Cold War, Culture Wars, War on Terror: the NEA and the art of public diplomacy

ABSTRACT

This article reframes the conversation on the National Endowment for the Arts’ loss of funding during the 1990s. It argues morality and fiscal responsibility have been overemphasised and instead suggests one must consider the agency’s relationship to the Cold War and cultural diplomacy. Born of the Cold War, it charts the NEA’s development of international programming, its partnerships with the State Department and United States Information Agency, and the financial impact of the Cold War’s end. It extends this analysis to the agency’s resuscitation after 9/11, as the War on Terror gave new life to old approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• National Endowment for the Arts
• State Department
• Cold War
• Culture Wars
• War on Terror
• cultural diplomacy
• arts funding

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Eline van Ommen and Lindsay Aqui for shepherding this article through the editorial process, and to M. Craig Brown, Brent Askins, and Jonnet Abeles for their thoughtful reads as it was written.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Laurence Jarvik, “Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts,” The Heritage Foundation, 29 April 1997, www.heritage.org/report/ten-good-reasons-eliminate-funding-the-national-endowment-orthe-arts accessed 4 February 2018.

² “Global Public Opinion in the Bush Years (2001–08),” Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center, 18 December 2008, www.pewglobal.org/2008/12/18/global-public-opinion-in-the-bush-years-2001-2008/ accessed 13 August 2018.

³ Richard Arndt, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Nicholas Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Sarah Ellen Graham, Culture and Propaganda: The Progressive Origins of American Public Diplomacy, 1936–1953 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Michael Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998); Frank A. Ninkovitch, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange & the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper/The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999); and Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

⁴ Livingston Biddle, Our Government and the Arts: A Perspective from the Inside (New York: ACA Books, 1988); John Frohnmayer, Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Bill Ivey, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Michael Straight, Twigs for an Eagle’s Nest: Government and the Arts, 1965–1978 (New York: Devon Press, 1979); and Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham, National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965–2008 (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2009).

⁵ Donna Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Dick Netzer, The Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); and Michael Kammen, “Culture and State in America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 3 (1996): 791–81. Written during the Culture Wars, Kammen investigates why America has not had a ministry of culture or clear national cultural policy.

⁶ Dana Michael Harsell, “My Taxes Paid for That?! Or Why the Past Is Prologue for Public Arts Funding,” PS: Political Science and Politics 46, no. 1 (2013): 74–80.

⁷ James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 42.

⁸ Craig R. Whitney, “Moscow Rights Conference Sees Danger in Nationalism,” New York Times (NYT), 11 September 1991.

⁹ Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), xi, xv; and Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993).

¹⁰ Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 27, 34.

¹¹ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: Whittle Books, 1991), 81.

¹² Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Hartman and Rodgers are the only holistic studies; further works exist by public historians focused on specific Culture War battles at the Smithsonian. Charles T. O’Reilly and William A. Rooney, Enola Gay and the Smithsonian Institution (New York: McFarland, 2005); and Robert C. Post, Who Owns America’s Past?: The Smithsonian and the Problem of History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2013).

¹³ Daniel Simpson, “Ambassadors for Peace, Armed with Slapstick,” NYT, 1 January 2003.

¹⁴ NEA Annual Report, 2000, 40, www.arts.gov/about/annual-reports accessed 12 August 2018. NEA records are at the National Archives and Records Administration II (NAII) in College Park, MD, with limited availability through the early 1990s. See also the NEA Collection at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (NEA UMASS), http://scua.library.umass.edu/ead/mums686.html accessed 12 August 2018.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Our Mission, CEC ArtsLink, www.cecartslink.org/about/mission_history.html accessed 12 August 2018.

¹⁷ NEA Annual Report, 2000, 40. Arts International combined resources from the NEA, State Department, Rockefeller Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trusts.

¹⁸ Sydney Gruson, “Soviet Scores U.S. at Breslau Parley,” NYT, 26 August 1948.

¹⁹ Leslie Judd Portner, “Art in Washington: Legislation Favoring the Arts,” Washington Post (WP), 28 August 1955.

