Culture Wars – The Liberal and Conservative Opinions 2016
Lucy M. Warner
July 16, 2016


The following three articles concern the national governmental funding of art and the humanities, improving the educational level of our population in general, and the incredible Republican opposition to it. I do remember, thinking of this however, that one of Hitler’s beliefs was that much of modern art was “degenerate,” and that is the claim of our Religious Right today. The first story from the website "liberalamerica.org," encompasses many of my concerns with current Rightists, whom I tend to consider "NeoFascists," and who called themselves the Tea Party. All of the articles are exceptionally well written and persuasive.

The final story is both shocking and enlightening, comprised of a series of statements made by Senator Jesse Helms’ of my home state, North Carolina. His subjects are on liberal culture and such tender subjects as black people. NC was not the most racist state in the South, but it wasn’t free from that intellectual pollution either. Like Donald Trump, some of his statements would be funny if they weren’t being taken as good political policy by many modern day US citizens. Enjoy your read.



http://www.liberalamerica.org/2015/02/11/28-reasons-im-done-talking-to-most-of-my-conservative-friends-and-family-members/
By Tiffany Willis on February 11, 2015


I’m a Southern girl. Born in the South, raised in the South, and have rarely lived anywhere BUT the South. I actually love the South. I’ll die in the South. Being a Southern girl, I have more than my share of right-wing friends, neighbors, and family members — and some of you have in recent years crossed the line into nut-jobbery.

The fact is — I love you guys and that will never change.

I’ll admit that I’m disappointed and disturbed to see intelligent and/or educated people who are willfully ignorant. But while it does change my opinion about you on some level, more than anything I’m embarrassed for you. It hurts me to see you post conspiracy theories on your Facebook timeline, only to have them debunked with a quick Snopes link. It hurts me to see you expressing unapologetic and blatant racism and ignorance. It absolutely tortures me to see you being on the wrong side of history on so many issues.

Although I’ll always love you guys, I have had to quit — for my own sanity and for the sake of our relationships — attempting to engage in intelligent conversation about politics and social issues with most of you. From now on, we’ll talk about the weather, recipes, our mutual friends, our children, our illnesses, thrift shop finds, and our old memories. I want to know what’s going on in your lives. What books are you reading? What home improvements are you planning? Hell, I’ll even follow you on Pinterest!

I very much appreciate those of you who can still have an intelligent conversation and listen to another point of view. Hopefully this small group of sane conservatives never changes.

Here is why I have to abandon attempts at intelligent conversation with most of you.

1. You support revisionist history.

When I was in a high school history class, I’ll never forget one thing our teacher taught us: what you read in history books isn’t always accurate. The example she used was history books in the Soviet Union, now known as Russia. She informed us, to my shock and horror, that the Soviets pretty much included what they liked in the history books and left out everything else. As a result, she said, there were generations of Russian students who were misinformed.

Oh we were dismayed, my classmates and I! Those poor little Russian kids who were being taught false history. But wait….you guys on the right are trying to do the same thing right here in the Good Old U.S.A.

Last year, I wrote an article about Texas’ plan to revise history and include Moses as a Founding Father. When I shared the article with an educated Texas adult and asked “is this OK with you,” his response was:

“Why teach our children at length regarding the horrors of slavery as we have eliminated that curse from our society? We don’t deny it occurred here or anywhere else in the world, but, why dwell on a segment of our past that has been corrected? I don’t think it is appropriate to drag our dirty laundry through our history lessons at length.”

Because it’s HISTORY. You don’t get to just rewrite history books if it’s unpleasant. What are you thinking? Shall we rewrite the Revolutionary War? “A minor disagreement with Great Britain.” How about the bombing of Pearl Harbor? “A spat with the Japanese.”

2. You cite Jesus as your reasoning for rejecting marriage equality.
Yet the Bible only mentions homosexuality six times. Six. Times. 6. This many:

So why is this one of the biggest issues on your agenda? Why are you putting so much energy and hate into an issue that clearly wasn’t one of God’s major concerns?

As Christians who are pro-family, why would you deny people the right to the sanctity of marriage? If marriage strengthens families, why would you not want everyone to have this, even if you disagree with their choice of mate?

YOU (we) have destroyed the sanctity of marriage. There is no possible way that gay marriage can do more harm to marriage than heterosexuals have done. Yet we seldom hear a sermon bemoaning the divorce rate or people living together before marriage. Why is that? Because the pews would be empty.

3. You use Biblical scripture to excuse yourself from feeding the hungry.

There is nothing you do that makes me more disgusted with you than your abuse and misuse of 2 Thessalonians 3:10.

For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, If any will not work, neither let him eat. 2 Thessalonians 3:10

You are deliberately taking the scripture — ONE VERSE! — out of context when you use them to justify your own hatred of poor people. And again, you’re showing your ignorance.

From Liberal America reader Eric Susee: “2 Thessalonians 3:10. are NOT the words of Christ. They are the words of Paul of Tarsus, a man who never met Christ.”

Biblical scholars have pointed out that the author of 2 Thessalonians was referring to Christians who stopped working in anticipation of Christ’s return.

4. You lie when you say you value “freedom of religion.”

I had lunch with some conservatives a while back, and the topic of freedom of religion came up. They expressed concern at the “war on Christianity.” I cited a recent event that had occurred in which protesters interrupted the U.S. Senate’s first Hindu-led prayer. The response from my fellow diners? “Good.”

I don’t know how educated people can be so ignorant. Seriously. You can’t even see your own contradictions.

5. You claim God speaks to you and tells you to do things.

Over and over and over, we see right wing nutjobs in the news saying they’re doing this horrible thing or that horrible thing because God told them to. This is, to quote the Christian Courier, “a very convenient method of authenticating what you want to do.”

He does NOT do that.

God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son. Hebrews 1:1

But conservatives believe these nuts. Here is what I think: not only should sensible conservatives not believe these nuts, you need to start speaking out against them. These are the false prophets that the Bible warns us about, in my humble opinion. Most of you lack the courage to take a stand against these idiots even when you know they’re nuts.

6. You question my faith.

“Christian Left is an oxymoron.”

Oh my, I’ve heard that so much from the right, and believe it or not, I often hear it from my “friends.” First of all, your questioning of my faith genuinely means very little to me. What it does is destroy my opinion of you; I now view you as self-righteous hypocrites.

Recently, I found out that a woman from my church questioned her teen son for spending time here at my home with my children. I believe her words were “why would you want to be around someone so liberal.” I’ve never had a conversation with this lady. We’ve never even made eye contact. But alas, her comment (and more that she said) has forced me to now see her differently.

Keep questioning my faith, though, my people, because you can be sure I’m questioning yours. One thing I won’t do, however, is accuse you of not being a believer as you do me. What I will suggest to you is that my faith may be stronger than yours. I’ve educated myself, dared to question all things, and STILL believe. Most of you are too afraid to even learn. It may, after all, test your faith.

I’ll pray for you! :)

7. You care more about your guns than you do about children.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, and following other similar tragedies, I asked many of you if you loved your guns more than you do children. I made the statement of “I’d give up my gun forever if it would bring back even one of those children.”

I asked you if you’d do the same. You admitted that you would not.

8. You get excited about people dying.

You really, really like to see death. And not just to terrorists. You love the death penalty. You love war. You love seeing kids like Trayvon Martin being shot. They deserve it, you say. But his murderer has shown — again and again — since his acquittal that he is a dangerous person.

9. You assume that everyone who needs help are losers and parasites who refuse to work.

Approximately 47 million people receive food stamps, and most of them are children or the elderly, in addition to people who are employed. The numbers, from a 2012 USDA report:

10. You weren’t concerned about uninsured people– including me.

Most of you know that when I made the decision to become self-employed that I would be giving up my employer subsidized health insurance. I’m 47 years old, and like most people my age, have at one time or another had preexisting conditions that would cause insurance companies to deny me a private policy.

I didn’t want a free ride. I was eager to pay for my own insurance. Obamacare opened that door for me and millions of other hard-working Americans and disallows insurance companies from rejecting millions of Americans who were previously rejected. But without even knowing fully what the Affordable Care Act is, you chose the path of ignorance. You didn’t care.

11. The Creation Museum — that is all.

You think this is OK. It’s not. These people just make stuff up. Do you really think kangaroos floated from Africa to Australia on rafts? Why are you condoning this ignorance?

12. You’re liberal in youth, yet grow conservative in age.

I call this the Dead Peter Syndrome in men and/or the Formerly Hot Syndrome in women.

A couple of years ago, a man confronted me on Facebook about my liberalism. I knew him when I was growing up; he was a friend of my parents and his children were my playmates. He called me a stupid, misguided, amoral, liberal. Yes, those were his words. I had one question for him:

“When I was a little girl, didn’t I sit on your lap while you smoked a joint and drank beer?”

I’m afraid I burned the bridge of that friendship — and good riddance.

Similarly, many women who embraced the sexual revolution are now taking a stance against women’s rights and suggesting that I’m killing babies with my IUD.

You don’t get to live it up as a young person and then try to take a moral high ground when you get old and aren’t interested in living anymore.

13. You don’t want people who disagree with you to vote.

Oh, Gerrymandering, you ugly devil, you. But do we question why this is so common and seldom questioned by people on the right? It’s because you, my conservative voter loved ones, agree with it. You think it’s perfectly acceptable (and necessary) to suppress the vote. It’s for the “good of the nation.”

I once heard someone tell his wife to not inform her Democratic friend how and where to vote. “She’ll cancel out your vote.”

There you have it.

14. Some of your best friends are black. Or Mexican.

A conservative I know professes that “my best friend is black” and balked when I called him and his wife racist. Why did I call him racist? Because my little girl — at that time about 12 — went to a movie with one of her African American friends and his mother. The conservative and his wife were “very concerned” about me allowing my little girl to consort with “blacks.” But oh, no, they’re not racist, are they?

I don’t care how many black or Hispanic friends you have. If you think that mentality is OK, then yes, you’re racist.

15. You scream about undocumented immigrant children at the border, but you hire Mexicans to do your dirty work.

I live in Texas. Duh! Every single upper-middle-class or wealthy person I know has at one time hired cheap labor to do their menial tasks like home repairs, yard work, housekeeping, and childcare. They actually seek out Hispanic people because they know that they do good work and that they’ll work for cheap.

16. You insist on calling undocumented immigrants “illegals” and “aliens.”

They are human beings. They are undocumented immigrants. Many of them are children. It reallyyyyy makes me furious to see you deliberately depersonalizing these human beings who are doing nothing but seeking the American Dream that you are so proud of.

And you do this on purpose. You know what you’re doing. You’re proud of your very unethical and un-Christian attitude towards these human beings.

17. You don’t mind using force against “lesser” groups to get what you want.

Case in point, protesting outside of abortion clinics.

Or protesting at the funerals of gay people. And yeah, I know that is Westboro Baptist Church and not you, but if you refuse to speak out against them, then you’re a part of the problem.

18. You love war, death, and destruction.

And why do you love war, death, and destruction? Because ‘Murica. Because you think this somehow makes us superior. We may be militarily superior, but we are ethically inferior.

Even when confronted with the lies, now confirmed officially, that got us into the Iraq war, you don’t care. You like for America to be the world’s largest terrorist organization and the world’s most formidable bully.

19. Speaking of war, you think draft dodging is OK and military service is for the little people.

Why doesn’t it bother you that Dick Cheney et al are draft dodgers? Or that Mitt Romney has an entire baseball team of sons and not one of them served in the military? Or that none of the current generation of Bush children have served in the military. Let me tell you in one sentence, as was told to me personally by a wealthy draft dodger:

“Wouldn’t you get out of it if you could?”

Dying for your country is such a noble cause — if you’re not one of the elite. Right?

20. You claim to care about the Constitution, but in reality you don’t.

Oh yes, you scream “CONSTITUTION” at the top of your lungs, but when idiotic Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently tried to strip the Constitution of the 5th and 6th Amendments, where were you? Where was your outrage? [SEE WIKIPEDIA FOR A COMPLETE LIST OF AMENDMENTS BELOW.]

