The Culture Wars, 1965-1995: a historian's map.

1. Political History

The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities were twin agencies created in 1965 by liberal Democrats to fund vocal constituencies. At the time the Great Society was simultaneously setting up expensive new poverty and education programs, racing to the moon, and building up in Vietnam. Humanities faculties (which strongly supported LBJ in 1964) were worried about too heavy a national emphasis on science and engineering. Led by the American Council on Learned Societies, the humanities organizations made sure they got their own agency. The very first thing the new beneficiaries did was to bite the hand that fed them. By summer 1965, leading artists and intellectuals had started turning against Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, and their loud protests escalated to the point where the President and his top advisors were no longer welcome on any major campus.(2) The New Deal had a well-known arts program as part of the WPA - an agency Johnson knew well, since he headed the youth part of its Texas program. However, the WPA was a poverty program whose primary mission was to help the poorest artists - poor in money and usually in talent as well. The Endowments, by contrast, boasted that they disregarded "need" and made "highest artistic talent" a key criterion. Artists who were successful in the private sector rarely applied to NEA. In the humanities, major universities did not treat NEH grants as especially useful, except that NEH fellowships were prestigious awards sought by the most talented scholars. Secondly, the WPA was a national program that operated arts programs at the state and local level in every state. Instead of encouraging local arts institutions, it rivaled and preempted them, and perhaps delayed the formation of local arts funding programs. Thus NEA and NEH were new creatures, not reborn New Deal agencies.(3)

Interest in the fine arts grew exponentially after World War II. The NEA claimed credit, but the true reason was the remarkable growth in the potential audience - the number of adults with a college degree doubled and redoubled from 8 million in 1960, to 16 million in 1975, and 33 million in 1990. Arts and museums programs flourished as an affluent and increasingly well-educated public consumed more and more sophisticated arts. As demand for local arts performances soared, communities began establishing local arts councils. The NEA probably did help stimulate the expansion of state and local arts agencies, but it no more created them in the first place than NEH created history museums or literature departments. Thus NEA claimed that its small planning grant to Winston-Salem North Carolina started a veritable urban renaissance. In fact Salem was a Moravian community famed for its music for two centuries, and the city had been one of the first to set up a community arts council in 1949.(4)

The model for NEA was the arts program that Nelson Rockefeller built in New York State as governor from 1959 to 1973. Rockefeller was himself a noted arts connoisseur, and the various family foundations played a major role in supporting the arts and especially in setting arts policy. In 1954 there were 15 local arts councils; thanks to support from the Rockefeller Foundation there were 60 by 1959.(5) The Ford Foundation, in the 1950s and 1960s, pumped tens of millions a year into the performing arts, which started a unending spiral of rising salaries for performers. Artists will work for peanuts or for caviar, whichever is offered. Strikes by symphony orchestras for even higher salaries underscored the urgent need for new funding. A glance at the total budgets in Table 1 will show that federal funding (in constant 1995 dollars) peaked during the Carter years, while state funding matched and then surpassed the federal budget during Reagan's term. Most cities started assigning some hotel taxes to arts agencies, generating over $500 million a year for local arts agencies by 1993. (Arts budgets for cities, and for schools and universities, are not included in Table 1. The NEH budget closely tracked the NEA budget.)(6)

Table 1:

NEA and State Arts Budgets, 1966-95: annual average, in millions of
constant 1995 dollars

                      all 50        New York
           NEA       States(*)       State      % NEA/all

LBJ        $ 28.9    $ 26.2           $ 8.5       52%
Nixon       131.6      95.5            57.1       52%
Carter      255.7     164.1            57.6       61%
Reagan      199.5     240.4            56.9       46%
Bush        177.1     271.8            46.7       40%
Clinton     167.5     256.8            32.4       39%

SUM        $4,817    $5,028          $1,421       49%

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the
United States, annual editions.

* Includes New York, D.C., and Puerto Rico, which also had a
large arts program; does not include cities.

Richard Nixon's main political rival in the 1960s was Nelson Rockefeller, and as president, Nixon used the NEA in competitive fashion. To run NEA, Nixon chose Nancy Hanks, a former close aide to Rockefeller who had played a central role in promoting local arts councils. When Rockefeller boosted the New York State Arts budget from $2 million in 1970 to $20 million in 1971, Nixon stunned the arts world by asking and getting comparable increases from Congress. Nixon said that doubling the budgets would bring arts to millions of patrons, help financially strapped museums and orchestras, induce more private philanthropy, improve writing skills, redress the balance between the sciences and the humanities, and bring the lessons of history to bear on racial and generational tensions.(7) During the 1960s and 1970s, Republicans in Congress generally opposed the Endowments - voting by 2-1 margins against their creation in the first place. They realized that the artists and humanists were not in the GOP fold. Nixon of course realized that too, but he was concerned with using the arts to neutralize opposition among the art patrons of the "Eastern Establishment," who otherwise preferred Rockefeller to him. After Nixon's departure, the Endowments seemed uncontroversial. Nancy Hanks, in particular, proved brilliant in lobbying for more money during her long tenure at NEA (1969-77), all the while taking credit for the enormous expansion of artistic activities of every sort throughout the country.(8)

Joseph Duffey, the NEH director under Jimmy Carter, worked with Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI) to move his endowment away from high scholarship and toward more community activity and "populism." An example was the Chicago Metro History Fair, which used state humanities money and large amounts of local foundation money to help high school history teachers establish "history fairs." Tens of thousands of students every year exhibited projects that presented their own findings on topics of local, community, and family history. The new social history was an explicit model for the program. In the process participants learned new research and presentation skills. On the whole, the projects, based on the experiences of the students' own families, local businesses and neighborhood institutions, were celebratory and "Whiggish" - a demonstration that social history could be successfully introduced at the high school level, and need not inculcate in the students the notion that American history is a negative experience.

During the Reagan years, conservative intellectuals turned their attention to the Endowments, which they saw as the federal feedbox for liberalism. They tried to defund the agencies, or at least slash their budgets in half. They failed because many otherwise quite conservative Republican congressmen heard loud and clear from friends at country clubs, Rotary, and local Chambers of Commerce how valuable NEA was to the support of burgeoning local theatres, museums, smaller symphonies, and to the needs of rural states. The social base of the GOP included few people back stage but many from the arts audiences. Rebuffed, the Reaganites decided to seize control of the Endowments in order to shift American culture to the right (or at least to neutralize the leftward tilt that made most artists and humanists hostile to Reaganism). They greatly exaggerated the financial power of the Endowments, which contributed only 5 to 10 percent of overall funding for the non-profit arts and the humanities. (In the humanities, most funding came through college departments, and through museums and archives.) The moral power of the Endowments depended on credible leaders, and the Reaganites only had a couple dozen suitable "big names," whom they had to use time and again. Conservatives furthermore were philosophically split between two candidates for chair of NEH, M.E.L. Bradford and William Bennett. Bradford was the favorite of the old conservatives - the types who had rallied behind The National Review, or admired Russell Kirk. However Bradford had been a leader in the 1968 Wallace campaign, and had at some length attacked Abraham Lincoln as a shifty politician who subverted the Constitution. The job went to Bennett, a combatative philosopher, and the choice of the "neoconservatives," such as Irving Kristol, and the Commentary/Public Interest crowd. Bennett moved NEH money away from potentially controversial research programs toward mundane tasks with minimal ideological components, such as microfilming old newspapers and upgrading foreign language instruction. As Bennett moved up, his successor was the wife of Wyoming politician and presidential wannabe Dick Cheney. Lynne Cheney's inner staff was quite conservative, and openly hostile to the Civil Service professionals who ran the operating divisions. Her effort to fill the National Council with conservatives crashed in 1991, when the Senate rejected the nomination of Carol Iannone, a literary critic who had complained that black women novelists were winning prizes primarily in recognition of their race and gender. The Modern Language Association and the American Council of Learned Societies led the attack on Iannone, claiming it was not her politics that troubled them but her thin vita. That is, they asserted that the scholarly associations in the humanities by right ought to control "their" humanities agency.(9)

