The Culture Wars, 1965-1995: A Historian's Map

Jensen, Richard, Journal of Social History

1. Political History

The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities were twin agencies created in 1965 by liberal Democrats to fund vocal constituencies. At the time the Great Society was simultaneously setting up expensive new poverty and education programs, racing to the moon, and building up in Vietnam. Humanities faculties (which strongly supported LBJ in 1964) were worried about too heavy a national emphasis on science and engineering. Led by the American Council on Learned Societies, the humanities organizations made sure they got their own agency. The very first thing the new beneficiaries did was to bite the hand that fed them. By summer 1965, leading artists and intellectuals had started turning against Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, and their loud protests escalated to the point where the President and his top advisors were no longer welcome on any major campus.(2) The New Deal had a well-known arts program as part of the WPA - an agency Johnson knew well, since he headed the youth part of its Texas program. However, the WPA was a poverty program whose primary mission was to help the poorest artists - poor in money and usually in talent as well. The Endowments, by contrast, boasted that they disregarded "need" and made "highest artistic talent" a key criterion. Artists who were successful in the private sector rarely applied to NEA. In the humanities, major universities did not treat NEH grants as especially useful, except that NEH fellowships were prestigious awards sought by the most talented scholars. Secondly, the WPA was a national program that operated arts programs at the state and local level in every state. Instead of encouraging local arts institutions, it rivaled and preempted them, and perhaps delayed the formation of local arts funding programs. Thus NEA and NEH were new creatures, not reborn New Deal agencies.(3)

Interest in the fine arts grew exponentially after World War II. The NEA claimed credit, but the true reason was the remarkable growth in the potential audience - the number of adults with a college degree doubled and redoubled from 8 million in 1960, to 16 million in 1975, and 33 million in 1990. Arts and museums programs flourished as an affluent and increasingly well-educated public consumed more and more sophisticated arts. As demand for local arts performances soared, communities began establishing local arts councils. The NEA probably did help stimulate the expansion of state and local arts agencies, but it no more created them in the first place than NEH created history museums or literature departments. Thus NEA claimed that its small planning grant to Winston-Salem North Carolina started a veritable urban renaissance. In fact Salem was a Moravian community famed for its music for two centuries, and the city had been one of the first to set up a community arts council in 1949.(4)

The model for NEA was the arts program that Nelson Rockefeller built in New York State as governor from 1959 to 1973. Rockefeller was himself a noted arts connoisseur, and the various family foundations played a major role in supporting the arts and especially in setting arts policy. In 1954 there were 15 local arts councils; thanks to support from the Rockefeller Foundation there were 60 by 1959.(5) The Ford Foundation, in the 1950s and 1960s, pumped tens of millions a year into the performing arts, which started a unending spiral of rising salaries for performers. Artists will work for peanuts or for caviar, whichever is offered. Strikes by symphony orchestras for even higher salaries underscored the urgent need for new funding. A glance at the total budgets in Table 1 will show that federal funding (in constant 1995 dollars) peaked during the Carter years, while state funding matched and then surpassed the federal budget during Reagan's term. Most cities started assigning some hotel taxes to arts agencies, generating over $500 million a year for local arts agencies by 1993. (Arts budgets for cities, and for schools and universities, are not included in Table 1. The NEH budget closely tracked the NEA budget.)(6)

Table 1:

NEA and State Arts Budgets, 1966-95: annual average, in millions of
constant 1995 dollars

                      all 50        New York
           NEA       States(*)       State      % NEA/all

LBJ        $ 28.9    $ 26.2           $ 8.5       52%
Nixon       131.6      95.5            57.1       52%
Carter      255.7     164.1            57.6       61%
Reagan      199.5     240.4            56.9       46%
Bush        177.1     271.8            46.7       40%
Clinton     167.5     256.8            32.4       39%

SUM        $4,817    $5,028          $1,421       49%

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the
United States, annual editions.

* Includes New York, D.C., and Puerto Rico, which also had a
large arts program; does not include cities.