You love the parts of the Constitution that please you personally — NOT the entire Constitution.

21. It’s impossible for you to see your privilege.

If you were born into a family and a place that allowed you to thrive, you’re blessed and fortunate. This isn’t the norm. A lot of success and stability depends on the structure that we have during our formative years. The vast majority of young Americans have not had your advantages and I can’t seem to make you understand that. I’ve stopped trying.

22. You don’t care about children.

You care about fetuses. Once those fetuses begin to breath outside the womb, your concern is gone if they’re born into a poor family that needs help.

Or how about poor children who are in school? Most of you want to do away with free and reduced lunches, for God’s sake. And let’s not even talk about free breakfasts for kids. What is wrong with you people??? There is no better investment that we can make as a nation than in the early childhood health of our children.

23. You’re greedy and miserable.

You spend more time bemoaning what is being taken from you that [sic] you do in being thankful that you have enough to share.

24. You think our religion is the only one.

I’m a Christian — a proud follower of the most amazing man I’ve ever studied. Most of what is good about me comes from the teachings of Jesus. I love my religion and my Holy Book. I use the Words in Red as a compass. But who am I to look at other people who feel exactly the same way about their own religions and judge them?

We’re all on this earth doing the best we can, making the best decisions that we can.

And we’re all taking our best guess. The evidence for and against their religion is no different than the evidence for and against ours.

25. You are lazy and you refuse to read.

I provide sources for you that will debunk most of your BS, or at least help you to see it a little differently. You refuse to read it. You stick to Fox News, World Net Daily, etc…You refuse to ever entertain another point of view.

I have a conservative friend who I adore. He and his wife grew up with me. I think he’s awesome because he did something amazing for me: he recorded Rachel Maddow for a week and watched her show. Did he agree? Meh, not really. But him being willing to even listen to another viewpoint won him favor in my book. Thank you, Michael.

26. Your misfortune is God’s blessing.

When something bad happens to you, you sanctimoniously think it’s God testing you and making you stronger. When something bad happens to me (or gay people or atheists or etc…), you think it’s God punishing them.

Really?

27. “Everyone has their lot in life.”

Except you, of course. Well, no….you do have a lot. Your lot is to have every privilege and entitlement and make sure your children have the same.

28. You think you’re the only one working and paying taxes.

“My tax dollars….” Here’s a clue: you’re not the only one paying taxes. Liberals pay taxes, too. Just how far do you think your $2,000 a year in income taxes goes? Or your $10,000, or even your $50,000? No matter how wealthy you are and how much income tax you pay — and most of those complaining aren’t paying that much — you’re actually probably paying more for wars (that you love) than for food stamps for children in poverty.

So anyhow….tell me, my loves, what are you cooking for dinner tonight?

All of this said, let me say this: I’m very grateful and appreciative of my sane conservative friends who can actually participate in an intelligent and respectful discussion. To name just a few (and if I leave anyone out, I’m sorry — these are just the ones I interact with the most on these issues): Michael, Laura K., Whitney, Laura M., and my pastor, Brent.

Thank you, my dear ones, for being sane. For understanding that things aren’t always black and white. And for disagreeing with me without belittling my very existence. And for not rubbing midterm losses in my face. And for never once calling me stupid or amoral for being a liberal.



Information which may not be on the tip of your tongue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution

List of amendments to the United States Constitution
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Excerpts -- Thirty-three amendments to the United States Constitution have been proposed by the United States Congress and sent to the states for ratification since the Constitution was put into operation on March 4, 1789. Twenty-seven of these, having been ratified by the requisite number of states, are part of the Constitution. The first ten amendments were adopted and ratified simultaneously and are known collectively as the Bill of Rights. Six amendments adopted by Congress and sent to the states have not been ratified by the required number of states. Four of these amendments are still technically open and pending . . . .

Approximately 11,539 proposals to amend the Constitution have been introduced in Congress since 1789.[2] Collectively, members of the House and Senate typically propose around 200 amendments during each two–year term of Congress.[3] Most however, never get out of the Congressional committees in which they were proposed, and only a fraction of those that do receive enough support to win Congressional approval to actually go through the constitutional ratification process. Beginning in the early 20th century, Congress has usually, but not always, stipulated that an amendment must be ratified by the required number of states within seven years from the date of its submission to the states in order to become part of the Constitution. Congress' authority to set ratification deadline was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433 (1939).

The thirty-three amendments to the United States Constitution—both ratified and unratified—are listed and detailed in the tables below.


Ratified amendments[edit] / Synopsis of each ratified amendment / No. / Subject Date submitted for Ratification[4] / Date ratification completed[4] / Ratification time span[5]


1st Prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances. September 25, 1789 December 15, 1791 2 years
2 months
20 days


2nd Protects the right to keep and bear arms. September 25, 1789 December 15, 1791 2 years
2 months
20 days


3rd Places restrictions on the quartering of soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent, prohibiting it during peacetime. September 25, 1789 December 15, 1791 2 years
2 months
20 days


4th Prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets out requirements for search warrants based on probable cause as determined by a neutral judge or magistrate. September 25, 1789 December 15, 1791 2 years
2 months
20 days


5th Sets out rules for indictment by grand jury and eminent domain, protects the right to due process, and prohibits self-incrimination and double jeopardy. September 25, 1789 December 15, 1791 2 years
2 months
20 days


6th Protects the right to a fair and speedy public trial by jury, including the rights to be notified of the accusations, to confront the accuser, to obtain witnesses and to retain counsel. September 25, 1789 December 15, 1791 2 years
2 months
20 days


7th Provides for the right to trial by jury in certain civil cases, according to common law. September 25, 1789 December 15, 1791 2 years
2 months
20 days


8th Prohibits excessive fines and excessive bail, as well as cruel and unusual punishment. September 25, 1789 December 15, 1791 2 years
2 months
20 days


9th Protects rights not enumerated in the Constitution. September 25, 1789 December 15, 1791 2 years
2 months
20 days


10th Reinforces the principle of federalism by stating that the federal government possesses only those powers delegated to it by the states or the people through the Constitution. September 25, 1789 December 15, 1791 2 years
2 months
20 days


11th Makes states immune from suits from out-of-state citizens and foreigners not living within the state borders; lays the foundation for sovereign immunity. March 4, 1794 February 7, 1795 11 months
3 days


12th Revises presidential election procedures. December 9, 1803 June 15, 1804 6 months
6 days


13th Abolishes slavery, and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. January 31, 1865 December 6, 1865 10 months
6 days
14th Defines citizenship, contains the Privileges or Immunities Clause, the Due Process Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, and deals with post-Civil War issues. June 13, 1866 July 9, 1868 2 years
0 months
26 days


15th Prohibits the denial of the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. February 26, 1869 February 3, 1870 11 months
8 days
16th Permits Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states or basing it on the United States Census. July 12, 1909 February 3, 1913 3 years
6 months
22 days


17th Establishes the direct election of United States Senators by popular vote. May 13, 1912 April 8, 1913 10 months
26 days


18th Prohibited the manufacturing or sale of alcohol within the United States.
(Repealed December 5, 1933) December 18, 1917 January 16, 1919 1 year
0 months
29 days


19th Prohibits the denial of the right to vote based on sex. June 4, 1919 August 18, 1920 1 year
2 months
14 days


20th Changes the date on which the terms of the President and Vice President (January 20) and Senators and Representatives (January 3) end and begin. March 2, 1932 January 23, 1933 10 months
21 days


21st Repeals the 18th Amendment and gives the States the power to prohibit or regulate the transportation or importation of alcohol for delivery or use. February 20, 1933 December 5, 1933 9 months
15 days


22nd Limits the number of times that a person can be elected president: a person cannot be elected president more than twice, and a person who has served more than two years of a term to which someone else was elected cannot be elected more than once. March 24, 1947 February 27, 1951 3 years
11 months
6 days


23rd Grants the District of Columbia electors (the number of electors being equal to the least populous state) in the Electoral College. June 16, 1960 March 29, 1961 9 months
12 days


24th Prohibits the revocation of voting rights due to the non-payment of a poll tax or any other tax. September 14, 1962 January 23, 1964 1 year
4 months
27 days


25th Addresses succession to the Presidency and establishes procedures both for filling a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, as well as responding to Presidential disabilities. July 6, 1965 February 10, 1967 1 year
7 months
4 days


26th Prohibits the denial of the right of US citizens, eighteen years of age or older, to vote on account of age. March 23, 1971 July 1, 1971 3 months
8 days


27th Delays laws affecting Congressional salary from taking effect until after the next election of representatives.



WARNER COMMENTARY:

The passionate and intelligent discussion above by Tiffany Willis mentions Cruz’s attempt to gut the 5th and 6th ratified Amendments, which concern unlawful imprisonment and imminent domain, and the rules of what I believe is referred to as “due process.” In other words, no more political imprisonment, trial without jury, racially or financially unbalanced jury, bail set so high that a person who is not well-to-do can afford to pay it (a possible exception is for a really egregious and horrific crime), imprisonment immediately and sometimes without a specified limit of time for those who can’t pay the fines levied by small towns over minor infractions like a broken taillight, or imprisonment for any reason whatsoever without a fair public trial before “a jury of our peers.”

That one goes back to English Common Law, which makes it very basic indeed. Our “peers” means that neither representatives of a wealthy plutocracy nor an all-white jury in the trial of a racial minority may be allowed. The jury should represent a cross-section of the population instead. Unfortunately, such cases have continued, just as police harassment or outright murder of blacks “just because” has continued; but the ACLU speaks strongly on such issues also, and they will fight fiercely for the goal of getting the trial decision reversed. That’s why I send them a few dollars if they don’t ask me too often. Painfully, many court appointed pro bono attorneys do not either know enough or put forth enough effort to guarantee the defendant’s rights. Our rights are there not to “get criminals off without punishment,” but to see that only the true criminals are convicted. Too often we simple-mindedly ASSUME that the cops did not do the wrong thing. (That’s what “conservatives” call “supporting our police” and “giving them the benefit of the doubt.” When injustice occurs, that’s when you call the ACLU, who will sue for relief free of charge.

On the subject, See: “https://www.aclu.org/blog/jury-your-peers-right-jury-trial-free-discrimination, A Jury of Your Peers – The Right to a Jury Trial Free from Discrimination, By Patrick DePoy, ACLU Washington Legislative Office
JUNE 19, 2012 | 3:17 PM.”

These things are all essential to the maintenance of a functioning democracy, but within my own lifetime the free press has revealed that those rights have been violated more than a few times. The ACLU, hated by “conservatives,” has stepped into the battle to pose legal constraints on legislation, judicial procedures, or other unfair treatment such as religious discrimination, which have violated our Bill of Rights. The ACLU are among my heroes! It seems obvious to me that those “conservatives” actually want to be able legally kidnap, shun, abuse and imprison those who disagree with them or violate their fundamentalist religious precepts. No wedding cakes for gay couples!

Speaking of religion and the Bill of Rights, a startling number of the Tea Partiers and other radical Rightists are actually talking about setting up Christianity as the national religion here in the USA. There is a Dominionist movement here. When I was going through school we were strongly taught that no religion is to be set up as a federal mandate for all citizens to follow. There will be no “established religion.” My patriotism was built around the fairness of our legal system, and I proudly loved my country. I still love it, but I’m not always equally proud of it. The racial issues were simply not MENTIONED nearly enough in high school when I went through. When I had been in college a couple of years I found myself becoming increasingly disenchanted and angry at what I saw in the world today and learned about in our college level history courses.

The modern “conservative” groups who want to indoctrinate our young people against these very rules of fairness – at least when applied in real life with equality -- have an entirely different view of what patriotism should entail (we support police no matter what they do, accept and abide by the logical or illogical rules and beliefs of the powerful groups without questioning, racial segregation in all ways, “know your place,” soldier up manfully and go to war, promote the welfare of the wealthy and Big Business, deny humane relief to the poor and lower middle class, and so on.) In England and Europe waves of war and repression were carried out by most of the nations against their own citizens on the basis of things like this. Catholics and Protestants killed people frequently over the right to think and believe “correctly.”

