A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Chapter 10 & Epilogue

 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[Welcome back to the concluding installments of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” after a pause on 8 December for Kirk Woodward’s discussion of the Beatles’ release of “Now and Then.”  This installment is the final chapter and the epilogue of Part 1, “The History of the NEA,” of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008” by Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham. 

[Chapter 10, “Building a New Consensus,” covers the Arts Endowment chairmanship (2003-2009) of Dana Gioia (b. 1950), a poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.  The Epilogue, “A Great Nation Deserves Great Art,” is a short summation of the results, benefits, efforts, and successes of the first three-quarters of the Arts Endowment’s existence.

[As I’ve recommended since the start of this series, visitors to ROT who are just encountering the NEA history should go back to the beginning and read Chapters 1 through 8/9, published on 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, and 30 November, and 3 December, respectively.  The NEA’s report is report organized chronologically, so it won’t make much sense if you jump in at the end.] 

“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 10

Building a New Consensus

The ninth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, poet Dana Gioia, was nominated by President George W. Bush to succeed Michael Hammond on October 23, 2002. The U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed the nomination on January 29, 2003.

Chairman Gioia, 52 at the time of his confirmation, was an intellectual figure of national importance. He had published three collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon [2001], which won the 2002 American Book Award. His 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” [Atlantic Monthly, April 1991] stimulated a major debate in the literary world, and a subsequent book, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture [1992], was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. He co-edited several best-selling literary textbooks with the poet X. J. Kennedy, and he had attained further distinction as a translator from Latin, Italian, and German. Also trained in music, Gioia had worked as a music critic and composed two opera libretti, Nosferatu [2001; jointly premiered by Rimrock Opera (Billings, Montana) and Opera Idaho (Boise), 2004] and Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast [2005; premiered in Los Angeles, 2008; co-production by the Los Angeles Opera, OperaWorks, CSU-Northridge, and the Southern California Opera Guild].

Born to a working-class family of Italian and Mexican descent in Los Angeles and the first member of his family to attend college, Gioia graduated from Stanford University and received a master’s degree in comparative literature from Harvard, where he studied under the poets Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop. He returned to Stanford to attend business school and earned an MBA. Beginning in the late 1970s, he spent 15 years in New York working for General Foods while writing in the evenings. He eventually became a vice-president before leaving business in 1992 to write full-time.

Gioia’s Vision

Gioia inherited an Arts Endowment that showed some progress in increasing its budget and devising promising new programs. Still, the impact of the 1990s culture wars hung heavily over the NEA, and the severe cuts in funding and staffing remained a burdensome legacy. In spite of more than 100,000 grants given in every state and U.S. territory, the Arts Endowment remained best known for a few controversial grants given nearly a decade prior. Many members of Congress continued to criticize the agency, and anti-NEA legislation was regularly introduced. The media remained alert for potentially contentious grants, artists and arts organizations were bitter over the cutbacks, and public perception was mixed at best.

Gioia approached his new position with the aim of first changing the national conversation about the rationale for federal funding for the arts. In a speech delivered to the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on June 30, 2003, he asked, “Can the National Endowment for the Arts matter?” The speech was a sober statement of philosophy, and a sharp overview of the public standing of the agency. He began by observing that, “If the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts had spoken to this forum ten years ago, the topic might well have been ‘Should the NEA Exist?’ At that time a serious cultural and political debate existed in Washington about whether the agency served a legitimate public function.” Gioia observed that this question had become moot, at least as a policy matter. Congress had saved the agency. The Arts Endowment had undergone severe budget cuts and a reduction in staff, but its continuing existence was assured. The question, to Gioia, was not should the NEA exist, but how could the NEA best serve the nation?

Gioia outlined his goal for the agency succinctly as “bringing the best in the arts and arts education to the broadest audience possible.” His vision stressed, first, that the agency needed to serve all Americans, including tens of millions in rural areas, inner cities, and military bases who had historically been ignored by the NEA. Second, the agency must enhance culture and enrich community life, especially by connecting “America with the best of its creative spirit.” To meet those goals, and do so in a way that would win over critics and change public perception, Gioia realized, would require more than funding strong applicants. It demanded a radical change in the still largely negative public perception of the agency, and these changes needed to be embodied in visible, national programs.

