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.”]