The Receipts of the Undertaker

On November 1, 1918, Joseph P. Cullen & Son, Undertakers at 1520 Chestnut Street, issued a receipt dated that same day and written in a clerk’s precise hand: one polished oak casket with silver-plated handles, $87; hearse and two carriages, $35; professional services, $25; total, $147. The account named Mrs. Helen M. Donahue of 2343 South 18th Street for the funeral of her husband, late of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company. Payment in full was noted on the receipt. The document carried no mark of emergency, no surcharge for rush delivery, no annotation that the deceased had waited days for interment. It was an ordinary transaction for an ordinary death—and that ordinariness was itself extraordinary.

Two weeks earlier, on October 17, a different document had moved through the same administrative channels of death. Father Paul A. McCloskey, rector of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary at Overbrook, had written to his seminarians serving at the potter’s field in southwest Philadelphia with instructions for the day’s labor. The city had delivered 118 bodies. The seminarians were to dig trenches four feet deep, no deeper, because the soil would not hold. The seminarians had been drafted by city order, along with prisoners from the county jail and men from the House of Correction, to dig mass graves when the commercial funeral system collapsed. There had been no receipts for those burials.

The city paid $2 per body to anyone who would handle them, and many handlers refused to record names. The trenches received the unclaimed, the unidentified, and the families who could no longer afford what Cullen & Son now offered as a matter of routine.

The contrast between these documents—one from the first day of November, one from the worst day of October—measures something the official mortality statistics cannot capture. The Bureau of Health recorded that daily deaths in Philadelphia dropped from 759 on October 16 to 289 on November 1, a decline that Health Director Wilmer Krusen would cite as evidence of successful intervention. But the receipts tell a different story about the end of the crisis. They mark the moment when death became once again a private transaction, negotiated between a family and a business, rather than a public emergency managed by the city and its improvised labor corps. The commercial normalization of death preceded and enabled the official declaration of victory over the epidemic. The market resumed its operations before the virus had finished its work.

To understand how this happened, it is necessary to follow the geography of death through the undertakers’ order books as the wave subsided. Cullen & Son’s records for the week of October 28 to November 3 show a clear pattern: forty-seven funeral contracts, up from twelve in the comparable week of 1917, but down from the 156 contracts of the week ending October 19. More significantly, the geography had changed. In mid-October, Cullen had drawn clients from across the city, from neighborhoods as distant as Kensington and Germantown, as families abandoned their customary undertakers when those firms could not promise delivery. By November 1, the catchment area had contracted. Forty of the forty-seven contracts came from addresses within two miles of Chestnut Street, the firm’s traditional South Philadelphia territory. The funeral industry was retreating to its established circuits, serving its customary communities, leaving the outer neighborhoods to other firms or to no one at all.

This contraction was a sorting. The families who could afford Cullen’s prices—who could pay $87 for a casket rather than accept a pine box from the city—were returning to the market. Those who could not afford it, or whose breadwinners had died in October when wages stopped and savings drained, remained outside the commercial system. The potter’s field continued to receive bodies through November, though at a slower rate. The seminarians were released from trench duty on October 29, but prisoners continued to dig graves for the unclaimed dead. The city’s expenditure on pauper burials for October and November 1918 would total $47, 000, against $8, 400 for the same period in 1917. The market had resumed, but it had resumed selectively, serving those with means while the public system continued to absorb those without.

The mechanics of this resumption can be traced through the supply chain that had broken in October and mended in November. The casket shortage of mid-October had been absolute. On October 14, the Philadelphia Casket Company had reported to the Bureau of Health that its inventory was exhausted and its suppliers in Indiana and Ohio could not ship for ten days. The firm had diverted its remaining stock to military contracts, leaving civilian undertakers to improvise. Some used packing crates. Others borrowed from the city, which had requisitioned coffins intended for the Navy Yard. The shortage had been so severe that the Bureau of Health on October 18 authorized the use of plain wooden boxes for all burials, suspended the requirement for metal caskets in cemetery regulations, and waived the embalming mandate that had previously generated much of undertakers’ revenue.

By November 1, this suspension was being quietly reversed. The Philadelphia Casket Company’s shipping records show five railcar deliveries between October 25 and November 2, totaling 340 caskets. The company’s invoices to undertakers resumed normal pricing: $12 for a plain cloth-covered coffin, $45 for polished wood with fixtures, $110 for the presentation models that had been standard before the emergency. The price structure signaled restoration. The company was no longer selling at emergency rates to anyone with cash; it was selling at standard rates to established accounts with credit. The market had regained its discipline, its hierarchies, its exclusions.

The hearse shortage followed a similar arc. In mid-October, the city had commandeered every available vehicle—ambulances, delivery wagons, private automobiles—to transport bodies. The Bureau of Health on October 20 had issued permits allowing any licensed driver to operate a hearse without the usual professional certification. By November 1, this permissiveness was contracting. Cullen & Son’s receipt specified hearse and two carriages, the traditional complement for a respectable funeral. The firm had recovered its vehicles from city service and restored its fleet to private use. Other undertakers’ records show similar patterns: the return of horses from municipal duty, the cleaning and relettering of carriages, the resumption of scheduled appointments rather than continuous emergency dispatch.