²⁰ Congress established ANTA in 1935 as a private/public venture. Public, insofar as it was federally chartered to present and promote American theatre, stimulate public interest, and nurture the field. Private, in that it was established with no federal endowment and a list of patron incorporators to foot the nonprofit’s bill. “National Theatre is Authorized by Congress to Advance the Drama,” NYT, 30 June 1935.

²¹ Report, “IES Plans for Cultural Program to be Financed from the President’s Emergency Fund for International Affairs,” International Educational Exchange Service, Department of State, 20 September 1954, OCB Working Group on ‘Cultural Affairs’ Folder, Box 5, Record Group (RG) 59, Department of State (DOS) Records, NAII. See also “Draft Directive: Comments on Unclassified Instruction of USIA to the Field Regarding ‘Cultural Program,’” n.d., Cultural Exchanges with the USSR Folder, Box 2, RG 59, DOS Records, NAII.

²² Carole Rosenstein, Understanding Cultural Policy (New York: Routledge, 2018), 21.

²³ The 1950s and 1960s birthed the Kennedy Center, as a national cultural centre in Washington, DC, and the NEA/NEH, through slow, winding processes. Introduced in 1958, Congress approved the National Cultural Center Act that same year, but political battles meant they would not break ground until 1964 or open until 1971. Eisenhower, meanwhile, recommended a Federal Advisory Commission on the Arts in 1955; it did not come to fruition until 1964. Rep. Frank Thompson Jr. (D-NJ) and Senator Clairborne Pell (D-RI), instrumental in creating the Council, ushered through legislation establishing the Endowments in 1965. Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse; and Lauren Erin Brown, “‘Cultural Czars’: American Nationalism, Dance, and Cold War Arts Funding, 1945–1989” (Ph.D. Diss., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2008).

²⁴ For more on NEA legislation, its relationship to cultural export and private philanthropy, see Brown, “‘Cultural Czars.’ For the CIA’s relationship to Cold War culture funding, the best resource remains Saunders, Who Paid the Piper/The Cultural Cold War.

²⁵ National Council on the Arts, Annual Report 1964–65, 18; and NEA Annual Report, 1966, 2.

²⁶ NEA Annual Report, 1968, 44.

²⁷ NEA Annual Report, 1978, 11.

²⁸ Congress created the USIA in 1953 as a separate entity from the DOS; it expanded in 1978 into USICA, pulling into its agency State’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs. “Opposing Consolidation of USIA,” Congressional Record (CR), 141st Cong., 1st sess., 141, 1 August 1995, S 11061. The best resources on the USIA are Nicholas Cull’s The Cold War and the United States Information Agency and The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency: American Public Diplomacy, 1989–2001 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

²⁹ See note 27.

³⁰ NEA Annual Report, 1990, 329. USICA became the USIA in name (again) in 1982, after reorganisation under President Reagan. USIA, “The United States Information Agency: A Commemoration,” 1999, 51. This document is from the USIA’s final webpage before closing in 1999, now part of State’s Electronic Research Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago, http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/usia/ accessed 14 August 2018.

³¹ NEA Annual Report, 1992, 338–9; and NEA Annual Report, 1993, 289.

³² NEA Annual Report, 1995, 35. NEA budget analysis reveals the same dip for international programming in the early 1980s as for the whole agency. This research focused exclusively on funding labelled as the international programme (some years its own category, others a subset of the Policy, Planning, and Research budget). It did not attempt to tease out funds granted under genre (dance, music, and so on) programmes that may or may not have been used internationally. Beyond the scope of this study, it might prove fruitful for other scholars.

³³ John Frohnmayer, “Chairman’s Letter,” NEA Annual Report, 1990, 7.

³⁴ “America’s Art, Smeared,” NYT, 17 May 1990; and Anthony Lewis, “Fight the Philistines,” NYT, 8 June 1990.

³⁵ Frohnmayer, “Chairman’s Letter,” 7.

