Death is Never Over Life, Death and in a Historic

By Rebecca Boggs Roberts

B.A. in Politics, June 1992, Princeton University

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

May 20, 2012

Thesis directed by

Roy Richard Grinker Professor of Anthropology, International Affairs, and Human Sciences

Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to the 55,000 men and women who are buried at Historic

Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. It’s been nice knowing you.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the staff at Historic Congressional Cemetery for their support and good humor; Cokie and Steve Roberts for the babysitting and copy editing; Dan

Hartman for his infinite patience; and Jack, Cal, and Roland Hartman for letting mom steal the comfy desk chair.

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Abstract

Death is Never Over Life, Death, and Grave Robbery in a Historic Cemetery

The anthropology of death rituals describes various relationships among the three points of a triangle formed by the corpse, the soul, and the survivors. This structure, first proposed by Robert Hertz in 1907 and adapted many times since then, is useful for comparing seemingly disparate death rituals across cultures. Using this structure, the relative emphasis of one leg of the triangle over another can help clarify the needs a living community prioritizes upon the death of one of its members. I argue one leg of this triangle, the connection between the survivor and the corpse, deserves a longer period of examination. For the past two hundred plus years in the U.S., the overwhelming majority of dead bodies have been buried in a cemetery. But does not sever the connection between the survivor and corpse; the corpse is still there, and the living can choose to acknowledge that fact by visiting the cemetery.

Founded in 1807, Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. was originally a burial ground for white Christian elites. It came of age in the movement of the early nineteenth century, which encouraged the living to seek out the romantic melancholy evoked by the serene presence of death in a beautiful cemetery. Today

Congressional Cemetery is still an active burial ground, now open to everyone. It is once again beautiful, and well-visited by people seeking a connection with those buried there.

But over the two hundred years of Congressional Cemetery’s history, the connection between the living and the dead there went through several changes.

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With this thesis, I set out to examine how the connection between the survivors and the corpse evolved in the community of Congressional Cemetery from 1807 to the present.

I have found that this connection crystallizes in times when the accepted balance is upset by a grave robbery. Three grave robberies are examined in detail. The first is the theft of the body of 24-year-old Alvina Cheek in 1889. Her entire corpse was stolen by ‘body snatchers’, men who sold fresh to medical schools for . The second is the theft of the skull of William Wirt sometime in the early to mid-twentieth century. His skull ended up in the hands of a skull collector. The most recent theft involved stealing skulls, long bones, and patellae from the White family vault in 1991. These bones were probably stolen for use in some kind of occult ritual. I argue that the cemetery circumstances that allowed these graves to be robbed and the living community’s reaction to the thefts serve as a documented snapshot of the survivors’ attitudes towards the corpse.

Viewed together, the grave robberies at Congressional Cemetery illuminate the changing balance between the living and the dead in the cemetery community as it progresses through the twentieth century and into the future.

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Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract iv

List of Figures vii

Chapter One 1

Chapter Two 14

Chapter Three 31

Chapter Four 46

Chapter Five 58

References 65

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List of Figures

Figure One 4

Figure Two 7

Figure Three 10

Figure Four 37

Figure Five 38

Figure Six 39

Figure Seven 40

Figure Eight 41

Figure Nine 44

Figure Ten 48

Figure Eleven 51

Figure Twelve 54

Figure Thirteen 56

Figure Fourteen 60

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Chapter One: Death is Never Over

A cemetery is, first and foremost, a place to put dead bodies. Whatever other purposes it may serve, as a space of memory, recreation, or historical significance, are secondary to its role as a burial ground for corpses.

But the dead do not bury themselves. A cemetery, for Dethlefsen (1981), is a community, “a community of the dead, created, maintained, and preserved by the community of the living” (Dethlefsen 1981: 137). The living – be they mourners, tourists, gardeners, or vandals – are part of the cemetery, and their cultural priorities are just as present as those of the dead. If you go to a cemetery, for whatever reason, you have decided that the very literal presence of death there is not repulsive. You may even find it attractive. It is this interplay between those above ground and those below ground that makes a cemetery an interesting place to study, for the dead help to illuminate the living.

Although death is universal, the varieties of ways humans respond to death are numberless. And a society can, in many ways, be defined by the way it handles the cultural event of death (Farrell 1980: 3). When confronted with the inevitable death of one of its members, each community finds its own balance of reverence, sorrow, horror, guilt, fear, disgust, affection, and denial. In very general terms, we modern Americans bury our dead.

There are exceptions, of course, cremation being the most obvious. But cremation is still chosen for a minority of American deaths, in contrast to Canada, for instance, where the number approaches 60%. (NFDA 2010). In fact, given the cultural heterogeneity of

American society, the uniformity of death ritual is striking. After a wide-ranging survey of global mortuary practices featuring astounding variety, Metcalf and Huntington expected

American traditions to at least vary by region, class, or ethnicity. “But the odd fact is that

1 they do not. The overall form of funerals is remarkably uniform from coast to coast.”

(Metcalf & Huntington 1991:194). And the funerals end in a cemetery.

For its part, the cemetery does not stand still. It changes with the introduction of new bodies. It changes with new fashions of grave markers and landscape design. And the dead bodies also change. They decompose, skeletonize, become unrecognizable to their loved ones. More subtly, they change as they are interpreted differently by the living, as the balance of fear, reverence, disgust, denial, etc. shifts and evolves. There is, as Metcalf and Huntington (1991) say, “an eternity of sorts on either side of the line that divides the quick from the dead (Metcalf & Huntington 1991: 108).

Some of the changes a cemetery community undergoes over time are easy to observe. Because it is considered at least semi-sacred by the living, a cemetery often resists many of the alterations or destructions experienced by other parts of the cultural landscape (Hannon 1989: 256). Changes in gravestone styles, for instance, are not only easily seen, but the stones themselves helpfully have their dates of manufacture engraved upon them. The fascination and usefulness of is hardly an undiscovered secret among anthropologists. The systematic anthropological study of graveyards was pioneered by Harriette Forbes in 1927, and then largely forgotten. James Deetz (1989) tells of his

Archimedes-in-the-bathtub moment while wandering a cemetery with Edwin Dethlefsen in the 1960s. It suddenly dawned on them both that they were “sitting in the midst of orderly stylistic change (thunderclap, trumpets).” Their first article “Death’s heads, cherubs, and willow trees: Experimental in colonial cemeteries” was published in 1966, the same year as Allan Ludwig’s Graven Images. Both publications inspired a whole literature on the anthropology of cemeteries.

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Much of this literature focuses on the iconography and epitaphs of gravestones (e.g.

Snyder 1989, Edgette 1989, among many). Other works examine the landscape of a cemetery as whole (e.g. Linden-Ward 1988, Burgess 2001). There is also work on the socio-economic and ethnic divisions apparent in burial patterns (e.g. Tashjian and Tashjian,

1989, Buikstra 2000). All share the premise, as Edwin Dethlefsen (1981) puts it, that “it is ethnographically useful to see the cemetery not only as a historical record but as a current status report, and it is advantageous to conjoin both views to develop syntheses about community-in-process” (Dethlefsen 137). In fact, the article from which that quotation is taken, “The Cemetery and Culture Change: Archaeological Focus and Ethnographic

Perspective”, serves as a valuable how-to manual for conducting anthropology in a cemetery.

But not all changes a cemetery experiences over time are as easily observable as gravestones and landscapes. It is the task of this thesis to track instead the changing interpretation living visitors to the cemetery have of the dead bodies buried there. For help understanding this less visible thread of change, I turn not to the anthropology of cemeteries, but to the anthropology of funerary rites and mortuary rituals. From cannibalism in the Amazon (Conklin 1995) to sung lamentations in rural Greece (Danforth

1982) to the funeral industry in contemporary Japan (Suzuki 2000), ethnographies of death, mourning, and burial abound across time and place. Many of these papers draw on the seminal work of Robert Hertz, who in 1907 published “A Contribution to the Study of a

Collective Representation of Death” in the Année Sociologique. It was read and admired more widely when published in English in 1960, and it still “endures as the single most influential text in the anthropology of death” (Robben 2004: 9).

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Over one hundred years after its initial publication, Hertz’s work remains vital in part because of its elegance. Hertz proposed that there is a structural logic to all funerary rites, based on a triangular pattern (Green 2008: 187, Metcalf & Huntington 1991: 79).

The three points of the triangle are the corpse, the survivors, and the soul. Hertz’s essay devotes separate sections to each of these key players. But the section headings are deceiving; it was not the points of the triangle that interested Hertz, it was the connections between them (Hertz 1960). See figure 1.

Figure 1: Schematic Diagram of Hertz’s triangle. From Metcalf and Huntington 1991 Reprinted with permission

Of the examples given above, for instance, cadaver cannibalism is clearly about the survivor’s relationship with the corpse. The Greek lamentations are meant to sing the deceased to the afterlife – the connection between the corpse and the soul. In the Japanese example, the funeral industry places heavy emphasis on respect for the dead person’s memory, which has to do with the relationship between the soul and the survivor.

Hertz had the further insight that the base of the triangle, the connection between the survivor and the corpse, is the key to finding meaning in the ritual. This is why his

4 structure helps illuminate the changing connection between the living and the dead in a cemetery. In the vast majority of death anthropology, the role of the corpse is dropped after the last shovel of dirt is tossed on the grave. Any ongoing relationship the survivor has with the dead is with his or her soul, whether that takes the form of mourning, commemoration, prayer, haunting, or spiritualism. Hertz makes it plain that the relationship between the survivor and the soul is a separate leg of the triangle; it is not interchangeable with the relationship between the survivor and the corpse. Even after burial the corpse still exists. In the cemetery, the survivor and the corpse still have a connection. As Mike Parker Pearson (1999) puts it in The Archaeology of Death and

Burial, “Death is never over.” (Pearson 193) This ongoing connection between the living and the physical corpse, as distinct from the metaphysical soul, is mediated by (and captured in) the cemetery.

As a site for examining connection between the living and the dead, not all cemeteries are created equal. This thesis looks specifically at Congressional Cemetery which was founded in 1807 on the eastern side of Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. To understand why Congressional is an appropriate locus of study; some American cemetery history is very helpful. Before the end of the eighteenth century, Americans were generally buried in family graveyards or burying grounds next to churches. Unplanned and unmanaged, these graveyards were at best “barren and chaotic” (Linden-Ward 1989:139) and at worst “harmful to the living … hygienically indefensible, and aesthetically disgusting” (Curl 2000: 17). The potential hygiene issues were not trivial to a society that still believed plagues like cholera were spread by stinking impure “miasma”. And the aesthetics of the grim and crowded churchyard were increasingly at odds with romantic

5 view of death imagined by popular graveyard poets like Robert Blair and Thomas Gray

(Curl 2000: 3).

In 1797, New Haven, Connecticut became the first American city to establish a planned and landscaped graveyard unconnected to a church. The New Haven New

Burying Ground had tall trees, tidy roads and fences, and a sense of formality and order. It was considered altogether new, and the founders hoped it would “extensively diffuse a new sense of propriety in disposing of the remains of the deceased” (Linden-Ward 1989: 141).

The end of the eighteenth century was also the era of planning Washington D.C.

