Facing the "King of Terrors": Death and Society in an American Community, 1750-1990 (review)

Robert Wells has truly earned his reputation as one of the nation’s premier demographic historians. Of his five books, the best known is Revolutions in American Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society (1982). Over the course of his career Wells has won awards that attest to his achievements—he has held a Guggenheim and been a fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard. Unlike most stars who teach at major research universities, Wells has chosen to remain at Union College, a solid undergraduate institution in upstate New York. And from this niche Wells presents us with a fascinating social and cultural case study of the history of death in America, one that is based largely on materials in the College library or available in local archives.

“By restricting our focus to a single community—in this instance, Schenectady, New York, between the late seventeenth century and the present—it is possible to explore the connections among various aspects of death and dying” (p. 2). Applying Robert J. Lifton’s social-psychological model, Wells reconstructs statistical trends (focusing on surviving evidence about who died from accidents and natural causes; the impact epidemics had on populations at risk; and where people were buried) as he recounts historical shifts in last rites and funeral rituals as well as in individuals’ preparations (spiritual and familial) to their own deaths. Death in Schenectady, Wells contends, became more professionalized and more privatized over time. Along with changes in medical practice and increases in life expectancy after 1880 came new experts who handled the dead and directed funerals, who supervised cemeteries, and who collected vital statistics. In addition, memorial biographies replaced funeral sermons during the 19^th century. Wells takes this as an indication of “the loss of an appropriate vocabulary with which to discuss death” (p. 290), especially as the city grew after the Civil War.

Schenectady proved to be a remarkably rich site for studying “the King of Terrors.” Wells justifies his case study on grounds of the city’s early settlement (1661), demographic mix, and its geographic site (which created some interesting health problems). Given the paucity of solid case studies of death and dying, this monograph is bound to remain useful for years to come. But Wells’s acknowledgment that he “used anything and everything [he] could find on how the residents of Schenectady faced and responded to death” (p. 10) gives me pause. Are we offered two chapters on death during the Civil War because the material is so critical to the book’s central argument or because Wells simply found it terribly interesting? Why does Wells provide only two chapters on the period from 1870 to 1950, when many of the transitions seem to have occurred?

Facing the King of Terrors is a dedication of love, expertly crafted by a senior historian. The book would have been even more valuable had Robert Wells compared his findings to trends elsewhere. Did the various segments of Schenectady’s population always deal with death as did people in other places during the same historical period?