A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Chapter 5

 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[With the chairmanship of Frank Hodsoll (1938-2016) from 1981 to 1989, recounted here, the Arts Endowment struck some turbulence during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  It was a precursor to the really troubled waters of political controversy that followed.

[As I have suggested since I began this series, I urge readers who are just joining this thread to go back to 5 November and read the first installment of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” and the following Chapters 2 through 4, posted on 8, 11, and 14 November, before trying to make sense of Chapter 5 below.] 

“NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS: A HISTORY, 1965-2008”
edited by Mark Bauerlein with Ellen Grantham
(National Endowment for the Arts, 2009) 

p a r t  I

The HISTORY of the NEA

 

 chapter 5

The Reagan Era

The election of President Reagan in 1980 brought a different philosophy to the federal government, and initially, many in the new Administration questioned the propriety and expense of a public agency funding the arts. The NEA’s next chairman, Frank Hodsoll, faced a number of challenges, including a funding cut. By the end of his second term in 1989, however, the NEA emerged with a budget increased to $169 million [$356.8 million in 2023]. Important new initiatives such as the American Jazz Master Fellowship—now known as NEA Jazz Masters—and the National Medal of Arts were created, and the agency assumed the mantle of leadership in arts education. At the same time, and deriving primarily from Hodsoll’s background in government and public policy, the Arts Endowment focused on building infrastructures and support networks for the arts, cultivating new audiences, and fostering sustainability among arts organizations.

Hodsoll came to the Arts Endowment from the staff of the Reagan White House. [He was deputy to White House Chief of Staff James Baker.] With a background as a lawyer and U.S. Army officer, and with 14 years in the Foreign Service, he had joined his friend James A. Baker III in the Reagan election campaign. While working on the campaign, Hodsoll was asked to look into the reasons why Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director David Stockman was trying to “zero out”—completely abolish—the NEA.

[Baker (b. 1930) served as White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004; 40th President of the United States: 1981-89). He later served as Secretary of State under President George H. W. Bush (1924-2018; 41st President of the United States: 1989-93) before returning as Bush’s White House Chief of Staff.

[According to Wikipedia, Baker wasn’t part of Reagan’s 1980 presidential-primary campaign staff; he was Bush’s campaign manager in that race.  Bush became Reagan’s vice-presidential running mate for the successful general-election campaign, and Baker was appointed Reagan’s first chief of staff.

[Stockman (b. 1946), OMB director from 1981 to 1985, was a committed supply-sider (which he said was really the same as “trickle-down” economics with a nicer name) for whose budget strategy “zero out” was the watch word.  Atlantic magazine reported that “it meant closing down a program ‘cold turkey,’ in one budget year,” and it requited that grants for the arts and humanities be cut in half.]

Interviewed almost a quarter-century later, Hodsoll recalled that, at the time, he barely knew what the NEA was or why it was targeted for elimination. As it happened, the matter was an early expression of the “culture war” between liberals and conservatives that was then emerging in American life. A former U.S. Representative, David Stockman viewed the NEA as one of many examples of the federal government’s excessive influence in public life. Inheriting a sluggish economy and a large federal deficit, Stockman was looking for programs to cut in order to restrict the size of the federal government.

The first indicators of the new Administration’s direction were not promising. Under the alarming headline, “Pages from Budget Director Stockman’s ‘Black Book’” (Washington Post, February 8,1981), a story appeared with the following notes and comments about a proposed 50 percent budget cut: “Reductions of this magnitude are premised on the notion that the Administration should completely revamp federal policy for arts and humanities support. For too long, the Endowments have spread federal financing into an ever-wider range of artistic and literary endeavor, promoting the notion that the federal government should be the financial patron and first resort for both individuals and institutions engaged in artistic and literary pursuits. This policy has resulted in a reduction in the historic role of private individual and corporate philanthropic support in these key areas.” The Reagan Administration had to consider whether arts funding should continue at existing levels when cuts were to be made in welfare and other social programs.

Initially, Livingston Biddle bore the responsibility of defending the Arts Endowment, but for the most part, Hodsoll led the fight in the Reagan White House. Reagan was not strongly motivated to abolish the Endowments. As an actor himself, the President had many friends in the arts, including Charlton Heston, Reagan’s successor as president of the Screen Actors Guild and an early member of the National Council on the Arts. In addition, the Heritage Foundation, an intellectual redoubt of the Reagan revolution, in its first Mandate for Leadership volume (1980), endorsed the purposes of the Arts and Humanities Endowments, while urging greater adherence to those purposes and better management of Endowment programs.

In response, the Reagan White House established a presidential task force to study whether the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities should continue. Headed by Hannah H. Gray, president of the University of Chicago; Daniel J. Terra, art collector and ambassador-at-large for cultural affairs; and Charlton Heston, the task force held hearings and ultimately recommended keeping the Endowments alive and well funded. In accepting the report of the task force, President Reagan pointed out that the two Endowments, beginning in 1965, “account[ed] for only 10 percent of the donations to the arts and scholarship. Nonetheless, they have served an important role in catalyzing additional private support, assisting excellence in arts and letters, and helping to assure the availability of arts and scholarship.” The task force eventually became the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, established by Executive Order in 1982.

Hodsoll asked to be considered for the chairmanship of the Arts Endowment. “Everyone said I was nuts,” he later recalled, as President Reagan agreed to name him NEA chairman. Frank Hodsoll was sworn in as the fourth Arts Endowment chairman by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger on November 13, 1981, with the three former NEA chairmen—Roger Stevens, Nancy Hanks, and Livingston Biddle—present at the ceremony. By the time he assumed the post in November 1981, however, a number of discipline directors had resigned. Hodsoll had ample opportunity to reappoint existing program directors or select new ones.

Hodsoll expressed optimism about his mission. In 1981, the final year of the Biddle chairmanship, the NEA’s budget rose to nearly $160 million [$510 million today]. The following year Hodsoll had to contend with a cut of 10 percent, to $143.5 million [$413 million] in 1982—the first budget cut in the Arts Endowment’s history—but the reduction was far less than the 50 percent proposed by Stockman, and more favorable momentum was gathering. “The arts in America are alive and well,” Hodsoll wrote. “Our country continues to have the greatest variety of excellence of any country in the world. There are dozens of regional theaters . . . there are painters and sculptors everywhere. Post-modern architecture begins here. [There is] a greater variety of first-class orchestras than in any other single country. We are a world center for ballet and modern dance. There are great museums. And artists from around the world continue to flock to this country. This is a tribute to the nation.”

The NEA Jazz Masters Program

The year 1982 saw the inauguration of one of the NEA’s most significant programs, the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship, a lifetime achievement award honoring outstanding exponents of an art form that is undeniably unique in its American origins and character. The award was conceived in April 1980 when Aida Chapman, then assistant director of Music, wrote a position paper in which she posed several ideas for honoring the jazz field, including establishing a Jazz Hall of Fame. By the time the NEA acted, it was 1982 and the first NEA Jazz Masters Fellowships were awarded under Adrian Gnam’s leadership as director of Music.

The first trio of NEA Jazz Masters, named in 1982, represented distinct traditions and levels of experimentation in music: Roy Eldridge (1911-89), Sun Ra (1914-93), and Dizzy Gillespie (1917-93). Eldridge, a trumpeter, was a leading representative of the transitional generation between Louis Armstrong’s Dixieland, the big-band era, and the bebop style. Eldridge had played in the Teddy Hill band with saxophonist Leon “Chu” Berry, a brilliant performer whose career ended when he died in a car accident at age 33.

Sun Ra, originally known as Herman “Sonny” Blount, was a remarkable innovator famous for his cosmic spirituality and “space alien” persona, as well as his startling improvisations and pioneering use of electronic music. He moved from issuing and selling his own albums in the 1950s to producing a multimedia show, the Sun Ra Arkestra, which included singers, dancers, martial artists, film, and original costumes. John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was an authentic giant of the bebop era; he and Charlie “Bird” Parker were its two leading figures. The impact of Gillespie’s innovations is heard in the work of every jazz trumpeter who followed him, and his compositions have been played and replayed. In the 1940s, Gillespie formed a big band, and fellow musicians included such future stars as Yusef Lateef and John Coltrane; his rhythm section brought together John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke, and Ray Brown. The latter four went on to organize the Modern Jazz Quartet, and all were later selected as NEA Jazz Masters.

In the years that followed, the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship became America’s most prestigious honor in the field. In 1991, when jazz biographer D. Antoinette Handy was Music director, the NEA enhanced the program by having the recipients collect their award during a concert ceremony. The first ceremony was held at the Sheraton Hotel in Washington, DC, with support from Chevron (USA) and the Yamaha Music Corporation. The events were coordinated by the Charlin Jazz Society in conjunction with the 18th Annual International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE) conference, and the evening celebrated all 27 previous NEA Jazz Masters along with four new inductees: Danny Barker, Buck Clayton, Andy Kirk, and Clark Terry. Wynton Marsalis served as master of ceremonies.

In 2008, Arts Endowment Chairman Dana Gioia noted with satisfaction that in the 26 years since the NEA Jazz Masters program began, not only has the award’s prestige grown, but also the individual stipend has reached $25,000 [$34,600], and the number of awards given each year has risen from three to six. One of these awards, the A. B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy, named for the veteran agency official and jazz historian, is presented to a non-performing jazz advocate who has made major contributions to the field. Cultural critic Nat Hentoff received the first NEA jazz advocate award in 2004.

Since 1982, the NEA Jazz Masters award has encompassed outstanding talents across the generational span, from Count Basie to Cecil Taylor, from Ahmad Jamal to Dave Brubeck, from Ella Fitzgerald to Tony Bennett. The extraordinary variety of jazz idioms reflected what A. B. Spellman called “the old jazz principle that ‘you’ve got to make it new.’” For many years, the NEA Jazz Masters award had been presented at a concert held during the annual conference of IAJE. Working with Jazz at Lincoln Center, and with funding from the Verizon Foundation, the NEA also produced an online curriculum for high school students called NEA Jazz in the Schools.

National Medal of Arts Established

In 1984, President Reagan signed legislation establishing the National Medal of Arts as the nation’s highest award to artists and art patrons. This presidential award was destined, like other NEA honors, to become a hallmark of American creative excellence. Drawing from nominations by private citizens, members of Congress, and arts groups, the National Council on the Arts makes recommendations and submits them to the President.

The medal itself was designed by sculptor Robert Graham following a public competition. The National Medal of Arts was first presented at a White House luncheon on April 23, 1985. The first set of recipients included a stellar group of American artists and patrons:

• Elliott Carter, composer
• Ralph Ellison, novelist
• José Ferrer, actor
• Martha Graham, dancer and choreographer
• Lincoln Kirstein, dance impresario
• Louise Nevelson, sculptor
• Georgia O’Keeffe, painter
• Leontyne Price, opera singer
• Dorothy Chandler, patron
• Alice Tully, patron
• Paul Mellon, patron
 

Another recipient was not an individual, but a corporation, Hallmark Cards, Inc., for its longstanding support of the arts.