As an entirely planned city, Washington was able to avoid a lot of the ad hoc chaos that arose organically in other cities, and its cemeteries were no exception. The federal government officially moved to Washington at the end of 1801. By 1807, The Washington

Parish Burial Ground, later known as Congressional Cemetery, had opened for business.

Like the New Haven cemetery, Washington Parish Burial Ground was not adjacent to a church. It was a planned landscape on the eastern side of the city (see figure 2), purchased and designed by eight local men who intended it to be a profit-making venture for Christ

Church, the Episcopal parish on Capitol Hill they all attended. Almost immediately, the new graveyard became the burying ground of choice for Washington’s elites, including members of Congress who died while serving in the new capitol city (Roberts and Schmidt

2012).

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Figure 2: A 19th Century map of Washington D.C. The Capitol is circled at center, Congressional Cemetery is circled at right. Meanwhile, a cemetery revolution was beginning to gather momentum. In 1804,

Père Lachaise opened just outside of Paris. It was intended to embody a French post-

Revolutionary goal; to create a new institution to function as a ritualistic focal point for a new “cult of ancestors” (Linden-Ward 1989: 65). With winding footpaths and natural slopes, weeping willows and flowering fruit trees, the rustic beauty of Père Lachaise was unprecedented in a graveyard. Its fame and influence were immediate and enormous (Curl

2000: 25). It attracted international attention, and soon “formed the model for many similar multifunctional funerary landscapes in cities of another republic attempting to create a sense of history and social order in the wake of its own revolution” (Linden-Ward

1989:104).

In America, the ideals of Père Lachiase were first adopted and expanded in

Cambridge, Massachusetts, where opened in 1831. It is hard to 7 overstate how revolutionary Mount Auburn was to standard cemetery practice. The change was signaled first by its name. Not a “graveyard” or a “burying ground”, Mount Auburn called itself a “cemetery”, derived from the Greek koimeterium, meaning ‘a place to sleep’

(Yalom 2008: xii). Although it had been used sporadically in Europe, the uncommon word

“cemetery” was consciously chosen as the name for this new breed of burial ground, which softened the harshness of death into something like eternal sleep (Sloane 1991:55). The layout of Mount Auburn further reinforced its novelty. There is hardly a right angle on its map. Instead it is composed of meandering paths, through shady trees, which might lead a visitor to a pond, or a view of Boston across the hills. Mount Auburn “presented visitors with a programmed sequence of sensory experiences, primarily visual, intended to elicit specific emotions, especially the so-called pleasures of melancholy that particularly appealed to contemporary romantic sensibilities” (Linden Ward 1989b: 295).

But beauty and romance in and of themselves were not the goals of Mount Auburn, and the other ‘rural’ or ‘garden’ (the terms are interchangeable) cemeteries that followed.

The pastoral atmosphere had a purpose: to make the living feel closer to the dead, and therefore fear death less. This was explicit in the language of the men who designed and built rural cemeteries. British cemetery designer John Strang wrote in 1831, “A garden cemetery and monumental decoration…are not only beneficial to public morals, to the improvement of manners, but are likewise calculated to extend virtuous and generous feelings…. A garden cemetery is the sworn foe to preternatural fear and superstition”

(Quoted in Curl 2000: 47). In that romantic age, the idea of placing a grave in a garden was deeply symbolic, and transformed death from something grotesque into something beautiful (Sloane 1991: 50). The lovely landscaping of rural cemeteries gave the dead a

8 pleasant, perpetual home that the living could also enjoy. The living were encouraged to visit often, and to see the cemetery as a natural extension of their living world (McGuire

1988: 472).

And visit they did. Mount Auburn and the other garden cemeteries became must- see spots on any fashionable traveler’s itinerary. Not all of these visitors sought sweet melancholy communion with the dead, of course. In that era before widespread public parks, people also courted, picked flowers, and raced horses along the cemeteries’ winding sylvan paths (Jackson and Vergara 1989:19). But even the pleasure-seekers served to help demystify death, and transform the cemetery from a place of ugliness and terror into a place of life and optimism.

In the nation’s capital, Washington Parish Burial Ground was quickly caught up in the garden cemetery trend. Although its pre-Mount Auburn design includes no curving paths and landscaped ponds, it did (and still does) have shade trees, flowering plants, rolling hills, and a commanding view out over the Anacostia River. By the 1830s, it was universally known as Congressional Cemetery, a nickname the trustees encouraged both for the federal associations of the first word and the modern connotations of the second.

Washingtonian George Watterston wrote in 1842, "the Congressional burial ground may not be compared at present to Père la Chaise, near Paris, or Mount Auburn, in the vicinity of Boston; but I know of no other cemetery in this country superior to it in beauty of site"

(Quoted in Breitkreutz 2003: 15). The cemetery grounds served as a rare green place of recreation in a Washington that was still largely under construction. Gravestones shaped like picnic tables invited visitors to stay a while. At peak hours, the cemetery was popular enough to require admission tickets. (See figure 3) The most common images carved into

9 stones of that era are flowers and willow trees, reinforcing the idea that death was natural and beautiful. Congressional, like other cemeteries of the time, “provided for the frequent communion of the quick and the dead” (Farrell 1980:107).

Figure 3: 1873 Admission ticket to Washington Congressional Cemetery (Christ Church Archives)

This history explains why Congressional Cemetery is a particularly interesting place to find out how the living and the corpse connect: it was designed as a place where the lines of communication between the living and the dead were open, popular, and mutually beneficial. To return to Hertz’s triangle of death ritual, Congressional at its beginning encouraged an ongoing positive relationship between the survivor and the corpse, even after burial. But despite the seeming permanence of a burial ground, cemeteries are subject to change, just as other institutions are. Cemeteries are dynamic places, which reflect changing cultural realities (Meyer 1989:105). As David Charles

Sloane puts it in The Last Great Necessity, “Cemeteries, like farms, cities, suburbs, theaters, businesses, and people, are born, live, and die. Anyone who has ever walked through the high grass and broken stones of a country graveyard or urban cemetery knows this” (Sloane 1991: 241-242).

Two hundred five years after its founding, Congressional Cemetery is still alive.

But it was definitely on life support for a while, and could have gone either way.

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Throughout Congressional’s dynamic history, its role in the community has evolved. In response, the community’s relationship between the living and the dead (Hertz’s survivor and corpse) has evolved as well. But how best to trace that evolution? When do people articulate how they feel about the dead bodies in the local cemetery? It turns out, the attitudes of the living are crystallized when some one actually tries to remove a corpse from the cemetery without permission. I believe the best way to map the corpse/survivor connection at Congressional Cemetery is to examine it through incidents of grave robbing.

In particular, there are three incidents that stand out as changing and defining the living community’s relationship with the dead. The thefts all happened at different times in the cemetery’s history. Different body parts were stolen. And the contraband was put to different uses. But viewed together, the grave robberies at Congressional can illuminate the evolving social context of the cemetery, and the changing connection between the living and the dead in the cemetery community as it progresses through the twentieth century.

The first incident occurred in 1889, when the Victorian cult of death had taken on a new tinge from the American Civil War. Visitors to Congressional still talked about death in romantic tones, and the cemetery’s original culture encouraging a burry line between the living and the dead was still prevalent, if waning. A few days before Christmas, the newly dead body of 24-year-old Alvina Cheek was discovered, still dirty from the grave, in the back of a horse-drawn wagon. The man arrested for body-snatching Mrs. Cheek was Dr.

W.W. Beall (Evening Star 12/23/1889). It was not uncommon at the time for corpses to be stolen for dissection in medical schools: the demand for cadavers meant grave robbers could earn a good price for supplying them, and the “resurrectionist” business thrived in

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Washington up to the twentieth century. It was unusual, however, for elite Congressional to be a target. The Alvina Cheek case, and the tepid prosecution of Dr. Beall, marks a moment when he living community around Congressional began to distance themselves from death.

As the twentieth century progressed, the cultural attitude toward death shifted dramatically. Instead of beautifying death, Americans sought to deny it (McGuire 1988

472). As the became more powerful globally, and Washington D.C. grew more busy locally, the romantic sentiments of the Victorians began to seem morbid and backward. The American Century looked forward almost exclusively. As a result, the needs of the dead were increasingly ignored and minimized. In this new environment,

Congressional Cemetery fell into terrible, even dangerous disrepair. And at some point in this period, the largest, most prominent monument in Congressional Cemetery was robbed.

No one even knew it had happened until years later, when someone called the cemetery and offered to return the skull of William Wirt. Wirt, who served as Attorney General for

James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, died in 1834. Upon investigation by the cemetery groundskeeper following the anonymous call, it was clear the vault had been vandalized, but it was impossible to tell when. The rest of Wirt’s body was still there. The skull had become a souvenir, no longer connected to the life of the man who once inhabited it. The

Wirt case represents a low point in the corpse/survivor connection, an undetected and unmourned grave robbery that didn’t cause the living a moment’s pause.

In the second half of the twentieth century progressed, a new trend emerged in cemetery design. Euphemistically called “memorial parks”, the new burial grounds looked like nothing so much as golf courses. These cemeteries actively discourage a relationship

12 between the living and the dead (Meyer 1989: 61). The living are extraneous in memorial parks, even detrimental. They get in the way of the lawnmowers and leave inconvenient mementos. Memorial parks are all about the corpse; about its convenient and predictable disposal. With its long history, Congressional Cemetery sidestepped this trend, but not necessarily the cultural priorities that led to it. And as the twentieth century drew to a close, Congressional experienced a third theft. The summer of 1991, three people were arrested for a series of thefts from churches, including crucifixes and candelabra. Also found in their possession were several skulls, long bones, and knee caps that had been stolen from the White family vault at Congressional the previous spring. The theft had been very careful – only certain bones were taken, the vault was not ransacked, and the thieves had precisely replaced the outside padlock to make it look as though it had not been cut. Police said the bones were taken for “use in occult practices”, including fashioning jewelry from the patellae (Washington Times 2/23/1992). This was clearly not a random crime. The White Family Vault is one of the closest to the cemetery gate. These thieves chose a crypt, broke in, brushed aside the spiders and debris, pulled crania and femurs out of the rubble, and left. The thieves had to target a historic cemetery, a place where corpses were within the reach of the living in a way they simply aren’t in memorial parks. And in this crime, ironically, is the hope for Congressional Cemetery’s future. It was caught and resolved quickly. And it is a symptom of something bigger and more important: the

Congressional is still a place where the living and the dead can connect across their leg of

Hertz’s triangle.

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Chapter Two: The Case of Alvina Cheek

In the previous chapter, I introduced the idea that the circumstances of and reaction to grave robberies serve as snapshots of the living community’s relationship with the corpse in the cemetery. In this chapter, I will examine further the robbery of the grave of

Alvina Cheek in Congressional Cemetery 1889.

The rural cemetery movement and the sentimentality of the Victorian era gave

Americans a concrete sense of what a “good death” should look like. The Good Death was peaceful, at home surrounded by loved ones, and faced by the dying with wisdom and even optimism (Green 2008:15). The American ideal of the Good Death was exemplified by

Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her deathbed is a highly romanticized scene where the brave Eva comforts sobbing slaves and her panicky father, calmly clipping off and distributing locks of her own hair as memento mori.

“I am going to leave you,” she tells them without fear. This is death as victory, not defeat.

But that optimistic view of death, the one that allowed visitors to feel welcome and even joyful in a cemetery like Congressional, did not last through the turn of the century.