A New Approach Is Needed

The controversies of the previous decade showed that, in the media and political spheres, a single questionable grant could outweigh a thousand meritorious ones. Historically, the Arts Endowment’s successes tended to be seen merely at a local level. Only when a grant became controversial did it and the NEA receive national attention. Likewise, most arts organizations mounted programs that had only local impact, even though the larger issues they faced such as sustainability, funding, media coverage, and audience development transcended their local reach. Gioia concluded that the American arts might benefit from a different model than the NEA’s traditional piecemeal approach of awarding single grants to individual organizations for specific projects. Stronger national leadership was needed. Properly designed and executed, an expanded funding model could link local arts organizations to broader networks and partnerships in fruitful ways.

And so the Arts Endowment developed an ambitious new method of supporting the arts that would have unprecedented impact. In addition to continuing its numerous direct grants, the Arts Endowment created large initiatives designed to incorporate local organizations into broader national partnerships. These national initiatives improved both the efficiency and effectiveness of arts programs. By creating large national partnerships, these programs could achieve enormous economies of scale while also gaining publicity no individual organization could generate independently. Arts organizations were invited to apply for the opportunity to deliver a program to communities around the country, especially those in which opportunities to experience the arts were limited. These national initiatives served both artists’ need for employment and arts organizations’ need for funding, educational outreach, and affordable programming. In addition to reaching an unprecedentedly large and diverse public, the new initiatives provided the public—including the media and government officials—with tangible examples of the Arts Endowment’s achievements.

National Initiatives

Shakespeare in American Communities

In April 2003, Chairman Gioia announced the launch of the first national initiative, Shakespeare in American Communities, a project designed to bring Shakespeare to audiences and schools all across the U.S. and unite players in the arts and arts education systems. It also focused on reviving theatrical touring of serious drama, a once thriving practice that had become unaffordable for most companies. In its initial phase, the program organized regional tours of Shakespeare plays by six distinguished theater companies. First Lady Laura Bush and Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti served as honorary chairs and Arts Midwest as partner.

[In a June 2008 NEA document entitled “National Initiatives: Shakespeare in American Communities: About Shakespeare in American Communities,” the agency named seven theater companies which participated in the touring program in 2003-04: The Acting Company (New York, NY) – Richard III; Alabama Shakespeare Festival (Montgomery, AL) – Macbeth; The Aquila Theatre Company (New York, NY) – Othello; Arkansas Repertory Theatre (Little Rock, AR) – Romeo and Juliet; Artists Repertory Theatre (Portland, OR) – A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Chicago Shakespeare Theater (Chicago, IL) – Romeo and Juliet; The Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis, MN) – Othello.]

The first phase of the program began in autumn 2003 and ran to November 2004. In that year, six companies visited 172 communities—mostly small and midsized towns—and 500 schools across all 50 states. As the initial phase gained momentum, an unexpected new dimension of the program began as the Department of Defense supported the NEA to expand the Shakespeare program to visit military bases and neighboring schools. It was the first time the National Endowment for the Arts had received funding from the Defense Department, and the first significant program that the Arts Endowment had ever offered to the millions of Americans in the military or their families. This surprising partnership signaled to the arts world, the press, and the general public that something new was happening at the agency.

Over the next four school years, Shakespeare in American Communities grew into the largest Shakespeare tour in history. Focusing increasingly on providing students with the opportunity to see a professional production of Shakespeare, the program eventually sponsored performances and tours by 77 theater companies, reaching more than 2,300 municipalities in all 50 states. The program also provided free education materials for teachers, including an audio CD and two award-winning films that featured Tom Hanks, William Shatner, Martin Sheen, Harold Bloom, Julie Taymor, Mel Gibson, and James Earl Jones, among other talented artists. By late 2008, the Shakespeare kits had been distributed to teachers and librarians across the country and reached more than 24 million students. In addition to its vast educational impact, the program gave 2,000 actors paying work performing classic theater—a great boon to professionals so often underemployed.

[The two videos noted above are Shakespeare In Our Time: Shakespeare in American Communities and Why Shakespeare? (both 2005).  The CD featuring literary scholar Bloom (1930-2019), among others, is An Introduction to Shakespeare (2003).]