The Bush administration had one cardinal goal for the arts: keep them quiet. It failed because a resurgent Christian Right discovered enough cultural sins in NEA to energize its ranks, and political commentator Patrick Buchanan realized this was a wedge that would prove to true conservatives they should dump Bush. The White House spoiled its own canvass by turning NEA over to a totally incompetent and disloyal unknown, John Frohnmayer.(10) Front page controversy plagued NEA throughout the Bush years. Cultural conservatives discovered and publicized artists whose work they found shocking, and who seemed to have either direct or indirect support from NEA. The main targets were museum exhibitions of Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs and Andres Serrano's Christ-in-urine photograph, Karen Finley's feminist performance art, and a PBS television program that celebrated homosexuality. The Washington Times, the capital's aggressively conservative daily, kept up a weekly drumbeat of attacks on the NEA, which Frohnmayer's ineptitude helped magnify until even the friends of the arts despaired. A highly publicized criminal obscenity case against the Cincinnati museum that exhibited Mapplethorpe kept the issue alive (the director was acquitted.)(11)

The Religious Right, having peaked in political influence in 1980 under the guise of "Moral Majority," was in eclipse by 1989. Several prominent televangelists had been discredited, Jerry Falwell was inactive, and Pat Robertson's bid for the 1988 COP presidential nomination was a fiasco. However, the new "Christian Coalition" that Robertson had created found a new political strategist, Ralph Reed, who recognized the power of the culture wars. With perhaps 175,000 dues-paying members, and an excellent internal communications system (augmented by Robertson's daily cable TV show, the "700 Club"), the Christian Coalition employed the obscenity issue to powerful effect. As Reed, the Washington Times, Helms and Buchanan reiterated endlessly (with videotapes and dirty pictures to drive home the point), taxpayers were subsidizing filth and obscenity foisted upon them by a distant (and rich) elite that did not share Christian values. The solution - in analogy to the drive to stop federal funding of abortions - was to stop funding all art.(12)

Congress responded in 1989 with a law that prevented either Endowment from funding obscene or homoerotic arts, or depictions of sexual conduct. Grantees had to swear they would not be obscene on federal time. Critics persuaded the federal courts that Congress had violated the First Amendment. In 1990, after additional highly publicized debates on the federal tax dollars spent on obscenity and blasphemy, Congress removed some of the restrictions and installed tighter procedures to eliminate favoritism and exert more oversight.(13)

2. The Culture Wars Revived, 1992-95

The art wars climaxed in 1992. Pat Buchanan, challenging Bush in the Republican primaries, made the NEA a centerpiece of how Bush's elitist attitude put him out of touch with the good Christian voters. Bush fired Frohnmayer, replacing him with Anne-Imelda Radice, a conservative who guaranteed that controversial art would not get federal funds. Buchanan endorsed Bush at the GOP convention, in a stirring call for a "religious war" that probably did more damage to Bush than any embarrassment the Endowments ever caused. Bush wanted to make morality and character an issue in 1992, but by that he meant the contrast between himself and Bill Clinton in terms of war service and family life. The arts and humanities communities, as usual, supported the Democrats in 1992. With Clinton's inauguration, the conservative political appointees at the Endowments all resigned, allowing Clinton to fulfill his campaign promise to "de-politicize" the Endowments. He put Jane Alexander in charge of NEA. A liberal actress who worked well with critics of all hues, she restructured the NEA grants process so that moneys would flow to established museums not avant garde artists. As Alexander explained, "I did not think it was appropriate to continue funding third-party organizations which in some cases could not meet our panels' criteria. . . ."(14)

To everyone's surprise, the cultural wars of the Clinton years turned not on art but on scholarly history, and shifted focus to the quiet National Endowment for the Humanities. By 1991, conservative intellectuals were complaining loudly about "political correctness" threats to their own marginal standing on campuses. Organized into the National Association of Scholars, and with prominent syndicated columnists like Thomas Sowell, George Will and John Leo trumpeting their cause, the conservative complaints were widely publicized. They alleged that leftists were trying to systematically silence conservative voices on campus by denouncing certain intellectual positions as beyond the pale of debate and deserving of summary punishment. Zero tolerance of criticism of black studies and women studies were examples of "political correctness", as was the widespread demand to encourage or even require courses in "multiculturalism". The conservatives charged that multiculturalism in practice was an attack on dead white men and western civilization in general, and that critics were systematically silenced as politically incorrect.(15) New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein was appalled by much of what he saw in the new historiography and literary criticism - the rise of a militant, absolutist, left-wing orthodoxy, hostile to Western values and American traditions. He saw it spreading into foundations, media, seminaries, museums and high schools. Philosopher Richard Rorty agreed the multiculturalists were nasty, but claimed they comprise no more than 10 percent of all humanists - thus suggesting that they really cannot do much damage on campus. While 10 percent sounded innocuous to the philosopher, it could appear to be a critical mass to the political historian.(16) When Clinton nominated a family friend, historian Sheldon Hackney as Chairman of NEH, the PC debate moved into national politics. As President of the University of Pennsylvania, Hackney had taken an equivocal position on "political correctness" controversies on his campus. One student was punished for yelling "Water Buffaloes" at noisy black women outside his dorm, while blacks who had destroyed an issue of the student paper were being winked at. Hackney solved his crisis by apologizing before the Senate and promising that "political correctness" would not be allowed at the NEH.(17)

The positive aspect of multiculturalism was its inclusiveness, its eagerness for diversity. The downside was its vehement rejection of older ways of understanding, an attitude that quickly veers into demands that academics be either politically correct or shut up. One aspect was the demand that politically correct history stress the negative features in American history. In 1993 the Disney Company proposed a historical theme park near Washington. "We want visitors to come away with a patriotic sense, a positive sense of America," said Robert Weis, senior vice president of Walt Disney Imagineering, in charge of the park's creative development. "We will take a point of view, and it will be a positive one in that we have challenges, divisions, differences in points of view, but that's an asset and not a negative."(18) Novelist William Styron was indignant:

There's immediate danger in celebrating. For years there's been factitious celebration of American history in the form of bad novels, superficial movies, and so on, which tell us how wonderful we are, when in reality we aren't that wonderful. That, to me, is another danger in the motivations behind the Disney project. . . . It's the idea that in making people feel wonderful, which is undoubtedly what they will try to do, they will utterly shirk the bleak and dark underside of history.