The living did not reverse their views overnight. Instead a series of changes, both national and local, helped edge the living away from the dead in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The robbery of the grave of Alvina Cheek in 1889, and the public reaction to it, captures this transition in the context of Congressional Cemetery.

Nationally, the Civil War upended Americans’ preconceived notions of the Good

Death. Young, healthy men died away from home, unattended and unnoticed, on chaotic, anonymous battlefields. In direct contrast to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “Civil War battlefields and hospitals could have provided the materials for an exemplary text on how not to die”

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(Faust 2008: 9). In addition to the changed circumstances of dying, the sheer numbers of the death toll affected American’s attitudes about death. This was not the sweet melancholy death of a romantic poem. This death was constant, brutal, and everywhere.

Historian Drew Gilpin Faust (2008) says death was the dominant fact of life in the war years: “For those Americans who lived in and through the Civil War, the texture of the experience, its warp and woof, was the presence of death” (Faust xiii). Americans were not always proud of how they handled this carnage, especially at the war’s beginning. Bodies were treated in ways that would have seemed unthinkable before the war. Not only was this disrespectful to the traditional rituals of death, it also “diminished the living, who found themselves abandoning commitments and principles that had helped to define their essential selves” (Faust 2008: 100). Washington D.C. was at the center of this experience.

Fighting in the corridor between Washington and Richmond extended relentlessly over years.

Americans eventually responded, Faust argues, by focusing a new attention on the way they handled death. Tasks we now take for granted, such as identifying war dead and notifying next of kin, were invented by Civil War-era Americans who struggled to preserve their humanity in the midst of unprecedented carnage (Faust 2008). When the war was finally over, Americans had a less romantic view of death than they had before the war, coupled with a strong need to behave honorably in the face of death. This new attitude was tested in a very public way just after Appomattox, when President Lincoln was shot in a

Washington theater. As exemplified by the throngs who turned out to weep over Lincoln’s widely displayed corpse, much of the pre-war sentimentality to death still existed. The difference was that the sentimentality was now anchored in very real priorities about the

15 proper way to honor a corpse. The relationship between the living and the dead was permanently altered, and the living knew it.

On a more local level, Washington D.C. underwent huge changes at the end of the nineteenth century. This transformation from provincial village to world capital also had an impact on the connection between the living and the dead, increasing the distance between them. In the years following the Civil War, Washington DC exploded in size, scope, and technology. The city, still reeling from the battle years, was not ready for this influx. The extra-broad avenues in Pierre L’Enfant’s city plan were deemed too expensive to pave, and the roads were alternately reduced to clouds of dust or quagmires of mud, depending on the weather. When New Yorker Horace Greely was first contemplating his

1872 presidential run, he said, “Washington is not a nice place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting, the mud is deep and the morals are deplorable”

(quoted in Bryan 1916: 591).

In 1870, a new territorial government took over local rule. It was widely considered a failure, and the Organic Act of 1878 took home rule away from DC citizens in exchange for annual federal payments equal to half the city’s expenses. But before it folded, the territorial government initiated huge Public Works projects, including paving the roads, extending the streetcar system, and building Eastern Market on 7th Street SE

(Melder 1997: 238). With better infrastructure and federal oversight and subsidies, DC was ready for the boom that so many American cities experienced at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1860, Washington had about 75,000 residents. By the turn of the century, that number had mushroomed to 230,392 and was rising fast (US Census Bureau).

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In the neighborhood of Congressional Cemetery, the Capitol grounds were extended east in 1872 (Bryan 1916: 618). On Capitol Hill, rowhouses gradually spread out east, south, and north of the Capitol between 1880 and 1900. Most Capitol Hill dwellings were modest, built of brick, and conservative in design. They became residences for a stable middle-class population of government clerks, storekeepers, carpenters, teachers, and others with moderate, steady incomes (Melder 1997: 238). With the opening of Arlington

Cemetery during the Civil War and the post-War growth of the National Cemetery System,

Congressional was no longer the de facto National Cemetery. In 1877, Congress ended the tradition of placing markers in the Cemetery for members of Congress who died in office.

But if Congressional’s national prominence was declining, its local importance was as strong as ever. It was still the burying ground of choice for Washington’s elites, and some of the largest and grandest monuments were installed in the cemetery in the post-Civil War years. Indeed, wealthy local families built a whole new row of large stone mausolea near the southern edge of the property in the 1890’s.

The growth of medical science also had an impact on the connection between the living and the corpse. The Civil War gave battlefield surgeons a crash course in the value of , a knowledge too many of them lacked. Until the mid-1850s, some American medical schools conferred degrees without requiring anatomy courses. Others had anatomy demonstrations, but not hands-on dissection for students (Shultz 1992). After the war, the medical profession set out to correct the deficiencies of medical education, particularly dissection (Shultz 1992: 60). Dissection requires a very literal connection to a corpse, as well as the ultimate destruction of it. It was the need for corpses to dissect that led to the robbery of Alvina Cheek’s grave.

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By 1878, there were about 10,000 students in American medical schools (Shultz

1992:15). Washington DC had three licensed medical colleges; Georgetown University,

Howard University, and The National Medical College (also called the Medical

Department of Columbian University), now known as George Washington University

Medical School. Doctors outside of medical schools trained other students privately, and there was an ongoing debate about which education was more effective (Medical Society of the District of Columbia 1866 oration, 14). One reason would-be doctors chose to pursue their profession through medical schools was the schools’ superior access to cadavers for dissection. In 1889, a local doctor complained in the Washington Post “It has been years since I dissected anyone, and perhaps I am a bit rusty on some points….But the medical colleges use so many bodies that I couldn’t get one for love or money”

(Washington Post 12/29/1889).

The practice of taking a fresh corpse from a grave to sell it to a is generally called ‘’ (MacDonald 2010: 12). The best body snatchers had the act down to a science. They drove a wagon close to a cemetery at night, and left it in the care of an accomplice. They scouted fresh graves, and located the direction of the head

(almost always to the west, a tradition that pre-dates Christianity) (Shultz 1992: 32-33).

Then, using wooden shovels to make less noise, they removed the dirt in a vertical tunnel over the head, often moving it to a tarp of some kind to keep the theft as neat as possible.

They smashed the wood at the head of the coffin, grabbed the body by the neck with a long metal hook, and replaced the dirt. They carted the corpse to the waiting wagon, and went straight to the anatomy lab of the local medical school to sell it. Body snatching was a

18 seasonal business: only cold weather kept corpses from rotting too fast for instructional use

(Nuland 2001:126).

Body snatchers were loathed and feared, in part because they tended to be “men of the lowest type, murderers, criminals, desperate fellows” (Baker 1916: 247). But they were also reviled because they disrupted so thoroughly the Victorian notion of the Good Death.

Dissection by medical students (generally a more privileged class of person than the

‘desperate’ body snatchers) was feared just as much as being pulled from the grave. In

English legal tradition, dissection was an extra punishment for a particularly egregious crime, considered a stricter sentence on top of execution (Richardson 1987: 32). This idea of dissection as super-punishment was similar to the idea of drawing and quartering a criminal, or exhibiting the severed head of a guillotined criminal on a fence spike. But there was one crucial difference: the were carried out by doctors, in the name of medical science. As Ruth Richardson (1987) says in her history Death, Dissection and the

Destitute, “the surgeon anatomist thereby became an executioner of the law.” (Richardson

34). Even dissections that were not conducted as legal punishment retained the taint of it.

“Dissection was a very final process. It denied hope of survival – even the survival of identity after death. Above all, it threw into relief the collaborative role of the medical profession in the actual execution of death” (Richardson 1987: 76). Dissection set up a tension between medical advancement and the feelings of the recently bereaved, a tension that continues today, it could be argued, in the debate over organ donation. Richardson says, “dissection represented a gross assault upon the integrity and identity of the body and upon the repose of the soul” (Richardson 1987: 76). This was a relationship between the living and the corpse that westerners just couldn’t countenance, perhaps because it did

19 encroach on the relationship between the living and the soul as well, a relationship the survivors felt more responsibility for tending carefully.

In England and Scotland, despite an increasingly alarmed public, body snatching reached positively epidemic proportions by the 1830’s. Indeed, the demand for cadavers there was so great, and the competition for robbing fresh graves was so fierce, that infamous body snatchers William Burke and William Hare took to smothering living humans instead of resurrecting dead ones (Shultz 1992: 69). Body snatchers in Great

Britain were put out of business by the Anatomy Act of 1832, which provided anatomists with unclaimed corpses from hospitals and poorhouses (Marshall 1995: 329). The 1832

Anatomy Act effectively transformed dissection in England from a punishment for being particularly evil into a punishment for being poor and alone (Richardson 1987: 51). In

England in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Victorian desire to be buried with a decent funeral cut across social classes, not just to honor the notion of a Good Death, but to avoid the anonymous pauper’s death that would end in the anatomy lab (Curl 2000:

197).

Americans lacked the lengthy legal tradition of dissection-as-punishment, and were perhaps slightly less horrified at the idea of being subjected to body snatching and anatomy lessons. But only slightly. When the Civil War disrupted the accepted processes of death and mourning, Americans readjusted. But the post-War years were characterized by a national need for healing and reconstruction, including in restoring as much as possible the traditional rituals of death. And those rituals ended in a cemetery.

Survivors did what they could to keep graves safe from body snatchers. They mixed sticks and rocks into the grave dirt to make digging it more difficult. They kept vigil

20 over new graves, or hired others to do so. And as in England, sellers of “mort safes” (iron cages installed above gravesites) and extra-strong coffins promised to keep your loved one resting in peace (Curl 2000: 40). In the February 27, 1888 edition of the Washington Post, an undertaker on 11th Street NW introduced a “coffin safe”, a steel box that would “render the efforts of ressurectionists futile” (Washington Post 2/27/1888).

But the main way to avoid being body snatched was to avoid being poor. Body snatchers preferred the graves of paupers, ideally in potter’s fields (Shultz 1992: 31).

Potter’s fields (a name taken from the Book of Matthew and used to describe any burial ground for the indigent) had several advantages for body snatchers (Sloane 1991: 24). The coffins in these graves, if there were any at all, were flimsier. The potter’s fields were less likely to be guarded by watchful sextants. Some paupers’ graves contained several bodies, which meant, in the words of one body snatcher’s testimony “instead of working for one subject, you may get three or four” (quoted in Richardson 1987: 60). And perhaps most crucially, poor people buried in potter’s fields were less likely to have mourners come visit their graves, potentially discovering the theft and reporting it to the police. In a potter’s field, unlike Congressional, the connection between the living and the dead was virtually nonexistent. As a corpse, you only ended up in a potter’s field if you had little relevance to the living.

There was (and is) no federal Anatomy Act in the United States providing a regular source of cadavers for dissection. Although a few states passed Anatomy Acts in the 1830s and 1840s, most of them were repealed quickly. By the end of the Civil War, only

Massachusetts and New York had laws providing cadavers for dissection (Shultz 1992:

78). As a result, body snatching in this country continued into the early twentieth-century.