The real problem that groups like agnostics/atheists/dissenters have is that they simply cannot believe some of the more unlikely sounding creeds of powerful and populous fundamentalist faith groups. Faith is not an exercise of power. That is warfare. In righteous fury, people in Europe simply killed all dissenters for almost two thousand years; first the Catholics killed everyone else, and then when the Protestants were born as a faith, they came in killed Catholics. Meanwhile everybody killed witches. Witch burning, that was a great sport just like hangings. Good citizens would throng to an execution site and watch avidly, as we now watch a horse race or a football game. When I think of things like that, my heart sinks. It’s not that we came from apes; it’s that we are apes! If the Tea Party does totally take over here, I expect to be thrown into jail for that statement. Sorry, guys!

The specifications on issues of freedom which appear in the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written, due directly to the hated abuse of personal freedom of thought and other essential freedoms in England and most of Europe. Such prohibitions were enforced over the Colonists, even after we made it over here to America. It wasn’t just the issue of “no taxation without representation.” England at that time viewed personal rights in general as being highly conditional on wealth, personal opinions, social status, etc. The idea of social fairness was “radical” in their view, and irreligious. If you want to read a great novel on that subject, go to the library and get Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Poor people were throwaways, even on matters like personal safety. Unacquainted with Hardy? To brush up on his work, go to “https://interestingliterature.com/2015/02/23/the-best-thomas-hardy-novels/.”

We have carried that unfortunate precept forward like mold, bacteria and mildew spores among our more “conservative” citizens as being right and good. They claim that the Constitution does not actually forbid an established religion, and that the wording in the Constitution is “vague.” That’s what Amendments are for, to clarify and make changes as needed. Our 1st Amendment makes it abundantly clear. I believe that the political Rightists’ true emotional reason for their views is that they want to cling to their unfairness and group hatred. It’s easier than thinking or trying to accommodate others. Social courage can be very dangerous, even here in the US if you live in the backwaters.

As I have always been taught, however, the very first sentence in the 1st Amendment below is not only clear as a bell; it is stringent in its statement that an “established religion” is simply not to be allowed. The word “prohibit” means that there is no wiggle room there. The wording is, “Prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion.” Rights in this country usually involve a proscription that a citizen does not in following his own rights trample on the rights of others!

That means that the US is and must remain a secular state, which allows all religions to think and worship freely according to their beliefs except for certain specific cases – such as refusal to obtain medical help for children in lieu of “faith healing” beliefs -- and forbids the persecution of atheists and agnostics or any requirement that they join a church. One of those Tea Partiers, a woman in low level municipal office during the last two or three years, said that she “sometimes thinks” if every one of us were REQUIRED to go to church we would have a better society. Eh, what??

In the days of the early Calvinists, religious freedom was not yet a law much less a right, and twenty people in Salem, Massachusetts were executed for supposedly being “witches.” Hundreds were killed in Europe for the same reason. People actually believed in those days that if your cow got sick or your child was born with a physical disability it was very likely because a “witch” had placed a spell on you. I am so very glad for free public education. About witches, one of the common “trial proofs” that I have seen was based on the idea that that witches can’t drown, so they would throw suspects in deep water to see whether or not they would escape alive. If they did live through that they were then executed for witchcraft! As the wise old adage says, people who don’t study historical errors and sins are “doomed to repeat them.”



ON FEDERALLY FUNDED GRANTS TO ART AND THE HUMANITIES

Along these lines, read the next long, but highly informative, study of the history of our nation’s current distrust and even hatred of what I consider to be intelligent discourse, as shown in the politicization of the federal funding for the arts by Rightist forces. It is my cynical opinion that their true reasoning behind such social policy is that with most citizens having no more than a high school diploma, if that will them happy to board hosiery or cut chickens for a living and, better still, afraid to ask for a raise or risk communicating with a Union. That’s a win-win, right?

I think a permanently poor and deeply ignorant lower class begins with a history of personal poverty and a basic lack of education from generation to generation, and it is connected directly with our very class-based societal structure. A person born to a very poor family which also is characterized by emotional/mental disorders, may well see no option for themselves other than spending twenty or so years in prison. It may even be preferable to sleeping on the street. It is also, unfortunately, linked closely with our very freedoms to do whatever the heck we want to, which all of us, myself included, prize so highly.

One of the “freedoms” which the undereducated tend to follow is the “broad and seemingly easy path of least resistance,” described by Jesus as the road to perdition. In the case of mental and emotional laziness such as espousing racist and violent behavior, bullying those weaker than oneself, and glorying in a lack of educational progress we see the result of that path. Studying to many people, white and black, is “getting above your raising.” This occurs too widely in our country, and is considered to be a sign of strength and masculinity, so those decadent characteristics are prized rather than scorned. After all, they are important skills to a promising career in crime.

Our very physical, disrespectful and macho culture is a fair portion of the origin of that, I think. Some of those people are indeed Black, but those with a similar lack of positive and strong family structure, love and supportiveness who happen to be White will show the same tendencies. That is especially true if their family members are violent among themselves as we so often are. FEW such people are ASIAN, though there are Asian criminal classes in this country also, and mental illness cuts across all classes and types. Those Asian groups of people have often moved here with the primary goal of getting ahead in the world, and they will STUDY, in most cases, rather than hanging around a pool hall drinking beer and trying to pick up girls.

Some psychologists have postulated that those groups may literally be more intelligent than the rest of us, but from an interesting documentary on the subject, I tend to believe that their culture simply does not reward and in fact strongly punishes a carefully cultivated or intentional ignorance. It is shameful to them. I watched a Japanese father sharply whacking his son over the head with one finger, not to hurt him but to shame him for failing to learn his lessons. I think that is harsh parenting, but it is a fact that kids from that kind of family are much less likely to walk down the street with their pants hanging down to their knees because to show their disrespect to the whole world, they leave their belt so loose that it is totally ineffective. Macho, you know!

I also believe that, in our country, those whose fathers or mothers have no idea at all of their kids’ ever being able to get a college degree, will too often allow them to hang around the street corners and pester or even assault innocent people passing by, with the hope of stealing something they can pawn. Bad thought patterns are passed down from parent to child, and the result is that we are becoming more incapable as a society of even enjoying anything of a more high-minded type, so why care a whit about art or history or ethics or any of those other “highbrow” and ennobling things? I am convinced, furthermore, that if a Bernie Sanders/Hillary Clinton were to succeed in changing our laws on free college tuition at state schools -- for the poor and lower middle class at least -- and get the $15.00 an hour minimum wage mandated for all full or part time working citizens, that the lives of the poor would be significantly changed, to the point that they would have a little bit of HOPE and therefore, PRIDE. It takes encouragement to be a productive and positive citizen.

I believe, also, that when increased prosperity becomes a fact, our legislators will no longer believe that it is to their personal advantage to stop fostering EDUCATION, and will therefore improve THEIR behavior as well! One of our main problems in this society is that we fail to understand that ENOUGH money is a smaller amount than what the 1% make, and that being a success has more to do with personal improvement than with wearing a $10,000 wristwatch. Our beliefs as a people have become crass and predatory. That is a terrible shame.

I still believe we have a chance of reforming our inner thinking patterns, however, in a way that will bring good citizenship out of a less than well-to-do financial background. When I was young in the ‘50s most of us were more or less poor in my small industrial city, but not essentially criminals. Some were, of course, and I am speaking of white kids. I didn’t know any black people in those days except one. My point is, it is absolutely possible to have a good society without a great deal of wealth, but not without honesty and gentleness. Privation does, however, tend to pull people down psychologically and lead into the “Slough of Despond.” I hope that we are turning a corner right now to a more benign culture. The strong discontent among Progressive Democrats and the blue collar white groups alike, is forming a decided push for change. I believe we will make it as a Democracy at least until I die. At least I do truly hope so.



http://www.upenn.edu/pnc/ptkoch.html

"The Contest for American Culture: A Leadership Case Study on The NEA and NEH Funding Crisis"

Cynthia Koch, 1998
Associate Director, Penn National Commission


"The National Endowment for the Arts has always been bigger than life," Mr. Armey said. "What makes it so big? It is made big by the concerted, well--funded, well--motivated efforts of the arts elite in America who want the focus to be not whether or not there will be funding for the arts but whether or not they will be in control." (1)
Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, Republican Majority Leader, July 10, 1997


The most recent round of the national debate over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) ended one year later, on July 21, 1998. On that day the House of Representatives approved $98 million for the NEA for fiscal 1999 and rejected the conservative Republican position that tax dollars should not be used to support the arts. This is the latest chapter in a concerted assault on the arts -- and eventually humanities -- that has been raging with more or less ferocity since May 1989 when Sen. Jesse Helms, on information supplied by the conservative Christian American Family Association, condemned Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" in an NEA-funded exhibition at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

But conservative discomfort with the endowments has existed since their founding; it first received national attention during the Reagan Administration. The real debate is not about money, or accusations of obscenity, or even -- as the National Endowment for the Humanities was dragged into the controversy -- over disagreements about how history is taught in our nation's schools. There are enduring enmities between those who favor a government role in supporting our national cultural life, and those, who for a variety of reasons, do not. Those in favor point to the record of support by governments in Europe, historical precedent, and the need to foster arts and scholarship in locations and disciplines where such activities would not be supported by market forces or private philanthropy. Opponents often take a libertarian approach, arguing against government involvement at all, or as social conservatives they oppose support for the arts and humanities on moral grounds as part of a broad-based critique of government rooted in religious beliefs that are at variance with prevailing public policy and values.

The philosophical differences between the two sides represent varying views about human nature and its relation to government. Endowments proponents generally hold modern liberal-moderate political views: minimal intrusion on the part of the state in private life combined with confidence in an activist government to guarantee individual rights and broad access to social goods such as economic, educational, and cultural opportunity. This view is opposed by many political opponents of the endowments, but by far the strongest opposition comes from Christian conservatives who advocate elimination of the NEA (and the NEH in the heat of the 1995 funding crisis) as part of their broader social agenda. For them individual rights and free expression, fundamental values in the liberal tradition, are radically at odds with a world view from an older ideology that sees human beings as basically flawed, their capacities for good nurtured only in the strict observance of Christian dogma. A government that fails to enforce these precepts is at odds with their deepest beliefs and must be changed. The Reverend Peter J. Gomes described the fervency of these political convictions in "The New Liberation Theology":

Within the Christian Coalition are groups adamantly opposed to abortion, homosexual civil rights, and the United Nations. Many are in favor of "creation-science" as an alternative to the theory of evolution; seek some kind of constitutional amendment that permits prayer in the public schools; want government vouchers for private education. Nearly everyone in the Christian Coalition agrees that the coarsening of our culture -- through pornography, sexual violence, and the demise of the traditional nuclear family -- comprises the greatest threat to our civilization. Their agenda is clear, and they now have the resources to put that agenda before the American people. They are organized, ambitious, and filled with a zeal that contrasts sharply with the tired-out politics and issues of the major parties. They are at war with the powers that be, and with the culture, that have for so long denied them and the legitimacy of their aspirations.(2)

While members of the Christian Right are certainly the most organized and vocal opponents of the endowments, their position also reverberates with those -- mostly the politically ambitious -- who attack the "eastern Establishment" and "cultural elite" in timeworn but often effective arguments that divide Americans along class and sectional lines.

The Terms of the NEA/NEH Debate

The arguments on both sides are, by now, familiar to many Americans. The Right, on the attack in the culture war of words, employs powerful arguments that are based in emotion and are hard to refute rationally. Their campaign is well funded, well organized, and apparently able to exert an influence in the press and in Congress disproportionate to their number. The two sides of the debate often take the following positions:

Opponents: Should the United States, which has no history of royal patronage or an established church, be engaged in directly sponsoring arts and learning? At risk, opponents of arts funding argue, is the independence of expression. Should America have an official art? Should it commission scholarship? A body of work that has been approved and funded by government agency smacks of communism or fascism.

