Keep on the Sunny Side

I've occasionally mentioned one of my side obsessions with associations. In this country, there's an association for everything, including an association of associations. And with associations, there's also often a trade press, where people in an industry talk to each other about the things that matter to them in their specialized language. 

In the age of the interweb, the trade press is not as much of a thing as it used to be, so it can be a little startling to glimpse a real insider magazine from back in the day like Casket and Sunnyside:

Yes, this is the trade magazine of the funeral home industry. 

It didn't come by its odd name naturally. That was my biggest worry, honestly, and I feel a bit better knowing that it resulted from the 1932 merger of one publication called The Sunnyside and another called The Casket. 

Cory Doctorow recently shared several covers from the magazine on Twitter. Unfortunately, most of the graphics were pretty low resolution, so the type is hard to read. But these two are not bad, so I could read them enough to wonder a few things about them:

This Christmas 1934 issue asks the question, "Shall We Have a Daniel Webster or a Czar?" I don't know what that means for sure, but I bet it has something to do with FDR. This would have been written about a year or 15 months into his first administration, in the depths of the Depression and the early years of the New Deal, and I can just bet the probably well-off owners of funeral homes were not fans of FDR. Daniel Webster was a great compromiser throughout his career, selling out on slavery, among many other issues of the day. To get ahead of myself by a few years, it sounds as though Casket and Sunnyside may have been a bit more with Nevil Chamberlain than Winston Churchill.

A few years later, during the 1939 World's Fair, the cover was used to juxtapose the Fair's iconic, modernist trylon and perisphere with an interesting graph:

It's a bit hard to make out even if you click to enlarge, but it reads "the retreat of death," and the years start at 1800 and increase in 30-year increments to 1920, then feature 1938 in between near the right. Notice how the curve flattens out to the right instead of continuing downward.

The deaths per 1,000 (per year, I assume) peak in 1830 at 36 (I think, it's a bit blurry) then drop through 1920 to 12, then further to 11 in 1938. As we know, this was largely due to public health work, but I'm sure it was all bad news for the funeral industry!

The cover headline below reads "Public Health Exhibit: New York World's Fair 1939 Captures Professional Interest." So that graph is a large, three-dimensional infographic from the public health exhibit. That spurred me to look around and find a better version of the exhibit photo:

For comparison, the 1950 U.S. death rate per year per 1,000 was a bit over 9.5. In 2019, it was a bit under 8.8 (though it reached its lowest level around 8.1 in 2008). Many other countries, I should note, have much lower death rates than the U.S., so that should make our funeral home industry happy.

Casket and Sunnyside ceased publication in 1988.