21

Washington DC seems to have been something of a hub for this activity, even serving as a base for shipping cadavers to other cities (Shultz 1992: 37). In 1888, the Washington Post warned, “Washington seems to be fostering a new industry, which at the present rate promises to assume startling proportions. It is that of grave robbing” (Washington Post

1/27/1888). Some of the local body snatchers became minor celebrities around town, including Percy Brown and his wife (or maybe sister) Maude Brown, Workhouse Kate, and

William Jansen (also known as Janssen, Vigo Jensen, James Jardine, and the

Resurrectionist King) (Little 2005). A government clerk named George Christian moonlighted as a body snatcher and cadaver exporter. When he was arrested in 1873, his diary was confiscated and its contents published in the Evening Star newspaper. These newspaper accounts detail almost nightly ventures into the city’s many graveyards in search of fresh bodies, with varying degrees of success. A typical entry from November

10th reads, “We went out prospecting at Rock Creek Church Cemetery, this afternoon but found nothing. We went to Holmead’s this evening and got a subject, which we took to

[censored] College. Got home before twelve. “ An outing on November 19th met with less satisfaction: “Went out to the alms house to-day and stayed until evening, expecting to get a subject that was buried to-day. When we went down after dark, however, we found it not, on account of the darkness” (Evening Star 12/15/1873).

Rock Creek Church cemetery still stands on the northern edge of Washington DC.

Holmead’s Cemetery, once on 20th street NW, was closed shortly after the time of

Christian’s diary, and the remains reinterred at other local cemeteries. The alms house, or

Washington Asylum, was just over the wall from the eastern border of Congressional

Cemetery, and included a potter’s field for inmates who died there (Sluby 2009). The alms

22 house was a favorite target of Christian’s, with several diary entries indicating that he spent the day there, presumably waiting for an inmate to die, and then retrieved the body after nightfall. Congressional is mentioned a few times in the diary, too. It was generally too prominent and well-guarded to be a common target, but its proximity to the potter’s field must have made it a tempting second choice for prospecting corpses.

William Beall made that choice on December 20, 1889. According to the somewhat breathless reports in the local papers, a police officer named Clinton was on duty that night on the gravel road to the Asylum, when he saw a horse-drawn buggy moving slowly with one man walking in front and another behind. Clinton “was aware that cadavers were often removed from that desolate place known as potter’s field, and suspected that the vehicle contained a dead body” (Evening Star 12/21/1889). Clinton stopped the buggy and grabbed the horse’s reins. The two walking men and the buggy’s driver all ran off into the night. Clinton found the corpses of two women in the buggy.

One was identified as Mary Hawkins, an African American who had been buried in potter’s field that day. The other was a white woman, who was also assumed to have been taken from potter’s field, “and for that reason, no effort was made to have [her] identified”

(Evening Star 12/23/1889). The bodies were taken to the morgue, and the horse and buggy were impounded at the police station, along with the big metal hook found under the bodies.

And it might have ended there, another body snatching of unmissed poor women not worth any more effort. But a policeman named Oliver thought the white woman had “a look of refinement about her that is not often seen about persons who occupy graves in the pauper cemetery” (Evening Star 12/23/1889). He examined the body for clues. The

23 woman’s clothes had been discarded, probably because body snatchers could be prosecuted for theft if clothing was taken with the corpse (the corpse itself was not considered property, and could therefore be neither owned or stolen) (Richardson 1987:58, Shultz

1992: x). But the body was wearing an undergarment of some kind, which Policeman

Oliver inspected more closely, and found the name “B.Cheek” written on it. A check of the health office records revealed that 24-year-old Alvina Cheek of South Carolina Avenue SE had died of “phthisis pulmonalls” the week before. She was buried in Range 1, Site 257 at

Congressional Cemetery, “not far from a gate which opens into the rear end of the work house grounds”(Evening Star 12/23/1889, Congressional Cemetery Daily Interment Log,

1889).

The fact that elite Congressional Cemetery was robbed and the corpse of a

“refined” white woman snatched apparently lit a small fire under the laconic DC police force. So too did the anger and grief of Alvina Cheek’s husband Thomas. Thomas Cheek initially vented his rage at A.C. Adams, a doctor and anatomy professor who came to claim the horse and buggy from police impound. Cheek visited Adams several times in the days that followed, and swore out a warrant for his arrest. But Adams said he was simply claiming the buggy on behalf of a friend, and produced a paper signed by seven of his medical students swearing he had been at the National Medical College during the night of the robbery (Evening Star 12/23/1889). Pressured further by the threat of the arrest warrant, Adams admitted the buggy belonged to a Doctor William W. Beall.

Although he was acquitted in both the papers and the court, the role of A.C. Adams in the Cheek case is something of an open question. Why would he go claim the buggy if, as he later stated in the trial, his “acquaintance with [Beall] was limited” (Washington Post

24

6/7/1890)? It is likely that Beall worked for Adams. It was not the first time Adams had been implicated in a body snatching case. In 1884, the notorious Jansen/Jenssen/Jardine was arrested, and said he was getting bodies for “The National Medical College and

Columbian University. If you will only call down on Dr. Adams, the demonstrator, and he will get me out of here” (Washington Post 10/11/1884). If Adams regularly bought cadavers off Beall, even if Adams was free from prosecution, he might have felt obliged to

“assist with character references for the court or with funds” (Richardson 1987:86).

Regardless, police attention quickly and totally tuned to apprehending William

Beall. Beall is a somewhat shadowy figure. The Evening Star reported that Beall

“formerly kept a barbershop … where he also extracted teeth. He afterward received a diploma to practice medicine” (Evening Star 12/24/1889). There is no Beall on the membership lists of the Medical Association of the District of Columbia in the 1880’s (the name of A.C. Adams appears there annually). Beall is mentioned briefly in the salacious

“History of Bodysnatching” that was published in the Washington Medical Annals in 1916.

The narrator, a Dr. Frank Baker, writes “Beale [sic] came along, but soon became scared of the work; was afraid of the ghosts of the jail” (Baker 1916: 252). When the police went to arrest Beall on December 24th, they found that his last known address was an apartment above a small grocery store on Q Street. The grocery, which was run by Beall’s son, “has not a very extensive stock of groceries, and there is no sign about the place to indicate Dr.

Beall’s vocation as either that of physician, dentist, or barber” (Washington Post,

12/25/1889).

Beall wasn’t there. He had fled to his brother Evart’s house in Washington Grove,

MD. When the police showed up on the next day, Beall hid. Evart invited the policemen

25 to share his Christmas turkey, fruitcake, and wine, giving his brother a chance to escape and couple of hours’ head start (Washington Post 12/26/1889).

Ultimately, Beall turned himself in. A.C. Adams was briefly tried and acquitted for his role in the affair. His students turned out at the courthouse in such numbers that the

Washington Post declared, “The cadaver class at the National Medical College might have held a recitation right at the police court yesterday, except there were no subjects there”

(Washington Post 1/4/1890). Beall’s trial was somewhat more complicated. In March, he was convicted by a Police Court, but appealed to the criminal court (Washington Post

3/5/1890). The criminal case did not go well. Regardless of their possible business connection, A.C. Adams testified against him. Beall himself seems to have been a terrible witness in his own defense. The Washington Post reported, “Many of his statements were so much at variance with others as to be wholly irreconcilable, and in some instances decidedly contradictory, while his explanations only confused matters the more and left impressions unfavorable to the accused upon those present” (Washington Post 6/11/1890).

He presented a frankly weak alibi and claimed his horse and buggy had been stolen. When a blacksmith testified that he had made the metal hook found in the buggy for Dr. Beall,

Beall said he needed it to hoist hay into the loft of his barn. The Washington Post, clearly not buying a word of this testimony, stated flatly “There was no loft to his stable, and the hook was not made for that purpose.” When several witnesses swore they regularly saw

Beall and his buggy in the vicinity of the alms house, Beall claimed his horse liked the long grass that grew near the property. When asked why he persuaded Dr. Adams to claim his horse and buggy from police impound “his explanation for not going to police headquarters

26 to claim his horse was very lame” (Washington Post 6/11/1890). Despite all this evidence, the jury could not reach a verdict, and was discharged (Washington Post 6/12/1890).

Part of the jury’s problem was that it was not clear which law, if any, Beall had broken. Since he had not stolen Mrs. Cheek’s clothes, he could not be prosecuted for theft.

Thomas Cheek claimed several times that jewelry was missing from his dead wife’s grave, but it was never found, and Beall was never charged with the theft of it. At the time of

Beall’s trial, there was no law in DC per se against the robbing of graves. In 1889-90 DC was, in accordance with the Organic Act of 1878, under federal rule. In 1888, the House committee for the District of Columbia of the 50th Congress considered H.R. 5042, a bill for “The Promotion of Anatomical Science, Etc” that would have made body snatching illegal in the District, while providing for cadavers for dissection from alms houses and hospitals (Congressional Record 2/16/1888). But after debate that included “a considerable amount of ghoulish glee by the committee members” (Washington Post

2/8/1888), the measure failed, vetoed by President Grover Cleveland. There was not a specific law against body snatching in Washington, DC until 1896. But even then, the provision of educational cadavers under the law was considered insufficient, and body snatching continued, if with somewhat less rapacity (Washington Post 1/22/1896).

At Congressional Cemetery, the trustees hired two extra watchmen after the theft of

Alvina Cheek’s body (Washington Post 12/25/1889). Cheek’s corpse was moved to the

Public Vault at Congressional, perhaps to allow it time to decompose past the point of usefulness for anatomy lessons (Curl 2000: 40). A few days later, Alvina Cheek was reinterred at Range 1, Site 257 (Congressional Cemetery Daily Interment Logs 1889).

Mary Hawkins’ body was reinterred in the potter’s field. Perhaps more Washingtonians

27 began writing their names in their underwear. But otherwise business, for the medical schools, cemeteries, alms house, and body snatchers, went on as usual.

What this case reveals is the changing nature of the corpse-survivor relationship in post-Civil War Washington. Alvina Cheek, born the year the war ended, was not the subject of widespread romantic sentiment. Even her own husband seemed as concerned about the loss of her jewelry as the disturbance of her corpse. The attention she did receive

– from the police and the newspapers – is only remarkable in comparison to the complete lack of attention to indigents like Mary Hawkins. If the culture of a rural cemetery community was meant to make the living feel closer to the dead, why weren’t the regular

Washingtonians who strolled the cemetery’s grounds more horrified by Cheek’s exhumation? Why didn’t they feel as if they had lost a friend?

There are several answers to these questions. First, as outlined above, the Civil

War forever changed the relationship that rural cemeteries hoped to foster. Americans, while acknowledging the need to pay attention to the dead, did so in a more practical and less romantic way. Those who lived through the war could not help but notice the “gap between the conventions of Victorian sentimentality and the reality of modern industrialized warfare” (Faust 2008: 194). Also, the success of rural cemeteries made more city planners realize the need for public parks, and by the end of the nineteenth century, urbanites had more options for open green spaces (Sloane 1991: 116). The improved streetcar system, too, meant city-dwellers could more easily access the greenery of the suburbs (Melder 1997: 232).

But more broadly, Americans were turning from a “cult of ancestors” to a new century of progress. The romantic idealism that characterized the first half of the

28 nineteenth century was fading, as was the post-revolutionary intention to fashion a usable republic past in places like garden cemeteries (Linden-Ward 1989: 321). Eventually, this evolution played out in cemeteries like Congressional in observable ways. As rural cemetery historian Blanch Linden-Ward (1989) puts it, “the past was past; the dead, buried.