³⁶ NEA appropriations data from the Americans for the Arts; inflation adjusted using the Bureau of Labor and Statistics’ CPI set to 2009 to correlate with White House Office of Management and Budgets (OMB) data referenced later. Report, “NEA Appropriations History: Fiscal Years 1966 to 2017,” Americans for the Arts, www.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/2017AFNEAAppropriations.pdf accessed 18 August 2018.

³⁷ Table 8.7, “Outlays for Discretionary Programs: 1962–2023,” and Table 8.8, “Outlays for Discretionary Programs in Constant (FY 2009) Dollars: 1962–2023,” OMB Historical Tables, WhiteHouse.gov, www.whitehouse.gov/omb/historical-tables/ accessed 18 August 2018.

³⁸ Bauerlein and Grantham, NEA: A History, 98; and Michael Oreskes, “Senate Votes to Bar U.S. Support of ‘Obscene or Indecent’ Artwork,” NYT, 27 July 1989.

³⁹ “Budget of the United States Government: 1990,” 9 January 1989, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/54/item/18996 accessed 18 August 2018.

⁴⁰ David Gergen, “Who Should Pay for Porn?” U.S. News & World Report, 30 July 1990.

⁴¹ Diane Haithman, “Frohnmayer is Ending Stormy Tenure at NEA,” Los Angeles Times (LAT), 22 February 1992; Kim Masters, “Arts Endowment Chief Forced Out: Frohnmayer Quits After Rocky Tenure,” WP, 22 February 1992; “Silence of the Sacrificial Lamb at NEA,” Chicago Tribune, 24 February 1992; and William H. Honan, “Head of Endowment for the Arts Is Forced from His Post by Bush,” NYT, 22 February 1992.

⁴² Christopher Knight, “The NEA Hearing: Haven’t We Heard This Song Before?” LAT, 7 March 1990.

⁴³ John Russell, “Getting High on Moral Indignation,” NYT, 6 August 1989.

⁴⁴ Joseph McLellan, “NEA: The First 20 Years: Looking Back on the Up-and-Down Union of Government & Art,” WP, 26 September 1985.

⁴⁵ Mel Gussow, “National Endowment Puts Government into Role of Major Patron of the Arts,” NYT, 12 August 1973; Hearings, Department of the Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1974, CR, 93rd Cong., 1st sess., 11 April 1973, 2464–73.

⁴⁶ “Martha Graham Dance Performance Abroad Brings Legislator’s Call for Censorship,” NYT, 10 September 1963.

⁴⁷ Jeffrey B. Gayner, Heritage Lectures: The Contract with America: Implementing New Ideas in the U.S. (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 1995), 3.

⁴⁸“ Ed Gillespie and Bob Schellhas, eds., Contract with America: The Bold Plan by Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. Dick Armey and the House Republicans to Change the Nation (New York: Times Books, 1994), 7–19.

⁴⁹ “The Politics of Slash and Burn,” NYT, 20 September 1990.

⁵⁰ McKay Coppins, “The Man Who Broke Politics,” The Atlantic, 17 October 2018; and Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein, Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Revival (New York: Little Brown & Co, 1996).

⁵¹ Bauerlein and Grantham, NEA: A History, 118–20.

⁵² Senator Jesse Helms, “FY 1996 International Affairs Budget Hearing,” Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony (FDCH-CT), 14 February 1995.

⁵³ Thomas W. Lippman, “Senate Kills Two Agencies, Reorganizes Foreign Affairs Roles,” WP, 22 October 1998.

⁵⁴ DOS budgets do not list the bureau (ECA), but instead the funding category of ‘Educational and Cultural Exchange Programs’ (ECE) – with line items for programmes managed by the bureau. ECE budget data: GAO, Report to the Chairman, Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives, “USIA: Options for Addressing Possible Budget Reductions,” 23 September 1996; DOS archived budget webpage, https://1997-2001.state.gov/budget/index.html accessed 18 August 2018; and Hyesun Shin, “Post-9/11 International Artists Exchange Between the United States and the Middle East,” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 43, no. 4 (2013): 206.