Through its vast reach and broad appeal the Shakespeare program soon became the Arts Endowment’s signature initiative. Widely covered by the press, it signaled a resolve at the NEA to bring the best of art and arts education to communities that had previously been overlooked. It also demonstrated a new concern for improving arts education in U.S. high schools. As more theater companies, actors, presenters, teachers, and students participated, the program developed a large constituency of supporters, including many members of Congress, who appreciated major theater companies visiting their districts. The Shakespeare program also represented a substantial new investment in American theater since the Arts Endowment was able to create this historical tour without cutting existing grant support for the theater field, continuing to support a huge variety of other projects including approximately 135 new works each year.

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience

As the events of 9/11 plunged the United States into a new era of geopolitics, the Arts Endowment leadership envisioned another, entirely new national initiative. In 2003, Connecticut Poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson and Chairman Gioia discussed a class on poetry Nelson had recently taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “The cadets had really eaten up the experience of writing and reading poetry,” Nelson said. “Now some of them are e-mailing me from the war. I wish we could do something more—something tangible—for them.”

The conversation became the seed of Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which began in 2004. Under the direction of NEA Counselor to the Chairman Jon Parrish Peede, the Arts Endowment sponsored a series of writing workshops at military installations led by a group of distinguished and diverse writers, including Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down), Tobias Wolff (In Pharaoh’s Army), Jeff Shaara (Gods and Generals), Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October), Bobbie Ann Mason (In Country), Stephen Lang (Beyond Glory), and Joe Haldeman (Forever War). As with the Shakespeare program, the Department of Defense and the military services became valuable partners, and The Boeing Company [the aerospace company] agreed to support it.

The response to the program was massive. Phone calls, letters, faxes, and e-mails poured into the NEA as military personnel and their families asked to participate, some calling from Baghdad and Kabul. Vietnam War veterans also sent emotional letters of support, stating that they wished they had been offered a similar opportunity decades earlier. During the next two years, teams of writers led workshops at 25 military bases in the U.S. and overseas for 6,000 service members and their spouses. Participation was so enthusiastic that the Arts Endowment decided to compile their best work in an anthology edited by Andrew Carroll. By the end, more than 12,000 pages of poems, memoirs, short stories, and letters were submitted by military personnel and their families and evaluated by an independent editorial panel of writers. As Gioia assured in the preface to the volume, “The Arts Endowment gave the visiting writers total freedom in conducting their workshops. They were not told what to teach, and they in turn gave the participants complete freedom on how and what to write.”

Essays written by service members and their families were published in The New Yorker in June 2006. In September 2006, the release of the anthology, Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, published by Random House, was celebrated at the Library of Congress. The project also inspired two documentary films: Muse of Fire, directed by Lawrence Bridges, and Operation Homecoming, directed by Richard Robbins. Muse of Fire premiered at the National Archives in Washington, DC in March 2007. Operation Homecoming was broadcast on PBS in April 2007, eventually winning two Emmys in 2008, as well as becoming a finalist for a 2008 Academy Award.

NEA Jazz Masters Initiative

In 2004, Chairman Gioia took a small but venerable NEA program of fellowships to jazz musicians and expanded it to become the largest jazz program in the agency’s history. Renamed the NEA Jazz Masters Initiative, it stood at the center of an ambitious effort to recognize the distinctive American musical form and expand the audience for jazz in the United States. Gioia increased the number of fellowship winners and the dollar amount for the award. A category for “jazz advocate”—eventually named after A. B. Spellman—was added.

All components—including the NEA Jazz Masters on Tour, a series of presentations featuring performances, educational activities, and speaking engagements by NEA Jazz Masters in all 50 states—were united into the new initiative in partnership with Arts Midwest. With the expansion came NEA Jazz in the Schools, an educational program for high school teachers that combined a Web-based curriculum produced in partnership with Jazz at Lincoln Center. The Verizon Foundation provided early support for the school initiative, and the Verizon Corporation along with The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation donated funds to support NEA Jazz Masters on Tour. Meanwhile, the Arts Endowment worked with XM Satellite Radio to feature the NEA Jazz Masters on a daily radio segment across 13 news, talk, and music stations. Donating their radio time, XM broadcasted these popular jazz features as often as 120 times a day.

American Masterpieces

In January 2004, First Lady Laura Bush made an historic appearance at the Old Post Office Pavilion. At a news conference there, she announced the Arts Endowment’s new national initiative, American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, along with a Presidential request to Congress for an $18 million [$26.6 million in 2023] budget increase for FY 2005.

