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

Death is Never Over Life, Death and Grave Robbery in a Historic Cemetery 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. ii 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. iii 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 burial 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 rural cemetery 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. iv 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 cadavers to medical schools for dissection. 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. v 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 vi 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 vii 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 cemeteries 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 archaeology 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. 2 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 cadaver 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.

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