Richard Nixon's main political rival in the 1960s was Nelson Rockefeller, and as president, Nixon used the NEA in competitive fashion. To run NEA, Nixon chose Nancy Hanks, a former close aide to Rockefeller who had played a central role in promoting local arts councils. When Rockefeller boosted the New York State Arts budget from $2 million in 1970 to $20 million in 1971, Nixon stunned the arts world by asking and getting comparable increases from Congress. Nixon said that doubling the budgets would bring arts to millions of patrons, help financially strapped museums and orchestras, induce more private philanthropy, improve writing skills, redress the balance between the sciences and the humanities, and bring the lessons of history to bear on racial and generational tensions.(7) During the 1960s and 1970s, Republicans in Congress generally opposed the Endowments - voting by 2-1 margins against their creation in the first place. They realized that the artists and humanists were not in the GOP fold. Nixon of course realized that too, but he was concerned with using the arts to neutralize opposition among the art patrons of the "Eastern Establishment," who otherwise preferred Rockefeller to him. After Nixon's departure, the Endowments seemed uncontroversial. Nancy Hanks, in particular, proved brilliant in lobbying for more money during her long tenure at NEA (1969-77), all the while taking credit for the enormous expansion of artistic activities of every sort throughout the country.(8)

Joseph Duffey, the NEH director under Jimmy Carter, worked with Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI) to move his endowment away from high scholarship and toward more community activity and "populism." An example was the Chicago Metro History Fair, which used state humanities money and large amounts of local foundation money to help high school history teachers establish "history fairs." Tens of thousands of students every year exhibited projects that presented their own findings on topics of local, community, and family history. The new social history was an explicit model for the program. In the process participants learned new research and presentation skills. On the whole, the projects, based on the experiences of the students' own families, local businesses and neighborhood institutions, were celebratory and "Whiggish" - a demonstration that social history could be successfully introduced at the high school level, and need not inculcate in the students the notion that American history is a negative experience.

During the Reagan years, conservative intellectuals turned their attention to the Endowments, which they saw as the federal feedbox for liberalism. They tried to defund the agencies, or at least slash their budgets in half. They failed because many otherwise quite conservative Republican congressmen heard loud and clear from friends at country clubs, Rotary, and local Chambers of Commerce how valuable NEA was to the support of burgeoning local theatres, museums, smaller symphonies, and to the needs of rural states. The social base of the GOP included few people back stage but many from the arts audiences. Rebuffed, the Reaganites decided to seize control of the Endowments in order to shift American culture to the right (or at least to neutralize the leftward tilt that made most artists and humanists hostile to Reaganism). They greatly exaggerated the financial power of the Endowments, which contributed only 5 to 10 percent of overall funding for the non-profit arts and the humanities. (In the humanities, most funding came through college departments, and through museums and archives.) The moral power of the Endowments depended on credible leaders, and the Reaganites only had a couple dozen suitable "big names," whom they had to use time and again. Conservatives furthermore were philosophically split between two candidates for chair of NEH, M.E.L. Bradford and William Bennett. Bradford was the favorite of the old conservatives - the types who had rallied behind The National Review, or admired Russell Kirk. However Bradford had been a leader in the 1968 Wallace campaign, and had at some length attacked Abraham Lincoln as a shifty politician who subverted the Constitution. The job went to Bennett, a combatative philosopher, and the choice of the "neoconservatives," such as Irving Kristol, and the Commentary/Public Interest crowd. Bennett moved NEH money away from potentially controversial research programs toward mundane tasks with minimal ideological components, such as microfilming old newspapers and upgrading foreign language instruction. As Bennett moved up, his successor was the wife of Wyoming politician and presidential wannabe Dick Cheney. Lynne Cheney's inner staff was quite conservative, and openly hostile to the Civil Service professionals who ran the operating divisions. Her effort to fill the National Council with conservatives crashed in 1991, when the Senate rejected the nomination of Carol Iannone, a literary critic who had complained that black women novelists were winning prizes primarily in recognition of their race and gender. The Modern Language Association and the American Council of Learned Societies led the attack on Iannone, …

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Publication information: Article title: The Culture Wars, 1965-1995: A Historian's Map. Contributors: Jensen, Richard - Author. Journal title: Journal of Social History. Volume: 29. Issue: SUPP Publication date: Winter 1996. Page number: 17+. © 2009 Journal of Social History. COPYRIGHT 1996 Gale Group.

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