National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities

National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. The federal government handsomely supported the arts and humanities from at least 1917, when the income‐tax law permitted exemption for contributions to nonprofit organizations.In the New Deal Era, the Works Progress Administration included visual and performing arts in its programs. In the early 1960s, fears that the communists were winning the cultural Cold War bolstered President John F. Kennedy's modest plans for federal arts funding. Following Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon B Johnson in 1965 persuaded Congress to establish “endowments” for both arts and humanities with initial funding of ten million dollars, a token gesture toward balancing the government's massive subsidies for science. The endowments, initially envisioned as two arms of the same agency, quickly became separate entities. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), under its first chair, Barnaby Keeney, funded mostly university research. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), under Roger Stevens, funded individuals and institutions in performing and visual arts. Both organizations used peer panels to select grantees, approved by national councils of prominent individuals in the humanities and the arts. By law, both endowments distributed 20 percent of their appropriation among state humanities and arts councils.

During President Richard M. Nixon's administration, appropriations for both endowments expanded to more than $100 million each, with consequent growth of their constituencies. NEH chairman Ronald Berman expanded NEH support to public television programs and blockbuster museum exhibitions. NEA chair Nancy Hanks added jazz, crafts, and folk arts and crafts.

As funding crept toward $200 million for each endowment in the late 1970s, conservative critics disparaged what they dismissed as frivolous or arcane grants, such as the NEH's support of obscure linguistic research. But both endowments maintained strong congressional support, forcing President Ronald Reagan to retreat from his vow to abolish them. The NEH quietly continued to dole out its funds mostly to universities and museums, but the NEA, despite its substantial support of opera, music, and dance, became increasingly controversial for smaller grants to such projects as an artist's dropping of crepe paper streamers from an airplane over Wyoming. Besieged by insistent constituencies, the NEA never developed coherent goals. The problem exploded in 1988, when chairman Frank Hodsoll unwittingly approved expansion of an exhibition to include sexually explicit photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Both endowments suffered in the 1980s and 1990s from a combination of congressional budget‐cutting pressures and conservative criticism of a few grants that opponents attacked as trivial, bizarre, or repulsive. Appropriations dwindled toward $100 million, and the NEA was damaged when President George Bush appointed a weak chairman who vacillated over several controversial grants. Under his successor, the actress Jane Alexander, the NEA lost almost half its staff and was required to give the states 35 percent of its appropriation. The folklorist William Ferris, President Bill Clinton's choice to head the NEH, worked with considerable success to build a congressional and public constituency for his agency, focusing on public‐private partnerships in funding regional humanities centers and other projects. As the twentieth century ended, both agencies continued their efforts to clarify their goals, fend off conservative attacks, and build public support for the arts and the humanities.
See also Education: The Rise of the University; Great Society; Public Broadcasting.

Bibliography

Livingston Biddle , Our Government and the Arts, 1988.
Joseph Wesley Zeigler , Arts in Crisis: The National Endowment for the Arts versus America, 1994.
Alice Goldfarb Marquis , Art Lessons: Learning from the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding, 1995.

Alice Goldfarb Marquis