Americans abandoned the pleasures of melancholy for progress, the past for the future. By emerging from the Civil War intact, the nation stayed the ultimate cataclysm, the death of the Union…” (Linden-Ward 1989: 322). In this context, the robbing of Alvina Cheek’s grave can be seen as a transition point between sentimentality and pragmatism – the moment when the needs of progress (in the form of medical science) took precedence over mere tradition. The groundwork for this transition was laid during the Civil War, and was complete by the beginning of the twentieth century.

As it happens, it was not public outrage of effective legislation that finally halted body snatching in DC (indeed, throughout the United States). It was actually the perfection and acceptance of the art of embalming. While as old as ancient Egypt, embalming was uncommon in this country into the nineteenth century. During the Civil War, the acceptance of embalming was accelerated by families’ desire to recognize a fallen loved one whose corpse did not arrive home till weeks after his death (Faust 2008: 92). The embalming process was perfected over the next 30-35 years. By the early 20th century, embalming was commonplace. This meant cadavers obtained from legal sources could be procured even in the summer months and could accumulate even when anatomy class was not in session without risk of putrefaction. A single embalmed cadaver could last through several dissections, and the dissection itself could be slower and more methodical. And

29 although the number of medical students continued to increase, the demand for dissections subjects grew steadily less acute (Shultz 1992: 90).

With embalming, the circumstances that led to the robbery of Alvina Cheek’s grave disappeared. But hers was not the last grave robbed at Congressional Cemetery. And although the reaction to this theft might seem tepid in the context of the rhetoric of a rural cemetery, at least there was a police investigation and a pubic prosecution. By the middle of the twentieth century, the connection between the living and the dead at Congressional had become so tenuous that the next robbery went entirely unnoticed.

In the next chapter, I will examine the robbery of the grave of William Wirt. An exact date for this theft cannot be determined; decades passed before any knew it had happened.

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Chapter Three: The Case of William Wirt

In the last chapter, I examined the body snatching of Alvina Cheek in 1889, which revealed a cemetery community in transition. The post-Civil War living community was starting to distance itself from the dead in Congressional Cemetery. In this chapter, I turn to the robbery of the tomb of William Wirt, which illuminates just how distant that connection had become by the middle of the twentieth century. This distancing was not unique to Congressional. The relationship between the living and the dead in America that dominated the early twentieth century has been variously called “the denial of death”

(Linden-Ward 1989: 306), the “dying of death” (Farrell 1980: 4), or even “the pornography of death” (McGuire 1988: 472). In the words of cemetery historian David Charles Sloane,

“The twentieth-century attitude existed as if the ‘Romantic interval’, which softened death and diminished the boundaries between the living and the dead, had never existed” (Sloane

1991: 173).

To see a very visible representation of this new attitude, you need only walk through a cemetery founded in the early years of the twentieth century. The rural cemetery was supplanted by the transitional lawn cemetery, and ultimately the memorial park. Some of this change was, ironically, a direct result of the popularity of rural cemeteries. Seeing city-dwellers’ desire for nature, city planners created grand green spaces like New York’s

Central Park. According to David Charles Sloane (1991), “Dozens of new parks were ultimately created, and Americans found a new recreational spot to replace the more solemn rural cemetery and adopted new ideas about landscape, which were then applied to new cemeteries” (Sloane 116). Specifically, lawn cemeteries put restrictions on the size

31 and placement of gravestones, which made maintenance easier. It also made the presence of death smaller, less visible (Sloane 1991: 119). Memorial parks took the restrictions one step further, allowing only flat uniform plaques on graves. The rural cemeteries, the oldest of which were approaching the century mark, found themselves referred to as

“monumented cemeteries”, meaning old-fashioned burial places where the indulgent, foolish monuments had no uniformity and regularly got in the way of lawn care.

But inconvenience and old-fashioned aesthetics were not the only drawbacks to nineteenth century cemeteries. Philosophically, they simply paid too much attention to death. The new style of cemeteries made death less dramatic (Sloane 1991:127). Hubert

Eaton was the mastermind behind Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Southern California.

When he was out evangelizing for Forest Lawn in 1917, he said, “The cemeteries of today are wrong because they depict an end, not a beginning. They have consequently become unsightly stoneyards, places that do nothing for humanity save a practical act, and that not too well” (quoted in Jackson and Vergara 1989:30). To turn death into ‘a beginning’ is to change the emphasis from the corpse point of Hertz’s triangle to the soul. If you transform the dead from a body to a soul, then your relationship with the dead can happen anywhere.

It is no longer anchored in the place where the body is buried. To prioritize the soul, you need to diminish the visibility of death, and hide the physical remains of the human body.

Marilyn Yalom states this contrast succinctly: “The garden cemetery privileged nature as a sweet setting for the dead and consolation for the living; the memorial park practically hides death altogether” (Yalom 2008: 47).

Congressional Cemetery reflected these changes, just as it reflected the rural cemetery movement a century earlier. The contrast between the sumptuous, grand obelisks

32 and urns of the 1880s and the small modest markers of the 1920s is striking. Clearly, the no-nonsense, pragmatic priorities of the new century carried over into the graveyard

(Meyer 1989: 61). A developmental history of Congressional Cemetery written in 2003 states, “As at other cemeteries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trend toward the "lawn park" aesthetic with manicured lawns resulted in the slow loss of

Victorian-era decoration and an increasingly efficient landscape appropriate to the era of mechanized grass cutting” (Breitkreutz 2003:1). Arlington National Cemetery had taken over the role of burial ground for prominent federal figures in the 1880s, and by 1907 a newspaper article lamented that Congressional no longer appeared in guide books and that

"the old burying ground that was once deemed the only fit and proper resting place for the illustrious dead is forgotten" (Quoted in Breitkreutz 2003: 40). This was something of an exaggeration, for illustrious Washingtonians were still being buried at Congressional, including pioneering suffragist Belva Lockwood in 1917 and “March King” John Philip

Sousa in 1932. But it was certainly true that, like many monumented cemeteries,

Congressional was having increasingly serious financial troubles by the middle of the twentieth century. Many of the garden cemeteries just didn’t have a large enough permanent fund to take care of their graves (Shively 1988: 358). Gravestone conservation was an acute problem at Congressional, where many historically important graves, including the Congressional graves the cemetery was so proud of, were marked by monuments made of a local sandstone. A 1929 report from the Quartermaster General of the War Department stated that these sandstone monuments, cut by hand from the softest part of the stone, were particularly prone to erosion (Breitkruetz 2003: 44). Compounding the problem was the fact that Congressional was no longer earning as much money from

33 the sale of gravesites as it had in the 1800s. The cemetery was filling up, and most of the few available gravesites were in sections of the property that were considered less desirable. The cemetery’s finances, popularity, and prospects were definitely on a downward slope.

Meanwhile, Washingtonians were distracted by other priorities. The city was booming, with a population that almost tripled from 1890 to 1940 (U.S. Census Bureau).

The City Beautiful movement of the 1890s led to the McMillan plan in 1902, which aimed to redesign the area near the U.S. Capitol into a monumental city worthy of a world capital.

The National Mall was extended and redesigned, and grand buildings like Union Station and the Lincoln Memorial joined the Capitol and White House in the city’s federal heart.

New museums lined up along the new mall, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (then called the National Museum) in 1911.

But just because the living weren’t seeking out the dead in cemeteries, it didn’t mean they weren’t seeking them elsewhere. In fact, the new National Museum was one place that dead bodies retained their relevance. The founder of the museum’s physical anthropology department was a Czech immigrant named Ales Hrdlicka. Among other things, Hrdlicka is known for measuring and cataloging thousands of human skulls.

Although he was later criticized for treating the bones of nonwhites as specimens rather than people, his research made him the most knowledgeable human craniologist of the twentieth century (Quigley 2001:101). Craniology (or craniometry) is the comparative study of the size and shape of skulls. It has its roots in phrenology, a kooky fad of the early nineteenth century that suggested a person’s character traits could be judged by measuring bumps on his skull. Craniologists claimed a more scientific pursuit: classifying human

34 races by the differences in their skulls. Almost universally, the study of craniology was undertaken with the goal of proving the superiority of Caucasians (Quigley 2001:99).

Despite this frankly racist imperative, craniologists did amass and curate huge collections of human remains, many of which continue to be useful objects of study to contemporary physical anthropologists. And they did reinvigorate the connection between the living and the dead, giving value to the corpse when other Americans were trying to forget its existence.

Skull collecting was not invented by craniologists and phrenologists. The skull, as the most recognizable part of the human skeleton, is laden with symbolism (Quigley 2001:

3). Across cultures, the skull is a central symbol of humanity, “representing the enigma of life and the unavoidability of death” (Dickey 2009:17). As such, the skull has been prized throughout human history as a trophy, a relic, and an object of ritual, admiration, and scientific study. Skull collecting has never been entirely a mainstream hobby, but it has persisted across time and place. It experiences periodic spikes in popularity as it did into the early part of the twentieth century (Fabian 2010: 39). As a comparative study, craniology required large samples to obtain statistically significant results (Dickey 2009:

219). Phrenologists, on the other hand, often sought the skulls of specific, well-known individuals, with the hope of documenting their exaggerated attributes in the shape of their skulls.

I believe it was a skull collector who robbed William Wirt’s grave in Congressional

Cemetery sometime in the middle of the twentieth century. The theft was not discovered until many years later. Though hardly a household name now, William Wirt was prominent in his day. Born into a relatively prosperous Maryland family in 1772, Wirt was

35 orphaned as a boy. When his small inheritance ran out he had to get by on brains and charm. With the help of some generous patrons, Wirt received a law degree, and eventually served as U.S. Attorney General for presidents James Monroe and John Quincy

Adams (Jabour 1998). Wirt is widely credited with turning the job into a position of national influence, and remains the longest-serving Attorney General in U.S. history. Yet when he died in 1834, he left his wife and children in substantial debt. He was buried in an undistinguished grave at Congressional Cemetery (Daily Interment Log, 1834).

Nineteen years later in 1853, Wirt’s son-in-law Rear Admiral Louis Malsherbes

Goldsborough built a grand family vault near the highest point of Congressional’s central hill, a huge, square granite column atop a sizable underground tomb. Wirt’s name was carved in huge letters at eye level. It remains the largest and most visible monument on the property. (See figure 4) William Wirt’s skeletonized remains were reinterred in the new vault, along with those of his daughter Agnes, who died in 1830. Also interred in the vault were Wirt’s daughter Ellen (1853), wife Elizabeth (1857), grandson Louis (1863), granddaughter Lizzie (1866), son-in-law Louis (1877), and daughter Liz (1885).

(Congressional Cemetery Private Vault Book). The underground crypt is accessed by a small locked door on the east side of the monument. Opening this door allows you to move the heavy capstone that covers an opening at ground level. With the capstone out of the way, access to the vault is gained by “climbing down a metal ladder originally built as a means of access to the burial chamber” (Smithsonian Report 2005). The crypt itself has three stone shelves for coffins. William Wirt’s coffin was originally placed on the middle shelf (Smithsonian Report 2005).

36

Despite all the granite and ladders and locks, someone was able to rob the Wirt vault some time in the twentieth century. Three skulls were taken, which were later determined to belong to William Wirt, his grandson Louis, and his granddaughter Lizzie

(Smithsonian Report 2005). Only the skull of William Wirt was recovered, when it was returned to Congressional Cemetery in 2005.