This physical restoration of the funeral infrastructure required labor, and the labor market for death workers had also shifted. In October, gravediggers had been scarce at any price. The city’s regular cemetery staff had been depleted by illness; of the 34 men employed by the Bureau of City Property to maintain the public cemeteries, 28 had been sick in the week ending October 19, and seven had died. The city had raised wages to $5 per day, then $8, then $12, without securing adequate crews. The resort to seminarians and prisoners had been an admission that the labor market had failed.

By November 1, the market was functioning again, but on altered terms. The city’s regular gravediggers had returned to work, though at the elevated wage of $6 per day that would persist into 1919. The prisoners were returned to their ordinary duties. The seminarians were sent back to their books. But the undertakers’ records reveal a more significant change: the emergence of a new category of funeral worker, the emergency attendant, who had entered the trade during the crisis and now sought to remain. Cullen & Son’s payroll for November 1 shows three such men, hired in mid-October at $4 per day, now retained at $3.50—below the union rate for established workers, but above the pre-crisis entry wage. The epidemic had created a reserve army of death workers, and their presence would keep wages depressed and conditions precarious for years.

The resumption of commercial funeral service was a reconstruction, with new participants, new vulnerabilities, and new patterns of exclusion. The families who entered Cullen & Son’s parlor on November 1 found the familiar rituals restored: the viewing, the procession, the graveside service, the receipt. But the price of this restoration was a hardening of the boundary between those who could purchase it and those who could not. The city continued to provide pauper burials, but it provided them more grudgingly, with more documentation required, more investigation of family resources. The Bureau of Health on November 4 issued new regulations tightening eligibility for public burial, requiring proof of three years’ residence and demonstration that no responsible relative could pay. The emergency had suspended these rules; the restoration of normalcy meant their reinvention, their tightening, their more rigorous enforcement.

The undertakers themselves understood this moment as a professional triumph. The Philadelphia Funeral Directors’ Association met on November 5, 1918, its first regular meeting since September 20. The minutes record a presidential address celebrating the restoration of their calling to its proper dignity and remuneration. The association voted to petition the Bureau of Health for permanent relaxation of the embalming requirement for pauper burials, not from humanitarian concern but from competitive interest: embalming was the service that most clearly distinguished professional undertakers from mere casket sellers, and the association wished to preserve this distinction in the public sector. The petition was denied. The city, having learned to manage without professional embalmers, saw no reason to restore their monopoly.

This professional politics of death had its parallel in the larger political economy of Philadelphia’s epidemic response. The city had spent $312, 000 on emergency measures in October, against a budgeted $45, 000 for the entire quarter. The largest single expenditure, $89, 000, had gone to temporary hospitals and emergency accommodations—the conversion of schools, armories, and fraternity houses to influenza wards. By November 1, these expenditures were being scrutinized with an eye to termination rather than extension. The Board of Health on November 2 ordered the closure of the emergency hospital at the 23rd Street Armory, effective November 5, though 47 patients remained. The patients were transferred to the Pennsylvania Hospital or sent home, depending on their perceived convalescence. The armory was needed for its military function: the Army was preparing to stage victory parades.

The closure of emergency facilities preceded any confident assessment that the epidemic had ended. The Bureau of Health’s daily mortality returns for November 1 showed 289 deaths, against 428 on October 31 and 759 on October 16. This was a decline, but it remained more than triple the normal rate for November. Fiscal pressure and the competing demands of the war’s final military operations drove the decision to close the emergency hospital, not epidemiological data. The city had committed to the Fourth Liberty Loan, which opened for subscription on October 24. The loan required financial participation and ceremonial display. The armories must be cleared for rallies. The streets must be prepared for processions. The emergency must be declared over before it was over, so that the normal business of patriotism could resume.

This pressure from the Liberty Loan apparatus intersected with the funeral industry’s recovery in ways that the undertakers’ receipts illuminate. The Fourth Liberty Loan bonds, dated October 24, 1918, maturing October 15, 1938, were not convertible into future issues, unlike the Third Liberty Loan whose terms had allowed such conversion. This rigidity signaled confidence: the Treasury expected no need for further emergency borrowing. The loan’s subscription campaign in Philadelphia, led by Mrs. J. Willis Martin as chair of the National Woman’s Liberty Loan Committee, aimed to demonstrate that the city had recovered its civic capacity. Pennsylvania would ultimately subscribe $437 million to this loan, exceeding its quota. The campaign required visible normalcy, and the visible normalcy of death—orderly funerals, scheduled processions, receipted transactions—was as necessary as the visible normalcy of commerce and entertainment.