Ironically, Styron was talking to Sheldon Hackney, who in line with his promise to the Senate promptly rebutted him, pointing out that, "One can deal with the bleak and dark underside of American history in conjunction with its triumph, and come out proud of being an American." Styron, unwittingly revealing how "PC" works in practice, shot back that Hackney was a "Yankee Doodle Dandy" engaging in "false celebration of our virtues" - that Hackney and Disney were both politically incorrect.(19)

Hackney survived the Senate and Styron, but his NEH came under fire in 1995 from an unexpected direction: its former chairs Cheney and Bennett astonished the Beltway with calls for the abolition of their old agency. Bennett puzzled everyone by saying NEH was "corrupt" - an odd charge in the Whitewater Era, for both Endowments had clean records in financial terms. Bennett was not alleging dishonesty; his confusion reflected a transition he was undergoing in his political ethics from classical republicanism to libertarianism.(20) Cheney had been lackadaisical about management of the Endowment, letting political aides make the decisions while she accompanied her husband, the Secretary of Defense, on numerous trips making the contacts that would be needed for his possible presidential bid. The attention she did pay to the humanities came in the form of attacks on postmodern values she detected among certain literary critics and historians. Meanwhile, conservative intellectuals were increasingly troubled with the decline of traditional intellectual skills in the schools, with history giving way to social studies (or perhaps driver education). They promoted a plan for national standards in the schools, received Congressional funding for Goals 2000, and worked with the Department of Education and NEH to develop model curricula in history and other fields. Cheney awarded a $1.6 million grant, with much fanfare, to UCLA for comprehensive national history standards that would be available for adoption by textbook publishers, high schools and elementary schools. Cheney felt project director Charlotte Crabtree would listen to conservative historians, but in the event co-director Gary Nash supervised the Standards. Cheney perhaps was unaware of Nash's reputation as a champion of multiculturalism.(21) No one in 1991 imagined that President Bush would be defeated in 1992, and the conservatives would lose their control of NEH and the Education Department.

The final "Standards" horrified Cheney and the other conservative intellectuals at her American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington. The Standards for World History, they charged, shrank and denigrated the role of Western Civilization, while exaggerating and sugarcoating the achievements of non-western cultures. Cheney counted examples to demonstrate that Great Men had became Great White Male Villains. The American History Standards, they argued, presented a highly negative image of American history as basically the story of how heroic women and minorities resisted oppressive white males. The Standards, the critics further alleged, had been deliberately distorted so that students would hear far more about Nash's favorite villains (Joe McCarthy and the Ku Klux Klan, especially) than people he seemed to consider dispensable, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Minority figures, on the other hand, were glorified and magnified in uncritical fashion, with Harriet Tubman recycled time and again while Thomas Edison was airbrushed out. Nash's response to Cheney ("As far as the absence of particular people such as Thomas Edison, also missing are great black inventors and great female inventors.") seemed to suggest that his new history was going to impose quotas to guarantee white men received no more credit for inventions than women and blacks.(22)

The Bush Administration conservatives who funded the Standards project assumed it would reflect a "consensus" where such existed among historians. Where there was no consensus, the Standards were to call for students to learn "to compare and evaluate competing historical interpretations of the past."(23) After the 1992 election, there was apparently no need to compromise with conservatives. The UCLA team obtained a "consensus" on every point, which they achieved by securing the official approvals of the major history organizations, or more exactly, writing standards that reflected the predominant leftist political view of the organizations.(24) Conservative critics protested that instead of getting a variety of viewpoints students were to be exposed to a single imposed interpretive framework - a "Tory history" that was authoritarian, orthodox, methodologically old-fashioned, and in terms of moral judgments, reversed all the Whig values. However, the Standards did comport well with a strong mood among politically committed history professors, many of whom agreed with Knox College Professor Penny Schine Gold, who articulated exactly the position Cheney condemned: "Neutrality is not something I want to encourage in my students. There is not an objectivity." Gold added that "she does not feel compelled in her women's-studies courses to lay out the views of anti-feminists."(25) As one historian noted, the Standards reflected an orthodoxy that already dominated many textbooks, but had gone largely unremarked. "If liberal academics suffer at all from this affair, it will not result from the Senate's wet blanket, but from their own triumphalism in publicizing what had heretofore been a quiet conquest of America's schoolrooms."(26) Unfortunately for UCLA, the 1994 elections produced a Congress that was aggressively neo-Whig and fiercely anti-Tory - it was in no mood to listen to arguments that multiple academic groups had been represented in the drafting of the Standards; it saw the issue as academic orthodoxy suppressing Whiggish viewpoints. The U.S. Senate resolved the matter by voting 99-1 to repudiate the Standards, leaving NEH and the history organizations thoroughly humiliated. To make sure that no one would seize control of the curriculum, Congress simply abolished the Goals 2000 program.(27)

Simultaneous with the attack on the Standards came the Enola Gay episode at the Smithsonian - a dispute far more people could and did pay attention to. The Smithsonian planned an exhibit on the ending of World War II featuring the Enola Gay bomber and its mission from the viewpoint of the hapless Japanese victims. The curators, experts on aerospace technology who lacked the broadening experience of having taught the material, shrugged off criticism from veterans as unrepresentative of the scholarly community they thought should have the final say. However, they largely ignored scholarship they disagreed with, including most military historians, and also ignored repeated political advice that the national museum was a shrine to servicemen. They paid the consequence, as the exhibit was gutted and the head of the Museum fired. The lesson for the public was that radical historians had done it again, this time attempting to deligitimize the "Good War."(28) Historical organizations tried to protect the curators, not by defending the accuracy of the exhibit or the depth of the scholarship, but by insisting that only accredited professionals had the right to make historical and moral judgments about the past. The organizations repeated this proprietary theme in testimony in spring 1995 against John Carlin, Clinton's nominee as Archivist of the United States. Carlin had been governor of Kansas and a business executive, and had worked closely with museums and archives, but instead of studying history in college he had taken a degree in dairy science. Majority Leader Robert Dole, ushering Carlin to a unanimous Senate confirmation, cracked that "With all due respect, history may be too important to leave to the professional historians." In an era that distrusts expertise and rejects the claim to superior moral insight on the part of people who have taken a graduate course, the historical organizations had again cut themselves off from the body politic.(29)

1994 was the year of the "angry white male" - responding to some degree to affirmative action and multiculturalism, and surely to a larger degree to themes of moral corruption and, especially, the fear that Washington had grown too distant from the people. The election swept into power an aggressive Republican majority led by Newt Gingrich dedicated to budget slashing in the name of fiscal sanity, anti-bureaucracy, and anti-elitism. Overthrowing the stable Congressional regime that had protected the Endowments for so long, Gingrich had a long agenda, with the Endowments near the top:

The National Endowment for the Arts has become a plaything. . . . It's art patronage for an elite group, and it is funding for avant-garde people who are explicitly not accepted by most of the taxpayers who are coerced into paying for it. The National Endowment for the Humanities . . . has gone off the deep end on proposing changes that are destructive of American civilization.(30)

Gingrich was if anything more hostile than Senator Helms - but no one could match House Majority Leader Richard Armey (R-Texas) in long-term dogged dedication to defunding the Endowments. Armey argued that "the government should not be in the business of authenticating art and literature."(31) Gingrich, Armey et al. had strong support from William Bennett, who told the Congress that even a modest federal role in the arts and humanities was inappropriate and counterproductive. Through NEA and NEH, he argued, the government contributed to the worsening of the arts and humanities; improperly served as the arbiter of artistic and scholarly standards; funded "obscene, pornographic . . . blasphemous" and "politically tendentious" works; diverted private foundations away from the arts and humanities; and fostered a harmful entitlement mentality among artists and scholars.(32) Bennett was misinformed about philanthropy. Private giving to the arts, culture and humanities, in constant 1995 dollars, doubled from $2.5 billion in 1970 to $5 billion in 1978 and redoubled to $10 billion in 1992. Annual growth after inflation was steady at 2.2% until the tax reforms of 1986 lowered it to about 1.8%.(33)

3. The Whiggish Economics of Local Arts

A critical argument made by arts supporters is that the arts are more than consumer luxuries, they are valuable producer goods. That is, they create jobs and taxes, so a little cash investment will pay back very large returns: NEA will make the town richer. Community boosters have long accepted the beneficial multiplier effects of government spending on the locality.(34) Nineteenth-century America was filled with local promoters - Whigs - who eagerly sought the county seat, or the state university, or best of all, because it brought the most jobs, the state penitentiary. Hundreds of economic studies have tried to estimate the multiplier effect of a dollar of extra spending.(35) The most detailed study estimated that the non-profit arts sector generated $38 billion of economic activity in 1992, and created 1.3 million paid jobs, not including the jobs of college and high school arts teachers. (Most of the jobs were outside the arts, to be sure, because of the multiplier effect that spreads money through restaurants and hotels, and indeed the entire economy.) Furthermore, the non-profit arts generated $2 billion of state and local taxes, and $3 billion of federal income taxes - they paid back far more than the subsidies. Arts projects rejuvenated worn-out Main Streets, lured tourists and shoppers, and attracted companies that had to relocate engineers and professional employees who demanded access to good schools and good art. Dollar figures are misleading in the non-profit sector because unlike the commercial sector, where every hour of work is paid for, the nonprofits elicit an enormous amount of work from highly talented volunteers. In 1992 volunteers donated about 20 billion hours to the non-profit sector, 2 billion of that to arts agencies. (2 billion hours is the equivalent of one million full time jobs.)(36)

Since 1965 NEA has awarded more than 115,000 grants worth over four billion dollars (in 1995 dollars) and NEH has given about 52,000, worth about the same. Most of the NEA money goes to state arts councils, to federal programs in music, dance and theater, to local institutions, and to colleges and universities. Only a small fraction goes directly to artists. NEH moneys go to state humanities councils, fellowships for researchers, institutes for teachers, reference tools, language teaching, newspaper and book preservation, history museums, and big media projects. NEA awarded $7,175,000 million in grants to 257 professional theatre companies for the 1994-95 performance season. The grants, ranging in size from $5,000 to $250,000, include first-time or reinstated support for 48 theaters and increases to 104 theaters that received support the previous year. However, 89 theaters were cut or eliminated from the NEA roster. The average grant was $27,918 compared to $39,775 in 1986. The flat budget and increasing number of grant awards caused a nearly one-third drop in average support for professional theatre companies over the decade of controversy, and once the inflation effect was subtracted, real federal funds dropped by more than half. There was an inherent conflict between the function of legitimizing excellent quality (which requires only small amounts of money) and providing an entitlement for routine funding year in and year out (which requires ever-greater sums as more and more institutions obtain their entitlement.)(37)

Any one community will be delighted to have a federal grant, no matter how small, for it provides legitimacy to the local arts cause which in turn makes community art and local museums appear to be of national quality and encourages local notables to donate more. In terms of multipliers, however, what works for the locality does not work for the nation. A federal dollar spent on the arts is a dollar taken away from some other government activity that also has a multiplier effect. Furthermore, it is a taxed dollar removed from the private sector. In sum, the oft-repeated arguments by the arts community that economic benefits can be extrapolated from the local to the state or national scene do not hold water, except to the extent that nonprofit agencies generate volunteer work that would otherwise not be donated to anything at all.(38)

4. Class Conflict

Is federal support for the arts and humanities a subsidy for elites?(39) Audiences for fine arts performances have about 20-30 percent higher incomes than the median family - but probably are close to or below the median income level for taxpayers. There is no subsidy for the affluent. Instead there is a subsidy for the educated classes. Audience studies consistently show a stunning educational gradient. The best educated were five to ten times more likely to attend symphonies, operas, musicals and ballets, or visit museums and watch PBS specials. For example, fewer than 5 percent of the people who attend fine arts programs hold blue collar or farm jobs.(40) Given the class and race gradient in voting, the audiences for the arts and humanities have historically been Republican. Even more important, the modern-day Whigs, the local community sponsors of arts programs and museums, have been heavily Republican; they comprise the country club COP. Artists themselves had about average incomes and slightly higher educational levels, and like humanists, a strong Democratic proclivity.(41) When the New Dealers ran Congress the Democrats cut a deal with the "liberal" Republicans that balanced government subsidies to Democratic constituencies with COP constituencies. After his 1972 reelection Nixon no longer needed to outmatch Rockefeller, and he considered drastic cutbacks in the arts programs. "The arts are not our people," he explained. "we should dump . . . the whole culture business."(42) Watergate stopped him. One of Nixon's key Watergate advisors was Leonard Garment, an enthusiastic backer of the arts who made sure the Endowments laid low and survived. Ford and Reagan rather enjoyed the company of artists or, more precisely, wealthy art patrons. The Democrats who decade in and decade out controlled the relevant Congressional committees were either ardent New Dealers (like Sidney Yates, D-IL) or arts patrons (like Senator Pell) or intellectuals favorable to the humanities (like Congressman John Brademas, D-IN). They formed working alliances in support of the arts and humanities with minority party leaders who were country-club Republicans who appreciated boosterism (like Congressman Ralph Regula, R-OH and Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, R-KS) or representatives of the "Eastern Establishment" (like Rockefeller or Senator Jacob Jayits, R-NY).(43)