⁵⁵ Tom Engelhardt, “Americans Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us,” LAT, 29 May 1995. Engelhardt was not the only one writing about America’s position relative to a post-Cold War world circa the early-to-mid 1990s. Three of the largest names were Joseph Nye, Samuel Huntington, and Allan Bloom. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind; Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); and Joseph Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

⁵⁶ Dana Gioia, Testimony, Hearing on National Arts and Humanities Programs, House Committee on Education and Labor, Subcommittee on Healthy Families, Congressional Quarterly (CQ), 8 May 2008.

⁵⁷ Jill A. Schuker, Testimony, Committee on Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia, CQ Congressional Testimony, 23 September 2008.

⁵⁸ “Can the NEA Matter?” NYT, 2 November 2002; and Bauerlein and Grantham, NEA: A History, 147.

⁵⁹ Thane Peterson, “Beyond the 1990’s ‘Culture Wars,’” Business Week, 27 July 2004; and Dana Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter?” The Atlantic, May 1991.

⁶⁰ Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter?”

⁶¹ Dana Gioia and Patricia R. Olsen, “A Poet in the Supermarket,” NYT, 28 October 2007.

⁶² Peterson, “Beyond the 1990’s ‘Culture Wars.’”

⁶³ Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter?”

⁶⁴ Nanette Byrnes, “The Man Who Saved the NEA,” Business Week, 13 November 2006; and Bruce Weber, “Poet Brokers Truce in Culture Wars: Endowment Chairman Coaxes Funds for the Arts,” NYT, 7 September 2004.

⁶⁵ Dana Gioia, Chairman’s letter, NEA Annual Report, 2002. The FY 2002 Annual Report was prepared the first months Gioia was in office; although he did not lead the Endowment that year he crafted the Chairman’s letter, coining the catchphrase that became the Endowment’s motto throughout his tenure, repeated regularly in subsequent annual reports, press, and Congressional hearings.

⁶⁶ Bauerlein and Grantham, NEA: A History, 119.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 120.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 149.

⁶⁹ While this paper is limited to the NEA, a similar phenomenon occurred at the NEH. They introduced ‘Picturing America’, a curriculum designed around great American artwork, and ‘We the People’, programming to expand America’s familiarity with its own history.

⁷⁰ Dana Gioia, Statement, Committee on House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, CQ Congressional Testimony, 1 April 2008; and Gioia, Testimony, 8 May 2008.

⁷¹ NEA Annual Report, 2003, 7; Promotional Package, NEA Shakespeare in American Communities, n.d., 19, NEA UMASS.

⁷² Media Tool Kit, NEA Shakespeare in American Communities, n.d., NEA UMASS.

⁷³ NEA Annual Report, 2004, 10–11.

⁷⁴ NEA Annual Report, 2006, 10.

⁷⁵ NEA Annual Report, 2003, 7.

⁷⁶ Simi Horwitz, “‘Macbeth’ Plays Military Bases,” Back Stage, 3 September 2004.

⁷⁷ Amy Belasco, “Troop Levels in the Afghan and Iraq Wars, FY2001-FY2012: Cost and Other Potential Issues,” Congressional Research Service, 2 July 2009.

⁷⁸ NEA Annual Report, 2007, 9.

⁷⁹ Promotional Booklet, Great American Voices, NEA, 2005, NEA UMASS.

⁸⁰ Gerry J. Gilmore, “NEA Project Helps Troops Write About Wartime Experience,” U.S. Department of Defense, 21 April 2004, archived website, http://archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=26832 accessed 27 July 2018.

⁸¹ Jon Parrish Peede, OH Director, NEArts 4 (2006): 3.

⁸² NEA Annual Report, 2007, 2.

⁸³ Ryan Kelly, Statement, Committee on House Education and Labor, Subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities, CQ Congressional Testimony, 8 May 2008.

⁸⁴ Andrew Carroll, ed., Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of US Troops and Their Families (New York: Random House, 2006).

⁸⁵ Mark Bauerlein, “A Different Iraq: Writings from the Front,” PMLA 122, no. 3 (May 2007): 874–5.