American Masterpieces brought exhibitions, concerts, dance performances, and broadcasts of great American art to large and small communities in all 50 states. Each grant was accompanied by an educational component that involved seminars, learning projects, and curricular materials, a feature that led Mrs. Bush to say, “I’m especially pleased at the program’s focus on arts education, as it is crucial that the knowledge and appreciation of our cultural legacy begins in our schools. The Endowment would support touring, local presentations, and arts education in order to acquaint Americans, especially students with the best of the nation’s artistic achievements.” By the end of 2005, Congress appropriated $10 million [$14.8 million today] for American Masterpieces, and support was firmly in place for the Visual Arts Touring, Musical Theater, Dance, Choral Music, and Literature components of the program. The art forms were remixed slightly each year. In 2006 Choral Music was added to the program, and in 2008 the chamber music and presenting fields received funding.

American Masterpieces has sustained an enormous number of tours, exhibitions, and festivals. Over 50 dance grants were awarded in the first three years of the program enabling companies like Alvin Ailey, Martha Graham, Luna Negra, Pilobolus, Trisha Brown, and José Limón to tour the nation. Meanwhile, over the past four years, 47 visual arts exhibitions from institutions such as the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Phillips Collection, George Eastman House, American Folk Art Museum, and Olana Partnership toured 200 venues across 39 states.

Research about Reading

Gioia placed great importance on careful research as a means to determine the public agenda for arts and arts education. In the early months of his chairmanship, the Arts Endowment’s Office of Research and Analysis began to analyze the results of the latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. As with previous surveys administered in 1982 and 1992, the Arts Endowment designed the 2002 questionnaire in consultation with survey experts and arts professionals, then commissioned the U.S. Bureau of the Census to collect a sample and conduct the survey.

The 1992 Arts Participation survey had offered reasons for optimism, with access to the arts and audiences on the rise in most art forms. In 2002, however, the trends reversed, with audience participation in the arts going down. Broken down by age groups, the findings proved even more troubling. The youngest group (18 to 24-year-olds) showed the steepest declines of all in numerous art forms. The percentage of young adults who listen to jazz on radio dropped by 11 points, while young listeners of classical music dropped by nine points. A major problem had clearly emerged in the American arts that would deeply influence NEA planning and programming—the decline of audiences in almost every art form, a decline steepest among the young.

One art form, however, underwent an especially daunting decline—literature. The rate of adults who read any fiction, poetry, or drama in the preceding 12 months—any imaginative writing of any length or quality in any medium—slid from 54 percent in 1992 to 46.7 percent in 2002. In addition, during this period, access to books and the arts expanded, with more libraries, museums, historic sites, performing arts spaces, and after-school programs in the United States every year. For literature, the portion of young adults who engaged in literary reading was 9.5 percentage points lower than ten years before—an astonishing drop in such a fundamental activity.

The reading declines called for further study, and Gioia commissioned an expanded analysis of the literary reading segment of the survey. The result was Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which turned out to be one of the most discussed and debated cultural stories of 2004. Created under then-Research Director Mark Bauerlein [the editor of this report], Reading at Risk showed literary reading rates falling precipitously in every demographic group—all ages, incomes, education levels, races, regions, and genders. Librarians, publishers, editors, writers, and educators weighed in on what Gioia termed “a national crisis,” and more than 600 stories and commentaries appeared in the first few weeks after its release. A serious national debate about the causes and extent of the reading decline had begun and would continue for years with the Arts Endowment taking the lead.

In 2007, the Arts Endowment’s research division, headed by Sunil Iyengar, issued an influential follow-up study, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence. The report compiled reading data from other government agencies, private foundations, and university research centers, all of which reached a consistent finding. This comprehensive report reinforced and expanded the earlier conclusions. All Americans, especially young people, read less and read less well, and these declines had serious educational, economic, and civic consequences. These reports have remained the definitive reference point for treatments of the field of literary culture and publishing in America.

Re-Investing in Reading: The Big Read

Gioia acknowledged that no single program or government agency by itself could reverse the decline in reading. As the leading arts agency in the United States, however, the Arts Endowment assumed the task of developing a national initiative to encourage literary reading.