Proponents: Exactly the opposite is true. The U.S. government, like all countries, has an interest in fostering the nation's culture. It is in the interest of American taxpayers to protect accessibility and freedom of expression by supporting culture with their tax dollars. Otherwise the arts and learning become the province of the few. The wealthy elite and corporations will inevitably silence points of view in opposition to their interests if they are paying the bills. Moreover, without government support the arts cannot survive in the American free enterprise system where media conglomerates aggressively market entertainment as "art" to an insatiable popular audience.

Opponents: Elitist! Large cultural institutions, artists, and intellectuals -- most of the them located on the East Coast -- have no right to use the tax dollars of working people across the nation to subsidize arts and scholarship that benefit only themselves. It is far more democratic to let the market decide which art should prosper. Besides, great artists will produce their masterpieces in spite of -- perhaps because of -- poverty. Look at Vincent Van Gogh, Mozart. Artists with NEA grants get lazy, too comfortable. If big museums and symphonies were producing what people really want, they wouldn't need subsidies.

Proponents: For each American taxpayer, the price of two postage stamps was the value of the federal contribution to the arts in 1994; today it is almost half that. The nation's great cultural and educational institutions, its artists and scholars, produce cultural "capital" that benefits the whole nation through traveling museum exhibitions and theater and opera productions, scholarship and preservation projects that inform the nation through research products that include TV and film productions, better informed teachers, and scholarly monographs that extend the frontiers of knowledge. Should America renounce its world leadership in the arts and higher education for the price of two postage stamps per taxpayer?

Opponents: Federal support for arts and education is unconstitutional. It is another misguided product of the 1960s Great Society that we can no longer afford.

Proponents: The federal government has been in the business of advancing arts and education since the founding of the Library of Congress in 1800 and the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. Since the establishment of the two national endowments in 1965, America's cultural life and educational leadership have grown to an unprecedented degree. American arts and learning are the envy of the world. Without federal dollars and the imprimatur of a federal grant that attracts private support, the arts will wither away.

Opponents: Americans will always be world leaders with or without federal subsidy. That "imprimatur" issue is exactly the point. There should be no "government seal of approval" on any art. And it certainly should not be on obscene and pornographic art, and as for the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian -- and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- they're on our list, too.

The Dollars Involved

It is well known that the actual dollar contribution of the federal agencies to the nation's cultural life is minute. The combined 1998 appropriations for the two national endowments is $.78 per person in the United States, while the total government (including state and local) spending on culture in this country is $6.25. In other Western countries the government share of spending on culture is much higher: $27.40 per person in the United Kingdom and $97.70 in Finland, the biggest spender in Europe. The combined budgets of the NEA and the NEH will amount to approximately 1/100 of 1% of the 1999 federal budget of $1,751 billion. In the United States private philanthropy's share is much more important than it is in other countries, but it only amounts to another $2.96 per person -- bringing our total support for culture to less than $10 per person. NEA and NEH appropriations since 1966 are shown in Figure 1.(3)

Early Efforts to Establish Cultural Endowments

The National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 provided for the establishment of a National Council on the Arts and a National Council for the Humanities, the two endowments, and ultimately arts and humanities councils in every state. The two endowments probably trace their roots most directly to the Depression-era WPA programs: the Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Writers Project, and Federal Theater Project. Besides providing needed employment for artists, they also gave many Americans their first experience with "public art" as communities dealt with artists on civic boards determining standards for highly visible public commissions in schools, post offices, and city halls. Art and artists were no longer the province of the "high" society of art museums and symphony orchestras, but rather of society as a whole. (4)

During the Depression some legislation was proposed at the federal level that would have had the power to institutionalize some of these activities on a permanent basis. (5) But with the beginning of World War II, the political will to establish a national cultural agency disappeared. As the economy improved, WPA legislation was phased out and conditions largely returned to their pre-war stasis: government support for the arts -- with the exception of practical necessities such as monuments and military bands -- was perceived as a frill and outside the legitimate realm of government support. During the war the government sponsored propagandistic arts projects to advance the war effort; but with the exception of programs sponsored by the Office of Inter-American Affairs (headed by Nelson Rockefeller), which sponsored tours and cultural exchanges with Latin America, whatever modest arts funding existed was usually buried in the budgets of nonarts programs.

The immediate precursor of the national endowments came as an extension of Rockefeller's activities with the OIAA during World War II. In 1954 Rockefeller, then an undersecretary in Eisenhower's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, developed a plan based on the Arts Council of Great Britain to create a National Council on the Arts. But necessary legislation failed in Congress. Nancy Hanks, who worked for Rockefeller at the time and was later to become a popular chair of the NEA, described the derision with which this proposal was met in Congress where the bill was referred to as the "President's toe dance bill." Nonetheless, according to Hanks, this legislation saw life a few years later in 1960 when Rockefeller became governor of New York and it served as the model for the New York State Council on the Arts. (6)

The 1965 federal legislation was also patterned after the 1954 bill (according to Hanks) and it was in that year that cultural and educational advocacy efforts in a number of areas finally coalesced. The Rockefeller Panel Report, The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects, made front page news describing serious funding problems in some the nation's largest arts organizations. The Elementary and Secondary School Act, authorizing schools to "develop innovative projects which . . . utilize the service of arts groups and cultural resources in their communities" was passed, and a crucial piece of legislation was crafted in Congress that brought together the parallel but divergent efforts of arts and humanities advocates.

As had been the case since the 1930s, advocacy for the arts and humanities -- while never popular among American political leaders -- enjoyed the support of a few leaders at the highest levels. The Kennedys' Camelot, inspired by Jacqueline Kennedy's love for the arts, briefly placed the arts at the center of the national life, with practical policy consequences. For example in 1961, Arthur Goldberg, secretary of labor for the Kennedy Administration, brought the department into action as arbitrator in the Metropolitan Opera Strike, stating, "the nation must come to accept the arts as a new community responsibility and part of this responsibility must fall to the federal government." In 1963 August Hecksher, former director of the Twentieth Century Fund, who had been appointed two years earlier by President Kennedy as his special consultant on the arts, issued a special report on the relationship between the arts and the federal government. This led to the establishment within the Executive Branch of a special advisor on the arts. In 1964 President Johnson appointed Roger L. Stevens, a theatrical producer, to the newly permanent post of special assistant to the president on the arts. Stevens became an active arts advocate with Congress and succeeded in getting a plank in the Democratic National Committee platform that year pledging continued support for the arts. (7)

At the same time humanities advocates organized the first Commission on the Humanities, a "blue-ribbon" panel of scholars convened by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council of Graduate Schools, and Phi Beta Kappa that was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The commission issued a report calling for the establishment of a national agency consistent with President Kennedy's "New Frontier," a national call for excellence in scholarship justified by a belief in the implicit value to the nation of a thriving cultural and intellectual life.

As support for cultural funding grew, long-standing political divisions that had stymied previous federal efforts became more public as debate intensified. Arts and humanities advocates were generally liberal Democrats and Republicans, while conservatives of both parties espoused small government and untrammeled free enterprise. Not insignificantly, arts and humanities supporters were also well educated and drawn from urban areas where many leading cultural and educational institutions were and still are concentrated. Their opponents were often from the South or rural areas and frequently anti-intellectual.

By 1965, the year of the successful legislation that combined the two separate arts and humanities advocacy efforts into a single National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act, more than 100 separate bills in favor of cultural funding were introduced in the 89th Congress. The leading sponsor in the House was Frank Thompson of New Jersey joined by John Brademas (Indiana), Sidney Yates (Illinois), John Lindsay (New York), Lloyd Meeds (Washington), and many others. Leading supporters in the Senate included Claiborne Pell (Rhode Island), Hubert Humphrey (Minnesota), Jacob Javits (New York), Claude Pepper (Florida), Joseph Clark (Pennsylvania), and Abraham Ribicoff (Connecticut). It was Pell who spearheaded the combined arts and humanities legislation, joined in the House by Thompson. (8)

Opponents in the early 1960s used arguments against the endowments that still ring familiar: "With the nation $290 billion in debt," declared Rep. Howard Gross of Iowa, "an additional $200,000 each year for a council might be better deferred until we have a balanced budget in this country and start retiring the Federal debt." Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia, an outspoken foe and chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee, displayed his animosity for the cultural elite":

What are the arts? And here is where I display my ignorance. I do not know. . . I suppose fiddle players would be in the arts and the painting of pictures would be in the arts. It was suggested that poker playing would be an artful occupation. Is this going to subsidize poker players that get in trouble? (9)

In Senate debate over the National Arts and Cultural Development Act in 1963, another precursor to the final legislation, Strom Thurmond was the only opponent of the bill to speak. Doubting the constitutionality of arts subsidies, he objected to the supporters' contention that government involvement in arts subsidies was covered under the "general welfare" clause and raised the specter of government control of the arts: "the Federal Government has the power to control that which it subsidizes and experience proves that when the Federal Government has the power, that power is eventually exercised." (10) This argument of the defeated opposition would surface again and again in the next thirty years.

The Reagan Crisis

The 1966 appropriation to the NEA was nearly $2.9 and $5.9 million went to the NEH. Funding and programming at the endowments grew throughout the 1970s, expanding to new audiences and dramatically increasing the arts and humanities presence in local communities and national institutions.

To be sure, there were controversies in the 1970s since the endowments were always easy targets. One of Sen. William Proxmire's "uncoveted" Golden Fleece awards was given to the NEA in 1977 for a grant it made to an artist who filmed colored crepe paper as she threw it from an airplane. The NEH received its share of Golden Fleeces, too. Joseph McLellan, writing for the Washington Post in the mid-1980s, recalled "sporadic, scattered protests (usually in Congress, sometimes in the press) about budget increases" and noted that when in the first ten years Nancy Hanks increased the NEA budget from $2.5 million to almost $75 million, George Will called her "the Mayor Daley of the Arts." Proxmire "found the NEA budget as hard to cut as the Pentagon budget. When he attacked the soaring NEA budget, his phone rang off the hook with protests from grant recipients all over Wisconsin." (11)

But in late 1980, the criticism suddenly took a more ominous turn as Hilton Kramer reported on the front page in the New York Times just three weeks after the election of Ronald Reagan:

“An important debate on the future course of Government policy on the arts is in progress in the inner councils of President-elect Ronald Reagan's advisers on cultural affairs. . . . Its outcome is likely to determine how the two Federal agencies will allocate funds and establish priorities for years to come.
At the crux of this debate is a firmly held belief, reported to be virtually unanimous among otherwise divided Reagan advisers, that the activities of both endowments have been profoundly compromised by politicization and an accompanying lowering of standards under the Carter Administration.”

Despite their consensus on the problem, Reagan arts policy advisors were reported to hold widely "widely divergent conclusions" on solutions:

One calls for the adoption of narrower programs designed to meet stricter standards of professional accomplishment. This, in effect, would mean a significant withdrawal from programs of popularization and mass appeal, and a renewed emphasis on programs encouraging high art and professional scholarship.

The other was characterized as "more extreme":

It takes the view that the endowments have strayed hopelessly off their intended courses and become mired in social and political causes unsanctioned by the legislation that brought them into being. As a result, there is now no alternative but to abolish them altogether. It would, of course, require an act of Congress to abolish the agencies. (12)

The Washington Post carried a far less alarming piece, in which the chairmen of Reagan's two transition team study groups apparently tried to quiet the rumor mill:
"Some people have said they are concerned that the Moral Majority and NCPAC are out to get the National Endowment for the Humanities," said Richard J. Bishirjian of Ronald Reagan's transition team. "The important thing to understand is that Reagan has no intention whatsoever of turning loose people who are destructive to the humanities. That's not the case at all."