Figure 4: The monument atop the vault of William Wirt and his family is the tallest in the cemetery (courtesy Congressional Cemetery)

37

In 2003, an unidentified man called Congressional and asked the cemetery manager, “Would you be interested in getting William Wirt’s head back?” The answer, of course, was yes, but the mysterious caller never produced the skull. The cemetery manager went out to the Wirt vault and confirmed that the lock had been broken off the door, but the breakage didn’t look recent. Someone had shoved a heavy slab of granite in front of the door to keep it closed, but the cemetery manager couldn’t say when. (See figure 5) And with the granite in the way, he couldn’t get down into the vault to see if Wirt’s skull was missing (Washington Post 10/20/2005).

Figure 5: Door to Wirt Vault with granite slab on top of the capstone (Courtesy Congressional Cemetery)

After a lot of confusion and unreturned phone calls, the story came out. The skull was just one of at least forty skulls that had been collected by a man named Robert L.

White. When White died in 2003, the expert who appraised his estate found an old metal box painted with gold block letters reading “Hon. Wm. Wirt.” (See figure 6) The skull was

38 inside. It was the appraiser who set in motion the process of returning the skull to the cemetery, which finally happened in 2005.

Figure 6: The metal box in which the skull was recovered. (Photo by the author)

How Robert White obtained Wirt’s skull is still an open question. Why he collected Wirt’s skull is easier to surmise. White was, by all accounts, an avid collector of many things. As a kid, he collected autographs. Eventually, White branched out in to all kinds of artifacts, many of which had only a tangential connection to someone only mildly famous. He had John D. Rockefeller’s golf clothes. He had the Oscar statuette won by the cinematographer of Wuthering Heights. He had a seltzer bottle signed by two of the three stooges ( Sun 4/29/2004). He was best known for his collection of John F.

Kennedy memorabilia, which contained enough valuable and significant items that it led to a legal dispute with Kennedy’s children.

In addition to all the vaguely historical flotsam and jetsam, White seems to have had a special fondness for human skulls. A website maintained in White’s honor by his son

Zachary features an undated photo of one of White’s business cards. (See figure 7) On one

39 side is printed “Robert L. White, Baltimore’s #1 Head Hunter.” On the reverse it reads

“Serious Collector of: Human Heads, Shrunken Heads, Mummified Heads, Skulls – Scalps,

Atrocity Items, Famous Locks of Hair, Egyptian Art, Historical Items.”

(www.facebook.com/pages/Robert-L-White-Collector-and-Historian)

Figure 7: One of Robert L. White’s business cards, front and back

When you combine a fascination with skulls with an interest in curios from minor historical figures, it’s not hard to see why William Wirt’s skull was appealing to Robert White.

Interestingly, he collected other Wirt memorabilia too, including several of his letters, a lock of his hair, and a ninth edition copy of Wirt’s biography of Patrick Henry. White also had several photographs of Wirt’s monument in Congressional Cemetery (Catalog,

Hantman’s Auctioneers and Appraisers, 2004).

But no one ever accused Robert White of being a thief. He bought, begged, and traded his strange mementos, but there was never any suggestion of stealing them. It’s safer to bet that White bought Wirt’s skull for his collection. Perhaps surprisingly, it is entirely legal to sell and possess human bones in the United States. There are some exceptions; the bones of Native Americans are federally regulated, for instance, and certain municipalities (like New Orleans) and states (New York, Georgia, and Tennessee) have local restrictions. But by and large, when human skulls are for sale, it’s legal to buy them

40

(Joey Williams, Director of Education, Skulls Unlimited, personal communication 2012).

Most buyers seek skulls for educational purposes, so price is driven more by quality than the identity of the skull. When Robert White was buying, a skull could be had for $100-

$600. Since then, prices have tripled, because the two biggest sources of human bones,

India and , have both banned exports (Wired Magazine 11/27/2007) If White discovered the existence of Wirt’s skull through his connections in the ‘head hunting’ world, he could have simply purchased it legally, and without breaking the bank.

This is of course assuming it was, in fact, William Wirt’s skull, the labeled metal box notwithstanding. When the skull was recovered in 2005, Congressional Cemetery sought the expertise of anthropologists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural

History to help assess whether the skull was Wirt’s. Preliminary examination of the skull determined that it belonged to a Caucasian male. Anthropologist Douglas Owsley was originally doubtful the skull was Wirt’s, since it retained an almost full set of teeth, which would have been unusual for a sixty-two-year-old man in the 1830s. (See figure 8)

Figure 8: The skull in its metal box. (photo courtesy Congressional Cemetery)

But “because Wirt died prior to the introduction of technologies often used to determine identity, such as radiography, the practical way to assess possible identification

41 was to access the vault and inventory the remains interred there” (Smithsonian Report

2005: 2). When the anthropologists moved the granite slab blocking the vault door and descended the metal ladder (now missing several rungs), it was immediately clear to them that the Wirt vault had been vandalized. Bones and coffin debris were scattered across the brick floor of the crypt. In particular, it was clear that a male buried in a lead lined wooden coffin had been pulled off of the middle of the three stone shelves. Two of the three coffins on the bottom shelf had also been vandalized. The five remaining were largely undisturbed (Smithsonian Report 2005). Amid the remains of the lead lined wooden coffin in the center, the team found a metal nameplate with the inscription “William Wirt 1772-

1834”. Most of the postcranial bones of the skeleton were present and in decent condition, although the skull was missing. Upon further examination, the anthropologists determined that “similarities in bone preservation, color, adhering rootlets and dark brown soil, physical size, and sex affirmed association between the post-cranial bones and the skull from the metal box” (Smithsonian Report 2005: 7). They felt confident saying the skull did indeed belong to William Wirt. It, and the other remains in the crypt, were reinterred in new boxes, and the granite block was shoved back into place against the broken door.

The mystery remains about just when and how the skull was stolen from the vault.

It was thought that White had the skull in his collection for about 18 years before his death.

But who knows how long the lock on the vault door had been broken? Amid all the debris in the crypt, the anthropologists found the skeleton of a newborn, unrelated to the Wirts, which had been dropped down the vault ladder at some point. Clearly, there had been some period of relatively easy access to the vault before someone placed that granite slab in front of the door. The management at Congressional Cemetery assumes the Wirt vault was

42 vandalized some time in the 1970s or early 1980s, when the cemetery was in serious decline and vandalism to the gravestones was not uncommon. But I believe that the theft occurred much earlier, during the skull collecting fad of the early part of the century. One piece of supporting evidence for this theory is the box the skull was resting in. The

Smithsonian investigation determined it to be a metal document box dating to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. It was closed with a lock decorated in art nouveau style, dating somewhere between 1890 and 1920 (Smithsonian Report 2005:2). There is no proof, of course, that the box dates to the time of the theft. But the fact that it is so much older than the assumed date of the grave robbing is curious.

Another curious detail is the lock on the vault door. When the vault was examined in 2005, it was noted that the locking mechanism had been broken off the outside of the door, although the inside portion of the lock remained in place (Smithsonian Report 2005).

But a 1913 photograph of the Wirt vault shows no locking mechanism on the outside of the door. (See figure 9) Either the lock was already broken by 1913, or the Smithsonian investigators misunderstood the nature of that lock.

Also at issue is the question of why William Wirt was targeted. If the thieves were just after a few skulls they could sell for a couple of hundred dollars, why risk the tallest hill in the cemetery and rob the most prominent grave? If they sought artifacts associated with Wirt, why leave the engraved coffin plate behind? If they were looking for some bones with historical cache, why not rob the grave of J. Edgar Hoover, who people had actually heard of in the 1970s? He was buried in his family plot at Congressional in 1972.

The last time anyone but an eccentric like Robert White would value the skull of William

43

Wirt was back in the days of phrenology and craniology, which have been discredited for a hundred years or more.

Figure 9: 1913 Photograph of Wirt Vault with evidence of missing lock (courtesy Congressional Cemetery)

The answer to who stole William Wirt will remain a mystery. And even if it was not craniology that led to Wirt’s skull being taken, craniology did have some role in getting him back to his grave. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where anthropologist Douglas Owsley ad his colleagues work, still curates the skeletal collection begun by craniologist Arles Hrdlicka. And it was data from that collection, and others like

44 it, that allowed Owsley to determine the sex, ancestry, and age at death of the skull in question.

When the living sought the dead in the laboratory rather than the cemetery, the dead were transformed from humans into specimens. It is easy to explain the changes in cemetery aesthetics or lawn care priorities. But what about the changes in people’s attitudes? How has the community come to reverse its role and forbid the mourning which it was responsible for imposing until the twentieth century? “The answer,” according to

Philippe Ariès, “is that the community feels less and less involved in the death of one of its own members” (Ariès 1987: 46-47). The emotional remove from death only widened as medical science continued to advance into the twentieth century, and fewer Americans had first-hand experience with peacetime death.

Meanwhile, memorial parks around the nation cemented their role as the new cemetery standard. If the rural cemetery movement was about fostering a connection between the living and the dead, the transition away from rural cemeteries weakened that connection. Memorial parks, with their controlled serenity that makes the visitor feel messy and loud by contrast, have very little to do with the living. By the end of the twentieth century, even those who wanted to seek out the dead couldn’t find them. In the next chapter, I turn to the robbery of the White family vault in Congressional Cemetery in

1991. I believe this theft marks the beginning of a resurgent connection between the ling and the dead in the cemetery.

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Chapter Four: The Case of the White Family Vault

In the previous chapter, the theft of William Wirt’s skull occurred at a time when the living were actively distancing themselves from the dead in the cemetery community.

In this chapter I examine the theft of the White family vault in 1991. This incident highlights a moment when people began to reengage with the dead at Congressional.

There weren’t a lot of options for Americans seeking out a connection to the dead at the end of the twentieth century. The garden cemeteries of the nineteenth century were abandoned in favor of memorial parks, ghettos of the dead where the living felt like intruders. A page of restrictions for visitors to the six Forest Lawn Memorial Parks in

Southern California includes the admonishment to “walk carefully around sprinkler heads” and to place potted plants “on tablets or vases to protect the grass.” Loitering is prohibited

(www.forestlawn.com). The skeletal collections that had amassed in anthropology museums in the early twentieth century were maintained, but not expanded. In fact, many of them shrank significantly as legislation like NAGPRA (the Native American Graves

Protection and Repatriation Act, passed 1990) required the return of thousands of Native

American bones(Fabian 2010: 2010). The pseudo-sciences of phrenology and craniology were discredited. By 2000, cremation became the mortuary ritual of choice for one quarter of Americans, although the numbers vary widely by region (NFCB 2010). No one alive, it seemed, wanted much to do with the dead once they were buried.

But someone did rob the White family vault in Congressional Cemetery in 1991.

Congressional was in terrible disrepair then. Most monumented cemeteries experienced a general decline across the country at this time. Out of fashion, out of space to sell new plots, and out of any money that earlier families had donated for care, aging rural

46 cemeteries were crumbling nationwide (Shively 1988). At Congressional, other factors influenced this decline as well. The middle class families that once occupied Capitol Hill’s rowhouses began moving to the suburbs. The congregation dwindled at Christ Church, the

Episcopal parish that owned the cemetery. With limited church funds and few gravesites to sell, the Christ Church Vestry felt they could no longer maintain Congressional Cemetery.