National Medal of Arts recipients in the second Reagan Administration included film directors Frank Capra and Gordon Parks, composers Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, painters Willem de Kooning and Romare Bearden, choreographers Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins, folklorist Alan Lomax, philosopher and critic Lewis Mumford, fiction writers Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow, and poets Howard Nemerov and Robert Penn Warren—a constellation of the nation’s most creative talents.

Twentieth Anniversary

In 1985, the NEA celebrated its twentieth anniversary. On March 25, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded a special Oscar to the NEA for its service to the arts, and six months later, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded the Arts Endowment an Emmy. Frank Hodsoll was renominated as NEA chairman, and President Reagan declared September 23-29 of that year National Arts Week. First Lady Nancy Reagan served as honorary chairman of the Twentieth Anniversary Committee, headed by Charlton Heston. Widespread public support for the Arts Endowment was manifested in more than 800 NEA anniversary events around the country. Additionally, the NEA’s budget rose to $164.7 million [$412.9 million].

As another marker of its twentieth anniversary, the Arts Endowment sponsored Buying Time, edited by Scott Walker, an anthology of work by recipients of the NEA Literature Fellowships over the years. Published by Graywolf Press in St. Paul, Minnesota, the volume comprised an anthology of America’s best poets and short-story writers. The poets in Buying Time included John Ashbery, John Berryman, Louise Bogan, Lucille Clifton, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Galway Kinnell, Etheridge Knight, Stanley Kunitz, Philip Levine, W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Rexroth, Muriel Rukeyser, May Sarton, and Charles Wright. Fiction was represented by Paul Bowles, Raymond Carver, Louise Erdrich, John Gardner, John Hawkes, Maxine Hong Kingston, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Tobias Wolff. The playwriting section featured the work of Maria Irene Fornes. It was an extraordinary roster of literary talent and a fitting tribute to two decades of NEA support of literature.

Grant Patterns Continue

At the onset of the Reagan Administration, the NEA’s grants, based on peer review, generally followed the patterns previously established. Many of the same institutions continued to appear on lists of grantees, prompting concern about the rigor—or lack of it—in the application review process.

Determined to ensure that the panels forwarded only artistically worthy applications for funding, Chairman Hodsoll personally reviewed hundreds of applications, including supporting materials and panel notes. Applications which he believed failed to meet the standard of artistic excellence, lacked adequate support for funding, or raised policy issues were selected for additional review and discussion by the National Council on the Arts at its quarterly meetings. In some instances, a majority of council members agreed with the chairman’s judgment and recommended that the applications be rejected. In accordance with the NEA legislation, Chairman Hodsoll made the decisions himself, after considering the recommendations from panels and the National Council on the Arts.

Hodsoll was assisted in this regard by Associate Deputy Chairman for Programs Ruth Berenson, whom he had brought to the Arts Endowment from her earlier work as art critic and writer for the National Review. The panels were required to document more fully, and for the record, their recommendations—not just reasons for rejections, but their rationales for funding, reinforcing Hodsoll’s resolve to support only the most artistically meritorious among the 20,000 or more applications received each year.

In 1982, Hodsoll emphasized that private donations for the arts would remain the most important component of arts support in a “pluralistic system . . . in which no one sector dominates.” But he also called for new practices needed to address developments such as the acquisition of film companies and publishing houses by business conglomerates, the increasing predominance of “blockbuster” exhibitions at museums, and a decline in adventurous repertoires produced among performing arts institutions. His approach demonstrated a far-reaching economic and institutional understanding of the arts in America, one that recognized new financial pressures on arts organizations and the need for a different kind of public support.

Hodsoll developed a six-part strategy for the NEA: 

• Providing long-term institutional assistance to the best of the arts organizations, big or small;
  • Encouraging broader audiences for advanced and diverse art forms;
  • Increasing efficiency in grantmaking by promoting anticipatory planning by arts institutions;
  • Reinforcing links among federal, state, local, and regional arts organizations;
  • Stimulating broader private support;
  • Initiating a system of arts information delivery.

Efficiency, stability, partnership, and sustainability—these new concepts took their place beside the traditional ideals of artistic excellence and artistic heritage, and they were reflected in several accomplishments during the decade.

A noteworthy instance of two of those goals, long-term assistance and federal-state-local links, is the Idaho Shakespeare Festival (ISF). In the words of the managing director and later member of the National Council on the Arts, Mark Hofflund, “ISF is the product of modest and steady federal support over many years through a highly scrutinized, professional and publicly engaged process of federal leadership at a statewide level. There is nothing immediately notable or sexy in this. It generates no medals or headlines or sound bites. In 30 years, this organization has progressed from an annual budget of $4,500 [$19,400 in 2023, based on 1978 dollars] to $2,500,000 [$3.5 million based on 2008 dollars]—with assets of $5,000,000 [$8.6 based on 1998 dollars (the year the amphitheater was built)] from a campaign to build an amphitheater situated among 12 acres of riverside habitat.” Furthermore, the success resulted from two parties: “The greatest cumulative source of support for ISF, during these decades, was none other than the Idaho Commission on the Arts—as supported by the NEA.” Indeed, Hofflund adds, Idaho “likely would not have an arts agency had the NEA not encouraged its creation 40 years ago.”

Congressional Controversies and Influential Critiques

In 1984, while the agency was reforming its grants process and expanding into new programs, another controversy erupted when Representative Mario Biaggi (D-NY) stepped forward to protest the funding of a production by the English National Opera company of Verdi’s opera Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. This version of Rigoletto, advertised as being set among Mafiosi in New York’s Little Italy, was judged by some as demeaning to Italian-Americans. Biaggi was joined in his complaint by Rudolph Giuliani, then associate U.S. attorney in New York, and various Italian American advocacy groups. Representative Biaggi called Chairman Hodsoll to testify at a special Congressional hearing. The Rigoletto uproar eventually died down, but the episode demonstrates the sharp scrutiny applied to the Arts Endowment whenever an organization it funded produced art that verged on controversial topics and touched on edgy themes.

The battle heated up again in 1985, when Congressmen Tom DeLay (R-TX) and Dick Armey (R-TX) declared that the Arts Endowment had violated its mandate by awarding grants to authors of poetry that the two legislative critics described as “pornography.” As reported in the New York Times, Representative Armey argued that authors of obscene verse continued to benefit from Arts Endowment grants as a consequence of cronyism within the NEA. By this he implied that former grantees, who had become panel members judging the appropriateness of applications, would then reward those whose work resembled, supported, or justified their own.

Such allegations constituted a legitimate area for Congressional oversight. Indeed, a public agency distributing funds in a competitive process must avoid even the suspicion of inside dealing or unfair practices. In 1979, the Washington Post commented, “The charge that a ‘closed circle’ of acquaintanceship runs the [Arts] Endowment through overlapping appointments to panels and committees is a serious one, and one both the Arts and Humanities [Endowments] have been guilty of for a long time. Beside the obvious wrong of creating situations where friends make grants to friends, or friends of friends, there is also the patently unhealthy set-up in which stale ideas recycle like so much dead air.”

The Armey-DeLay criticism also had been anticipated in a number of articles about the Arts Endowment in literary and political journals. Hilary Masters, fiction author and son of the distinguished American poet Edgar Lee Masters, published a critical examination of the Arts Endowment’s Creative Writing Fellowships in Georgia Review in 1981. Titled “Go Down Dignified”—a phrase from a Robert Frost poem “Provide, Provide” about securing wealth and fame—the article noted the charge of cronyism directed against panelists, and also observed that most grants went to writers in New York and California. “Few found their way to Middle America or to the South. States like Oklahoma, Michigan, Georgia, and Indiana received only two grants each. Louisiana, Kansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi got only one each. Both West Virginia and Utah received only one fellowship each, and theirs were given to writers with no permanent residence in those states. Missouri received none,” Masters observed, adding that a disproportionate amount of grant money had been awarded to writers connected with certain small presses. In one case, seven writers associated with Big Sky Press were among the 267 winners of fellowships out of a pool of 3,750 submissions—evidence to Masters of an interlocking relationship among publishers, authors, and panelists. The Georgia Review printed a “Restrained Response” to Masters by NEA Literature Director David Wilk, who asserted that Masters misrepresented the grants review process and cherry-picked from the statistical data. Nevertheless, Masters’s scathing essay caused much commentary in the literary world.

Armey and DeLay were joined by Representative Steve Bartlett (R-TX), who proposed an amendment to the NEA’s 1985 funding bill prohibiting awards to artists whose work could be considered “patently offensive to the average person.” Though none of the cited poems were written when any of the authors were NEA grantees, the objections were powerful nonetheless. Congressional staff members even came to the Arts Endowment facility and searched through Literature grant archives looking for more controversial material.

Led by Chairman Hodsoll, the NEA repudiated the challenge to its grantmaking by issuing a firm defense against attempts to impose federal regulations on literary content. Professor Cleanth Brooks, a surviving member of the influential “New Critics,” a group of literary critics and scholars whose methods dominated mid-century American literary study, came forward to declare Congressional censorship a “cure worse than the disease.” He also suggested, “A properly educated public should be able to act as their own censors.” On the other hand, John Illo, a professor of English at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, soon responded in the letters column of the New York Times, finding it “surprising” that Brooks “should not know the difference between the right of publishing without restraint and the privilege of being subsidized.” After he left the Arts Endowment, Hodsoll expressed agreement with Illo’s position, noting, “I make a fine distinction (some would argue too fine) between content standards and administrative common sense that respects the expectation that taxpayers have that their taxpayer dollars will not be used to offend them.”

Nevertheless, internal notes on the political debate, written by NEA Congressional Liaison Anne Marie Barnes and circulated to NEA staff, included the statement, “The Endowment would not have been established if there were any suggestion that the Federal government, or any instrumentality of it, would in any way influence the content of supported art. [Emphasis in original] The Endowment was not to become a Soviet art czar or Ministry of Culture.” Clearly, the Arts Endowment was still struggling with the general problem of how to negotiate the competing demands of artistic freedom and public standards, and soon the NEA would undergo much more severe attacks.

New Programs

In summing up the situation of the NEA at the close of its second decade, Hodsoll pointed out a new economic constraint in the arts: “Notwithstanding increasing overall support for the nonprofit arts, it is important to note that, especially in the performing arts, expenses are increasing, in some cases even faster than revenues. We need a better sense of how great these difficulties are. We also remain concerned about the reluctance in many quarters to produce, present, or exhibit programs that lack the drawing capacity of ‘stars’ or ‘blockbusters.’ The tension between marquee value for its own sake and artistic excellence remains; the only question is whether that tension is producing greater imbalances today than previously. Most importantly, we are concerned that 61 percent of American adults do not participate in most of the arts we support; hence, our priority for arts education and television programming in the arts.” Both were essential to sustaining future audiences for the arts.