Across the street, transition official Robert S. Carter said, "All we're going to do is to make a report by Dec. 22 on the situation as we find it at the National Endowment for the Arts -- with very possibly no recommendations." (13)

But such comments did little to quell the anxieties of cultural advocates. Neither did reports in both newspapers that Michael Joyce, executive director of the James M. Olin Foundation, had prepared a report for the Heritage Foundation that was called "highly critical" of both agencies. As part of a larger study of the federal government prepared as a "blueprint for a conservative American Government," the report found in both endowments "a tendency to emphasize politically inspired social policies at the expense of the independence of the arts and the humanities" and called for "redirecting the endowments toward the highest purposes for which they were intended." Joyce was also identified as serving as a member of Bishirjian's NEH transition team study group and William J. Bennett (then head of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina who would become Reagan's NEH chair) was cited as a consultant to the Heritage Foundation report. (14)

By early 1981 the first major NEA/NEH funding controversy was in full swing. Its dimensions are suggested by the number of newspaper articles on the NEA and NEH that were carried in major papers. Instead of thirty-seven articles which had been the nearly invisible level of coverage prior to 1980, suddenly there were close to one hundred. But still the fracas was limited in scope: it was a story largely covered by and for Washington and arts insiders. All but one story, which was carried by the Christian Science Monitor, were found in either the New York Times or the Washington Post. Nonetheless, the sequence of stories selected from that year's coverage outlines a pattern of activities and press coverage that would become familiar and broader in scope with the next two funding controversies:

January 16, 1981, Washington Post, "NEA, NEH Seek Budget Increases for '82."

February 5, Washington Post, "Budget Cuts Threaten Arts."

February 18, Washington Post, "Reagan Seeks 50% Cuts in Endowment's Budgets."

February 25, Christian Science Monitor, Midwestern Edition, "Arts Groups Efforts to Keep U.S. Funding: Just the First Act."

March 22, Washington Post, "Cutting the Endowment: An Argument," Toni Morrison.

March 25, Washington Post, "Distinguished Voices Protest NEH Cuts: Pleas and Protests, Fall of the Ax, Cont'd."

April 15, Washington Post, "Arts Reshuffle? Arts Reshuffle? NEA, NEH May Be Replaced: Independent Agencies May Replace NEA, NEH."

April 29, Washington Post, "Endowment Staffs May Not Face Cuts: OMB Says Budget Slash Shouldn't Mean Firings."

May 7, Washington Post, "NEA, NEH Review: The Endowments: Task Force Named."

May 16, Washington Post, "NEH Freezes Grant Awards: Proposed Endowment Cutback for This Year Prompt Humanities Group's Interim Action."

June 5, Washington Post, "Arts Task Force Named, White House Task Force Named, And Rescissions from NEA, NEH 1981 Budgets Will Be Less Than Expected."

June 9, Washington Post, "Charlton Heston to the Rescue: The Actor Comes to the Aid of the Arts."

June 11, Washington Post, "Higher Funding Ceilings Advocated for Endowments."

June 12, Washington Post, "Higher Funding Backed for Arts, Humanities: Endowments Funding; Subcommittee Supports 'Essential Program.'"

July 14, Washington Post, "Task Force Favors Saving NEA and NEH."

July 18, Washington Post, "Individual Grants May Be Prohibited."

July 23, Washington Post, "House Boosts NEA, NEH Funding."

September 11, Washington Post, "Reagan Aide in Line for NEA . . . Frank Hodsell Expected To Be Named Chairman."

September 17, Washington Post, "Tax Breaks for Arts Patrons?"

September 26, Washington Post, "Touching All the Bases: Arts Staffs Go to Bat for the Sake of the Game: Going to Bat for the Arts and Humanities."

October 24, Washington Post, "NEA, NEH Bonuses: Bonuses Going to 102 Employees of NEA, NEH, Cash Awards to 102 Endowment Employees."

November 5, Washington Post, "Conferees Clear NEA, NEH Funds."

December 13, Washington Post, "The Amazing Endowment Scramble: When Politics and Professors Meet, the Fracas is Anything but Academic.'

December 24, Washington Post, "NEA, NEH Funding Bill Signed." (15)

Familiar in these headlines -- because they would recur again and again in future press accounts -- are reports of grassroots advocacy efforts; celebrities testifying on Capitol Hill and writing op-ed pieces pro and con; threats to gut the agencies, privatize them, and cut grants to individuals; countermoves by the agencies; and antiendowment stories that highlight arts patrons, college professors, and endowment staff as beneficiaries of federal largesse. But these articles in major newspapers give only the barest indication of what was going on throughout the country. Arts advocates reacted vocally, which quieted the endowments' opponents and helped their supporters in Congress:

In 1981 the Reagan administration ran into a . . . flood of protests when it threatened to cut the Carter arts budget in half. Star-studded protest parades marched down Broadway to Lincoln Center; theaters staged momentary blackouts to dramatize the budget situation; volunteer lawyers began to talk about class-action suits of artists against the Reagan administration; audiences were given postcards to send to their congressmen. (16)

In the end both agencies did sustain cuts, which appeared at the time to be minor. In fact, the 1982 cuts were severe. The arts appropriation dropped from $158.8 million in fiscal 1981 to $143.5 million the next year. The NEH lost close to 14 percent of its $151.3 million budget in 1982 and would not regain its 1981 level of funding until 1989. In an era of double-digit inflation this represented a real dollar cut of approximately 50 percent over the course of the 1980s -- an amount consistent in the end with the Reagan administration's original objective. The NEA, which had a more effective lobbying network in well-known performing arts advocates and a large and dedicated institutional base of arts organizations, did return to (and exceed) its 1981 appropriation by 1984; however, even that did not keep pace with inflation. (17) Figure 2 shows the effect of inflation on the endowments' appropriations. (18)


If by 1985 the opponents had not succeeded completely in their original budget cutting objectives, they had nonetheless found their flash point. In September of that year, McLellan wrote that a few weeks earlier a "trio of Texas congressmen" had spearheaded the effort to withhold grants to individual artists whose work was "found offensive to the average person." He dismissed the effort as "a bit of noise" that was "quietly buried by the endowment's congressional friends, who have by now accumulated a lot of experience in handling such problems." (19) But his sanguinity was proved wrong. In 1989, when the next furor broke, the charge that the NEA funded "offensive" art found a national audience as social and political conservatives joined forces with those who saw political advantage in attacking the "arts elite."

The Serrano-Mapplethorpe Controversy

The storm . . . broke on the Senate floor on May 18, as Senator Alfonse D'Amato rose to denounce Andres Serrano's photograph Piss Christ as trash. "This so-called piece of art is a deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity," he said. . . . Not to be outdone, Senator Jesse Helms joined in the denunciation: "The Senator from New York is absolutely correct in his indignation and in his description of the blasphemy of the so-called art work. I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk. . . . Let him be a jerk on his own time and with his own resources. Do not dishonor our Lord." Within minutes over 20 senators rushed to join [D'Amato] in sending a letter to Hugh Southern, acting chair of the NEA, demanding to know what steps the agency would take to change its grant procedures. "This work is shocking, abhorrent and completely undeserving of any recognition whatsoever" the senators wrote. (20)

The offending work was a 60-by-40 inch photograph of an inexpensive wood and plastic crucifix submerged in a transparent container of the artist's urine. It had been shown, with no public outcry, in a three-city exhibit organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. SECCA had received an NEA grant, as it had for years, for its "Awards in the Visual Arts" series and had selected Serrano and nine other artists from among five hundred applicants for inclusion in the exhibition and as the recipients of $15,000 fellowships. But as Carole S. Vance, who summarized the controversy in a September 1989 article for Art in America put it, "How the senators came to know about the regional show was not accidental."

The show had closed by the end of January 1989, yet throughout the spring, the right-wing American Family Association, based in Tupelo, Mississippi, attacked the photo, the exhibition and its sponsors. The association and its executive director, United Methodist minister Rev. Donald Wildmon, were practiced in fomenting public opposition to allegedly "immoral, anti-Christian" images and had led protests against Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ the previous summer. The AFA newsletter, with an estimated circulation [of] 380,000 including 178,00 churches, according to association spokesmen, urged concerned citizens to protest the art work and demand that responsible NEA officials be fired. The newsletter provided the relevant names and addresses, and letters poured in to congressmen, senators, and the NEA. (21)

A few weeks later when "Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment" was scheduled to open at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, the furor escalated. The Mapplethorpe show had been organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania. The ICA had received $30,000 from the NEA for the show, which originated in Philadelphia and was scheduled to travel to five other cities.

A retrospective of the artist's work over a twenty-year period (Mapplethorpe had died of AIDS in March 1989), the exhibit included more than 150 photos: formal portraits, flowers, children, and sexually explicit gay and sadomasochistic erotic poses. It was presented in Philadelphia from December 1988 through January 1989, where it was well received, and then moved on to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where its run was uneventful. But according to Vance, what happened next was entirely a different story.

. . . But by June 8, Representative Dick Armey (R-Tex.) sent [NEA acting chair] Southern a letter signed by over 100 congressmen denouncing grants for Mapplethorpe as well as Serrano, and threatening to seek cuts in the agency's $170 million budget. . . . Armey wanted the NEA to end its sponsorship of "morally reprehensible trash," and he wanted new grant guidelines that would "clearly pay respect to public standards of taste and decency." Armey claimed he could "blow their budgets out of the water" by circulating the Mapplethorpe catalogue to fellow legislators prior to the House vote on the NEA appropriation. Before long about 50 senators and 150 representatives had contacted the NEA about its funding. (22)

Amid cries of censorship from the arts community and liberals, the Corcoran canceled the show rather than run it in Washington during budget negotiations. Outraged, a local alternative arts group, the Washington Project for the Arts, ran the show instead. With the exhibit later scheduled to travel to Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center, trustees there voted to uphold their contract with the ICA and hosted the show accompanied by warnings and other safeguards against children viewing the explicitly sexual material. Nonetheless, the museum's director, Dennis Barrie, was arrested on charges of violating community standards of decency. The arrest was a result of pressure exerted on Cincinnati law enforcement officials by a local religious alliance, Citizens for Community Values, which included among its program objectives a determination to fight pornography through the criminal justice system. After a trial that shook the museum community to its core, Barrie was acquitted by a jury of four men and four women in October 1990. (23)

The turmoil affected the budget debates in both houses. Angry members of Congress vowed to gut the NEA budget, though they were stopped by more moderate amendments that signaled congressional disapproval of the controversial grants by deducting the total cost ($45,000) of the Serrano and Mapplethorpe grants from the 1990 appropriation. In late July Jesse Helms's bill to prevent the NEA from sponsoring "obscene or indecent" art passed a Senate voice vote but died in the House of Representatives. Congress authorized a $2 million increase in the NEA budget but withheld $45,000 -- the amount spent on the Serrano and Mapplethorpe exhibits. In September a Congressional committee added an antiobscenity clause to NEA appropriations that would ban federal funds for art that "may be considered obscene, including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." (24)

While it had no immediate impact on funding for the arts, the controversy secured the conservatives' first concession to their agenda and inaugurated a new wariness on the part of the arts community. As described by Judith Tannenbaum, who was then acting director of the ICA:

The bill that was finally passed by both the House and the Senate in October 1989 represented a compromise from the original Helms amendment and the harsh punitive measures earlier proposed for both ICA and SECCA. That legislation, enacted to appropriate funds for both the NEA and the [NEH] in 1990, however, did include a clause requiring that Congress be notified of any grants recommended for funding to ICA or SECCA. No one could have predicted just six months before that we would now be grateful for what amounted to being placed on probation, and that, similarly, the arts community would accept an obscenity clause of any kind. Yet these compromises represented a victory of sorts, given the more extreme Senate bill that might have been adopted. (25)

In the spring of 1990 the National Council on the Arts voted to reject two grants to the ICA that had been recommended for funding by peer review. It was felt that funding the exhibits, although their content was entirely uncontroversial in nature, might be perceived "as an act of defiance towards Congress." (26) That decision was overturned the following August, but the council refused to reconsider grants that had been rejected on similar grounds to performance artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller. It was their case that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the "obscenity clause" as constitutional in June 1998. (27)

The 1995 Funding Controversy

With the election of the 104th Congress in 1994, Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time since 1954 and for the first time since the founding of the cultural endowments. Those elected among the 367 Republican candidates who signed the Contract with America took seriously their pledge "after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive and too easy with the public's money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family." (28)

Major provisions of the Contract called for congressional term limits, a balanced budget amendment, the line-item veto, and welfare reform. Less noticed in the Contract's appendix was call for the outright elimination of the NEA and NEH. (29) In the companion "contract" produced by the Christian Coalition in 1995, Contract with the American Family, "profamily" stipulations also led to calls for the elimination of the federal Department of Education; the repeal of Goals 2000 -- the hard-won legislation leading to national educational standards in key areas of elementary and secondary student performance -- and elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). (30)

The influence of the Christian Coalition was evident when their Contract was announced at a May 17 press conference in the Capitol attended by a number of prominent senators and members of Congress, including Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Prepared by Ralph Reed, Jr., then the organization's executive director, with assistance from Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, Douglas Johnson of National Right to Life, and representatives from RNC for Life and the American Family Association, the Christian Coalition Contract urged "privatization of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) because we do not view such funding as a proper role for the United States Government." But the Coalition quickly moved to justify its position in terms of the NEA's support for "public funding for obscene art" growing out of the Mapplethorpe-Serrano controversy: "Over the years, the NEA has incurred the anger of individual members of Congress, but it was not until 1989 that the agency became the focus of intense criticism." Their attack on culture also included the CPB and NEH, which was charged with "politicization." The recently released National History Standards were held up as the prime example. (31) The Christian Right's objections to the endowments were now codified in a single document endorsed by the congressional leadership.

