When Robert Wells began his research on changing roles
and perceptions of death in Schenectady, he expected the project to take
only three or four years.
That was a decade ago.
Now, after visiting hundreds of cemetery plots and
combing through thousands of pages of diaries, letters and death
registers, Wells has finished his book, Facing the King of Terrors:
Death and Society in an American Community, 1750 to 1990 (Cambridge
University Press).
“It ended up that death was more prevalent in the
local records than I had expected,” said the Chauncey H. Winters
Professor of History. “I went to Special Collections when I was just
getting started, and said, 'Do you have anything here on this topic?'
Ruth Ann Evans (associate librarian emerita) suggested the diaries of
Jonathan Pearson (1835 graduate, professor and treasurer). I ended up
taking 137 pages of notes.
“This was symbolic of what I discovered,” he
said. “Expecting to find a little bit, I found a lot and it took me
quite a while to extract it all and make sense of it.
“Most historians … are curiously uninterested in
attitudes and practices regarding death,” he writes in the preface to
the book. “Yet there can be little that is more central to the human
condition or that gives greater insight into the central values of any
culture than attitudes and behavior when confronted with the most
impressive of all transitions: death.”
Wells, whose earlier research focused on marriage and
child-bearing, jokes that it was inevitable that he would come to study
death. But the stimulus to study death in Schenectady actually came from
Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. The author used the city
and its residents as models for the story, and he clearly refers to Vale
Cemetery when he describes a cemetery surrounded by the city.
“I began to wonder why so large a piece of land
lying in the middle of Schenectady had been devoted to the dead,”
Wells writes. (The city expanded to surround what was once a rural
cemetery.) “At the time, I simply became curious about the location
of Vale and gradually about other aspects of how a community lives with
death.”
Besides geographical convenience, Wells found
Schenectady an ideal city to study because it had a community dating back
to the 17th century, an interesting geography that affected patterns of
mortality, and diverse populations that included French, English, Dutch,
Native Americans and African Americans.
With industrialization, the community's population
grew and became more diverse ethnically and religiously. As a result,
death and funerals shifted from being public events to being private ones.
In 1858, for example, one family displayed the body of a child on their
front lawn for some 3,000 mourners, an act that would have been
unthinkable only 50 years later. By the turn of the century, death had
become private as more people died away from the community, in hospitals;
arrangements were handled by professionals such as funeral directors in
funeral homes.
Wells used public records like death registers as well
as personal collections of diaries and letters to provide insight into
attitudes and customs about death.
Especially poignant was the book of Tayler Lewis, a
language professor at Union, who mourned the death of a 17-year-old
daughter by translating Biblical passages into several different
languages. The Civil War-era diary of Lewis' son, Charles, gives a
chilling account of Lincoln's assassination, which the writer witnessed
at Ford's Theater.
“Some say we are, today, a death-denying
culture,” Wells said. “I don't think that's quite right. We
have a vicarious relationship with death,” experiencing it at a
distance through television shows, movies and the news. “We may have
lost the vocabulary to speak of death, but in some ways we are still
immersed in it.”