In 1986, the promise of television’s creative engagement would be partly fulfilled by funding of the Public Broadcasting Service series on American artists, American Masters. The first season included documentary profiles of critical figures in the history of American culture, including the architect Philip Johnson, author Katherine Anne Porter, actor Charlie Chaplin, singer Billie Holiday, conductor James Levine, composer Aaron Copland, painters Thomas Eakins and Georgia O’Keeffe, and playwright Eugene O’Neill. The series also included a collaborative project among playwright Arthur Miller, German director Volker Schlöndorff, and the cast of the cinema version of Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a classic of the modern theater.

The concluding years of the Reagan era saw many other positive developments in the Arts Endowment’s support of media arts. The NEA had supported the founding of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation as a subsidiary of the American Film Institute. The center is an archive for film and television products whose holdings are at the Library of Congress and other archives. Its mission, to advance technology for rescuing and reproducing film and television originals, has resulted in the transfer of black and white products from fragile and hazardous nitrate-based stock to acetate, research to resolve a range of separate problems associated with the degradation of acetate stock itself, the application of special technologies for the preservation of color films, and research on the preservation of videotape. In 1986, AFI initiated a two-year national moratorium on the disposal of television programming and began preparing comprehensive national guidelines for the selection of television programs for retention and preservation. The center held the first national conference for local television news archives in 1987, and the guidelines were distributed to the nation’s television networks, broadcast groups, and production companies in 1988.

The Dance Program supported a landmark event when the Joffrey Ballet produced The Rite of Spring in 1987. Led by the choreographer and historian Millicent Hodson and her husband, Kenneth Archer, the Joffrey Ballet reconstructed the choreography of ballet genius Vaslav Nijinsky, set to the score of Igor Stravinsky. The Rite of Spring had not been staged with the complex Nijinsky directions since its tempestuous premiere in 1913 in Paris, when it sparked a riot. The 1987 revival featured the original sets and costumes designed by the Russian mystic philanthropist and painter Nicholas Roerich. The event proved to be notable in the history of ballet. The reconstructed version of The Rite of Spring has been adopted into the repertory of the Kirov Ballet in Russia and presented many times since. In supporting the project, the Arts Endowment demonstrated its crucial role in maintaining artistic legacies, making a famous episode in the history of ballet accessible to a broad American audience.

A New Priority: Arts Education

Chairman Hodsoll’s commitment to arts education resulted in an ambitious research study published by the Endowment in 1988, entitled Toward Civilization. The study sounded a grave and dignified warning about the decline of arts instruction in the K-12 curriculum. In the foreword, Hodsoll wrote, “We have found a gap between commitment and resources for arts education and the actual practice of arts education in classrooms. Resources are being provided, but they are not being used to give opportunities for all, or even most, students to become culturally literate. The arts in general are not being taught sequentially. Students of the arts are not being evaluated. Many arts teachers are not prepared to teach history and critical analysis of the arts.”

This statement articulated a new theme of arts education at the NEA. Whereas previous efforts had focused on placing artists in the schools and exposing children to arts activities, Toward Civilization emphasized learning and study, with the great traditions of art and culture at the center of the curriculum. In this sense, it accorded with the broader movements of education reform in the 1980s signaled by documents such as the Department of Education’s influential report, A Nation at Risk (1983), and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ controversial study of higher education, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (1984). These reform documents emphasized content knowledge and basic skills, and they helped inspire the standards movement in K-12 education, but they didn’t take the arts much into account. Toward Civilization insisted the arts be an essential part of a regeneration of elementary and secondary education, and the call was heard throughout the arts education community. The report would be answered a decade later with the establishment of National Standards for Education in the Arts.

Closing Achievements

The close of Hodsoll’s tenure saw other efforts to survey the arts in U.S. society. Hodsoll initiated the Arts in America reports, which offered inventory and analysis of America’s artistic resources and issues. He also helped create the National Task Force on Presenting and Touring the Performing Arts. Administered by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the task force aimed to strengthen arts presentation and to reinforce the networks of presenting organizations, performers, audiences, and communities—once again underscoring Hodsoll’s emphasis on the infrastructure of arts support.

President Reagan summarized the importance of the Arts Endowment’s work at the National Medal of Arts presentation in 1987: “Why do we, as a free people, honor the arts? The arts and the humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we’re a part, and they provide the foundation from which we may reach out to other cultures so that the great heritage that is ours may be enriched by, as well as itself enrich, other enduring traditions. We honor the arts not because we want monuments to our own civilization but because we are a free people. The arts are among our nation’s finest creations and the reflection of freedom’s light.”

As Arts Endowment chairman, Frank Hodsoll had demonstrated strong leadership and management skills, securing budget increases, setting a new agenda for arts education, and addressing serious criticisms originating from inside and outside the federal government. The NEA’s programs and awards were going strong, and the National Medal of Arts, the NEA National Heritage Fellowships, and the NEA Jazz Masters awards had become distinguished honors. The Arts Endowment appeared to be primed for even further growth and success.

[Chapter 6 of Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham’s report of the history of the National Endowment for the Arts, “Culture Wars,” will be posted on Monday, 20 November.  I hope you’ll return to Rick On Theater to read its coverage of the troubled tenure of John E. Frohnmayer (b. 1942), a lawyer and former chairman of the Oregon Arts Commission, as NEA Chairman (1989-92).]

A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Chapter 4

 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[Welcome back to Rick On Theater and the continuation of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008.”  Chapter 4 chronicles the administration (1977-81) of NEA chairman Livingston Biddle (1918-2002).  For those who haven’t been reading along with this history, I strongly suggest going back to parts one through three, posted on 5, 8, and 11 November, before getting into “A Long Summer,” below.] 

“NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS: A HISTORY, 1965-2008”
edited by Mark Bauerlein with Ellen Grantham
(National Endowment for the Arts, 2009) 

p a r t  I

The HISTORY of the NEA

 

chapter 4 

A Long Summer

In November 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Livingston Biddle to the chairmanship of the Arts Endowment. Biddle came from a distinguished American family, graduated from Princeton University, and served as an ambulance driver in World War II. He wrote popular novels before coming to Washington to be a special assistant to Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI), his roommate in preparatory school and at Princeton, who was a key figure in drafting the legislation that established the Arts and Humanities Endowments. Biddle also had served as NEA deputy chairman under Roger Stevens, and later served as Nancy Hanks’s Congressional liaison. A Washington insider, he was steeped in the workings of legislation and policy.

Chairman Biddle approached his position with a desire to refocus on the role which Congress initially envisioned for the Arts Endowment. An integral part of that role, Biddle claimed, was a strong partnership between the government and the private community. The emphasis on the role of the private sector led Biddle to recommend three essential provisions for progress in the cultural life of the nation:

• Responsibility should be primarily based on private and local initiatives;

• A comprehensive restriction on federal interference in the determination of NEA grantees, which Biddle defined as “a provision basic to freedom of expression and the creative spirit of the arts,” should be in place;

• The Endowment must be guided by a council of private citizens.

Biddle noted that when he was nominated to the chairmanship, “there [had] been suggestion that the arts may be subject to politicalization . . . mean[ing] . . . subject to inappropriate governmental pressures.” He maintained, “The law prescribes a catalyst role for the government . . . to encourage, not dominate, to assist without domineering.” Biddle regretted “words like ‘elitism’ and ‘populism’ being used to suggest a polarization of the arts,” noting that “elitism can indeed mean quality, can indeed mean ‘the best,’” while populism “can mean ‘access.’” He urged a policy bridging the two ideals, resulting in “access to the best” as a guiding principle.

He had a strong ally in Vice President Walter Mondale’s wife Joan, a ceramicist and the author of a book entitled Politics in Art (1972), as well as honorary chairperson of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Prior to the 1976 election, Mrs. Mondale had served on the board of directors of the Associated Councils of the Arts, a private association of state arts agencies and community arts councils. During her years in the Vice President’s residence, she filled the house with examples of contemporary American painting, sculpture, and crafts. She encouraged the placement of art works in federal buildings, and in Congressional testimony she urged legislators to alter the federal tax code so that estate taxes would not affect the families of artists so heavily. For her efforts, she earned the title “Joan of Art.”

[The Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities is a component sub-agency of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, alongside the Arts Endowment, the Humanities Endowment, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  Joan Mondale (1930-2014) served as honorary chairman of the Federal Council from 1977 to 1981, while she was the Second Lady of the United States. The Federal Council is distinct from the National Council on the Arts, which is the NEA’s advisory committee.]

Under Biddle’s leadership, the Endowment continued to enjoy rising funding, the total reaching $158.8 million in 1981 [$537.7 million today]. In the first year of the Carter Administration, the NEA made several decisions that strengthened its impact on American intellectual life and improved its outreach to underserved communities. One was the establishment of a 23-member task force to assess the needs of the Hispanic arts community in the U.S. and to develop a means to respond to Hispanic artists and organizations. Other initiatives included the Office of Minority Concerns to act as a clearinghouse for minority artists and art groups in dealing with the NEA, and the establishment of the Folk Arts Program with its own staff.

Folk Arts Expansion—NEA National Heritage Fellowships

The Folk Arts Program had come under the directorship of Bess Lomax Hawes, a distinctive individual in the NEA’s chronicles and in the wider context of American cultural history. The Arts Endowment’s program of National Heritage Fellowships originated with Hawes’s tenure as director of the Folk Arts Program, beginning in 1976 and continuing beyond her retirement in 1992. Based on the Japanese custom of designating expert craftsmen and artisans as [Living] National Treasures, the NEA National Heritage Fellows receive a one-time award recognizing individual artistic excellence and their efforts to conserve America’s many cultures for future generations.

The Arts Endowment had long been a strong supporter of folk and traditional arts. According to Burt Feintuch, editor of The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector [1988], the agency’s Folk Arts Program “legitimized the traditional arts in the eyes—and budgets—of agencies around the nation, democratizing and pluralizing the concept of the arts. NEA seed money rooted most of the state programs, resulting in a national network of public sector folklorists who, in turn, began to till the soil of their own states.” One NEA folk arts panelist, Barre Toelken, recalls an incident after dinner in a New Mexico village after the agency funded a centuries-old play, Los Moros y los Cristianos. When the panelists finished their dinner at a local restaurant, “an elderly man stepped forward and said, ‘We only want to thank you for helping us to keep our culture. I’ve lived here since before the income tax came to be [probably referring to 1913, when the 16th amendment to the Constitution was ratified], and this is the first time any of our money ever came back to help us.’”