In the framework of the Republicans' Contract, elimination was addressed more often as a budgetary -- rather than ideological -- issue. Advocates for culture and education were told that if the nation were ever to achieve a balanced budget, the nation simply could no longer afford the "bloated bureaucracies" of the Department of Education and the cultural endowments. The Department of Education carried the additional onus of inconsistency with the American tradition of local control of education. (32) At this early stage in the dispute it appeared that the three disparate wings of the Republican party -- fiscal conservatives, libertarian advocates of small government, and the cultural and religious right -- were powerfully united in opposition to national cultural and educational activities.

The attack on the NEH took many by surprise when in January 1995 the Senate voted 99 - 1, in a "sense of the Senate resolution," to oppose the National History Standards. Almost immediately the history standards were linked to the NEH as Mapplethorpe was to NEA. And on January 24 William J. Bennett and Lynne Cheney, both former NEH chairs, called for elimination of the NEH in a House committee public hearing. This marked the transition for the NEH to the forefront of the controversy. It was now publicly known that the NEH, along with the NEA, was a target for the Christian Coalition, Heritage Foundation, and Cato Institute and culture wars press coverage now included the humanities as well as the arts. (33)

Lynne Cheney, chairwoman of the NEH from 1986 to 1993, set forward the conservative critique of her former agency in a March 10 New York Times op-ed piece:

Reading the world history standards, one would think that sexism and ethnocentrism arose in the West, when Western civilization has in fact led the way in condemning the unjust treatment of women and encouraging curiosity about other cultures. The American history standards make it seem that Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism (mentioned 19 times) are far more important than George Washington (mentioned twice) or Thomas Edition [sic] (mentioned not at all). So outlandish was the standards' version of history that 99 members of the U.S. Senate voted to denounce them. (34)

Sheldon Hackney, chairman of the NEH at the time, saw the Senate vote against the history standards in an entirely different light. In his view the argument against the standards had been structured in such a way that disagreement with Lynne Cheney and the conservative critics was essentially a "lost cause." In an interview he pointed out that the senators knew that arguing against Cheney was impossible because she described the content in such a way that a vote in favor of the standards was a vote that favored Sojourner Truth over George Washington. "That's really why the Senate voted that way." But the "rapidity and content of the attack floored [the drafters of the History Standards.] They were not ready." (35)

No one in the humanities community was ready for the onslaught. Suddenly the humanities, along with public broadcasting, was cast into the center of the press maelstrom. As in the Mapplethorpe-Serrano controversy five years earlier, the media coverage of the endowments reached fever pitch again, although it had never fully subsided after 1990. (Figure 3) What was new was the involvement of the NEH.

The calls for elimination of the endowments were incessant and they had their intended impact in Congress. The three-year reauthorization that both endowments received in 1990 expired and in 1993 and 1994, in a climate still heated by Mapplethorpe-Serrano, neither the White House nor leaders in Congress had pushed for reauthorization. Continued funding was appropriated on a temporary year-to-year basis, thereby avoiding the all-out confrontation of reauthorization hearings. To the endowments' opponents in the new Congress, this was unacceptable. One of the first pledges made in January as the 104th Congress reorganized was "no appropriations without authorization." And in March, when $5 million appropriated to each agency by the previous Congress was rescinded, arts and humanities advocates felt the first blow to their budgets. But like the strange sense of relief experienced by arts people five years earlier, when the final 1990 appropriation legislation carried a compromise version of the original punitive Helms amendment on obscenity, the $5 million rescission seemed more a relief than an assault. Or, as it was put in a retrospective memo sent to humanities councils: "By March, a lot had happened. We avoided a serious rescission, and the councils were fortunate to take no cut at all. Did we dodge a bullet, or the bullet?" (36) Like the arts advocates who had faced years of vocal attack that threatened their core purposes, now the humanities constituency was grateful for small abuses.

And so amid the press clamor in the winter and spring of 1995, reauthorization hearings were held with friends and opponents testifying. By March advocates were lined up to counter the damaging testimony from opponents such as Cheney and Bennett who spoke in January. Charlton Heston once again testified on behalf of the arts; David McCulloch and Ken Burns were among those favoring the humanities. By May a House committee approved the Goodling/Cunningham bill (named for its chief sponsors, William F. Goodling of Pennsylvania and Randy Cunningham of California) calling for a three-year phase out of the NEH, two years for the NEA, with significant cuts every year leading to "zero" funding.

Chilling as these provisions were to the arts and humanities communities, they at least paved the way for appropriations discussions, which took a tortuous route in the House throughout the summer of 1995. In the Senate the authorization committee headed by Sens. James M. Jeffords (Vermont) and Nancy Kassebaum (Kansas) approved a reauthorization bill proposing a gradual series of cutbacks totaling 20 percent over five years. Varying appropriations proposals in both houses called for everything from "zero" funding to cuts of 20, 40, and 50 percent. The most effective friends of the endowments were moderate Republicans like Jeffords, Kassebaum, and Alan Simpson (Wyoming) in the Senate and Reps. Steve Gunderson (Alaska), Peter J. Torkildsen (Massachusetts), Nancy Johnson (Connecticut), and Marge Roukema (New Jersey), who worked strategically within their own party. In the House Democrats Sidney Yates and Pat Williams (Montana) continued their strong support, as did the ever loyal Claiborne Pell. "Dear Colleague" letters were circulated and trade-offs negotiated, which at times involved funding for the National Biological Survey and the Naval Petroleum Reserve and even the Federal Emergency Relief Agency. In the House the appropriations battle came down to a single up or down vote on what came to be known as the Chabot Amendment (after Steve Chabot from Ohio), which would have eliminated the NEH; the amendment was defeated by a wide majority. According to Jamil Zainaldin, president of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, this was the crucial moment for the NEH. It clearly demonstrated that the House leadership was not willing to "fall on its sword" over the NEA and NEH, nor possibly were a majority of Republicans. (37)

The result in the House was a bill that called for the NEH to receive $99.9 million in 1996 to be phased out in three years. The NEA was to receive a similar amount, but was subject to a two-year phase out and formal reauthorization before it would receive its 1996 funding. The Senate subsequently approved a budget for the NEH of $115 million and $99.9 for the NEA. Finally, in September a House-Senate conference committee reached a compromise of $110 million for the NEH and $99.5 for the NEA.

But this was only the beginning of the end of the story. The federal fiscal year ended on September 30, but by November only three of thirteen appropriations bills had passed Congress and received presidential approval. The Interior appropriations bill, which included the cultural endowments, was among those in limbo. At issue was the Contract with America provision to balance the budget in seven years with the Congressional Budget Office and the Administration's Office of Management and Budget offering differing estimates of annual targets needed to achieve a balanced budget by 2002. As late as March 28, 1996, six months into the fiscal year, Congress was still debating five of the spending bills, dealing with nine cabinet agencies and the District of Columbia. They were eventually melded into a single $160 billion measure covering spending for the last half of the year. (38) Only a series of thirteen "continuing resolutions" or temporary spending agreements between the White House and Congress kept the government functioning at all between October and April, but not without disagreements that led to two federal government shut-downs. Americans felt these most acutely in delays in securing passports and visas and in closed Social Security and Veterans' Affairs offices, but the greatest outrage resulted from the closing of the National Gallery of Art during the international tour of the Vermeer exhibition. Bad press also resulted from the closure of national parks, monuments, and the Smithsonian Institution. And in the end people blamed Speaker Gingrich and the Contract with America.

Finally, on April 25 Congress approved funding for the agencies that had received no appropriation and the endowments were funded at the level agreed to in the conference committee the previous September. The president signed the appropriations and national attention turned to the presidential election. Press coverage of the endowments fell below its 1989 level (39) and, at least in Washington, the NEA and NEH breathed a sigh of relief. Yet each had been dealt a crippling blow: the cut to the NEA budget was 39 percent and to the NEH 36 percent.

Fifteen months later, in July 1997, the crisis began its final phase. On July 10, in a 217-216 vote, the House voted to eliminate the NEA and disperse its remaining budget of $99.5 million to the states. (40) A day later conservatives voted to strip the agency of $10 million in shut-down costs and rejected the provision for distributing the balance to the states; they voted instead for elimination. The unity of the 104th Congress's first 100 days gone, the debate split the Republican party into factions. Ultimately this showdown lead to the defeat of efforts to eliminate the NEA:

The windup to the debate in the House today over the endowments produced passionate speeches from both sides of the issue, a rare floor speech by Speaker Newt Gingrich and an odd circumstance in which warring Republican moderates and conservatives joined forces to defeat the block-grant compromise that Mr. Gingrich had championed.

"We are not going to give the money to aging hippies anymore to desecrate the crucifix or do other strange things," said Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California. . . . Mr. Hunter was one of a number of Republicans who support an amendment offered by Representative Vernon J. Ehlers, a Michigan Republican, to replace the arts agency with a block-grant program.

The Republican leadership had aggressively pushed Mr. Ehler's proposal on Thursday as a compromise to head off a floor fight between moderates and conservatives. . . . Mr. Gingrich was the last to speak on the issue, imploring House members to support "a new approach and a new way of funding the arts at a Federal level." But in the end the block-grant amendment was rejected, 271 to 158. (41)

President Clinton threatened to veto the entire $13 billion Interior Department appropriations bill if funding were not restored to the NEA. The vote to totally eliminate the NEA also faced strong opposition from moderate Republican Sens. Slade Gorton (Washington), Jeffords, and John Warner (Virginia), who held key positions. In the fall the NEA emerged from a House-Senate conference committee with a $98 million for 1998.

At the same time -- July 1997 -- efforts in the House to eliminate the NEH failed by a voice vote. NEH Chairman Hackney had known the crisis was over for the NEH a few months earlier "when the NEH was reported out of [Ohio Rep. Ralph] Regula's [appropriations] subcommittee with $110 and the NEA $0, [and] a reporter from the DC Times asked Regula why and he replied, 'Nobody's telling me they're doing terrible things.'" (42)

For the NEA it took a year longer. On June 26, 1998 the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, "The NEA found unexpected support Thursday on the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee, which reversed an earlier decision by one of its subcommittees to eliminate financing the agency next year."