⁸⁶ NEA Annual Report, 2004, 13; and “Giving Voice to Men of Honor: An Interview with Stephen Lang about Beyond Glory,” NEArts 4 (2006): 8.

⁸⁷ NEA Annual Report, 2007, 2; Dana Gioia, Foreword, in Andrew Carroll and Jon Parris Peede, eds., Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience: A Guide for Writers (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, n.d.), 4.

⁸⁸ Dana Gioia, Statement, “Funding for the Arts,” Committee on House Appropriations, Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, CQ Congressional Testimony, April 1, 2008; and “NEA Launches New Music Therapy Component of Operation Homecoming Program,” Brain World Magazine, 16 November 2012, https://brainworldmagazine.com/nea-launches-new-music-therapy-component-of-operation-homecoming-program/ accessed 27 July 2018.

⁸⁹ “Recognizing the Courage and Sacrifice of US Armed Forces Held as Prisoners of War during the Vietnam Conflict and Calling for a Full Accounting of Those Who Remain Unaccounted for,” 12 February 2003, CR, 149 Cong., sess. 1, Vol. 149, No. 26, H399.

⁹⁰ Kelly, Statement, 8 May 2008.

⁹¹ Aleksandar Hemon, “Operation Homeland Therapy: The NEA’s New Writing Program for Soldiers,” Slate, 13 October 2004.

⁹² Eleanor Wilner, “Poetry and the Pentagon: Unholy Alliance?” Poetry 185, no. 1 (2004): 37–42.

⁹³ Reginald Gibbons, “Letters to the Editor,” Poetry 185, no. 2 (2004): 143. See also Erica Funkhouser, “Singing in Dark Times,” Harvard Review, no. 29 (2005): 108–26; and Juliana Spahr, “US Poetry and its Nationalisms,” Contemporary Literature 52, no. 4 (2011): 684–715.

⁹⁴ Elaine Sciolino, “Invaders: Who Hates the US? Who Loves It? Not Love or Hate. Both,” NYT, 23 September 2001; David Hoffman, “The Answer to Hate-America TV,” WP, 14 August 2002; and Jane Perlez, “Anger at US Said to Be at New High,” NYT, 11 September 2002.

⁹⁵ In Depth: Iraq, Gallup, 2003–2015, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1633/iraq.aspx accessed 7 August 2018.

⁹⁶ “Global Public Opinion in the Bush Years,” 8.

⁹⁷ Karen DeYoung, “Bush to Create Formal Office to Shape US Image Abroad,” WP, 30 July 2002.

⁹⁸ Ibid.

⁹⁹ Gioia, Statement, 1 April 2008.

¹⁰⁰ Johanna Neuman, “Iraqi Orchestra Plays Up Unity,” LAT, 9 December 2003.

¹⁰¹ Dana Gioia, Statement, Fiscal 2005, Committee on House Appropriations, Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, FDCH, 1 April 2004.

¹⁰² “U.S. State Department: Mrs. Laura Bush Launches Global Cultural Initiative to Enhance U.S. Cultural Diplomacy,” Coventry, 26 September 2006.

¹⁰³ NEA Annual Report, 2005, 5–6.

¹⁰⁴ Sopan Deb, “Trump Proposes Eliminated the Arts and Humanities Endowments,” NYT, 15 March 2017.

¹⁰⁵ Dana Gioia, “For the Umpteenth Time, the NEA Deserves its Funding,” LAT, 17 February 2017.

¹⁰⁶ Jen Kirby, “Trump Asked the Guggenheim for a Van Gogh. The Museum Offered a Gold Toilet,” Vox, 25 January 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/1/25/16933970/trump-white-house-guggenheim-toilet-art accessed 29 August 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren Erin Brown

Lauren Erin Brown (A.B. Smith College, A.M. and Ph.D. Harvard University) is an Associate Professor of History at Marymount Manhattan College. A Jacob K. Javits Fellow, a Joint Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museums of American Art and American History, and a Fulbright Scholar at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, her research focuses on cultural policy, philanthropy, and diplomacy. Her work has been supported by the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Rockefeller Archives.