[The grant referred to above was in 1976 to the tiny town of Chimayo, New Mexico (pop. in 2020: 3,077), where an annual festival takes place on the Feast of Santiago (Saint James, patron saint of Spain), 25 July.  Los Moros y los cristianos (“The Moors and the Christians”) is a reenactment of a symbolic battle between the two forces that resulted in the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Christian Spaniards after centuries of occupation by the Muslim Moors of North Africa.

[The festival dates back to the 15th century—on different dates in different parts of the Spanish-speaking world.  Several hundred people come to Chimayo every year to view the reenactment, and the 1976 funds paid for new costumes and dressings for the horses, reviving the tradition that had been barely surviving after some three hundred years in the same location.]

The NEA National Heritage Fellowships boosted folk arts to a new level of prominence. In 1985, Hawes observed that “these fellowships are among the most appreciated and applauded, perhaps because they present to Americans a vision of themselves and of their country, a vision somewhat idealized but profoundly longed for and so, in significant ways, profoundly true.” Although the creation of the fellowships was announced in 1980, at the end of Biddle’s chairmanship, the first awards were made in 1982, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Since then, the NEA National Heritage Fellowships have been bestowed upon a diverse selection of individuals who have “made major contributions to the excellence, vitality, and public appreciation of the folk and traditional arts.” The first honorees included the blues singer Sanders “Sonny” Terry and his frequent partner in performance, guitarist Brownie McGhee, as well as the Mexican-American singer Lydia Mendoza, bluegrass musician Bill Monroe, and traditional artists producing Western saddles and ornamental iron.

Since its inception, the NEA National Heritage Fellowship has become the most important honor in the field. In the blues tradition, the influential John Lee Hooker received the fellowship in 1983. In 1984, the recipients included Clifton Chenier, the accordion master of the Cajun zydeco style; Howard “Sandman” Sims, the leading African-American tap dancer; and Ralph Stanley, the Virginia mountain banjo player, singer, and composer. In 2000, after his fellowship, Ralph Stanley would gain national fame when his songs were used on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? In 2006 he received the National Medal of Arts. As the years have passed, the program has expanded beyond standard “folk music” and African-American blues to include the musical styles and craft specializations of Native-American and other indigenous and immigrant cultures.

Since the first NEA National Heritage Fellowships were presented, many genres of popular creativity that were seldom thought of as “American folk” expressions were represented and honored, illustrating the assimilation of new ethnic communities into the life of the nation. Recipients have included a Native-American ribbonworker, a performer on the Slavic tamburitza, Hawaiian musicians and craftworkers, a Cambodian court dancer and choreographer, a Lao singer, Bukharan and Bosnian Jewish singers, a Ghanaian-American drummer, and such genres as Chinese opera, the north Indian raga, and Basque poetry.

Although it is an individual honor, many recipients regard the fellowship as broader recognition. Gerald Bruce Miller, Skokomish elder and 2004 NEA National Heritage Fellow, announced at the fellows banquet held in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress: “I want to extend my gratitude on receiving this award to all of our ancestors who left us the gifts that we exhibit today; the gift of the song, the gift of the dance, the gift of the story, and the gift of creativity. As long as we keep these traditional arts alive, we speak for our people.” Michael Doucet, Cajun fiddler and composer, reflected upon his 2005 NEA National Heritage Fellowship: “You know, it’s interesting—it’s a national award but it really comes down to your community and what you do for your community. I was very fortunate to be around when a lot of people born before 1900 were still alive—the ‘old-timers,’ as we call them now. I think that’s where most of my inspiration comes from. It’s really a process of a continuation—I wouldn’t be getting this award if it wasn’t for people who came before me.”

The NEA National Heritage Fellowship program embodied the daring soul of Bess Lomax Hawes herself. By 1960, Hawes was already a leading figure in the development of folk music as a commercial medium, participating in folk festivals on both coasts. She served on the faculty of California State University at Northridge before coming to work at the NEA. In honor of her powerful legacy, the Arts Endowment inaugurated in 2000 a special recognition within the NEA National Heritage Fellowships: the Bess Lomax Hawes Award for “achievements in fostering excellence, ensuring vitality, and promoting public appreciation of the folk and traditional arts. To be considered, nominees should be worthy of national recognition and must be actively engaged in preserving the folk and traditional arts.”

The Arts Endowment has also played an essential role in the creation and support of a network of folk arts coordinators based at the state, regional, and local folk arts agencies and other cooperating nonprofit organizations. In addition, statewide folk and traditional arts apprenticeship programs, allowing master traditional artists to pass along their unique skills and knowledge, have been developed in more than 35 states with NEA funding. Direct grants continue to support festivals, touring, documentary and media projects, exhibitions, and educational programs.

Opera, Musical Theater, and New Music

Folk art was not the only area to see fresh developments during Biddle’s chairmanship. In 1979, Ezra Laderman, composer, teacher, and later dean of the Yale School of Music, became director of the NEA Music Program. In the same year, the Arts Endowment introduced a New Music Performance program to support organizations performing or presenting contemporary compositions. The first grants totaled $352,500 [$1.5 million in 2023] and ranged from $1,500 [$6,360] to $28,000 [$118,707]. The Arts Endowment’s Contemporary Music Performance Program granted $441,500 [$1.9 million] for performances at institutions such as the New Music Consort of New York, while its Composer/Librettist Program gave $525,420 [$2.2 million] to individuals and institutions including the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, California, which had long been associated with the musical avant-garde. Recipients under the Composer/Librettist Program included the composer William Bolcom of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Lukas Foss of New York City, along with many others.

In 1978, Biddle established the Opera-Musical Theater Program to provide support for “that art form which has a lasting luster in the history of American art.” A new panel, representing opera and musical theater together, adopted a policy statement linking classic expressions with popular traditions: “Whether comic or serious, earthy or elevated, music theater, from the time it moved from the courts to the public arena over two centuries ago, has been part of a tradition of people’s art at its best. The Opera-Musical Theater Program hopes to eliminate the barriers which separate the various forms of music theater, and to help create an atmosphere of mutual respect and appreciation. . . . The program emphasizes the creation, development, and production of new American works, as well as experimentation with new forms and techniques.”

Carlisle Floyd, an American opera composer and recipient of the 2004 National Medal of Arts, as well as the 2008 NEA Opera Honors, participated in the Arts Endowment’s panels from 1976 to 1978, a period he remembered a quarter-century later as “an exciting time in the Endowment.” Floyd was a leading figure in the creation of the Opera-Musical Theater Program (later, Opera returned to the broader Music Program, and Musical Theater to the Theater Program). He was joined from the musical theater side by composers Stephen Sondheim and John Kander, as well as producers Hal Prince and Stuart Ostrow. In a 2004 interview, Floyd recalled, “We had made a case that opera had more in common with musical theater than with regular classical performance. The association [between the genres] made sense because opera and musical theater alike used costumes and other elements of performance differently from classical music presentations. At the first meetings the opera people were afraid the musical theater people would consider them dull—but they came to realize a basic agreement.” The program also provided for the creation and performance of new operatic and musical theater works. In the same period, demonstrating that the traditional classical music categories would remain central to the Arts Endowment’s work, the Music Program recognized choruses and chamber music as separate fields requiring support.

The Biddle Way 

Biddle began his leadership of the NEA with a major fiscal decision. He removed ceilings on grants, which allowed advisory panels greater discretion in recommending grant amounts. In 1978, under the rubric “Unity, Quality, Access,” Biddle explained this decision: “The test all applicants for Endowment support must meet thus becomes the test of quality. If a project of extraordinary merit is in need of funding, is it reasonable to dilute quality as a standard by imposing an arbitrary limit on support?” He distributed funds far and wide in an ever-increasing quantity of new initiatives that sought to parallel the growing innovation and variety in the arts and to reach a diverse American public.

Many more new programs emerged in the Biddle years. The chairman formalized support for “multidisciplinary presenting” of cultural programs at institutions such as New York’s Lincoln Center. The Arts Endowment also launched its first major joint venture with the National Endowment for the Humanities. This effort was a month-long symposium entitled “Mexico Today,” which consisted of concerts, poetry readings, films, panel discussions, dance performances, and exhibitions of art and photography. “Mexico Today” visited nine American cities and was seen by nearly half a million people.

In 1979 the NEA’s funding reached significant levels. In dance alone some 360 grants were awarded, accounting for $7.9 million [$33.5 million]. The enormous growth and diversification of the arts during the decade raised new challenges for the agency. Nancy Hanks had convened a Management Task Force to examine the growth of the agency and make structural recommendations. One suggestion was that the Humanities and Arts Endowments no longer share administrative personnel. In 1978, with approval from Congress, the Arts Endowment became self-sufficient and hired its own administrative staff. Until that point, the two agencies had shared staff for budget, finance, and personnel management. 

According to Biddle, the great problem for the arts in America was “the danger of fragmentation.” When special interests come into play, he maintained, “they can diminish the value of the art, for although art does a great many good things in the world for a great many people, it does them best when it is free. No task is more important now than to keep the arts free—free from their own politicization, free from limiting special interests, free to experiment and explore.”

For Biddle, if the pursuit of innovation becomes too strong, art threatens to fragment into islands of expertise, and may end up “forced to serve special interests.” The connection between artists and the public is broken, coteries form, and artworks lose their universal appeal. While he considered it the Arts Endowment’s responsibility to promote experimentation in art, it also has a duty to keep art central to American society. Much of Biddle’s chairmanship might be interpreted as an effort to steer a difficult course between those two mandates.

Revised Structure

Outside pressures not only broadened access to the Arts Endowment’s funding, they also compelled various internal adjustments. Annually, when the chairman of the U.S. House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee held hearings on the NEA’s budget, not only was the Arts Endowment’s chairman called to testify, but the agency’s program directors also were asked to provide a status report. Representative Sidney R. Yates (D-IL), the subcommittee’s chairman, took great enjoyment in learning firsthand the latest developments in each arts field.

As the Arts Endowment’s budget grew, a perception of favoritism and conflicts of interest by individuals serving on grant panels sparked concern in both artistic and governmental circles. Deputy Chairman for Programs Mary Ann Tighe wrote, “How panelists are selected seems to be a subject of particular interest to the arts community. Our process is a subjective one . . . the staff, generally the program director in consultation with individuals in and outside the Endowment, makes the list, with at least one-third of the panel changing every year.” Nevertheless, reappointments of some panelists for longer periods of time had occurred since the Hanks period. Biddle reorganized the panel system and enforced the standard that a panel member could only serve for up to three consecutive years.