Mrs. Martin’s committee had its own epidemic history. Its predecessor, the Women’s Oversea Hospitals maintained by the National Suffrage Association, had received $20, 573 from Pennsylvania contributors, with $11, 397 raised at a single outdoor féte in Pittsburgh chaired by Mrs. Leonard G. Wood. These funds had supported medical units in France, including one led by Dr. Marie Curie for radiological services. The suffrage organizations that had channeled women’s wartime energies into medical service now channeled them into financial mobilization. The state suffrage convention, held in Philadelphia November 20-22, would celebrate both the loan’s success and the epidemic’s supposed end, though the convention’s own program noted regrettable absences among delegates from western Pennsylvania, where the virus was still active.

The undertakers’ receipts thus participate in a larger pattern of performative recovery. The transaction recorded on November 1—the polished casket, the hearse, the professional fee—was a private arrangement for a private grief. It was also a public demonstration that Philadelphia had resumed its ordinary operations, that the mechanisms of respectable death were functioning, that the crisis could be relegated to memory. Mrs. Donahue’s receipt for her husband’s funeral was a small certificate of civic health, as meaningful in its context as a Liberty Loan subscription or a cleared armory.

But the receipts also record what this performance cost and what it concealed. The $147 that Mrs. Donahue paid represented more than three weeks’ wages for a skilled worker at the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company, where her husband had been employed. The expense would have consumed any savings the family possessed, and perhaps required borrowing from relatives or the company benevolent association. The receipt marked payment in full, but it did not mark the financial wreckage that payment might have entailed. Nor did it acknowledge that her husband’s death, like most influenza deaths in October 1918, had been sudden and unprepared-for, leaving no time for the prudent arrangements that funeral insurance or burial societies might have provided. The commercial normalization of death imposed its costs immediately and absolutely, without the cushioning mechanisms—credit, charity, public provision—that the emergency had briefly made available.

The Bureau of Health’s parallel accounting, the official mortality statistics, performed a different kind of normalization. The daily death tolls, reported to the press and compiled for federal authorities, showed a curve that peaked and declined, a narrative of crisis and resolution. But the undertakers’ records suggest a more complicated geometry. Deaths in Philadelphia did not decline uniformly across neighborhoods, classes, or age groups. Cullen & Son’s contracts for November 1-7 show a concentration in the 25-45 age group, the W-shaped mortality curve that distinguished this epidemic from ordinary influenza. The official statistics aggregated these deaths into a single number; the receipts disaggregated them, showing which families could afford to mark their losses individually and which could not.

The city’s final accounting for the epidemic, compiled in December 1918, would record 12, 191 deaths from influenza and pneumonia between September 1 and November 30. This figure, based on death certificates filed with the Bureau of Health, almost certainly undercounts the actual mortality. The potter’s field received 1, 047 bodies in October and November 1918, against 187 in the same months of 1917; many of these were never certified with a cause of death. The emergency hospitals, operating with skeleton staffs and improvised record-keeping, failed to file complete returns. The undertakers’ receipts, preserved in private archives, suggest a total closer to 14, 000 deaths in the epidemic period. This discrepancy matters for historical accuracy and for understanding how the crisis was officially concluded. The lower number supported the narrative of successful management; the higher number, visible only in the fragmentary private records, suggested a catastrophe incompletely acknowledged.

The resumption of commercial funeral service in early November thus carried a double meaning. For the families who could participate in it, it offered a restoration of dignity, of ritual, of the social forms through which grief is processed and community affirmed. For the city as a whole, it offered a mechanism for declaring the emergency over, for returning to the business of war and its aftermath, for converting unmanageable mass death into manageable individual transactions. The receipts from Cullen & Son and their competitors were the small change of this conversion, the daily evidence that the system was working again.

But the system was not working for everyone. The trenches at the potter’s field remained open through November, receiving the bodies that the commercial system would not or could not serve. The city’s expenditure on pauper burials would exceed its annual budget for such services by 340 percent. The emergency attendants who had entered the funeral trade during the crisis would find their wages stagnant and their status uncertain for a decade. The families who had paid premium prices for emergency service in October would carry those debts into the postwar recession. The normalization of death, like the normalization of finance and politics, distributed its costs unevenly and recorded them incompletely.

The final receipts from the epidemic period, dated November 4, 1918, show this tension in miniature. Cullen & Son recorded three funerals that day: Mrs. Donahue’s husband at $147; a child, Margaret O’Brien, age 7, at $35 for a plain service; and an unidentified man, age approximately 60, forwarded from the city morgue, for which the firm received $12 from the Bureau of City Property.

Three deaths, three prices, three social locations. The first restored a family to the ordinary economy of grief. The second marked a reduced but still private mourning. The third represented the persistence of the emergency into the period of its official conclusion, a body that the market would not absorb and the city must handle.

The receipt for this third burial was the last in the firm’s epidemic file, but it was not the last such transaction. The city would continue to pay for pauper burials at elevated rates through December, and at gradually declining rates through the winter of 1919.

The commercial facade of normalcy was restored, but it rested upon a staggering cumulative loss. The next chapter must explore that loss from the human side.