, one in which race mattered little. The deaths from the pandemic conveyed dissimilar meanings. Soldiers were supposed to die in battle, not be killed by a germ. McCusker concludes presciently, “One kind of death was appropriate; the other was to be hidden in a modern world where good health was supposed to exist” (p. 81).

The book’s best chapters describe the changes wrought by the Depression and World War II. Significant federal New Deal programs, like the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and social security, “built a centralized healthcare infrastructure while creating a cultural infrastructure that defined older death care as odd, different, and certainly premodern” (p. 192). World War II saw an extension of the issues raised by World War I, as race played a significant factor in how southerners viewed death and burials. Breaking regional tradition, the American Battle Monuments Commission buried white and Black southerners together in large national cemeteries both overseas and around the nation. For McCusker, it was indicative of larger changes in the South’s landscape of death. She concludes that the changes brought by a “post–New Deal and World War II world” provided a place...