On May 9, 2006, the agency unveiled a new program, The Big Read. Building on ideas from existing “City Reads” programs, the National Endowment for the Arts created a partnership of public, private, nonprofit, and corporate entities—Arts Midwest, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, The Boeing Company, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation—to support and administer an ambitious national reading program. The Big Read offers citizens the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their communities, as well as provides comprehensive resources for discussing the work, including readers guides, teachers guides, CDs, and publicity material as well as a national public service campaign and an extensive Web site with comprehensive information on authors and their works.

For a pilot program, the Arts Endowment selected ten municipalities from across the country to receive grants to conduct and promote four- to six-week community-based programs aimed at both teens and adults. From January through June 2006, these diverse communities—ranging from rural Enterprise, Oregon (population 1,895) to metropolitan Miami-Dade, Florida (population 3,900,000)—took part in the pilot phase. Each community created unique events, activities, and literary programs around one of four classic novels: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

To introduce public officials to the program, the NEA held a celebration of The Big Read on July 20, 2006, at the Library of Congress. Ray Bradbury participated vivaciously, greeting the capacity audience via a video recording. Members of Congress, including Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN), Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY), and Representative Charles Taylor (R-NC) read passages from their favorite books. Mrs. Laura Bush, who enthusiastically joined The Big Read as its Honorary Chair, remarked, “In ten cities and towns across the United States, thousands of Americans are being introduced—or reintroduced—to the joys of reading literature. They’re learning how characters in our favorite stories become close friends that we can visit, just by reopening dog-eared volumes. They’re discovering how we can escape to another world by losing ourselves in a good book—only to find truths about humanity that lead us right back to our own lives.”

In its third year, The Big Read reached all 50 states as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. By 2009, more than 400 towns and cities will have hosted a Big Read program, with over 21,000 local and national organizations supporting the initiative. Indeed, The Big Read has become the largest federal literature program since the World War II Armed Services Editions project. Organizers choose from 27 books, ranging from classic novels such as Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to contemporary works such as Tobias Wolff’s Old School and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The Arts Endowment also helped produce a weekday show on XM Satellite Radio focusing on The Big Read books. Broadcast three times daily, each book was read in half-hour segments. (All of the broadcast time was donated by XM Radio.) Among the many celebrated figures who volunteered their time and talents were Robert Duvall, Ed Harris, Robert Redford, Ray Bradbury, Nadine Gordimer, Edward Albee, Alice Walker, and Sandra Day O’Connor. The Arts Endowment, with Lawrence Bridges [director of the 2007 documentary film Muse of Fire; see above], also developed special introductory films presenting interviews and commentary by the living authors of The Big Read.

In late 2007, the Arts Endowment added an international component to The Big Read that included exchange programs with Egypt, Russia, and Mexico. In Egypt, partnerships were created in Cairo and Alexandria to bring American novels to readers (including the first Arabic translation of Fahrenheit 451). Meanwhile, American audiences read The Thief and the Dogs by Egyptian Nobel Laureate [1988] Naguib Mahfouz. Russia featured To Kill a Mockingbird in the Ivanovo and Saratov regions while selected American cities read Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. For the U.S./Mexico Big Read the NEA and the Fondo de Cultura Económica jointly produced an anthology of classic Mexican short stories, Sun, Stone, and Shadows, published in both Spanish and English editions to be read in both U.S. and Mexican cities. Each of these international titles became permanent selections for the U.S. Big Read.

Cleaning up the Old Post Office

Not all of Dana Gioia’s initiatives were national. Some of them were downright homey and domestic. When Gioia visited the Old Post Office in November of 2002, he was surprised and dismayed by the Arts Endowment’s cluttered corridors. The stately marble hallways had long served as storage for excess files, old books, office furniture, and an assortment of supplies and materials, for the agency was short on space. Although Gioia’s own desk sets no high standard for neatness—always piled high with books, documents, journals, and CDs—he felt a need for the NEA public spaces to portray the agency’s accomplishments. Laurence Baden, deputy chairman for Management and Budget, gradually secured more office and storage space in the Old Post Office. This expansion not only improved working conditions; it also allowed staff that had been dispersed around the building to enjoy a common working space with their colleagues.

[The Old Post Office building is discussed in Chapter 3 (11 November 2023) of this series; see also “Saving the Old Post Office,” a sidebar on p. 43 of the published NEA report.]