The NEA also carried out a discipline-by-discipline audit of its practices. In 1979, the NEA added two new areas of support to its traditional dance programs—artistic personnel and rehearsal support—which helped companies pay for existing and new artists and performers as well as rehearsal time. Rhoda Grauer, then-director of the Dance Program, noted that the United States was “the center, virtually the Mecca, of the international dance community.” Grauer praised the field of American dance as one in which “there are choreographers who use classical vocabularies and choreographers who invent whole new languages of movement.” In dance instruction, according to Grauer, “Though we have few national dance conservatories and though training in this country has evolved independently and erratically, much of our teaching and our dancers’ technical and performance standards are among the world’s finest. Still, acceptance has not come easily. In 1965, there was only a handful of high quality, fully professional dance companies in the United States, almost all of them in New York.”

In the field of literature, then-program director David Wilk described the NEA’s Residencies for Writers Program, which had existed for several years, as “an attempt to put writers in personal contact with their audiences.” The NEA had by then spent several years assisting the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, an entity that brought together and supported small press journals. The NEA “increased substantially its support for innovative and experimental projects attempting to solve the problems of distributing and promoting fine contemporary creative literature.” These included funds for book buses run by the Plains Distribution Service of Fargo, North Dakota, and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. In 1979, “small presses” drew $380,000 [$1.6 million] in federal funds.

Many creative writing fellowships awarded during Chairman Biddle’s term went to fledgling writers who subsequently became major figures in the literary world, including Jane Smiley, T. C. Boyle, Paul Auster, Alice Walker, and Tobias Wolff. One of the most noteworthy literary grants of the era supported the work of an author who had taken his own life ten years earlier. In 1979, the Arts Endowment awarded Louisiana State University (LSU) Press $3,500 [$14,203] to defray publishing costs of a comic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, by unknown writer John Kennedy Toole. Toole had finished the manuscript in the late 1960s while stationed with the U.S. Army in Puerto Rico, where he had taught English to Spanish-speaking recruits. After several publishers rejected the work, Toole committed suicide in 1969 [aged 31]. But his mother, Thelma Toole, assisted by novelist Walker Percy, managed to place the work with LSU Press. With the Arts Endowment’s help, the work was published in 1980. It was a critical and commercial success, selling 50,000 copies the first year and winning the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It has since been translated into 18 languages, and there are nearly two million copies in print.

In 1979, the Endowment funded several projects in the area of new media. With a budget of $8 million, the Media Arts Program under the direction of Brian O’Doherty continued to fund the American Film Institute as well as radio, television, film and video projects, and media arts centers. At the time, O’Doherty warned that “private funds for media arts centers [had] not been forthcoming in significant amount,” and that “the work of the independent artist, which maintains an individual voice in a mass medium overwhelmingly devoted to commercial ends, is still a misunderstood and underexploited resource.”

The direction of the Visual Arts Program had passed in 1977 to James Melchert, an artist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In the NEA’s 1979 Annual Report, Melchert summarized the state of his discipline and its relationship with the NEA by noting that in one year 7,000 painters, sculptors, crafts artists, and photographers had applied for grants. Most of them were necessarily rejected, with grants awarded at a ratio of three to one hundred applications (the broader ratio in the NEA was one grant to four applications). Melchert was avid about defending the grantees that were chosen and the criteria for their selection. “We are not success-oriented, in the conventional sense,” he wrote in the Annual Report. “Our ideas of success are different from the usual ones. A fellowship . . . might mean only that the artist spent his time testing new ideas, learning which led up blind alleys and which were artistically valid. We do not require our artists to be . . . popular, either, which is sometimes quite different from having artistic merit.”

The Regional Representatives

In 1980, the Endowment finally reached its full complement of what were called “regional representatives.” The regional representatives were the centerpiece of a program initiated in 1972 by Nancy Hanks that would promote better communication between the Arts Endowment and individuals and organizations in different areas of the country. These representatives, most of whom worked out of their homes (and suitcases) with only part-time clerical help, provided vital links between the NEA and those in near and distant states who might otherwise have regarded the growing agency as a faceless and faraway bureaucracy. At the end of Chairman Biddle’s term, the program had grown to 12 men and women employed to provide information, contacts, and free services to artists, organizations, and the public.

The “reps” traveled extensively throughout their regions, conducted workshops, represented the NEA at special events, assisted would-be applicants, assuaged unsuccessful ones, and answered hundreds of mail and telephone inquiries. Tied to their regions, with a history of involvement with arts organizations, they brought the agency leadership into closer contact with local conditions. They reduced the sense of isolation that many actual and potential applicants felt, helped people all over the country learn about the NEA—in particular its grants review process—and enabled those at the Endowment to understand more fully the needs, trends, populations, and regional differences that characterize the arts in the United States. The number of regional representatives was reduced to seven a few years later, and the program ultimately ended in 1991.

Major Accomplishments

Reporting near the end of his term, Livingston Biddle wrote in 1980, “The Endowment has had some controversial moments; and yet controversy is the yeast that makes the creative loaf rise.” During Biddle’s chairmanship, he and his staff took advantage of a relatively tranquil era to expand support for diverse artists reflecting American society. The Biddle era was one in which the Arts Endowment attained a well-defined stature as an institution representing American creative aspirations. There were difficulties in trying to reflect a splintering and volatile art world, but Biddle met them by developing new programs for historically underrepresented groups, supporting both traditional and avant-garde art.

[I’ll resume publishing this history of the NEA with Chapter 5, “The Reagan Era,” which covers the chairmanship (1981-89) of Frank Hodsoll  (1938-2016), a historian with a background in law.  Please come back to ROT on 17 November for the next installment of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts.”]

A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Chapter 3

 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[The third chapter of the NEA’s own account of its history, covering the period of Nancy Hanks’s (1927-83) chairmanship of the NEA (1969-77), chronicles the development and growth of the Arts Endowment as it heads into a stormier period largely generated by the looming Culture Wars of the following two decades. 

[As I always do in the cases of serialized posts such as this one, I recommend that readers who are just joining this thread go back to the first two parts, posted on 5 (Introduction & Chapter 1) and 8 November (Chapter 2), before reading Chapter 3 below.

[Be forewarned: this chapter of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008” is longer than my customary maximum.  It was decidedly too difficult to trim, so I left it at full length.]

“NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS: A HISTORY, 1965-2008”
edited by Mark Bauerlein with Ellen Grantham
(National Endowment for the Arts, 2009) 

p a r t  I

The HISTORY of the NEA

 

chapter 3

A Fresh Direction

As the NEA grew from year to year, so did its reputation. Much of the credit goes to an event one might never have expected, the 1968 election of Richard M. Nixon and his appointment of Leonard Garment to the White House staff as his special consultant. A New York attorney, Garment’s areas of interest and competence included the arts and humanities. When Roger Stevens’s term as NEA chairman expired two months after President Nixon’s inauguration, Stevens’s deputy chairman, arts educator Douglas MacAgy, who had transformed the teaching of art on the West Coast in the 1940s, was appointed acting chairman for six months.

Nancy Hanks, who was destined to leave a deep impression on the NEA, succeeded Roger Stevens as the Arts Endowment’s chairman on October 6, 1969. Hanks’s leadership at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and her tenure as head of the Arts Councils of America gave her an important national perspective on arts funding and public policy. Born in Miami Beach on December 31, 1927, she graduated from Duke University after a childhood spent in Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and North Carolina. She served in the Eisenhower Administration as an assistant to Nelson Rockefeller at the newly created Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and as a White House assistant for special projects. She then moved to New York where she worked for the Rockefellers until 1968.

Garment took responsibility for shepherding Hanks’s appointment through the confirmation process with the assistance of another friend and supporter, Michael Straight, who became her deputy chairman. Before her appointment, Hanks met with President Nixon, who assured her of his support for the agency’s continued funding.

Prior to being named chairman of the Arts Endowment, Hanks had articulated a vision for national arts policy in a 1968 article. She wrote, “In dollar comparison to our national needs for defense, for poverty programs, for health, for welfare, or for education, the requirements for the arts are minuscule. The support required for the arts, for the improvement of our cities . . . will come from a myriad of individuals, foundations, corporations, as well as governments.”

Hanks began her tenure with enthusiasm. In an interview with the New York Times soon after her confirmation, she commented, “A great orchestra or a fine museum is a natural resource, like a park. It must be maintained. I believe this, and so does the National Council [on the Arts].” She later recalled in an oral history, “I do not remember having any real question about which way the agency would go. I knew almost all the program directors well. . . . They had used their little money wisely. You had a strong basic staff. You had a very good Council. Therefore, right from the beginning, I had a feeling of total confidence in the people I was working with.”

Hanks’s Circle

The appointments of Garment and Hanks reflected a commitment to the arts that few would have ascribed to Richard Nixon, who, in fact, had an abiding love of classical music. Garment maintained that President Nixon’s support for the NEA represented a conciliatory gesture to liberal intellectuals, who were increasingly disaffected by the combat in Vietnam. Garment had looked toward a life as a professional jazz musician, playing the tenor saxophone, and he dropped out of college during World War II to perform. He was eventually drafted, and his place in Teddy Powell’s band, for which he had been playing, was taken by Lee Konitz, who would later gain fame as an exemplar of the West Coast style of cool jazz. Garment was dismissed from the service on medical grounds, and returned first to jazz and then to college. His new band included Larry Rivers, later acclaimed as a painter, and a young flautist-saxophonist named Alan Greenspan, who would one day become chairman of the Federal Reserve. A few years in college led Garment to the legal profession, and he began a career as a New York investment lawyer. Nixon, after a failed gubernatorial bid in California, moved to New York and joined the law firm where Garment worked. Six years later, Garment joined President-elect Nixon in Washington to help him assemble staff for his Administration.

Other distinctive personalities served in the agency during the Nixon Administration, or, as many NEA veterans refer to it, “the Hanks administration”—a justifiable claim, since Hanks’s tenure extended beyond Nixon’s to 1977. Michael Straight served prominently as her deputy chairman. A writer, philanthropist, and former editor of The New Republic, Straight became a close colleague and biographer of Hanks. Straight had served as an unpaid advisor to the State Department, and, briefly, at the Interior Department, during the New Deal. He was offered an advisory position in the Kennedy Administration, which he had turned down because of his former association with a Soviet spy ring. By 1969, after he had briefed the Federal Bureau of Investigation on his knowledge of Russian espionage, Straight was cleared to work under Hanks.

One of the first major events during Hanks’s chairmanship was a reception to honor veterans of the New Deal’s arts programs. Participants included the painters Milton Avery, William Gropper, Philip Evergood, Adolph Gottlieb, Jacob Lawrence (named to the National Council on the Arts in 1978), Louise Nevelson (one of the first recipients of the National Medal of Arts), and Isaac and Moses Soyer. In a memoir of Hanks, Straight recalled that “most of them could not believe that two bureaucrats of the Nixon Administration wanted to honor them. There was a great deal of laughter before the party ended—and a few tears.”