Historically, the less educated have been marginal to the middle class mainstream, and have been politically organized by New Deal affiliates, such as labor unions, city machines, farm groups, and civil rights organizations. (The Democrats later added well-educated groups that also felt marginalized, such as Jews, professors, artists, feminists and gays.) Each group received certain benefits and subsidies, with the understanding that they would never complain about the benefits received by another member of the alliance. The emergence of the Christian Coalition as a major grass roots political factor represented the first organization on the political right of a predominantly less-educated group. Their group had never been targeted for benefits (indeed, they had been singled out for attack in terms of prayer-in-school), so they felt free to attack New Deal programs, and played a decisive role in 1994 in upending the New Dealers from their Congressional power base.(44) Payback time for them included "privatizing" (that is, zero funding) the Endowments. The new Republicans leaders, and their legion of newly elected members, saw the Christian Coalition as more important constituents than the country club set. Gingrich and Armey showed disdain for the traditional COP alliances with big business. The Junior League debutantes who once had been central to the country club set and to the arts volunteers now were career women who veered sharply Democratic in 1994.(45) Volunteer work on behalf of non-profit agencies continued to be highly correlated with education, but education was no longer so highly correlated with politics. The GOP made its striking gains in the 1990s among the "some college" group, and lost ground among people who had post-graduate educations. Voting profiles by education now show a dramatic break at the postgraduate level, especially for women. In 1994 elections, the Republican vote was 50% among people who had not attended college, 58% among those with one to three years of college, 55% among those with four years of college, and a sharp dropoff to 42% among those with postgraduate education. Women with postgraduate education voted 2-1 Democratic in 1994. Thus the arts and humanities audiences by 1994 were no longer so dominantly Republican. Cheney and Bennett therefore could use the rhetoric of class conflict: "It is time to cut funding for cultural elites."(46)

The 1990s demand to cut "frills" and subsidies was by no means confined to Washington: it affected cities and states as well, especially after the 1994 elections gave the GOP 30 governorships and a stronger voice in state legislatures. The arts took a sharp hit during the recession of the early 1990s, with state funding falling from $291 million in 1990 to $212 in 1992; recovery of the economy brought only a partial restoration, as the states budgeted $266 million in 1995.(47) Republican governors in New York and California, and mayors in New York City and Los Angeles, shedding "cool" country club elitism for "hot" populism in the most important arts centers, took the axe to arts budgets. Higher education likewise came under special scrutiny, as a subsidy to rich kids, liberal professors, and politically savvy local interests. Nationwide, salaries for full-time faculty held up well, but major shifts were underway replacing regular tenure-track faculty with adjuncts or other cost-saving devices (bigger classes, more teaching hours, using technology to reach more people).(48) The implicit political economy was that if arts and higher education benefited cities and students so much, then they should pay for it themselves.

The historic connections between big business and the GOP had long been crumbling. In Washington, the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers were losing clout, displaced by multiple small specialized lobbies that showed distinctly less interest in the macro picture. Armey was an enemy of the Chamber, the NAM and the town-booster system. "This is a traumatic experience for the Fortune 500 chieftains," exclaimed one lobbyist when he realized Armey would control floor action in the House. "There is a culture gap."(49) In fall 1994, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, elaborating on a favorite liberal theme, criticized "corporate welfare." He identified 120 programs that totaled over $50 billion a year in subsidies or tax benefits. Reich intended to make the argument that if corporations got all sorts of subsidies and tax breaks, then it was only fair to also dole out largess to groups the liberals favored. Gingrich, Armey and the new GOP seized on Reich's suggestion and determined to balance the budget by slashing away at welfare for the poor and for the corporations alike - and for the cultural and academic elites for good measure. The 1995 Congressional budget zeroed out the entire Commerce Department as a giant boondoggie aiding business. The New Deal was dead in both Democratic and Republican forms, and the postmodern age of politics had begun.(50)

5. The Values of the Religious Right

Despite the remarkable growth of the Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, pentecostals, Church of Christ and other conservative denominations with strong fundamentalist constituencies, they were largely a passively Democratic group from 1932 through the 1960s. Heresy charges erupted as fundamentalists seized control of the giant Southern Baptist Conventions after 1978. In social terms, education was the main differential between the fundamentalists and the moderates. The cultural tradition of the conservative churches was dubious about schooling and highly suspicious of fine arts. Homophobia was highly correlated with theological fundamentalism.(51) The political stance of the religious right went through a series of transformations. They first made a major impact in the 1980 election, as they talked about a "Moral Majority" and the need to reclaim America's heritage as a "Christian nation." This argument resonated poorly, and attracted hostility. By the late 1980s they had become postmodern, and began representing themselves as a persecuted minority whose rights were trampled upon by a cultural elite that controlled Washington, the media and the universities. They argued that historic "family values" were specifically threatened, and vehemently rejected demands for rights for homosexuals, or acceptance of diverse lifestyles. This new "we are victims too" theme proved highly successful, allowed the Coalition to link up with conservative Catholics and Jews, and provided a specific reason for attacking the Endowments. The Coalition argued that being victims just like everyone else gave the "right" to demand redress, or at least to join the bargaining. Finally, in the early 1990s, Ralph Reed guided the Christian Coalition into an alliance with the Gingrich Republicans. He did that by broadening "family values" to include the range of economic and governmental issues that comprised the "Republican Contract with America." Reed successfully mobilized the grass roots of the Coalition into support for GOP candidates. With victory at the polls, Reed laid claim to a voice in Washington; as soon as the Contract was passed by the House, Reed outlined his "Contract With the American Family" - which included privatizing the Endowments and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In explaining his "Ten Suggestions" Reed observed, "We have finally gained what we have always sought: a place at the table, a sense of legitimacy and a voice in the conversation that we call democracy."(52)

6. Postmodern artists and humanists?

College humanities and arts professors were indeed mostly liberal Democrats, but the Right alleges something else: that they have used their power inside academe and the arts to systematically suppress conservative ideas and ridicule conservative values. The chief reason for the opposition to the Endowments is the belief strongly held on the Right that leftists - specifically, the politically correct/multicultural/postmodern types - dominate the arts and humanities, suppress conservative dissent, and brainwash students. The government is effectively subsidizing the enemies of the Right. Is the allegation true as regards NEH? After reviewing hundreds of NEH proposals over the years, and talking to numerous NEH officials, scores of project directors and hundreds of program participants, the author can report that the "political correctness" and "multi-cultural" factors in NEH grants appear to be well below the 10 percent level that Rorty mentioned. Both Endowments in the 1990s deliberately avoided areas that might prove provocative.

Humanists live in their own separate academic world and could care less about the general public. Artists, however, live dispersed and isolated, depend on audiences, and are nervous about a negative public. "We are constantly and always convinced that the American people don't like us, don't appreciate us, don't support us," sighed Anne Murphy, the executive director of the National Cultural Alliance.(53) Actually, there was broad public support for the arts and artists that stretched far beyond the well educated audiences. Polls indicated that 81 percent of all Americans felt the arts and humanities contribute to the economic health and well-being of society; 59 percent said they were a "necessity, not a frill"; 59 percent agreed that without public support, the arts and humanities would only be available to the wealthy; 92 percent thought the arts are useful for education.(54) One issue does set the artists apart from mainstream opinion, tolerance of homosexuality. The arts community insists that gays not be persecuted, while the Religious Right sees official acceptance of gay lifestyles, not just the actual practice, as an affront to their values. The Endowments, however, carefully avoided taking any stand on the issue of gay rights - only by reinterpreting an omnibus grant to a museum to include sanctioning the content of everything that the museum exhibited could the Religious Right make its case.