Today the corridors of the Old Post Office are clear of clutter. Those who visit the NEA enjoy viewing framed portraits of NEA Jazz Masters and stylish caricatures of American authors featured in The Big Read program. The staff also rescued its 1984 Oscar from storage to display as one more symbol of the agency’s achievements. Portraits of former chairmen now greet visitors to the chairman’s office, and striking paintings loaned by living American artists decorate the office walls.

[The Arts Endowment won an Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the 57th Academy Awards in 1984 “in recognition of its 20th anniversary and its dedicated commitment to fostering artistic and creative activity and excellence in every area of the arts.”  See Chapter 5 (17 November 2023).]

The Conversation Changes

By January 2004, the public conversation about the Arts Endowment had changed markedly. Discussing the proposed budget increase, Roger Kimball, conservative intellectual and previous critic of the NEA, now found the Arts Endowment “a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture.” Indeed, he added, “the NEA has become a clear-sighted, robust institution intent on bringing important art to the American people.” Kimball’s summary appeared in National Review Online, which had taken a different attitude toward the agency only a few years earlier. Meanwhile, veteran columnist William Safire of The New York Times likewise commended on the new programs, citing their bipartisan spirit. “The NEA has raised a banner of education and accessibility to which liberal and conservative can repair,” he said. The Wall Street Journal joined in the praise, too. In response to the new NEA Jazz Masters initiative, Nat Hentoff wrote, “No one with government funds to dispense has done more to bring jazz to American audiences than Dana Gioia.”

In a long piece in The New York Times, Bruce Weber [national arts correspondent and theater reviewer] wrote that the NEA under Chairman Gioia “has won the Congressional approbation that eluded his predecessors. And [Gioia] has done so without alienating artists, who tend to resist all restraints on their independence.” Michael Slenske’s [freelance writer] 2,700-word profile of Operation Homecoming, published in 2005 in The Boston Globe, referred to the program as an “innovative” model that not only serves an important historical purpose, but “promises to be helpful” in the recovery of war veterans.

Growing public support for Arts Endowment programs extended to Capitol Hill. In September 2004, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who had previously been highly critical of the NEA, wrote to the Montgomery Advertiser to praise the Shakespeare initiative. “In my view,” he said, “these are the kinds of programs the National Endowment for the Arts should be sponsoring—taking the best of American art and culture and making it available, in this case, to our service men and women and their families. . . . I’m proud that the Alabama Shakespeare Festival was chosen to participate in the program.” In floor debates in the House of Representatives on May 18, 2006, Rush Holt (D-NJ) argued that an increase in NEA funding “will build programs that use the strength of the arts and our nation’s cultural life to enhance communities in every state and every county around America.” One month later, Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) told his colleagues, “Funding for the arts is one of the best investments our government makes. In purely economic terms, it generates a return that would make any Wall Street investor jealous.”

Fortieth Anniversary

On March 10, 2005, when Chairman Gioia appeared before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, he summarized the situation of the Arts Endowment: “As the National Endowment for the Arts approaches the fortieth anniversary of its founding legislation, the agency enjoys a renewed sense of confidence in its public mission, reputation, and record of service.” Chairman Gioia also noted that the “Arts Endowment now reaches both large and small communities as well as rural areas, inner cities, and military bases—successfully combining artistic excellence with public outreach.”

At public events throughout 2005 and 2006, the 40-year history of the Arts Endowment was noted and celebrated. [On 28-29 October 2005], the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum at the University of Texas at Austin convened [The NEA at 40: Cultural Policy and American Democracy,] a three-day conference to commemorate the signing of the legislation establishing the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities [the NEH conference occurred on 27 October]. At panel discussions and receptions, the founding and evolution of the Arts Endowment were remembered. Among the many notable speakers was former Congressman John Brademas [D-IN], who discussed the original legislation creating the Arts Endowment [National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, 29 September 1965 (Public Law 89-209); see Chapter 2 (8 November 2023)]. 

In November 2005, President and Mrs. Bush hosted a black-tie dinner at the White House to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the NEA and NEH. Artists, scholars, and patrons attended, as did Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, daughter of President Johnson. President Bush paid tribute to NEA Chairman Gioia and the agency’s “support for music and dance, theater and the arts across our great country.” The NEA, he said, “has helped improve public access to education in the arts, offered workshops in writing, and brought artistic masterpieces to underserved communities.”

