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

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 32, no. 3, 2002 Cultural Anti-Modernism and “The Modern Memorial-Park”: Hubert Eaton and the Creation of Forest Lawn Kevin McNamara The Business of Death Born 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 The narrative of Eaton’s path to that hillside exists in at least three versions. Documents filed in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Association v. Commissioner of Internal Canadian Review of American Studies 32 (2002) 302 Revenue (1941) relate that, “In 1912, the [Forest Lawn] cemetery association engaged the services of Hubert Eaton … in the capacity of sales agent for ‘before-need’ sales of cemetery lots” (1092). Four years previous to that filing, advertising executive Bruce Barton profiled Eaton for Reader’s Digest as “a successful metallurgist and chemist” who at age thirty “mov[ed] to California with the expectation of retiring” (“A Cemetery” 73). Having developed there a sideline “in real estate and banking,” this Eaton first came to Forest Lawn “one morning in 1917, [when] he woke up to discover that a country cemetery, on which his institution held a mortgage, had been foreclosed” (73–74). Disheartened by the condition of this “sacred ground of a so-called Christian people,” Eaton vowed on the spot to transform the cemetery into a thriving “garden of memory in accordance with the Christian conception of a happy eternal life” (74, 76). Nearly two decades later, Adela Rogers St. Johns’s chatty “official” biography placed Eaton in the same elite company as Barton’s captain of industry. Members of Los Angeles’s WASP ascendancy are his closest friends and advisors, real-estate men Carroll Gates and W. I. Hollingsworth , society banker Motley Flint (gunned down in 1927 by a man ruined in the Julian Petroleum swindle), and the city’s leading Baptist minister, J. Winthrop Brougher (of whom Upton Sinclair recalled, “when the Socialists were near to carrying Los Angeles, this clergyman preached a sermon in support of the candidate of ‘Booze, Gas and Railroads’” [209]). Nevertheless, the one-time editor of Photoplay, Hollywood’s first fan magazine, insists that Eaton never quite shook the Missouri dirt off his boots. Before taking the Forest Lawn job at the suggestion of a hometown friend, St. Johns’s Eaton had “punched cattle in Montana, assayed copper in the Anaconda laboratories, quelled riots in Mexico,” and made and lost “a million dollars” in a Nevada silver mine (3; the fortune was only hypothetical, with most...