Why do the critics believe that the arts and humanities are so thoroughly controlled by an alien value system? To a considerable extent, humanities programs in "elite" universities seem to have a number of aggressive sponsors of "political correctness." The problem is much less widespread at peripheral colleges and universities.(55) To a small extent there is a confrontational art that deliberately challenges the family values the Christian Coalition holds so dear. The most blatant example of confrontation art is gangsta rap (which is NOT funded by NEA, and does quite well in Hollywood), but more sober examples can occasionally be found in leading museums.(56) The critics recycle a handful of episodes dating from the 1980s, because the Endowments have been quite careful since 1992. Perhaps the reason for the distrust by the Right is that their most visible intellectuals, such as Bennett, Cheney, Will, Leo, and D'Souza, are not academics, but they appear all the time on campuses for very well-paid debates. Their debate opponents are outspoken faculty types, many of them in that mystery 10-percent - and the experience provides a totally distorted view of the normal day-to-day operations of academe of the sort that the Endowments fund.(57)

7. Gingrich and Libertarian Virtue

One group we have not actually explained is the most important of all politically, Newt Gingrich and his House Republicans. They speak the language of virtue too, but on closer inspection it is a different tradition they reflect.(58) The House minority sat and simmered for years, angry that no one listened. Leadership fell increasingly to intellectuals like historian Gingrich, economist Armey, and economist Phil Gramm. They rejected New Deal liberalism of the sort supported by the party's "Eastern Establishment" - one of the reasons for Bush's problems was that these Republicans suspected him and his top advisors of being too similar to Rockefeller Republicans (like Bush's father, a liberal Republican Senator from Connecticut.) By accepting the Conservative Coalition emphasis on families, the Gingrichians found a new constituency that allowed them to distance themselves from the country club set, and from the Whiggish beliefs of town boosters that government spending could promote economic growth and benefits for the whole community. Thus when the National Humanities Alliance sounded the tocsin to mobilize the usual Republican friends, ("The ideal person to deliver a message in favor of NEH is a banker, industrialist, higher education executive or other prominent persons serving on boards of museums, libraries, and other cultural institution."), the new Republican powers could ignore it.(59)

The classical republican theme is that the government must promote virtue among citizens, and that the arts are a powerful tool to promote virtue. Gingrich and his followers, echoing the Revolutionary Era theme that arts are an effete plaything of the Tory aristocracy, revived a pristine version of classical republicanism.(60) For them, Washington was the "Court" and the states and localities were the "Country"; nearly all Court activity is inherently hostile to virtue, the only hope is in the Country. They demanded term limits to stop the professional politicians in Washington who personified corruption. Since the Court necessarily corrupts the people, national art and humanities are especially insidious because of the very function their backers point to with pride: the Endowments "certify" certain projects are especially worthy. The Endowments may have their uses - even Senator Helms likes arts education - but by their very nature as government institutions controlled by inherently corrupt politicians they ruin and degrade the arts and the humanities directly, and the citizenry ultimately. The only possible compromise - one heatedly debated in mid 1995 - was to turn 80 percent of the Endowment funding over to the states. The states could fund all the arts and humanities that they wanted, but they would be unable to certify anything on behalf of the nation as a whole.(61)

To rebut the Whiggish argument of arts as a tool to promote economic growth, the Gingrichians emphasize the negative impact on economic growth of the federal deficit. Balancing the budget defines virtue in Washington, again: it is an old theme, for Thomas Jefferson made the same point attacking Alexander Hamilton's budget.(62) While Gingrich recalls Jeffersonian Republicanism, Armey looks to classical liberalism - in the line of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman - stressing that the minimal state will do the least harm to the society. Conservative economists like Armey and Gramm, and their advisors in the think tanks, buy the "Chicago School" argument (of George Stigler and Gary Becker) that government efforts to regulate evils are always taken over by the regulatees for their own benefit.(63) They agree with Charles Murray that programs designed to help the poor are counterproductive or exist mostly to benefit the caregivers (such as social workers). They believe that programs to promote economic growth are good if they are very general (like lower taxes), but once they begin to target specific groups (like the arts industry), they become a patronage device used to reward friends and punish enemies. Libertarians believe lobbyists come to Washington to "seek rents" - that is, to make money via politics, in economically harmful fashion. Gingrich and his team are moralists who are totally committed to their vision of virtue. That commitment and that vision make for an astonishing unity and political effectiveness, and signals a new era of political economy.

8. Conclusion

Political historians have swung back and forth as to the underlying forces that animate politics: was it sectionalism or class, or ideas or culture? The complex realignments of recent years rotated the map by making the South the GOP's power base, eroded the New Deal era of class cleavages in politics, and reawakened a religious division that echoes the old battles over prohibition and public morality. The classical-republican tie-in between art and morality made conflict over the National Endowments inevitable. If efforts to "privatize" the arts and humanities succeed, the result is likely to boomerang for the conservatives. The Court-Country dichotomy is not the same as Washington-States; the "Court" the conservatives are fighting is based not in Washington but in the national foundations, the textbook publishers, the Hollywood studios, the professional societies, and the Ivy League universities.(64) The Endowments reflect the Country as much as they do the Court - they are perhaps the least biased of the possible funding sources. The battle for control of the nation's history is even more starkly a battle over the values and beliefs that the nation will officially honor in its museums and inculcate in its textbooks. We are at the midpoint of the Culture Wars, with the lines of battle clearly delineated for all to see, but with the ultimate winners and losers still to be decided.

Department of History Chicago, IL 60607-7049

ENDNOTES

1. James Davidson Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991).

2. Livingston Biddle, Our Government and the Arts: A Perspective from the Inside (New York, 1988) is the best history; see also Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Lessons: Learning from the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding (New York, 1995) and Joseph Wesley Zeigler, Arts in Crisis: The National Endowment for the Arts Versus America (Chicago, 1994). For all the historians aided by NEH, there is only Ronald Berman, Culture and Politics (Lanham, MD, 1984). Eric Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York, 1969), ch. 16.

3. National Endowment for the Arts, Five Year Planning Document: 1986-1990 (Washington, D.C., 1984), 19, 23. The New Deal likewise refused to support educational broadcasting, which languished until revived by the Ford Foundation in 1951. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting established in 1967, was one of the last Great Society projects. Nixon multiplied its funding tenfold. Robert J. Blakely, To Serve the Public Interest: Educational Broadcasting in the United States (Syracuse, 1979), 68, 84, 124, ch. 7, 197.

4. National Endowment for the Arts, Annual Report: 1980 (Washington, D.C., 1981), 3; Nina Freedlander Gibans, The Community Arts Council Movement: History, Opinions, Issues (New York, 1982), 69.

5. ibid; Robert H. Connery and Gerald Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York: Executive Power in the Statehouse (Ithaca, 1979).

