Sam Tanenhaus has a very odd piece in this morning’s New York Times. Tanenhaus is an historian who edits the paper’s weekly book review and who occasionally writes think pieces for the Sunday “Week in Review” section of the paper. He is a very smart and well-informed person on cultural matters, but this week I don’t think he gets it right.

“Sound of Silence: The Culture Wars Take a Break” is an apparently favorable comment on President Obama’s decision to appoint former Iowa Congressman Jim Leach as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Tanenhaus sees the appointment as part of “an emerging politics of accommodation,” since Leach was a Republican during his 30 years in the Congress. That may be right, but as Sam notes, Leach was also one of the founders of the Humanities Caucus on the Hill and a firm supporter of funding for the national cultural agencies at a time when conservative advocated defunding them entirely. Leach was also the head of Republicans for Obama, so his appointment is really not much of a surprise. Leach was from the start widely considered one of the leading candidates for the NEH job.

Tanenhaus interprets the appointment as a postpartisan move “as the second phase of the culture war nears its endgame.” Let’s examine that contention. The first culture war, in his view, was that launched by Lynne Cheney and Bill Bennett (another former NEH head) and aimed at alleged leftists (my characterization) in the colleges and universities — and at the admirable NEH chairman, Sheldon Hackney (hardly a leftist). This culture war coincided with the vigorous opposition of Newt Gingrich to funding for NEA and NEH. But the principal target of conservative attacks was the National Endowment for the Arts, not NEH. Tanenhaus (appropriately) mentions the conflict over the National History Standards, instigated by Cheney, but in fact despite her best efforts, the most damaging battles in the culture war involved attacks on the NEA-funded artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. The Gingrich assault was quite effective in reducing funding for both agencies, which have still not fully recovered their pre-1994 levels. But in my view the culture wars were effectively over by the second term of the Clinton presidency.

Significantly, Paul DiMaggio, Morris Fiorina, and other scholars have shown that the public was never radically divided on cultural questions throughout the alleged culture wars, a fact that seems to have escaped Tanenhaus. His point seems to be that the second culture war was about the conservative social agenda (family values and all that), but my view is that those issues are part of a much longer-term conservative political strategy going back to the presidency of Richard Nixon — see Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland for a good account. Tanenhaus also mentions the nomination of Sonia Sotamayor as evidence of Obama’s accomodationism, but I don’t see much to compare in Sotomayor and Leach, other than they are both Princetonians. He seems a bit disappointed that the Leach appointment has only evoked silence from conservatives, and sees this is evidence that “the volume of debate has been lowered.” He concludes that “in this post-culture war world, the National Endowment for the Humanities may be a less exciting place than it once was — no longer a battlefield, just another federal agency.” That’s fine, of course, but NEH has seldom actually been a battlefield, except in subtle ways (interference in peer review) that the press has never noted. I think that Jim Leach is just the person to get the agency back on track. If there is one thing NEH does not need, it is excitement.