The capstone anniversary event was a symposium on arts and culture held at American University’s striking, new Katzen Arts Center [Washington, D.C.] in May 2006 [Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement, 17-19 May 2006]. It was an educational symposium for graduate students and young professionals to learn about the Arts Endowment and the dramatic growth of the arts during the last 40 years.

Highlights of the two-day [Washington Post reported three days] conference were the individual sessions convened by every discipline director to discuss the impact of the Arts Endowment on his or her field. Other events included a plenary session on international cultural exchange and a panel discussing public funding and private giving. Finally, graduate students from colleges and universities throughout the country presented papers on diverse topics relative to the arts in the public sector. The NEA’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, including this symposium on arts and culture, provided ample opportunities for gleaning lessons from the past to shape the next 40 years.

Gioia’s Second Term

On December 9, 2006, Dana Gioia was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate for his second term as NEA chairman. During his second term, Chairman Gioia expanded the international activities of the NEA. Under the leadership of Pennie Ojeda, the agency created literary exchanges with Russia, Pakistan, Egypt, Northern Ireland, and Mexico. The Arts Endowment also streamlined its grants process and simplified its application categories. In its fortieth year, the NEA staff handled more applications (a 30 percent increase from Fiscal Year 2000 to 2004) and more grants (a 12 percent increase in the same period) without an increase in staff. While operating on a reduced administrative budget, the Arts Endowment also managed the substantial workload of Challenge America grants in order to reach every congressional district consistently each year.

Gioia continued to spend considerable time refining and expanding national initiatives. Believing that consistency of support and excellence of execution were essential to their success, he urged the NEA staff to look for ways to improve the programs with each new grants cycle. Application procedures were adjusted, teaching materials updated, Web sites revised and redesigned, and partnerships expanded.

Gioia also observed that arts organizations benefitted from being able to repeat programs. A theater company whose first tour was challenging gained the necessary experience to make subsequent tours go more smoothly. A school district modestly involved in one year’s jazz, poetry, or Shakespeare programs would greatly expand its participation the next time around. In a second Big Read program, a municipality coordinated its many partners more easily than in its first effort. Consistent NEA investment not only sustained the specific initiatives; it also helped build the expertise, confidence, and credibility of all the organizations involved. As the number of partners involved in these initiatives reached into the thousands, the widespread impact of this long-term planning and support became visible.

Historic Budget Increase

Congress noted the NEA’s progress with growing enthusiasm. In December of 2007, the NEA received a $20.1 million [$28.5 million] budget increase—the Arts Endowment’s largest increase in 29 years. The NEA’s $144.7 million [$200.2 million] budget for 2008 marked a 16 percent increase over 2007. This dramatic budget increase was not only a testament to Congress’s confidence in Gioia’s leadership, but a concrete example of the impact of the work of the NEA staff, including Senior Deputy Chairman Eileen Mason, Government Affairs Director Ann Guthrie Hingston, Communications Director Felicia Knight, and Congressional Liaison Shana Chase, in rebuilding the agency’s relationship with Capitol Hill and the media.

The NEA also helped secure historical legislative changes in the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The new legislation authorized a substantial increase, with the international indemnity ceiling reaching $10 billion [$13.8 billion, based on the valye of the dollar in 2008, the year of the changes in the indemnity program] along with an additional $5 billion [$6.9 billion] to support the creation of a domestic component to the program. In a period of skyrocketing art values and high insurance rates, it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this legislation, which made major museum shows financially possible across the nation. As John E. Buchanan, Jr., director of museums with Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco noted, “It is one of the greatest things that the government can do for American art museums.”

The same legislation also created the NEA Opera Honors, the first new class of federal arts awards in 26 years. Like the Arts Endowment’s Jazz Masters awards, the NEA Opera Honors are lifetime achievement awards celebrating artists and advocates who have earned the highest distinction and made irreplaceable contributions to their field. The new program reflected Gioia’s conviction that the U.S. government needed to do more to recognize and celebrate the contributions of its artists. The first NEA Opera Honors recipients were soprano Leontyne Price, conductor James Levine, composer Carlisle Floyd, and director Richard Gaddes. Administered by OPERA America, the awards were greeted with enormous enthusiasm by the American classical music world.