6. Joan Simpson Burns, The Awkward Embrace: The Creative Artist and the Institution in America (1975), 281-86; William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (New York, 1966); Marquis, Art Lessons, 190

7. Dec. 10, 1969 message to Congress in Congressional Quarterly, Nixon: The First Year of His Presidency (Washington, D.C., 1970).

8. Biddle, Our Government and the Arts; Marquis, Art Lessons; Alvaro Ignacio Anillo, "The National Endowment for the Humanities: Control of Funding Versus Academic Freedom," Vanderbilt Law Review 45 (Mar. 1992): 460.

9. Carol Iannone, "Literature by Quota," Commentary 91, no. 3, (Mar. 1991): 50-54; Helle Bering-Jensen, "NEH," Insight 7, no. 20 (May 20, 1991): 20-24.

10. John Frohnmayer, Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior (Boston, 1993); Zeigler, Arts in Crisis.

11. Marquis, Art Lessons; Tom Mathews, "Fine Art or Foul?" Newsweek 116 (July 2 1990): 46-52.

12. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "The Gospel According to Ralph," Time 145, no. 20 (May 15, 1995): 28-35; Joe Conason, "The Religious Right's Quiet Revival," The Nation 254, no. 16 (April 27, 1992): 541-8; James M. Wall, "Religiopolitical Operative," Christian Century 112, no. 18 (May 24, 1995): 555-7; Congress never considered defunding the Smithsonian. Millions of constituents came to Washington specifically to visit its museums.

13. Anillo, "NEH"; Frohnmayer, Leaving Town Alive.

14. Jane Alexander, "Testimony Before the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee, April 5, 1995," (Washington, D.C., 1995), 2.

15. Paul Hollander, "Imagined Tyranny? Political Correctness Reconsidered," Academic Questions: AQ 7, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 51-73; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York, 1992); Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York, 1991); for defenses of PC, see Catharine R. Stimpson, "Can Things Ever be Perfectly Correct?" College Literature 21, no. 3 (Oct. 1994): 191-200; Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York, 1992); Joan Wallach Scott, "The Campaign Against Political Correctness: What's Really at Stake?" Change 23, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1991): 30-44; Michael Berube and Cary Nelson, eds. Higher Education under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (New York, 1995).

16. Richard Bernstein, Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future (New York, 1994); Richard Rorty, "Demonizing the Academy," Harper's Magazine (Jan. 1995): 130-18.

17. Joyce Price, "NEH Nominee Says He's Victim of Media," The Washington Times (June 26, 1993); Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue.

18. Carol Innerst, "History by Disney to Have Positive Spin," The Washington Times (Nov. 26, 1993).

19. Sheldon Hackney, "Who Owns History: Conversations with Writer William Styron and Williamsburg Historian Cary Carson," Humanities (Jan.-Feb. 1995). As Simon Schama has noted with regard to "Pocahontas," Disney writers were as postmodern as anyone. "The Princess of Eco-Kitsch," The New York Times (June 14, 1995): A19.

20. Washington Post (Jan. 25, 1995); Jon Healey, "Opposing Interests Brace For a Culture Clash," Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report (Jan. 28, 1995). William Bennett, "The Case for Abolishing the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities: Written Testimony by William J. Bennett ... January 24, 1995," (Washington, D.C., 1995). Bennett's brother Robert was President Clinton's chief counsel for the Paula Jones affair.

21. Lynne Cheney, "Telling the Truth: A Report on the State of Humanities in Higher Education," (Washington, D.C., 1992); Carol Innerst, "Agencies Want Kids to Improve Grasp of History," The Washington Times (Dec. 17, 1991): A7.

22. Lynne Cheney, Wall Street Journal (Oct. 20, 1994); Walter A. McDougall, "Whose History? Whose Standards," Commentary 99, no. 5 (May 1995): 36-44; Charles Krauthammer, "History Hijacked," Washington Post (Nov. 4, 1994), editorial.

23. National Center for History in the Schools, National Standards for United States History (Los Angeles, 1994), 7.

24. C. Frederick Risinger, "The National History Standards: A View from the Inside," The History Teacher 28 (May 1995): 387-94.

25. Robin Wilson, "Teacher or Advocate? Role of Professor Debated Anew as More Students Challenge Content of Lectures," The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 16, 1995): A17-18.

26. McDougall, "Whose History?".

27. Congressional Record: Senate (Jan. 18, 1995): S1025-40. John Leo, "History Standards are Bunk," US News & World Report 118, no. 5 (Feb. 6, 1995): 23; for defenses, Arnita A. Jones, "Our Stake in History Standards," Chronicle of Higher Education 41, no. 7 (Jan. 6, 1995): B1-3; Jon Wiener, "History Lesson," New Republic 212 (Jan. 2, 1995): 9-12.

28. Hugh Sidey, "War and Remembrance," Time 143, no. 21 (May 23, 1994): 64; John Leo, "The National Museums of PC," U.S. News & World Report 117, no. 14 (Oct. 10, 1994): 21.

29. Chronicle of Higher Education (June 2, 1995): A30 for quote; Karen J. Winkler, "Who Owns History?" The Chronicle of Higher Education 41, no. 19 (Jan. 20, 1995): A1.

30. Washington Post (Jan. 25, 1995).

31. Paul Starobin, "True Believer," National Journal 27 (Jan. 7, 1995): 8-13; Paul Starobin, "Welcome to the Club," National Journal 27 (Jan. 28, 1995): 219-25. Healey, "Opposing Interests"; quote from Washington Times (July 13, 1993)

32. Healey, "Opposing Interests"; William Bennett, "The Case for Abolishing."

33. U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1994 (Washington, D.C.: CD-ROM edition, 1995), table 610.

34. Robin S. Tryloft, "The Role of State Art Agencies in the Promotion and Development of the Arts on the Plains," Great Plains Quarterly 9 (Spring 1989): 119-24; Frank Muhly, "A Silver Lining: Twenty-Five Years of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts," Rhode Island History 50 (May 1992): 35-61.

35. Michael J. DiNoto and Lawrence H. Merk, "Small Economy Estimates of the Impact of The Arts," Journal of Cultural Economics 17 (Dec. 1993): 41-54; Amy Hersh, "Arts' Impact is $9.8 Billion for New York-NJ Economy," Back Stage 34, no. 41 (Oct. 8, 1993): 1-3.

36. National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, Arts in the Local Economy Study Final Report (Washington, D.C., 1993); Virginia A. Hodgkinson, "Civic Participation in America: Volunteering and Contributing," The Public Perspective 5 (March/April 1994): 14-15.

37. Barbara Janowitz, "Flat Budget Reins in NEA Initiatives," American Theatre 11, no. 6 (July-August 1994): 60-2.

38. David Throsby, "The Production and Consumption of the Arts: A View of Cultural Economics," Journal of Economic Literature 32 (March 1994): 1-29; Paul J. DiMaggio and Helmut K. Anheier, "The Sociology of Nonprofit Organizations and Sectors," Annual Review of Sociology 16 (1990): 137-59; Dick Netzer, The Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the United States (New York, 1978); W. W. Powell, ed., The Non-Profit Sector (New Haven, 1987).