In 1975, they let the last remaining cemetery employees go, and recruited church volunteers to keep the cemetery up (Breikreutz 2003: 54). The volunteers formed a nonprofit group called The Association for the Preservation of Historic Congressional

Cemetery (APHCC), which sought funding for cemetery maintenance. The APHCC got some good news in 1976 when Congress passed a law making the Architect of the Capitol responsible for Congressional Cemetery, but no actual funds were appropriated for its care for three more years. Through the 1980s, Congress continued to appropriate funds, and the

APHCC raised money from private sources. It was never enough money to restore the cemetery to its former glory, but it did pay the salary for one full-time caretaker. Just as things were starting to look up, however, that caretaker was convicted of embezzlement,

(Washington Times 5/1/2000) causing not only financial loss for the struggling cemetery, but the loss of confidence from potential donors as well. The cemetery, overgrown and full of broken stones, became a creepy place you would only visit on a dare. (See figure 10)

It was hard to imagine it had once been a garden spot where people took picnics and felt comfortably close to death.

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Figure 10: Broken gravestones and fallen trees lie neglected in Congressional Cemetery, circa 1990. (courtesy Congressional Cemetery)

So who would brave this dangerous, spooky place in order to rob a grave? Someone who sees it as an act of rebellion to seek death out. In the case of the theft of the White vault, it seems to have been people seeking bones for use in occult practices. There was a surge of interest in the occult in the 1980s and early 1990s (Lachman 2003). The word ‘occult’ means ‘hidden’ (Agrippa 1898: 60), and early in the twentieth century, it was associated with the study of secret knowledge, generally by elites (Gunn 2005: xxiii). But the occult revival of the late twentieth century included practices as diverse as “astrology, tarot cards, pyramids, crystals, shamanistic healing, voudou, channeling, I Ching, goddess worship, wicca or witchcraft, and even Satanism” (Rowe and Cavender 1991: 263). Many of these traditions, like crystals, have little to do with death. Others, like channeling, are more associated with the relationship between the living and the soul, than that between the living and the corpse. But some of them, notably witchcraft and Satanism, invest real power in physical human remains.

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There are a lot of theories about why these practices, many of which are very ancient, saw a spike in popularity at the end of the twentieth century. Unlike the occult fads a hundred years earlier, which were often most popular with well-to-do dilettantes, the more recent revival was most evident among disaffected youth (Gunn 2005: 171). Perhaps, as some have suggested, belief in something secret and supernatural made a powerless person feel powerful. “Nor was this power always illusory,” says occult historian B.J.

Gibbons (2001). “At the very least, any religion, and magical religion in particular, can build confidence in its adherents. This is why magic flourishes in uncertain circumstances: even its illusions offer an avenue of escape from the debilitating doubts of sober realism”

(Gibbons 2001: 135). Perhaps the continuum of occult belief from tarot cards to Satanism follows a parallel continuum of cultural disaffection from boredom to overt rebellion.

Interestingly, this search for power in an uncertain world is also the reason given for the disproportionate fear of occult activity in the same era. After all, to fear the influence of Satan, you have to agree Satan exists. The so-called Satanic Panic of the

1980s and early 1990s was fanned by talk shows and best-selling books featuring (later discredited) recovered memories of ritual abuse. Terrified parents accused day-care providers around the country of conducting abusive satanic rituals on their children

(Bromley 1991). Like belief in the occult, the fear that an evil force is undermining society’s most cherished institutions is also cyclical. Phillips Stevens (1991) explains such beliefs invariably develop in “when a significant proportion of people who share cultural values have come to feel that they are being let down or ignored by the social and governmental institutions that they have always supported and in which they have placed their trust” (Stevens 1991:21). Occult practices and fear of the occult are two sides of the

49 same social coin: they both flourish when large numbers of people think traditional institutions just aren’t doing their jobs.

As result both of the increase in occult activity and the increased fear of it, law enforcement agencies began training their members on how to spot Satanic crimes. Lists of what to look for included circles of salt and black candle wax at the crime scene, events that occur on a solstice or an equinox, and the use of certain numbers and colors (Holmes and Holmes 2009). Many of these elements were taken from Anton LaVey’s The Satanic

Bible (1969) and Satanic Rituals (1976). To the degree that American Satanism, by definition anti-authoritarian, had any leader, it was LaVey, who founded the Church of

Satan in San Francisco in 1966, and presided over it till his death in 1997. And to the degree that Satanists follow any texts, LaVey’s books are popular. But occult activities are by nature secretive and irregular, so it was sometimes hard for law enforcement to draw the line between Satanism and garden-variety vandalism. Cemeteries, for instance, have always played a role in “legend trips”, teenagers’ ritual visits to an allegedly haunted or marginal site. According to folklorist Bill Ellis, “such trips are intended to be illegal and to shock adults; still, they are forms of entertainment, not religious rites, and the groups that commit them cannot be termed ‘cults’” (Ellis 1991: 279).

It is hard to be certain, then, that Satanism was the motivating factor in the robbery of William G.W.White Family Vault at Congressional Cemetery in 1991. William G.W.

White was a successful landowner in Washington in the early nineteenth century. He and in his wife had ten children. Perhaps in expectation of a large number of descendents,

White built in a family vault in Congressional in 1835. It is one of a dozen or so vaults on

50 the property with a brick and stone façade surrounding a heavy metal door at ground level.

(see figure 11)

Figure 11: The façade of the William G.W. White Vault at Congressional Cemetery (photo by the author)

The door opens onto several steps, which lead down to a belowground crypt with a vaulted roof. Only the façade and the rounded top of the roof, generally covered by sod, are visible from outside. Inside the White vault, there is no shelving on the walls, and coffins were simply stacked up on each other as family members died. Over the years, twenty-two bodies and one urn of ashes were interred in the vault. Three bodies were later moved to other gravesites at Congressional. The last interment (the urn of cremains) was in 1921 (Congressional Cemetery Private Vault Book).

In the summer of 1991, two young locals were arrested on charges stemming from the robbery of six churches in Southern Maryland. The pair was accused of taking crosses,

51 bibles, church robes, and candleholders worth $30,000. A search of one suspect’s house turned up “numerous crucifixes and satanic books and nine tombstones hidden under a bed” (Washington Times 2/23/1992). Further investigation led the police to a stash of skulls and long bones in a remote section of Prince William County, VA. The manager of

Congressional Cemetery John Hanley said at least some of those bones came from the

White vault, which had been disturbed within the last two months. Hanley said the thieves broke a padlock on the vault door, and “very carefully rummaged through, not as pranksters or drunks, and took what they wanted.” When they left, the thieves replaced the padlock so that it didn’t look broken (Washington Post 6/16/1991).

All things considered, it seems probable that occult activity was a factor in these thefts. The police certainly thought so. Lt. Philip Cooper of the St. Mary’s County, MD

Sheriff’s Department told the Washington Post, “there is some evidence that indicates a cult or Satanism is involved” (Washington Post 6/16/1991). U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens said the bones were stolen “for use in occult practices.” He also suggested the suspects had fashioned necklaces from the patellae, but those were not recovered (Washington Times

2/23/1992). Certainly most of the stolen items are mentioned in the rituals described in

Anton LaVey’s books, although there is no one ceremony that incorporates them all. In the ritual LaVey (1976) calls Le Messe Noir (The Black Mass), for instance, male participants wear robes, while the naked woman serving as the altar is surrounded by candleholders.

Among the symbols the ‘priest’ can choose to signify his ‘faith’ is an inverted cross. In the

“Law of the Trapezoid” ritual, a skull is placed on the altar surrounded by candles. The

“Night on Bald Mountain” ritual features “A human arm or leg bone is used as an aspergeant [sprinkler]” (LaVey 1976: 136). The kneecap jewelry seems to have been an

52 original invention of the thieves, if it was indeed made. Also in favor of the Satanism theory is the fact that the accused thieves, in their early twenties, were older than the usual teenage “legend trippers” who dare each other to break into graveyards (Ellis 1991).

Regardless of motivation, in 1992 both young men were convicted for grave robbery for stealing bones from Congressional Cemetery, and one was also convicted of burglary for the church thefts. They never discussed their influences, satanic or otherwise. Shortly thereafter, the ‘Satanic Panic’ faded out. So, apparently, did the widespread allure of the occult. “The sense of the occult as comprising a ‘tradition’ died at the end of the twentieth century; in postmodernity, the age of surveillance and publicity, there can be no coherent tradition of secrecy” (Gunn 2005: xxii).

After the convictions, the bones were returned to Congressional Cemetery and put back in the White family vault (with a new lock on the door.) And there they stayed, forgotten, while the cemetery continued its decline. Cemetery manager John Hanley was convicted of embezzlement. Graves toppled over and remained broken on the ground. The grass grew waist-high. The mortar began to deteriorate and fail between the bricks of the

White vault and others like it. Slowly, the vault was starting to crumble. (See figure 12)

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Figure 12: The crumbling bricks of the White (left) and Keyworth (right) family vaults, 2003 (courtesy Congressional Cemetery)

It wasn’t until 2009 that the APHCC raised enough money to hire conservators to restore some of the dilapidated vaults. The cemetery staff opened up the White vault to assess the scope of the project, and found a creepy mess. Like the Wirt tomb, the coffins in the White vault had deteriorated over time, leaving wood debris, coffin hardware, and bones scattered across the floor. Before the brick workers could come in, the remains of the White family had to be removed. In order to reinter them with some accuracy and respect when the conservation work was complete, the cemetery needed some forensic help. It was a good time to call back Doug Owsley and his anthropology team from the

Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

The anthropologists came in two shifts. In the summer of 2009, they helped the cemetery staff sort through the bulk of the rubble, separating out the skeletal material and removing it to the museum. This allowed the staff to clean up the coffin debris and allow

54 the brick workers access to the vault interior. Everyone working on the vault noticed the white plastic body bag marked with a police evidence number, but “as 19th century burials normally are not deposited in body bags, it was initially suspected that …the bag was a recent addition of uncertain association with the White family” (Hull-Walski et al. 2011:

3). The scattered bones from the vault floor were taken to the Natural History Museum for identification. The body bag was put in storage at the cemetery.

But as the anthropologists studied the White family’s remains, they found many bones were simply missing, particularly long bones and skulls. Meanwhile, the cemetery staff rediscovered and shared the details of the 1991 theft. So in the summer of 2010, the anthropologists came back to the cemetery for a closer look at the white plastic body bag.

Inside, they found several long bones and skulls, a coffin nameplate engraved “William

G.W. White”, and three police evidence bags containing another skull and two femurs. But the most surprising item in the body bag was a very well preserved, almost complete embalmed body. The remnants of clothing on the body looked feminine. Incisions on the torso indicated the body had been autopsied. (See Figure 13)

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Figure 13: The well-preserved body in the white plastic body bag (photo by the author)

Since no mention of an embalmed corpse appeared in the coverage of the 1991 theft, it was not immediately clear that the body had been stolen from the White family vault. Eventually Doug Owsley was able to match a talus bone found in the vault debris with the intact tibia of the embalmed body. Further historical and genealogical research confidently identified her as Catherine E. White, William White’s daughter-in law who died in 1882 (Hull-Walski et al. 2011). The skulls and several of the femurs from the body bag were associated with other skeletal remains from the floor of the White vault.