Hanks herself had been viewed with suspicion by some in the arts community with traditional artistic tastes. They feared that her work as a staffer to Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers—who, as a family, were involved in founding the Museum of Modern Art in New York and were aggressive promoters of the artistic avant-garde—would entrench an experimental bias in the NEA.

First Controversies

Throughout her first term, Nancy Hanks confronted a series of controversies that tested her leadership and strained relationships between the Arts Endowment and members of Congress. One commotion erupted over a grant awarded to the 1969 issue of American Literary Anthology, an annual volume of writings drawn from literary journals. The editor of the volume, George Plimpton, included a work by Aram Saroyan, son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Saroyan and a practitioner of a visual verse style of writing known as “concrete poetry” [shaped or patterned poems in which the words are arranged so as to depict their subject visually rather than literarily], Saroyan’s contribution consisted of a one-word concrete poem that had been published a year before in the Chicago Review. It read, verbatim, “lighght” [sic; not a typo]. The grant was attacked in Congress, most notably by Representative William Scherle (R-IA), who denounced the Endowment for devoting $750 [$6,290 in 2023] to the project. A second dispute followed, involving Plimpton’s acceptance of a so-called “obscene” work by poet and rock performer Ed Sanders for the 1970 American Literary Anthology, prompting the NEA to withdraw support for the annual volume.

The next year, Nancy Hanks and Michael Straight confronted another unexpected controversy. The Arts Endowment had awarded a $50,000 [$379,986 today] grant to Arena Stage’s outreach program, Living Stage, for performances for inner-city high school youth in Baltimore. The project encouraged the kids to express their reactions to the play in whatever idiom they wished. Notwithstanding an agreement between Living Stage and Arena Stage that only performers and youngsters would be present, a Baltimore newspaper reporter secretly viewed the improvised work, and later wrote that the youngsters were being encouraged to use profanity by the Living Stage actors. The story reached Congress swiftly, and occasioned lengthy and personal conversations between Hanks, Straight, several members of Congress, and the leadership of Arena Stage and Living Stage. The controversy dissipated, but took up considerable time and effort.

In 1974, another controversy erupted over an NEA grant that proved to be one of the most significant crises in the agency’s early history. Writer Erica Jong received a $5,000 [$31,216 in 2023] NEA Literature Fellowship in 1973, and soon after her novel Fear of Flying was published. A provocative work dealing frankly with sexual themes, Jong’s novel included an acknowledgement to the Arts Endowment, raising questions about the Endowment’s sponsorship of sexual content. Even though the chairman of the Literature Advisory Panel in 1973, who had recommended the grant, was the prominent book editor Simon Michael Bessie, contention over Fear of Flying extended to the U.S. Senate. Only with significant help from pro-Endowment legislators was the controversy resolved.

Hanks’s Vision: Art for All Americans

Historian Joseph Wesley Zeigler, in a detailed history of government funding for the arts entitled Arts in Crisis, noted that Nancy Hanks “had preserved the essential balance between artistic freedom and Congressional concern and oversight.” Her successes with both political parties, the arts community, and elected officials enabled her to expand the Arts Endowment in several different directions. August Heckscher, President Kennedy’s conceptual developer for federal arts support, had envisioned programs that would imitate the European model, in which central governments supported national theaters, museums, cinema, dance companies, and literary and language academies. The NEA under Hanks, however, preferred to forge numerous partnerships with nonprofit arts organizations, rather than underwrite the budgets of official state-sponsored arts groups.

Hanks favored support of local and regional institutions that would extend access and foster broader creativity. To encourage a wider range of applications and an expanded geographic reach for NEA-funded works, she clarified and strengthened the process for awarding grants. To distribute federal funds more widely, she committed to assisting state arts agencies, reflecting her earlier experience in helping establish the New York State Council on the Arts. She has been described as understanding art as a medium for public betterment, and many of her programs such as Artists-in-Schools reflected her sense of duty to the American citizenry as well as to American artists.

Hanks’s “art-for-all-Americans” approach won newfound support from legislators, most of whom represented districts far from the artistic centers of the country. In 1971, the NEA’s budget was doubled, from $8.2 million [$65 million] for 1970 to $15.1 million [$114.8 million]. Hanks’s and Straight’s deliberation with legislators made the increase possible. The Artists-in-Schools Program, with $900,000 [$6.8 million] from the U.S. Department of Education, sent more than 300 artists into elementary and secondary schools in 31 states. Such programs were not only artistically meritorious, but also represented Hanks’s commitment to ensure the Arts Endowment reached young audiences with few other opportunities to experience the arts. At the same time, the NEA expanded the scope of its programming. Music now included jazz and orchestras, and photography was added to the Visual Arts Program.

Joining Hanks, Garment, and Straight in the NEA leadership was Brian O’Doherty, who was recruited during the MacAgy term and arrived with Hanks in 1969. A former editor-in-chief of the influential magazine Art in America, he would direct the NEA Visual Arts Program and then the Media Arts Program for a total of 27 years. O’Doherty was an iconoclastic intellectual even by the standards of the arts scene of the late 1960s. He had been a friend and collaborator of Marcel Duchamp, one of modernism’s most inventive personalities, and admired the surrealist poet and critic André Breton—sure indications of his artistic tastes.

As suggested earlier, some believe that the Nixon Administration viewed support for the NEA as a means to quell discontent regarding foreign policy decisions in Indochina. Michael Brenson, a commentator on the Arts Endowment, argued in Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America that Brian O’Doherty “helped the Endowment to maintain its credibility among the most vocal and activist artists during some of the most explosive years of the Vietnam War.” Garment and William Safire, another central figure in the Nixon Administration, both remember how support for the arts figured in the politics of the day. In the 2006 Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, Safire recalled, “I knew this remarkable woman [Hanks] during the Nixon years in Washington when I worked in the White House. My fellow speechwriter, Ray Price, was enlisted by this Rockefeller Brothers arts enthusiast in the cause of federal support for the arts. . . . Expectations were low, to say the least, for President Nixon’s support of the arts. But Nancy Hanks and Ray had a powerful ally in Leonard Garment. . . . Nancy kept in close touch with Len, providing all the artistic arguments, and Len in turn worked over the President, who admired Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. But I can hear Nixon’s voice now, saying to me from his place in purgatory, ‘You know, Bill, there’s not a single vote in this for me.’”

In his own 1989 Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, Garment explained why he thought President Nixon favored the Arts Endowment. The extraordinary funding increases “did not come about just because the powers that be suddenly changed their minds one morning and decided it was time to give culture the respect it deserved. Nor did it happen mainly because President Nixon was persuaded of the concrete political benefits that support for the arts would bring him. More important was that Richard Nixon knew the extent to which the Vietnam War had turned America into two mutually hostile camps. The president wanted for his own an issue that would not divide his audience into sympathetic hawks and hostile doves. It was more an effort to soften and survive than divide and conquer, but this was the reason my arguments found favor.”

While the political motivations have faded with the passage of time, the fact remains that President Nixon’s support for the Arts Endowment eventually transformed the NEA from a tiny federal program into a significant policy leader in the arts.

Hanks’s Balancing Act

Nancy Hanks had the extraordinarily difficult task of navigating the political turmoil of the Administration, the political protests of the intellectuals, the populist tastes of many legislators, and the popularity of extreme positions within the art world. Thanks to her own talent for political persuasion and her recruitment of talented aides, Hanks prevailed again and again, and the agency evolved accordingly.

As the 1970s wore on, attitudes toward the NEA gradually changed, bringing new pressures on its grantmaking. For a new generation of artists, the NEA was part of the existing environment rather than an innovation. Many of them, according to Zeigler’s Arts in Crisis, “had come to believe that they were entitled to federal funding: ‘You, the United States, should be paying for me to create, because I’m here and I’m creating. As an artist, I’m an important member of the society—and so the society should be supporting me.’” At times, these artists would pressure the Arts Endowment to consider them, rather than the American public, the proper focus of the agency’s attention. To this constituency, the Endowment appeared more a foundation than a public agency.

In addition, the great expansion of higher education during the 1960s produced a significantly larger number of aspiring artists than had existed in the 1950s. From 1950 to 1961, first-year college enrollments nearly doubled from 2.2 million to 4.1 million. That figure more than doubled again to 8.6 million in 1970, then rose to 12 million in 1980. Many of these students were recruited to arts programs, and after graduation pursued arts careers.

During these transformative years under Hanks, NEA funding rose from $9 million [$71.4 million] in fiscal year (FY) 1970 to $99.9 million [$507.4 million] in FY 1977. With a soaring budget and, in accord with Hanks’s ambition—to increase the spread of Endowment grantees across the country—the NEA became a central influential institution in the world of American art. In a 1974 article in the New York Times Magazine, writer David Dempsey praised Hanks as “the person who has done as much as anyone in government or out, to bring about this change in attitude.” Once labeled “the lady from Culture Gap,” Hanks had become the fourth highest female appointee in the Nixon Administration.

Still, the Arts Endowment continued to have its problems. Even NEA supporter Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI), according to Dempsey, wondered whether the paintings the government was paying for were “realistic,” that is, representational, or “did they consist of doodles and swirls?” Dempsey saw the new Visual Arts Director Brian O’Doherty as fitting ably into an environment of “young, bright, dedicated, and suitably hip” staff. Dempsey also observed, “The joy of giving has nurtured a new type of government bureaucrat”—something few expected from the Nixon set. He noted that the NEA had come on the scene as private arts funding “was beginning to shrink,” yet this took place simultaneously with a “culture explosion.” The reasons for the latter phenomena were identified by August Heckscher during the Kennedy Administration as “more leisure and affluence for the average person . . . a new generation of college-bred taste makers in small towns and cities, life-styles modeled on artistic rather than commercial values.”

Organizational Expansion

The NEA under Hanks was as prolific as it was well financed, and the national outreach continued. Beginning in 1971, 55 state and jurisdictional arts agencies (including the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) received Basic State Grants from the Arts Endowment. Illustrating her dedication to serving every citizen, one of Hanks’s favorite projects was Artrain USA, a railroad service that brought a locomotive and six coaches carrying silversmiths, macramé artists, potters, and sculptors to towns in Michigan that had no museums. It began as an idea of the Michigan Council for the Arts, which recruited Helen Milliken, the lieutenant governor’s wife, to raise $850,000 [$6.5 million] for the local project. “It was tremendously important to have the backing of the NEA when we went to businesses and major industries asking for funding,” Milliken recalls. “It was the key; we couldn’t have raised that kind of money without that initial boost.” Soon afterward, when Milliken became the first lady of the State of Michigan, she was able to expand Artrain USA into eight of the Rocky Mountain states, with the Arts Endowment providing funding for half the cost of the trips.