The cultural endowments are badly hobbled but cautiously optimistic after their struggles against elimination. Their budgets have not recovered their pre-1994 level and there is little immediate prospect for such. Both agencies underwent massive layoffs and major program restructuring in the wake of the 1995 assault. Their ability to support large national projects, individual artists and scholars, and -- in this year's appropriations language for the NEA -- grants to New York cultural institutions are now curtailed. The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the NEA's 1990 "decency clause." But looking toward the future, both agencies are now headed by respected intellectuals with strong roots in Southern and heartland culture, who are expected to be able to bridge the chasm between the opposing sides in the culture wars. William J. Ivey, chairman of the NEA, was formerly director of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville, a research and educational institution. (43) NEH chairman William E. Ferris, Jr., a folklorist, was founding director of the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

The Leadership Issues

At the time of their founding the endowments were championed by a powerful group of bipartisan leaders: Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller, and a group of influential senators and congressmen. Richard Nixon, never a friend of the endowments, nevertheless found political advantage in their support. At the urging of Leonard Garment, his "arts loving saxophone playing legal aide," he oversaw substantial increases in the endowments budgets -- at least until his 1972 nomination was secure. (44) Also under Nixon (although credit for them must go to Claiborne Pell) the state humanities councils were organized, expanding public programs in the humanities to local communities through relatively modest grants to the states -- and, not incidentally, building a political base for the humanities in local communities. (45) Budget growth continued during the Carter Administration accompanied by a number of initiatives at both endowments that extended the reach of the arts and humanities to minority communities and other nontraditional audiences.

With the election of Ronald Reagan, however, the dynamic shifted. Critics at the time made their arguments on political grounds that opposed the expansion of arts and humanities programs to traditionally Democratic constituencies. The Heritage Foundation report prepared at the time of Reagan's election decried the NEA's Expansion Arts Program (described in the endowment's 1979 annual report as "a point of entry for developing groups that are established in and reflect the culture of minority, blue collar, rural and low-income communities") as an example of the dilution of aesthetic standards. The NEH was lambasted for sacrificing "scholarly excellence" in favor of "political" projects that did not properly belong "in the realm of humanities." A 1980 grant of $199,953 to a group called the Working Women: National Association of Office Workers, which held classes and film forums on the struggle of office workers for improved conditions, was criticized as an example of the politicization of the humanities with "populist" or "social action" programs considered to have little scholarly merit.

Ironically -- in terms of later charges of elitism against the endowments -- those involved in crafting the Heritage Foundation critique were proponents of elite culture. Their interest in limiting endowment expenditures in nontraditional areas coincided with Republican political objectives. The report on the arts endowment, written by Samuel Lipman, a concert pianist and music critic for Commentary magazine, assisted by Hugo Weisgall, a composer and professor of music at Queens College, was particularly telling on this point, as reported in the New York Times:

"Because the current direction of the NEA is in the hands of those with few esthetic commitments and less discernment, art is increasingly seen as mere entertainment, a diversion whose importance -- and the amount of money it receives -- is measured by the number of people who can be found to make up its audience." Deploring what it calls "a flawed conception of art" and the "trifling sums" now allocated for individual composers, writers and visual artists, the report goes on to say that "the NEA spends millions of dollars yearly to fund programs and policies which are unconcerned in any way with enduring artistic accomplishments; the best of these projects do no more than fossilize the popular culture of the past, and the worst are little more than high-flown welfare and employment schemes." It calls for a categorical distinction to be made between "serious art" and what it characterizes as "art for the sake of social service." (46)

However, it was not until the Mapplethorpe-Serrano controversy, when the religious Right joined the political Right, that criticism of the NEA captured national attention.

But the 1980s criticism took its toll in terms of leadership. With Reagan budget growth for the endowments was no longer championed by the president, and by 1989 the endowments relied ever more heavily on their friends in Congress, primarily Claiborne Pell and James Jeffords in the Senate and Sidney Yates and Pat Williams in the House. (Frank Thompson and John Brademas left Congress in the 1980 and 1981, respectively.) With this change in leadership and increasing criticism during the Reagan administration, by 1989 the endowments were vulnerable and were subjected to furious press coverage -- much of which was negative and broadened to encompass the whole country.

Figure 3 documents the number of articles on either the NEA or NEH appearing in major newspapers for the twenty-year period since the late 1970s, showing the rise and fall of their public visibility coinciding with the major assaults on the agencies by conservative activists. Most articles in the late 1970s and 1980s were carried in the Washington Post or the New York Times; modest increases in coverage are registered for 1981 and again 1985, when early budget cutting efforts were initiated. But in 1989-90 with Mapplethorpe-Serrano, the number of articles skyrocketed and expanded to include newspapers across the country. The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, St. Petersburg Times, Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle, Orange County Register, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Chicago Tribune, San Diego Union-Tribune, Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), and Christian Science Monitor regularly covered the controversy. In the early 1990s the number of articles moderated slightly but never again dipped to the nearly invisible levels that the endowments had earlier enjoyed. Coverage by newspapers throughout the country became regular; no longer was the fate of the endowments presumed to be of interest only to the readers of the Washington Post and the New York Times. The content of the coverage also changed. Earlier debates over budget growth, quality, and politicization of the endowments were replaced by appeals to emotion in the charges of pornography and attacks on the cultural elite. A June 1989 Washington Times editorial by Patrick Buchanan, founder of the Christian Coalition, was a clarion call for what would become the culture wars of the 1990s:

The decade has seen an explosion of anti-American, anti-Christian, and nihilist "art." . . . [Many museums] now feature exhibits that can best be described as cultural trash . . . as in public television and public radio, a tiny clique, out of touch with America's traditional values, has wormed its way into control of the arts bureaucracy. . . . As with our rivers and lakes, we need to clean up our culture: for it is a well from which we must all drink. Just as a poisoned land will yield up poisonous fruits, so a polluted culture, left to fester and stink, can destroy a nation's soul. . . . . We should not subsidize decadence. (47)

Participants were forced to take sides in an all-or-nothing, winner-take-all conflict that was largely fought in the media. Citizen outrage expressed to members of Congress was the ammunition and budget cuts to the cultural endowments were the spoils of war. The mediated nature of virtually all communication on the issues put rational argument at a disadvantage. Simplification and emotionalism on the part of the opponents were more powerful and effective than the defenders' appeals to free speech and "good news" stories about the agencies' many successes. A comparison between Figures 2 and 3 shows that public criticism of the endowments has always been an effective tool for opponents: as press coverage increased, the endowments' budgets declined over the past twenty years. Nervous members of Congress counted the postcards, telephone calls, and letters from constituents as harbingers of public sentiment, but in the end news coverage meant criticism, which translated into fewer cultural dollars.

In the most recent controversy, support for the endowments from elected leaders was badly compromised by the newly empowered conservative Republicans emboldened by the power of the religious Right. Stalwarts such as Yates, Pell, and Pat Williams continued to support the endowments, but their help was often behind the scenes and subject to the vagaries of an uncertain political landscape. Republicans too were at a disadvantage, their power circumscribed by the fervor of the new conservative Republican majority. Other leaders, including the president, seemed more inclined to wait and watch, choosing their moments for action very carefully.

Nevertheless and at the most important level the political process worked. Despite the extreme rhetoric and distortions that characterized much of the press coverage, within Congress the endowments received their hearing. Part of it might be attributable to a continuing culture of civility within Congress itself. For example, some believe that this year's failure to carry through on plans to eliminate the NEA was testimony to the respect many members of Congress feel toward long-time arts advocate Sidney Yates, who is retiring this term. (48) And Zainaldin saw a sense of fair play at work in Ralph Regula's handling of his appropriations subcommittee hearings in 1995. "I think Regula had made a decision that he was not going to let the NEA and NEH go down without a public hearing, which allowed for a bigger debate to take place." Zainaldin found that Regula, while maintaining his loyalty to the Republican leadership and while he had many "bones to pick" with both endowments, made sure that Yates, who was on the committee -- and through him other supporters -- were allowed to make their case. In so doing he let the public debate move forward, allowing the political process to work. Regula, according to Zainaldin, "played a high-minded role. He was civil." (49)

In the end a real national conversation on the arts and humanities took place between and among members of Congress and their constituencies. Unlike in the past, leadership came not from highly placed elected officials but rather from vocal conservatives outside of government -- Ralph Reed, the Reverend Donald Wildmon, Lynne Cheney and William J. Bennett. Cultural advocates relied on a network of organizational leaders (the American Arts Alliance, American Council for the Arts, American Association of Museums, American Council of Learned Societies, Federation of State Humanities Councils, National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, National Association of Local Arts Agencies, National Humanities Alliance, to name a few) but looked principally to NEA Chair Jane Alexander and NEH Chair Sheldon Hackney for personal leadership.

Hackney's approach was decidedly lowkey. In countless speeches and meetings he articulated rebuttals to the libertarian argument by describing important projects of national scope that would not have been possible without the NEH. At the same time, he stayed out of the headlines by avoiding a direct show-down with the religious Right: "the more of that [high-profile confrontation] I was seen doing, the less chance the NEH had of surviving," he stated in an interview. Distinguished and respected, he was effective in forging important ties with Republican Senators Mark Hatfield (Oregon), Slade Gorton, James Jeffords, Robert Bennett and Nancy Kassebaum. (50) His was a leadership that sought consensus rather than polarization. Through his efforts the often antagonistic entities within the humanities community learned to be mutually supportive. Characteristically, he believes that in the end the "real thing that worked" was the outpouring of citizen support for the endowments through letters, telephone calls, faxes, and telegrams to members of Congress throughout the country, demonstrating that the endowments were providing solid programs that were valued by millions of Americans.

Jamil Zainaldin, of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, seconded Hackney's conclusion on the value of grass roots advocacy. He also gives credit to another sort of quiet leadership: effective lobbying by influential citizens, particularly on behalf of the arts, which has a constituency that includes prominent board members of major cultural organizations. He credits Jane Alexander's visits to every state and more than two hundred local communities, where she spoke about the arts with great "integrity" and from the "soul," with mobilizing influential Republican supporters. Grass roots proponents also pressured their members of Congress, often in alliance with influential board members and business leaders. (51)

Grass roots advocacy was perhaps most effective with members of Congress from rural areas, whose constituents had benefited from many state humanities council programs. "The combined effect of arts and humanities advocacy at the grass roots and through powerful constituencies and the diplomacy of Hackney and Alexander was," according to Zainaldin," to win over some Republicans whose conservative credentials were impeccable -- Thad Cochran (Mississippi), Slade Gorton, Nancy Kassebaum, and Robert Bennett." This, in turn isolated the most radical conservatives in their opposition to the endowments. What was proved was that the majority of Americans, while nervous, did not buy the elimination of the endowments. "Most people," according to Zainaldin, "are pretty tolerant if they think a problem is an exception to the rule, if they can see the big picture." (52)

But that was certainly not the view shared at the time by the leaders of the endowments' defense. Rather, they feared that the Republican leadership would work very hard for the abolition of the endowments to keep their most conservative members happy. Balancing the unstable elements within the Republican coalition -- traditional economic conservatives, libertarian small government advocates, and the cultural/religious Right -- was the central GOP leadership problem. (53) The fact that the endowments survived at all is testimony not only to the cultural advocates' leadership skills, but also to moderate Republicans' ability to assert their influence within the party.

The years between the founding of the endowments and the conservative assault saw dramatic shifts in the position of the arts and humanities in America. Born out of a Cold War and Great Society ethos that trumpeted American achievement in the arts and scholarship as a point of national pride, by the 1990s critics charged artists and scholars with being destructive of the American family and un-American; the endowments, as their federally funded standard bearers, had to be abolished for the good of the country. Cultural advocates, forced to defend themselves, truly became politicized; they turned to their allies in communities and institutions and marshaled public and Congressional support for their survival. Deeply affected by the debate, cultural advocates are wary now. They have learned to live with lower budgets and in the public eye, self-censoring and careful to avoid public controversy. (54) But many also learned the importance of funding and delivering programs that have meaning and value for Americans in all their geographic and demographic diversity.