39. Robert D. Reischauser, "The Federal Budget: Subsidies for the Rich," in Aaron Wildavsky and Michael J. Boskin, eds., The Federal Budget: Economics and Politics (San Francisco, 1982), 235-62.

40. Gaye Tuchman, "Pluralism and Disdain: American Culture Today," in Alan Wolfe, ed., America At Century's End (Berkeley, 1991), 351; Paul DiMaggio, Michael Useem and Paula Brown, Audience Studies of the Performing Arts and Museums: A Critical Review (Washington, D.C., 1978), 22; Jan Larson and Joan Brightman, "The Museum Is Open," American Demographics (Nov. 1, 1994). Note that most leisure activities also have a surprisingly strong educational gradient. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1994 (Washington, D.C., CD-ROM edition, 1995), tables 410, 411; William E. Knox, Paul Lindsay and Mary N. Kolb, Does College Make a Difference? Long-Term Changes in Activities and Attitudes (Westport, 1993).

41. Harold Horowitz, "The Status of Artists in the USA," Journal of Cultural Economics 17 (June 1993): 29-48.

42. H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (Santa Monica, CD-ROM edition, 1994), Nov. 11, 1972 and Nov. 20, 1972.

43. Biddle, Our Government and the Arts.

44. Chip Berlet, "The Right Rides High," The Progressive 58, no. 10 (Oct. 1994): 22-9; James M. Penning, "Pat Robertson and the GOP: 1988 and Beyond," Sociology of Religion 55 (Fall 1994): 327-45.

45. O.K. Daniels, Invisible Careers: Women Civic Leaders from the Volunteer World (Chicago, 1988).

46. Everett Carll Ladd, ed., America at the Polls: 1994 (Storrs, CT, 1995); Lyman A. Kellstedt, John C. Green, James L. Guth and Corwin E. Smidt, "Religious Voting Blocs in the 1992 Election: The Year of the Evangelical?" Sociology of Religion 55, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 323; Lynne Cheney, "Testimony of Lynne V. Cheney ... Before the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee of January 24, 1995" (Washington, D.C., 1995).

47. National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, "Legislative Appropriations Annual Survey - November 1994: Fiscal Years 1994 and 1995" (Washington, D.C., 1994); Jill Petty, "State Arts Councils Face Budget Cuts, Layoffs," New Art Examiner 18, (Feb. 1991): 13-15.

48. Washington Post (Jan. 23, 1995) and (Dec. 24, 1994).

49. Richard Kirkland, "Today's GOP: The Party's Over for Big Business," Fortune 131, no. 2 (Feb. 6, 1995): 50-56; W. John Moore, "Breaking Apart," National Journal 25 (Feb. 27, 1993): 500-3; Starobin, "True Believer."

50. Kirk Victor, "Takin' on the Bacon," National Journal 27, no. 18 (May 6, 1995): 1082-88.

51. Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, 1988); Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, 1990), 102-9, 134-42; Rufus B. Spain, At Ease in Zion: A Social History of Southern Baptists, 1865-1900 (Nashville, 1967), 40-41, 200-2; Laurence R. Iannaccone, "Heirs to the Protestant Ethic? The Economics of American Fundamentalists," in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Politics, Economies, and Militance (New York, 1992); David Edwin Harrell, Oral Roberts: An American Life (Bloomington, IN, 1985), 217.

52. Hunter, Culture Wars; Joe Conason, "The Religious Right's Quiet Revival," The Nation 254, no. 16 (April 27, 1992): 541-8; John Judis, "Crosses to Bear: The Many Faces of the Religious Right," The New Republic 211, no. 11 (Sept. 12, 1994): 21-6; Sidney Blumenthal, "Christian Soldiers," The New Yorker (July 11, 1994): 31-37; Rebecca Klatch, "Complexities of Conservatism: How Conservatives Understand the World," in Wolfe, ed., America At Century's End, 361-376; Annie Tin and Juliana Gruenwald, "'Contract with Family' Welcomed Cautiously by House GOP," Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report 53 (May 20, 1995): 1448-50 for quote.

53. NEA, Five Year Planning Document, 308, 314; quotes from Robert Kolker, "Staying Funded in the Future: Act Locally, Think Long-term," Back Stage (April 28, 1995).

54. Kolker, "Staying Funded"; Charles S. Clark, "Arts Funding: Is Boosting the Status of the Arts a Wise Investment?" CQ Researcher 4, no. 39 (Oct. 21, 1994): 915-32.

55. Susan Dodge, "Few Colleges Have Had 'Political Correctness' Controversies, Study Finds," Chronicle of Higher Education 37, no. 47 (Aug. 7 1991): A23-24. On censorship of conservatives, see Paul Hollander, "Imagined Tyranny? Political Correctness Reconsidered," Academic Questions: AQ 7, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 51-73.

56. Frohnmayer, Leaving Town Alive; Steven C. Dubin, "Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions," The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 23 (Fall 1993): 255-62. Carl F. Stychin ,"Identities, Sexualities, and the Postmodern Subject: An Analysis of Artistic Funding by the National Endowment for the Arts," Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 12 (1994): 79-132. Marquis, Art Lessons, 215-216, notes the theatrical interplay between radical artists and conservative politicians, each seeking a national spotlight.

57. For the actual political views of academics, see David Thelen, "The Practice of American History," Journal of American History 81 (Dec. 1994): 933-60; Gordon Shepherd & Gary Shepherd. "War and Dissent: The Political Values of the American Professoriate," Journal of Higher Education 65 (Sept.-Oct. 1994): 585-615.

58. Stanley C. Brubaker, "In Praise of Censorship," The Public Interest 114 (Winter 1994): 48-64; Rochelle L. Stanfield, "The V-Word," National Journal 26 (May 28, 1994): 1235-8.

59. Kirkland, "Today's GOP"; quote from circular from National Alliance for the Humanities, December 20, 1994.

60. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York, 1969), 14-15, 32, 79, 103-5.

61. The conservatives never seem to criticize state or local support for arts or humanities programs. "Corruption" is something that happens at Court, and the only Court is Washington.

62. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 263; Gingrich in his Nov. 11, 1994 speech made his Jeffersonianism explicit - and even cited Wood. Gingrich, To Renew America (New York, 1995), 32-33.

63. Kurt R. Leube and Thomas Gale Moore, eds., The Essence of Stigler (Stanford, CA, 1986).

64. Evan Gahr, "Looking at Philanthropy - The Gift of Giving: Paymasters of the PC Brigades," Wall Street Journal (Jan. 27, 1995); Joyce Price, "Media Give Liberal Causes Millions More, Study Says," Washington Times (Nov. 14. 1993); Marshall Robinson, "The Ford Foundation: Sowing the Seeds of a Revolution," Environment 35, no. 3 (April 1993): 10-20; Goldie Blumenstyk, "New Head of Ford Fund's Education Program is Champion of Women and Minority Students," Chronicle of Higher Education 39, no. 16 (Dec. 9, 1992): A27.