Serving All Americans

In September 2008, Gioia announced his intention to resign the following January—two years before the end of his term—to return to writing. “I have given up six years of my creative life,” he remarked. “I want to return to poetry while I have the stamina and spirit to pursue the art seriously.” This announcement caused regret on both sides of the aisle. Congressman Patrick Tiberi (R-OH) wrote that Gioia “had successfully worked across party lines to bring broad support and enthusiasm to the arts and arts education.” Meanwhile Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) praised Gioia’s democratization of the Arts Endowment, which “brought the arts to many new communities and demonstrated to Congress how the NEA’s work touches every corner of the country.”

As he prepared to leave office in late 2008, Gioia received what he termed “the best farewell gift imaginable.” American literary reading had risen for the first time in 26 years. After the universal declines charted in earlier NEA surveys, reading trends reversed among virtually every group measured. Best of all, young adults (age 18-24), who had shown the most drastic declines over the previous decades, now registered the largest increase of any group (+21 percent). Although the survey did not establish cause and effect, it seemed no coincidence that these young adults had been in high school when the NEA launched the national literary initiatives (Shakespeare in American Communities, Poetry Out Loud, and The Big Read) that had reached millions of teenagers during the previous six years. Likewise the NEA’s influential reading surveys had helped ignite national concern about the decline of reading and its effects. While these new positive trends reflected the work of countless teachers, librarians, writers, and parents, the NEA had played a catalytic role—demonstrating that well-focused federal investment could make a difference in American society.

*  *  *  *

epilogue

A Great Nation Deserves Great Art

Over the past four decades, the National Endowment for the Arts has established itself as a unique institution in American culture. As the official arts agency of the U.S. government, supported by yearly appropriations from Congress, the NEA has not only become the nation’s largest supporter of arts and arts education, but also, by its special position as the nexus between the public and private sectors, an irreplaceable institution. In addition to distributing thousands of grants each year, including critical funding to the state arts agencies, the Endowment also convenes panels that set standards of artistic quality, publishes research reports that guide informed discussions of cultural trends and policies, and creates institutional partnerships that now reach every community in the nation. The NEA’s direct financial influence has been enormous. To date, it has awarded more than 126,000 grants totaling over four billion dollars [$5.5 billion in 2023, based on the value of a dollar on 2008], a sum that has generated matching funds many times larger than the initial investment. As a result, American culture has been enlivened, enlarged, and democratized.

Such impressive results were surely in the minds of the legislators who first called the agency into existence in 1965 at a moment of cultural optimism in which the government’s vision of a great nation included a commensurably great artistic culture. Although these legislators might have been surprised by some of the subsequent debates involving the agency, they understood that the NEA represented a bold innovation in federal policy. How could such great innovation occur without incident? In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the growth of federal arts policy would involve debate, challenge, and change as the nation defined the new agency’s proper role. Guided by nine chairmen with diverse outlooks and leadership styles, the Arts Endowment has lived through an often turbulent period of cultural transformation. The agency has not merely survived these challenges; its work has been strengthened and clarified by them.

Today, the National Endowment for the Arts enjoys high regard for its commitment to bring the best of arts and arts education to all Americans. Supporting excellence in the arts—both new and traditional—across all of the disciplines, it fosters the nation’s creativity and brings the transformative power of the imagination into millions of lives, reaching many who would have no easy access to the arts without government funding. Having created a new national consensus for federal support of the arts, with strong bipartisan support from Congress and wide public approval, the agency has moved decisively into a positive new era. As a new Administration arrives in Washington, led by President-elect Barack Obama, who has voiced his belief in the federal cultural agencies, the Arts Endowment seems poised for continued growth. Under future chairmen, the agency will surely pursue new ideas and opportunities, but one thing will remain constant, the Endowment’s commitment to serve all Americans by bringing the arts into their lives, schools, and communities.

[Chapter 10 and the Epilogue concludes Part I, “The History of the NEA,” of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008.”  After the final section of the serialization of Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham’s Arts Endowment report, I will try to post the update of the NEA history from 2008 and 2023 (if I can find enough information to compile one).

[The next installment of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” will be from Part II of the NEA report, “The Impact of the NEA.”  That section is divided into six topics—"Dance,” “Literature,” “Media Arts,” “Museums and Visual Arts,” “Music and Opera,” and “Theater”—but I’m only going to post the theater segment.  It will run on 16 December and I hope you will all return for that.]