ABSTRACT

The concept of cultural heritage implies generational transmission, the past handed on to the future. Children powerfully embody this temporal loop: childhood evokes the most deeply known individual experience of the past and children serve as the promissory and emblem of futurity. This essay uses the figure of one particular, if far from representative, California child to assess the generational stakes of cultural heritage and of the practices of collection and preservation that establish museums. Joseph Roach insists on the importance of recognizing the commingled actions of ‘looking back’ and ‘movement forward’ – of ‘memory’ and ‘invention’ – for understanding any kind of performance (2010: 1082). This seems paradigmatically true for the performances of progress and promise at stake for both childhood and California. As the son of one of the ‘Big Four’ investors who at enormous personal profit built the transcontinental railroad, Leland Stanford, Jr (1868-84) belongs to a family that epitomizes the most extravagant proliferation of industrial and Californian progress (Figure 15.1). Yet through two European tours the boy developed a keen interest in antiquities and began a collection that would serve as the rationale and founding core of the Leland Stanford, Jr Museum. His death in Italy, from typhoid fever, just two months before his sixteenth birthday, makes the memorializing impetus at stake in all museums a specific act of mourning. The role of art and collecting in the education and life of Leland Stanford, Jr and the memorializing function of the Leland Stanford, Jr Museum together elaborate the multiple and sometimes opposing parts childhood plays in the collection, preservation and transmission of cultural heritage.