Is the conflict over? Probably not. Doctrinaire conservative opinion makers continue to oppose the endowments as evidenced on the websites of the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Family Research Council -- all of which continue to carry position statements advocating the abolition of the endowments in the summer of 1998. And in a highly publicized meeting arranged last March by James Dodson, the Colorado religious broadcaster whose "Focus on the Family" radio broadcasts reach millions, Speaker Newt Gingrich met with Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed and secured the speaker's commitment -- against a threat by the religious Right to abandon the party -- that the Republican party would press three initiatives important to Christian conservatives: the religious freedom amendment, which Christian conservatives hope would reintroduce prayer in the schools; tax deferrals for tuition at religious and private schools; and elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts. (55) For the most part, opposition to the NEH seems to have once again receded to the background, while opposition to the NEA on "family values" grounds continues -- as it has since the Mapplethorpe-Serrano controversy -- to animate opposition from the religious Right.

But there are encouraging signs in the middle, which may well represent the enduring victory of the culture wars. A rancorous and emotional public debate that was started by radical conservatives with the goal of damaging the cultural endowments may ultimately prove to have strengthened them. Because, in the contest for the endowments' survival, members of Congress heard from citizens across the country about support for the arts and humanities and learned that culture is no longer the province of the few. The president listened, and whether from political instinct or personal preference, appointed endowments chairmen whose scholarly and artistic specialties reflect the broad interests of Americans whose culture has long been considered outside the province of high art and serious scholarship.

No longer championed unquestioningly by presidents and powerful friends in Congress, the endowments in the past decade have been the subject of a national debate centered around their value in American society. The debate has been messy, as politics always are, but the result has been a demonstration that culture in America has many faces. It has strong roots in local communities and in a variety of artistic and intellectual traditions. The Christian conservatives may never be satisfied; but in the contest for control of American culture, the endowments, albeit battle scarred and perhaps chastened, can take heart in the knowledge that their right to exist has been proved in Congress and in the court of public opinion.

What that signifies is enormous. It means that the most extreme charges have been put aside and that there is a bi-partisan consensus -- very likely for the first time since the endowments' founding -- for a legitimate role for the federal government in the support of American culture. Charges of elitism and domination by East Coast intellectuals and moneyed interests simply did not hold up under public scrutiny when arts and humanities organizations from across the country demonstrated that local communities in Kansas and Utah, Washington, and Mississippi value the federal agencies.

It also means that the new leadership of the endowments have an unparalleled opportunity. For the past decade millions of Americans have engaged in a national conversation in defense of the arts and humanities. Now is the time to keep that conversation going by involving an even greater number of Americans from all walks of life in exploring the world of ideas. If this is accomplished the NEA and the NEH can look forward to playing an even more important role in our national life in the decades to come.

Endnotes

I am grateful to former NEH Chairman Sheldon Hackney and Jamil Zainaldin, former president of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, both of whom were interviewed for this paper and guided me with their comments on the first draft. Also Esther Mackintosh, associate director of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, and Judith Tannenbaum, associate director and senior curator of the Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, graciously answered my questions and provided me with useful information. I also thank Steve Cherrington at the NEH and Aaron Fineman at the NEA for supplying budget information. Ann Young Orr at the NEH was also very helpful.

(1) Jerry Gray, "House 217 to 216, Votes to Replace Arts Agency with Grants to States," New York Times, 11 July 1998, p. A15.

(2) Peter J. Gomes, "The New Liberation Theology," 99, no. 2 Harvard Magazine (November-December 1996): 35.

(3) Figures compiled from budget information provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts; 1997 population statistics from the Agency for International Development; "Pop Grants Unsettle British Arts," New York Times, 25 June 1998, p. E-7; and information on philanthropy from Creative America: A Report to the President (Washington, D.C.: President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, 1997), p. 19.

(4) J.C. Taylor, "A Poignant, Relevant Backward Look at Artists of the Great Depression," Smithsonian, 10, no. 7 (October 1979): 52 as quoted in Fannie Taylor and Anthony L. Barresi, The Arts at a New Frontier: The National Endowment for the Arts (New York: Plenum Publishing Corp., 1984), p. 10.

(5) In early 1937, Rep. William I. Sirovitch of New York offered a joint resolution that called for a Department of Science, Art and Literature, whose head would carry Cabinet level rank. In August of the same year Rep. John M. Coffee of Washington introduced a bill calling for the establishment of a Bureau of Fine Arts, with a Commissioner appointed by the President, directors responsible for six fields of artistic endeavor, and a system of four regional bureaus. In January 1938 Claude Pepper introduced Coffee's bill in the Senate, and the measure received consideration, but failed to pass. Taylor and Barresi, Arts, pp. 10-11. I am indebted to Taylor and Barresi, chapters 1-2, for much of the historical information on the founding and early history of the NEA.

(6) This sequence of events is described in Taylor and Barresi, Arts, p. 13.

(7) R. W. Apple, Jr., "Elected Bodies With Hardly a Cultured Bone," New York Times, 26 July 1998, p. AR2:2 describes politicians' reluctance to be involved with the arts and Jacqueline Kennedy's role in encouraging JFK's interest; other historical information from Taylor and Barresi, Arts, p. 26-29.

(8) Taylor and Barresi, Arts, pp. 41, 42, 50.

(9) Ibid., p. 32.

(10) Ibid., p. 34.

(11) Joseph McLellan, "NEA: The First 20 Years; Looking Back On the Up-and-Down Union of Government and Art," Washington Post, 26 September 1985, p. D1.

(12) Hilton Kramer, "Reagan Aides Discuss U.S. Role In Helping Arts And Humanities," New York Times, 26 November 1980, p. 1.

(13) Carla Hall, "Reagan and the Endowments; Early Optimism from the Transition-Team Leaders, But an Uncertain Future for Federal Arts Funding," Washington Post, 23 November 1980, p. G1.

(14) Kramer, New York Times, 26 November 1980, p. 1.

(15) Selected results from Lexis-Nexis search of major newspaper coverage of NEA and NEH for 1980.

(16) McLellan, Washington Post, 26 September 1985, p. D1.

(17) Budget figures supplied by National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities.

(18) Adjustments for inflation supplied by the NEH.

(19) McLellan, Washington Post, 26 September 1985, p. D1.

(20) Carole S. Vance, "The War on Culture," Art in America (September 1989), reprinted in Richard Bolton, ed., Culture Wars: Documents from Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New Press, 1992), p. 106.

(21) Ibid., p. 107.

(22) Ibid.

(23) Information on the Citizens for Community Values received from their website, July 1998. The outcome of the Barrie trial is stated in Judith Tannenbaum, "Robert Mapplethorpe: The Philadelphia Story," Art Journal (Winter 1991), pp. 73-74. The American Association of Museums scheduled an emergency session at its 1990 annual meeting to hear from Board members and Dennis Barrie of the Contemporary Arts Center.

(24) "NEA Chronology," Christian Science Monitor, 6 August 1993, p. 13.

(25) Tannenbaum, "Robert Mapplethorpe," p. 74.

(26) Ibid.

(27) National Endowment for the Arts et al. v. Finley, 000 U.S. 97-371 (1998).

(28) Contract with America: The Bold Plan by Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. Dick Armey, and the House Republicans to the Change the Nation, ed. Ed Gillespie and Bob Schellhas (New York: Times Books, 1994), p. 7.

(29) There is some uncertainty about inclusion of the endowments in the Contract with America. Sheldon Hackney and Ann Young Orr, now chief of staff at the NEH, recall the outright elimination of the two endowments as appearing in the appendix of the originalContract in circulation in the fall of 1994. The published version cited above makes no mention of the endowments. Jamil Zainaldin believes the appendices were never clear, but recalls that the original Contract contained a provision in an appendix to reduce funding to the endowments by 5 percent a year for the next three years. In the weeks between the election and the swearing in of the new Congress in January, he believes those provisions were eclipsed by the drive for elimination. He identified William J. Bennett and Lynne Cheney as activists promoting this shift.

(30) Contract with the American Family: A Bold Plan by Christian Coalition to Strengthen the Family and Restore Common-Sense Values, intro. Ralph Reed (Nashville: Moorings, 1995), pp. 105-15.

(31) Contract with the American Family, pp. 110-11.

(32) I am indebted to Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the American Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), pp. 218-19 for their analysis of the connections between conservative opposition to Goals 2000 and the cultural endowments.

(33) Jamil Zainaldin, "Chronology of 1995 Legislative Activities," report delivered to the National Conference of State Humanities Councils, September 10, 1995.

(34) Lynne V. Cheney, "Mocking American at U.S. Expense," New York Times, 10 March 1995, p. 29.

(35) Interview with Sheldon Hackney, March 11, 1998.

(36) Zainaldin, "Chronology."

(37) Interview with Jamil Zainaldin, September 21, 1998.

(38) "Latest Federal Shutdown Threat Lacks Crisis Atmosphere," New York Times, p. 11.

(39) See Figure 3.

(40) Jerry Gray, "House 217 to 216 Votes to Replace Arts Agency with Grants to the States," New York Times, 11 July 1997, p. A15.

(41) Jerry Gray, "House Votes End of Federal Funding for Arts Agency," New York Times, 12 July 1997, p. 1.

(42) Interview with Sheldon Hackney, March 11, 1998.

(43) Melinda Henneberger, "Something Different at the Arts Endowment: Optimism," New York Times, 30 August 1998, p. 16 reports on new signs of support for the NEA. Reps. Dick Armey and Jesse Helms were reportedly favorably impressed by Ivey's ties to country music.

(44) Apple, New York Times, 26 July 1998, p. AR2:26 and personal correspondence with Sheldon Hackney, September 30, 1998.

(45) State humanities councils have a distinctly separate history from the arts councils, which came into being as state arts agencies in 1966. Enabling legislation for the humanities councils was spearheaded by Claiborne Pell in the early 1970s.

(46) Kramer, New York Times, 26 November 1980, p. 1.

(47) Vance, "The War on Culture," p. 109.

(48) Henneberger, New York Times, 30 August 1998, p. 16.

(49) Interview with Jamil Zainaldin, September 21, 1998.

(50) Ibid.

(51) Henneberger, New York Times, 30 August 1998, p. 16.

(52) Interviews with Jamil Zainaldin, March 5, 1998 and September 21, 1998.

(53) Personal correspondence with Sheldon Hackney, September 30, 1998.

(54) Interview with Judith Tannenbaum, June 30, 1998.

(55) "Religious Right, Frustrated, Trying New Tactic on the GOP," New York Times, 23 March 1998, p. 1.

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CONSERVATIVE THINKING AND RACISM -- JESSE HELMS


http://clclt.com/theclog/archives/2008/07/07/top-ten-quotes-from-jesse-helms

Top Ten Quotes From Jesse Helms
Posted By John Grooms on Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 10:45 AM


1. "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." - Ad created by campaign strategist Helms and friends for the blatantly racist (and successful) U.S. Senate campaign of Willis Smith in 1950. During the same campaign, Helms described UNC as "the University of Negroes and Communists."

2. "I didn't see any point in a naked man cavorting around on the stage." - Jesse giving his learned opinion on, and opposition to, a Charlotte Repertory Theatre production of Angels In America.

3."The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights."

4. "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced." - Helms responses in TV editorials at WRAL-TV in Raleigh during the Civil Rights movement, which he also described as filled with "moral degenerates."

5. "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries." - Said to US Sen. Orrin Hatch about Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, an African-American.

6. "The government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct."

7. "Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that CANNIBALISM, WIFE-SWAPPING, and the MURDER of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior." - Included in fundraising letter sent by the Helms campaign in 1996.

8. "The [Washington] Post caters to homosexual groups. Just about every person down there is homosexual or lesbian."

9. "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard." - In response to a question about a possible visit by President Clinton to Fort Bragg.

10. During his career, Helms supported brutal rightwing military dictators, including the notorious Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador. When confronted with irrefutable evidence that D'Aubuisson directed Salvadoran death squads that murdered thousands of civilians, Helms replied, "All I know is D'Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious."

Tomorrow: Top Ten Quotes About Jesse Helms.


GOOD EVENING TO YOU ALL. 9:31 PM, BY LMW.