My Brainstorm colleague Mark Bauerlein has focused our attention on the bottom line — appropriations for the NEA and NEH. He is correct in noting that both agencies succeeded in enhancing their congressional funding during the Bush II administration. This was in part, as Mark noted, due to the fact that Chairmen Dana Gioia and Bruce Cole gained bipartisan support for the budgets of the cultural agencies. My hunch is that their success was possible because the cultural hyper-partisanship of the Gingrich Congress had died down. It was possible also, of course, because the NEA’s programmatic wings had been clipped in the 1990s (it seemed less of a threat to conservatives), and because NEH staffing turned right under Cole.
Now comes the stimulus legislation, and as Robin Pogrebin’s article in yesterday’s New York Times explained, the arts lobby was able to overcome conservative Republican opposition last week and hitched its wagon to the legislation to the tune of a $50-million increment for the NEA. Pogrebin notes that while a “call from Robert Redford to the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi” in support of the provision could not have hurt the arts effort, it could not have sufficed to overcome Senate opposition to the provision. The arts lobby’s success was due to the support of the Congressional Arts Caucus, led by Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Norm Dicks (D-WA) and David Obey (D-WI). And their support was in large part due to the very well funded private arts-industry lobbying group, Americans for the Arts. Mazel tov, arts community.
If you hear humanities jealousy in my account, your ear is good. So far as I know, the humanities never had a seat at the stimulus-bill table. How could we have? Who is the Robert Redford of the humanities? How could the comparatively small National Humanities Alliance (supported entirely by organizational membership fees) compete with Americans for the Arts? Perhaps more important, can the humanities argue, as Rep. Slaughter did, that “If we’re trying to stimulate the economy, and get money into the Treasury, nothing does that better than art”? Pogrebin reports that the arts lobby’s claim that “culture contributes 6 million jobs and $30-billion in tax revenue and $166-billion in annual economic impact.” I happen to think those numbers are the product of faux social science, but even if the humanities were willing to engage in such rhetoric, no one would believe us.
The more important point is that the humanities community has not developed a plausible case for enhanced public support. If we are to make our case to the nation, the community has to articulate its goals and capacities much more clearly than it has done thus far. The new Chairman of the NEH, whomever he or she will be, needs to work with the breadth of the humanities community to demonstrate that the humanities are crucial to the national interest. I believe that is something we might achieve in this administration, given proper leadership.
