Cultural Anti-Modernism and “The Modern Memorial-Park”: Hubert Eaton and the Creation of Forest Lawn

Abstract

The Business of DeathBorn into a line of Baptist clergymen who pursued academic careers, Hubert Eaton (1881–1966) was raised in Liberty, Missouri, where his father was Chair of Natural Sciences at William Jewell College; his paternal grandfather, Rev. George Washington Eaton, had been president of Madison (now Colgate) University in Hamilton, New York, and his great uncle, Rev. Joseph Eaton, presided at Tennes­see’s Union University. Hubert forsook the family calling, however, and chose mining over the ministry. It was in the wake of a failed Nevada venture that he found himself in a cemetery just north of downtown Los Angeles in present-day Glendale. According to Forest Lawn legend, the rapprochement of Hubert’s dream of success with his inherited sense of vocation commenced on New Year’s Day, 1917, when he surveyed the graveyard’s growth of chaparral and devil grass, yet saw instead “a great park, devoid of misshapen monuments and other customary signs of earthly death, but filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers, noble memorial architecture with interiors full of light and color.” Eaton vowed then to remake the cemetery as a memorial park “where artists study and sketch; where teachers bring happy children to see the things they read of in books,” objects like great art (in reproductions) and famous churches (in reconstructions). Only such a displacement of death within the continuity of culture and the eternity of art, an undertaking to be secured by “an immense Endowment Care Fund, the principal of which can never be expended—only the income therefrom,” would adequately represent Eaton’s fundamental belief “in a happy Eternal Life” and, “most of all, in a Christ that smiles and loves you and me” (St. Johns 118–19).1