However, one cranium, two pairs of male femurs, one unpaired male femur, and one unpaired female femur from the body bag do not seem to match any of the burials in the

White Vault. It is not clear whether they were stolen from another cemetery or another grave at Congressional. The analysis of the bones is ongoing. In support of the Satanism

56 theory, preliminary results indicate that most of the patellae are indeed missing. It also looks like the heart was removed from the embalmed body, as there is a non-autopsy incision on the torso (Hull-Walski, personal communication, 2012).

The thieves’ motivation may have been rebellious, even abhorrent. But the fact remains that they were investing the corpse with power and relevance at a time when that was not easy to do. They could not have found what they were looking for in a memorial park, where the dead are hidden away under perfect lawns and expensive steel caskets.

They also could not have broken into Congressional undetected in an earlier era, when the

White family was still using its vault and the slate path on which it stands was a popular promenade. The thieves needed a place that was designed to keep the dead and the living close to each other, but which was no longer used in the way it was designed. As long as its design and use failed to coincide, Congressional would be a target for theft.

The mid 1990s represented a low point for Congressional Cemetery. Neglect and vandalism continued, until finally the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the cemetery one of its eleven most endangered historic places in 1997. The publicity brought the cemetery some much-needed attention and funding. But it was not until

Washingtonians started seeking a new connection with the dead that the cemetery was able to come back to life.

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Chapter Five: Untidy Death

In the previous chapters, I have used Congressional Cemetery as a site in which to anchor the changing connection between the living and the dead, as glimpsed through incidents of grave robbery. In this final chapter, I will turn to the state of Congressional

Cemetery in 2012, to hypothesize what form of survivor/corpse connection might be fostered in its current community. I will conclude with a broader analysis of the ongoing connection between the living and the dead.

Today, Congressional Cemetery is again a place where the living and the dead can connect. It is not pristine; gravestones lean and topple over, weeds grow through the flagstones, the iron gate sticks and squeals. But it is no longer dangerous and neglected.

In fact, it is quite beautiful, and its rough edges only add to its appeal. As James Curl

(2000) says, “Death was never a tidy thing: it is foolish to try to make it so, and to compartment it away from life and the living” (Curl 2000:266).

What saved Congressional Cemetery from total ruin was an unlikely combination of Congress and dogs. Following the 1997 Most Endangered Historic Site designation,

Congress granted $1 million to be held in trust for the cemetery by the National Trust for

Historic Preservation (Breitkreutz 2003: 56). The support of Congress has been essential to

Congressional Cemetery’s recovery. But it is purely financial; for the most part, members of Congress do not make a habit of visiting the cemetery. Members of Congress are occasionally invited to speak at cemetery events. They narrate a few of the cell phone tour audio segments. Members of Congress do still join the community of the dead as well,

58 including most recently Tom Lantos in 2009 and Steven Solarz in 2010. But they are only a small part of the Congressional Cemetery community.

The resurgence of a broader living community at Congressional Cemetery began at the grass roots. The $1 million appropriation from Congress had to be matched one-to-one by dollars raised by the APHCC. That’s where the dogs come in. Cemetery neighbors on

Capitol Hill often walked their dogs at Congressional. After all, it was a rare spot of open, fenced land where dogs could run free in a densely populated city. The dogwalkers saw the neglect and decay at the cemetery, and decided to help. They began collecting dues from each other, first casually, then more regularly, to help pay for mowing the grass and cleaning up garbage. Eventually, the Congressional Cemetery K-9 Corps developed into a regulated, membership-only organization, which now contributes about $150,000 to the annual cemetery budget. In addition to paying their yearly dues, dogwalkers are expected to volunteer at the cemetery, doing everything from cleaning gravestones to weeding gardens to digitizing archives. There is a waitlist to join that is hundreds of names long.

Every so often, the sight of dogs romping amid historic stones appalls a visitor to

Congressional. (See figure 14) Inevitably, the visitor mentions particular horror at the idea of a dog “peeing on their grave.” Clearly, Congressional Cemetery is not the right place for these people to spend eternity. For cemetery management is adamant: the dogs not only bring vital funds to the APHCC coffers, they are totally in keeping with the cemetery’s original role as a place where the living are as welcome as the dead. Thanks in part to the dogs, Congressional Cemetery today is just as Mount Auburn Cemetery was described in an 1831 editorial: “A village of the quick and silent, where Nature throws an air of cheerfulness over the labors of death” (Quoted in Jackson & Vergara 1989: 21). Or, as a

59 more recent newspaper article described Congressional, “These 35-plus acres have remarkable joie de vivre for a burial ground. Like, yeah, everyone’s dead, but they have a good attitude about it” (Washington Post Express 8/19/2011).

Figure 14: Members of the Congressional Cemetery K-9 Corps (photo by the author)

Having a “good attitude” about death in 2011 is the functional equivalent of cemetery designer John Strang’s 1831 statement that a garden cemetery is the “sworn foe to preternatural fear and superstition” (quoted in Curl 2000:47). Dogwalkers might not be consciously planning to commune with the dead when they visit the cemetery, but on a basic level they have chosen to spend time in a place that is, first and foremost, a burial ground. Those of us who love old cemeteries can forget that they give plenty of people a serious case of the willies. I once had an unwilling visitor tell me he would only work at a cemetery if McDonald’s wasn’t hiring. No matter how lovely the grounds are, if you find the presence of death repulsive or just creepy, you will walk your dog elsewhere.

The dogwalkers, self-selected as they are, inevitably do find themselves making a connection with the dead in the cemetery. They regularly seek out cemetery staff to ask

60 about favorite stones, or unusual epitaphs, or a name that might be an ancestor. They speak of the dead in familiar terms, reporting that “Belva needs weeding” or asking how

“Leonard’s corner” fared after a heavy rain.

The support of the dogwalkers also makes Congressional much more inviting to people who are purposefully seeking a relationship with the dead: genealogists and historians and people looking to buy a burial plot for themselves. People even picnic among the stones again, just as they did two hundred years ago. This is not simply a function of nostalgia. The cemetery is not a precious Victorian-cult-of-death theme park.

People still buy plots and buried their loved ones at Congressional, and some of the most interesting and popular gravestones are contemporary ones. At Congressional at least, the living have have once again begun to connect with the dead.

According to the literature, Congressional is unusual. The more typical contemporary cemetery is isolated from the living community. The attitude that replaced the Victorian “celebration of death” (Curl 2000) has been variously called “the denial of death” (Linden-Ward 1989: 306), the “dying of death” (Farrell 1980: 4), or even “the pornography of death” (McGuire 1988: 472). As cemetery historian David Charles Sloane

(1991) puts it, “Two centuries of interaction between the cemetery and American society has left the cemetery, once central to the urban scene, a necessary, but not necessarily desirable, neighbor in the suburbs” (Sloane 1991: 1-2). Choosing a sanitized suburban memorial park over an untidy urban historical cemetery is a conscious reaffirmation of attitudes to death and the dead (Pearson 1999).

Metcalf and Huntington (1991) go so far as to say the denial of death that began a century ago has now become “undeniably a marked feature of American culture” (Metcalf

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& Huntington 1991: 201). I disagree. There are a couple of places to look to see

Americans’ growing willingness to acknowledge death, and even to celebrate it. First, there is the growing interest in “green” burials. Definitions differ, but for the most part green burials refer to burials without embalming the corpse, and using only a shroud or biodegradable wooden or wicker box. As evidenced by their name, green burials are marketed as an environmentally friendly alternative to embalming chemicals and metal coffins which delay decomposition (Green Burial Council 2011). Part of this environmental message is the bald reality of the circumstances of a decaying corpse. The language of green burials does not employ funeral industry euphemisms like “eternal rest” or boast of producing a “lifelike” body for an open-casket funeral service. A green burial treats a human corpse as a biological organism, which decomposes into the soil unmitigated by human interventions like embalming fluid or upholstered coffins. You cannot choose a green burial without facing exactly what happens physically to a corpse.

Yet Americans are choosing green burials more and more, with a 15% annual growth that industry experts only expect will grow ( PBS NewsHour 4/12/2012).

Another place to find an acknowledgment of death is the statistics on organ donation. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, organ donation after death has doubled in the U.S. since 1988 (HHS Organ Procurement and

Transplant Network 2011). Although those awaiting transplants still outnumber organ donors, awareness and acceptance of organ donation is on the rise, as evidenced by the recent addition of an organ donor status option on Facebook (Fox News 5/1/2012).

Metcalf and Huntington (1991) find evidence for the widespread American denial of death in the changing Western literature on how to die. Describing the tends in this

62 literature over the past four hundred years, they say “the earlier volumes urge that the sinner ‘look on death’ in order to wake the fires of conscious; the latest writers advise a sidelong glance to avoid psychological maladjustment” (Metcalf and Huntington 208-209).

But this observation, too, seems out of step with the current reality. The Western literature on how to die has included several recent blockbusters, such as Tuesdays with Morrie and

The Last Lecture, each of which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for months.

Tuesdays with Morrie is defiantly not a denial of death – death is the theme, justification, and plot line of the book. And while Morrie may show some of the saintly optimism of

Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he is frank about his fears and the indignities of his disease. He also directly addresses the issue of a connection between the living and the dead. “Death ends a life,” he tells narrator Mitch Albom, “not a relationship” (Albom 1997:

174).

But what, ultimately, does this relationship matter? What is gained by seeking a relationship with the dead? What is lost when death is denied and isolated? For answers, let us return to Hertz’s triangle of death ritual. For Hertz, the purpose of the connection between the living and the corpse is not simply a refuse disposal problem. Is exists to help the living conquer the fear of death. “Death, in fact, by striking the individual, has given him a new character; his body, which …was in the realm of the ordinary, suddenly leaves it; it can no longer be touched without danger, it is an object of horror and dread” (Hertz

1960: 199-200). The danger from touching a corpse Hertz describes is not literal, or at least not solely literal. Certainly in cases of death by communicable disease, there can be a literal fear of contamination. But Hertz explicitly denies that the fear of the corpse has a hygienic basis. Instead, Hertz is talking about a more supernatural danger, a sort of death

63 pollution that invades the land of the living. The closer you were to the deceased in life, the more contaminated you are by his or her death. Death rituals that exist along the axis between the survivor and the corpse, Hertz argues, serve to mitigate that pollution and thereby reduce the survivor’s fear. Following this logic, those who find a connection with the dead fear death less, while those who avoid or deny death exacerbate their fear of it.

Hertz’s argument does seem to play out in Congressional Cemetery, hence the “good attitude” noted by the Washington Post Express. Not being as familiar with other cemeteries, I cannot say if it is the exception that proves the rule. Perhaps another study could systematically investigate the differing levels of fear of death in a modern memorial park and compare them to a place like Congressional. I suspect that Hertz is right, and a cemetery that fosters a connection between the living and the dead results in survivors who fear death less. As James Curl (2000) says, “Where gracious monuments are enhanced by comely planting, it is possible to be free of introspection, and to see those magical spots as more than delightful incidents, but as places where a reticent people had poured out their feelings into the selection of sites, botanical embellishments, and unstinting architectural and sculptural ornamentation. There, death may be looked in the eye, without fear, and with, if not equanimity, resignation to the inevitable” (Curl 268).

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