Artrain USA later expanded its operations across the Western states, touring to 30 towns in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Television reporter Charles Kuralt showcased Artrain USA as it moved through Idaho and Wyoming. Artrain USA continues to this day, and has visited more than 725 communities in 44 states and the District of Columbia, changing shows every two or three years. The 2006 tour, Native Views: Influences of Modern Culture, provided a contemporary Native-American art exhibition. As of 2008, this tour, funded with an NEA American Masterpieces grant, had reached more than 160,000 people in 95 primarily rural and Native-American communities across America.

NEA funding doubled in 1972 to $31.5 million [$231.9 million], allowing expansion of existing programs and the establishment of support programs for opera and jazz. A total of $2.3 million [$16.9 miillion] was awarded in dance to choreographers including Alvin Ailey, Trisha Brown, and Alwin Nikolais; national tours of American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey Ballet; dance companies such as Salt Lake City’s Ballet West; and a broad range of smaller companies.

Music programs received $9.8 million [$72.2 million], the largest discipline share. Smaller awardees ranged from the Mobile Jazz Festival to the Bach Society of Minnetonka, Minnesota. More than $5 million [$36.8 million] went to orchestras in all areas of the country, including Shreveport, Louisiana; Toledo, Ohio; El Paso, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; Honolulu; Boston; Seattle; and Chicago. And $3 million [$22.1 million] was directed toward Central City Opera in Denver, Houston Grand Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, Santa Fe Opera, the Mississippi Opera Association, and many other companies.

The impact of early Arts Endowment grants is well expressed by Joan Woodbury, co-artistic director of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Salt Lake City. In 1972, Ririe-Woodbury received support to participate in two of the agency’s dance programs, Artists-in-Schools and Dance Touring. The aid “sent this small dance company from the West on a course of national and international service,” Woodbury recalled in 2006. “For the nine-year life of these two programs, the company toured to almost every state in the Union. They developed artists, commissioned new works, and developed artist-teachers to fulfill their goals.” The agency had identified a worthy but fledgling organization and granted it sustainability. “Without the ‘stamp of approval’ from the NEA . . . very few of the accomplishments of this company would have been possible,” Woodbury continued, “We can proudly say, with many others, ‘We’re still alive and kicking.’”

Initiated in the NEA’s earliest years, by 1974 the Dance Touring Program included 94 companies reaching audiences in 48 states and two special jurisdictions for an aggregate of more than 400 weeks, truly a revolutionary change in the American dance landscape. Other programs had similar impacts. Artists-in-Schools, whose pilot Poets in the Schools also began in the Stevens years, reached more than 5,000 schools in all 50 states and five special jurisdictions by 1974, including hundreds of thousands of children and teenagers in the fields of dance, crafts, painting, sculpture, music, theater, film, folk arts, and design.

Many leading authors and poets received grants of $5,000 [$36,817] each in 1972, including Stanley Elkin, Etheridge Knight, William Meredith, Carl Rakosi, James Schuyler, and William Jay Smith. Regional film centers were now funded through a Public Media Program. In 1972, President Nixon authorized the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, chaired by Nancy Hanks, to create the Federal Design Improvement Program. The program was intended to examine and upgrade design in the federal government, including architecture, graphic design, and standards for design procurement.

There were now ten discipline-based advisory panels with members generally serving staggered three-year terms. The panels had begun as “peer panels,” and stemmed from a 1965 resolution of the National Council on the Arts calling for the chairman to “appoint committees of interested and qualified persons or organizations to advise the Council with respect to projects, policies, or special studies as may be undertaken.” The panels had been formalized in 1969, and by 1973 there were more than 200 members. The painter Roy Lichtenstein participated, as did the authors Toni Morrison and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Other prominent authors also served in various capacities. For example, the Mississippi writer Eudora Welty was appointed by President Nixon to the National Council on the Arts in 1972, and she served on the Arts Endowment’s Twentieth Anniversary Committee of Leading American Artists in 1984.

Hanks’s Second Term

Nancy Hanks was reappointed NEA chairman in 1974. Her first term had seen a seven-fold increase in the Endowment’s budget, which now stood at $64 million [$399.6 million].

By the end of 1974, President Nixon had resigned, succeeded by President Gerald R. Ford, who appointed Nelson Rockefeller as Vice President. President Ford came out early in support of the agency, recalling the civic impact of an enormous 42-ton sculpture by Alexander Calder in the center of what is now Calder Plaza in Grand Rapids, Michigan—Ford’s hometown. The sculpture had been funded by a grant in 1967 of $45,000 [$414,687] from the Arts Endowment’s nascent Works of Art in Public Places Program, and it had become a symbol for the city. Each year on the anniversary of Calder’s birth [22 July], the city hosts an arts festival encompassing ten city blocks and attended by half a million people. According to City Historian Gordon Olson, the project “changed the role of the arts and public sculpture in the life of this community.”

In part because of growth in personnel, the Arts Endowment moved from its home in the Shoreham [Office] Building at 15th and H Streets [NW] to the McPherson Square Building on K Street [NW, at 15th and I Streets], which also housed investigators of the Watergate scandal. “Every day we had to face a battery of television cameras when we arrived and left work,” recalls Ann Guthrie Hingston, who served under Hanks and again under Chairman Dana Gioia as director of Government Affairs. A few years later the agency moved again to Columbia Plaza in Foggy Bottom, which also housed the U.S. Bicentennial Commission headed by John Warner, later a U.S. Senator from Virginia.

[The above locations are all in Northwest Washington, D.C., between the White House and the Capitol. Foggy Bottom is the neighborhood west of the White House towards the Potomac River occupied largely by George Washington University. It’s home to agencies such as the State Department and the Federal Reserve, and international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.]

The Arts Endowment’s tenth anniversary was celebrated September 29-30, 1975, first at the LBJ Ranch [near Johnson City in central Texas], then at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum at the University of Texas at Austin. The event coincided with the public opening of the presidential papers on the arts and humanities and included the participation of [First Lady] Lady Bird Johnson, Nancy Hanks, Roger Stevens, Hubert Humphrey [LBJ’s vice president, 1965-69], Jacob Javits, Kirk Douglas, Jamie Wyeth, and Beverly Sills. [President Johnson had died on 22 January 1973.] Thirty years later, in 2005, the NEA’s fortieth anniversary also would again be marked with programs and discussion at the LBJ Library and Museum.

Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Act  

In December 1975, President Ford signed the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Act. U.S. Representative John Brademas (D-IN) played a prominent role in shepherding the indemnity legislation through Congress. (In 1976, Representative Brademas would again serve the cause of the arts by cosponsoring, with Senator Pell, a four-year reauthorization of the Arts Endowment’s operations.) The new legislation facilitated the insuring of art, artifacts, and other objects for exhibition in the U.S. The dollar value of art and other objects from other countries that could be insured by the government at any one time was $250 million [$1.4 billion]. With this program in place, extremely valuable works of art housed around the world could now be transported to the U.S. for exhibition with their value protected in cases of damage, theft, or vandalism. With the entry of major works of art and archaeological artifacts from abroad, America saw the beginning of massive, “blockbuster” museum shows on major themes in art history, ranging from the tombs of ancient Egyptian pharaohs to retrospectives of the greatest modern painters and sculptors.

Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and former member of the National Council on the Arts, hailed the program many years later. “Because of the indemnity program,” he commented in a 2000 NEA publication, “members of the public get to experience tremendous works of art that they wouldn’t normally be able to see unless they could travel to the countries of origin.”

The indemnity program is staffed and administered by the Arts Endowment on behalf of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Applications for indemnity are reviewed by the council, which consists of the chairmen of the Arts and Humanities Endowments; the librarian of Congress; the archivist of the United States; the director of the National Science Foundation; the secretaries of State, the Interior, Commerce, Education, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, and Veterans Affairs; and other public officials.

Challenge Grants

Congress established the Challenge Grants program in 1976 during the final months of Chairman Hanks’s tenure with a special allocation in the Arts Endowment’s appropriation. NEA grants to organizations typically required one-to-one matching funds; however, Challenge Grants required at least a three-to-one match, initially in new or increased non-federal support. In reviewing Challenge Grants proposals, the Arts Endowment evaluated applicants’ organizational and managerial capacity in addition to artistic quality. Under the new program, federal grants of up to $1 million [$5.4 million] leveraged private funds for the construction of arts facilities, the development of endowments and cash reserves, or major artistic initiatives. Challenge Grants proved hugely successful, generating many times the government’s investment and helping arts institutions build solid financial foundations to sustain them through hard times.

[Challenge grants are funds disbursed by the grant-maker to a non-profit institution upon completion of the challenge requirement(s). The challenge refers to the actions or results that must be achieved, such as the acquisition of funds from other sources, before money is released.]

The first round of Challenge Grants awarded $27 million [$146 million] over two years to 66 organizations. Recipients included the Joffrey Ballet in New York, the WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, as well as many other prominent institutions. One example of the program’s effectiveness is Young Audiences, a nationwide network of more than 5,000 performing and visual artists presenting nearly 100,000 arts programs and services to eight million young people, teachers, and families. According to Richard Bell, executive director of Young Audiences, “Challenge Grants in the 1980s and early 1990s resulted in a 30-fold increase in the organization’s endowment, with matching grants and gains of $6.5 million [ca. $15.3 million (figuring from a total in 1990 dollars)] from the private sector.”

Representative Norm Dicks (D-WA) spoke fondly of the impact of Challenge Grants on private giving for arts organizations in his state. In the early years of the program, four Seattle organizations received grants totaling $1.7 million [$7.2 million] in federal funds, which generated a minimum of $5.2 million [$22 million] in new private funds (in 1979 dollars). The Seattle Symphony Orchestra received $600,000 [$2.5 million] to eliminate an accumulated deficit, augment its endowment, and meet increased operating costs as it approached its fiftieth anniversary. That year, Representative Dicks joined NEA Chairman Livingston Biddle in Seattle to announce three more Challenge Grants: to the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Opera, and the Seattle Repertory Theater. The Challenge Grants program operated successfully for 20 years until the agency’s budget was severely cut in FY 1996. During the lifetime of the Challenge Grants program, the NEA awarded nearly $203 million [ca. $398.2 million (calculating from a total in 1996 dollars)].

Arts on Radio and Television

Another area of achievement came through the initiatives of Programming in the Arts (later called the Arts on Radio and Television). Several outstanding individual programs in the early 1970s received Arts Endowment funding. Allan Miller’s 1973 film The Bolero, with Zubin Mehta conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a performance of Maurice Ravel’s piece, won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. The 90-minute television dance special American Ballet Theatre: A Close Up in Time (1973) profiled various ballet and dance performances, and Alvin Ailey: Memories and Visions (1974) featured selections from Ailey’s work.

In January 1976, two series changed the profile of the performing arts on television, and both were developed with funding from the Arts Endowment. Dance in America [1976-ca. 1981?] was a groundbreaking program that used the “true-action method,” originally developed to cover football, to capture live performances on film. Jac Venza and WNET adapted this method to film dance, and fused the television medium with the choreographer’s art. Famed choreographers including George Balanchine, Robert Joffrey, Martha Graham, and Alvin Ailey teamed with television directors Merrill Brockway and Emile Ardolino to restage works specifically for the small screen. The first broadcast season of Dance in America included performances by the Joffrey Ballet, Twyla Tharp, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and the Pennsylvania Ballet. At the same time, the Arts Endowment funded a study of the Joffrey Ballet to determine whether increased television broadcasts would cut into live attendance at the theater. The study found that television exposure of ballet performances actually increased attendance.

The other series was Live from Lincoln Center [1976-present], one of the most successful programs ever produced for broadcast on public television. The Arts Endowment provided funding for, among other things, development of low-light-level cameras that could record live performances without disturbing the performers or the audience. Live from Lincoln Center’s first season featured André Previn conducting the New York Philharmonic with Van Cliburn, the New York City Opera performing The Ballad of Baby Doe, and American Ballet Theatre’s Swan Lake. The year 2008 marked its 32nd season, and the series produced six shows a year for a national audience averaging five million viewers per performance.

Another award in a different medium had a similar long-term impact. In 1974, a grant from the Arts Endowment helped Garrison Keillor and Minnesota Public Radio launch A Prairie Home Companion, which has grown into one of the most listened-to radio shows in the country. In testimony before Congress in 1990, Keillor highlighted the “seed” aspect of NEA grants: “By the time the show became popular and Lake Wobegon became so well-known that people thought it was real, the Endowment had vanished from the credits, its job done. When you’re starting out . . . it seems like nobody wants to give you a dime. When you have a big success and everything you could ever want, people can’t do enough for you. The Endowment is there at the beginning, and that’s the beauty of it.” Speaking before the Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities, Keillor went further, noting that “today, in every city and state, when Americans talk up their home town, invariably they mention the arts.” He termed this growing respect for the arts “a revolution—small and lovely—that the Endowment has helped to bring about.”

Other awards bore fruit in the careers of Arts Endowment literary grantees as well. Among authors who received NEA fellowships during Hanks’s tenure, the following poets went on to win the Pulitzer Prize:

• Donald Justice (NEA 1967, 1973, 1980, 1989, Pulitzer 1980)

• Louise Glück (NEA 1970, 1979, 1988, Pulitzer 1993)

• Stephen Dunn (NEA 1973, 1981, 1989, Pulitzer 2001)

• Charles Simic (NEA 1975, 1979, Pulitzer 1990)

• Charles Wright (NEA 1975, 1984, Pulitzer 1998)

• Philip Levine (NEA 1976, 1981, 1987, Pulitzer 1995)

• Ted Kooser (NEA 1976, 1984, Pulitzer 2005)

• Natasha Trethewey (NEA 1999, Pulitzer 2007)

One of Nancy Hanks’s significant personnel decisions was to hire the African-American poet and jazz writer A. B. Spellman in 1975. Spellman first served as a consultant in arts education, from which he was promoted to leading positions in the Expansion Arts Program [see the sidebar on p. 49 of the report]. In 2005, Spellman recalled the origin of Expansion Arts, a major addition during the Hanks period: “It was founded and named by my predecessor, the late Vantile Whitfield. . . . Its purpose was to find and develop professional arts organizations that were, according to the letter of the guidelines, ‘deeply rooted in and reflective of the culture of minority, inner-city, rural, and tribal communities.’ We were responsible along with folk arts for. . . expanding the cultural portfolio of the Arts Endowment.” The program had a strong social grounding, as it was “geared to low- and moderate-income groups and to people living in rural communities, towns, and inner-city neighborhoods.” Leading the effort, Spellman sought to “assure [emphasis in original] that no American will be denied the opportunity to reach his or her artistic potential because of geographic, economic, or other social or cultural restraints.”

During the next 30 years, Spellman would play an important role in many major Arts Endowment programs, most notably the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowships. Spellman remembered, “In 1975 when I came here jazz was in about the same position as Expansion Arts. Most of the arts establishments simply would not touch it. . . . On the National Council on the Arts the attitude, unfortunately, was the same. Billy Taylor and I had many heated arguments with council members about giving some parity to jazz with classical music in the guidelines of the Arts Endowment. David Baker had many arguments with several council members, including, of course, the late pianist and cultural critic Sam Lipman, again about jazz as a fine arts form. And, of course, David was able to change Sam’s point of view.” Spellman also summarized the contribution of the Arts Endowment by commenting that after the passage of 30 years, “We see a much, much more inclusive arts world today than we had in 1975.”

A Research Agenda

Research was explicitly recognized as a central undertaking of the Arts Endowment in 1975. That year, the National Council on the Arts approved the first program budget for the agency’s Research Division, headed by Harold Horowitz, a 47-year-old architect who came to the agency from the National Science Foundation. The Endowment’s new focus on empirical data collection and analysis was augured by an important study from 1974, Museums USA: A Survey Report. Produced by an agency contractor, the study proved critical in advancing quantitative research for the field. By documenting staff levels, attendance, membership, budgets, and regional trends in museums in the United States, the report sparked substantive policy discussions about appropriate support mechanisms for these institutions. In the ensuing decades, the Research Division (later named the Office of Research and Analysis) would repeat this pattern in other areas. Under Horowitz and others, the division issued reports documenting the “state of the arts” for various disciplines and extended those inquiries into artist employment, arts participation, and other domestic indicators that would be used to guide policy.

Two years after the division’s founding, Joseph Coates, assistant to the director of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, stated at an agency conference that he welcomed a “long-term commitment on the part of scholars to a program of arts research; not the kind of in-and-out contract research [formerly conducted].” He predicted, “The issue will arise whether the Endowment should be doing basic or applied research. I believe that at this stage it should be committed to applied research; research that has a high utility element.” Since then, the NEA has continued to be a leading source of such research studies in the arts and arts education.

Hanks’s Legacy

During her tenure, the Arts Endowment’s support reached all 50 states and six U.S. territories. Nancy Hanks expanded the Arts Endowment’s operations and career staff, while developing seed grants for major arts institutions and supporting high-profile initiatives such as the U.S. Bicentennial celebration, which occurred near the end of her second term.

Nancy Hanks’s legacy was one of outstanding dynamism, and the effects of her years as NEA chair were far-reaching. One of Hanks’s noteworthy achievements was her role in establishing the state arts agencies. By 1977, at the end of her second term, state legislative appropriations for state arts agencies stood at $55.7 million [$282.9 million], more than half the NEA appropriation of $99.9 million [$507.4] that year. Other important successes of her chairmanship were the impressive expansion of the audience for dance and the extraordinary spread of regional theaters. As Peter Donnelly, managing director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre, stated in 1976, “What has been accomplished in the last decade with the assistance of the Endowment has been quite phenomenal. A theater which for all practical purposes did not exist except in New York has been created nationally.”

Yet Hanks’s greatest accomplishment was to bring more federal money for the arts to more communities in the United States than ever before. Her success in doing so—and the popularity of an “arts-for-all-Americans” vision for the agency— may be measured by the Arts Endowment’s growing budget in the eight years under Hanks, which increased by 1,400 percent. In 1978, the last year funded under her chairmanship, the NEA’s appropriation stood at $123.8 million [$584.4  million]. To appreciate the scope of the increase, consider that $124 million in 1978 is equivalent to approximately $405 million in 2008. Moreover, the 1978 funding served a total population in the United States that was three-quarters the size of the 2008 population (223 million compared to 304 million).

[In regard to Bauerlein and Grantham’s citation of the $124 million figure above, I couldn’t account for their equivalence to a 2008 amount of $405 million.  All the sources I consulted calculated the equivalent value of $409 million for 2008, and thereafter a figure of $585 million for 2023.]

Grants were offered in many new areas, including aid to exhibitions, crafts fellowships and workshops, apprenticeships, and a fellowship program for art critics. Hanks provided support for the final work of the great American muralist Thomas Hart Benton, who died in 1975. The Sources of Country Music, a monumental painting, was commissioned for Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, with the grant application submitted by Bill Ivey, who would become NEA chairman more than 20 years later.

With the end of the Ford Administration and the election of President Jimmy Carter, Hanks’s eight years of service with the Arts Endowment concluded. Michael Straight recalled that the chairman had “a sense that she was accepted by the incoming Administration, but the sense was illusory.” When Hanks sought to influence President Carter, her attempt, according to Straight, was too personal—she found a way to meet the new chief executive directly, little realizing that he was a man who preferred contact through his staff. President Carter understood that she expected to be reappointed to head the Arts Endowment, but he did not even request that she continue until a successor was appointed.

The example of Nancy Hanks’s leadership lived on well beyond her tenure, however, and the devotion she inspired was enduring. Original National Council on the Arts member R. Philip Hanes, Jr., provided a telling sign of her character: “When Nancy discovered she had cancer, we all knew that she was not well; but she would take no one at all into her confidence. . . . She was without question one of the strongest and ablest human beings I have ever known and one of the most giving and selfless.”

Three weeks after her death in 1983, President Reagan asked Congress to name the Old Post Office complex, which she had sought to save, the Nancy Hanks Center. On April 19, 1983, the building was dedicated as the new home of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the Institute of Museum Services, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. The Old Post Office at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW in Washington, DC, was renamed the Nancy Hanks Center, in recognition of her tireless efforts to save the building from demolition and as a fitting tribute to her long and productive tenure as chairman of the NEA.  [See “Saving the Old Post Office,” a sidebar on p. 43 of the report.]

[In 2013, after year-long negotiations with the General Services Administration, the Trump Organization leased the historic Old Post Office, completed in 1899, for a luxury hotel.  In 2016, amidst considerable controversy, the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., opened, setting off a series of legal challenges to then-President-Elect of the United States Donald Trump’s control of the property.  In 2021, Trump sold the lease and in 2022 the Trump Hotel closed and later that year, the Old Post Office reopened as the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC.]

[I call the attention of readers to the statement in the NEA’s history report above that the agency was largely responsible for “the extraordinary spread of regional theaters.”   Peter Donnelly (1938-2009), who was managing director and then producing director at the Seattle Rep from 1964 to 1985, asserted, “What has been accomplished . . . with the assistance of the Endowment has been quite phenomenal.  A theater which for all practical purposes did not exist except in New York has been created nationally.”  This is precisely my rationale for republishing this history of the Arts Endowment as a supplement to my irregular series on regional theater in the United States.

[Chapter 4 of this chronicle, “A Long Summer,” recounts the further development of the agency during the chairmanship of Livingston L. Biddle, Jr. (1918-2002), from 1977 to 1981.  I’ll be posting it on Tuesday, 14 November.  Please return for the continuation of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts.”]