A Sideshow in America’s Culture Wars

The National Endowment for the Arts is again on the Republican chopping block. Now that House Republicans have torpedoed themselves in their war against the federal government on issues such as the disaster-relief bill, they are retreating to abolishing the NEA.

Despite its tiny budget and size--just under $100 million--the NEA has become the main target of the GOP in the culture wars. Indeed, for Southern congressmen like House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.), the NEA is the ultimate symbol of big government run amok: a federal organization run by a liberal elite bent on subverting religious and moral values.

In targeting the NEA for extinction, Republicans are tapping into an enduring impulse in America: anti-intellectualism. For the culture wars have always been an integral part of America. They are rooted in a battle between Southern fundamentalist, evangelical beliefs and the Northern educated classes. Southern populism has always viewed Northern elites and their high culture as fundamentally un-American. And, over the past three decades, the Republicans have skillfully played this Southern card. The GOP has attempted to de-legitimize the federal government by linking it as an institution with elitism--and the NEA is seen as the elitist institution par excellence.

As historian Richard Hofstadter first observed in his book “Anti-Intellectualism in America,” suspicion of and hostility toward intellectuals are rooted in American religious traditions. It has been a continual struggle between the Puritan New England ethos and the evangelicalism that eventually took hold in the Midwest and South. A profound tension between religion and rationalism existed among the new settlers who had fled the stuffy conventions of Europe for a spartan life devoted to serving God. Two forces came together in America: an exaltation of the savage life and of direct access to God.

This didn’t happen among the first wave of immigration--the Puritans. On the contrary, Puritan has become an epithet. The reason Puritans occupy such a forbidding image in American memory is precisely because they constituted a religious class of intellectuals who emphasized learning. The Puritans established Harvard University, where young Americans could read Aristotle and Homer in the original Greek. The Puritans frowned on the ecstatic forms of religion, and emphasized sobriety and scholarship.

But a backlash soon began. As more and more Europeans immigrated to America, the Puritan oligarchy that had ruled New England began to face a stiff challenge to its authority. That challenge came during the first Great Awakening, in the mid-18th century. The Englishman George Whitefield journeyed to America on an evangelistic crusade; tens of thousands gathered in towns to hear him. Evangelists like Whitefield disdained unknotting theological complexities; instead, they democratized religion by going over the heads of the established churches. They exhorted their worshipers to work themselves up into a frenzy. The whipped-up crowds attacked colleges and book burnings of Puritan authors occurred.

American Protestant evangelicalism really took off during the 19th century. Evangelicalism grew strongest in the South, where it was the antithesis of the uptight doctrines practiced by the Boston Brahmins. By the 1920s, it surfaced most spectacularly during the Scopes trial, when William Jennings Bryan famously faced off against Clarence Darrow. Bryan denounced the theory of evolution and a “little irresponsible oligarchy of self-styled ‘intellectuals.’ ”

The fundamentalists won the Scopes trial but lost the war, as the teaching of evolution entered the standard school curriculum. Yet, as Garry Wills perceptively points out in his book “Under God,” it was a Pyrrhic victory for the rationalists. The Scopes trial ended up mobilizing fundamentalists to kick Darwinism out of school textbooks.

In fact, strong anti-intellectual themes continued to rumble underneath the strata of U.S. politics throughout this century, but they did not erupt again until the Cold War ended in 1989. The Cold War acted as a carapace on cultural tensions; the religious zeal that American evangelicals felt had an apocalyptic target in the form of the Soviet Union. It was no accident that Ronald Reagan first used the term “evil empire” when addressing the national association of evangelicals in 1983. With the loss of this great foreign enemy, anti-intellectualism and religion have been the fuels propelling the Republican crusade against the enemy within--as represented by the NEA. The rise of the religious right in the GOP and the attack on the NEA are intimately linked.

Conservatives continue to berate the NEA for funding such artists as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, even though the NEA is hardly about to repeat such blunders. Armey recently called the NEA the “single most visible and deplorable black eye on the arts in America that I have seen in my lifetime.” But this is nonsense. Armey and Co. are not only displaying the worst traits of American anti-intellectualism, but they are also deeply distorting the conservative role of the NEA.

The truth is, the NEA performs a vital service in preserving American culture. Despite its $99.5 million budget, the NEA has managed to act as a life-support system for crucial cultural projects across the nation. Under its Heritage and Preservation grants, for example, the NEA has awarded a total of 121 grants totaling $6,142,025 for such valuable projects as restoring New Mexico’s historic adobe churches, for resurrecting vintage stage musicals and creating an archive of tapes of performances of Jelly Roll Morton and Woody Guthrie. It directs thousands of other grants to orchestras, film institutes and regional theaters. Small theaters in places like Des Moines, Iowa, would never be able to survive without the NEA. Far from being an elitist organization, the NEA is serving middle America. Rather than focusing on eliminating the NEA, Congress should be thinking about increasing its budget.

Instead, the House GOP is intent on wiping out the Wilson Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities as well. The Wilson Center, which was founded by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and is based in Washington, brings together scholars and journalists from around the country to work on special projects and demonstrates federal support for serious scholarship that can draw on the Library of Congress. This is precisely the sort of enterprise that the federal government should be supporting in the nation’s capital.

The Southern anti-intellectual revolt that Gingrich is spearheading against the NEA and the Wilson Center may play well in Georgia and Texas, but moderate Republicans as well as Democrats are preparing to defend the NEA and its sister organizations. Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that controls spending for the NEA, and Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), have declared that the NEA should receive full funding. And President Bill Clinton has made it clear that he will veto any attempts to abolish the NEA.

The survival of the NEA means the far right will continue to have the external enemy it needs to vent its anti-intellectual fervor. But in putting the NEA back on the chopping block, Southern populists like Gingrich are only delivering a self-inflicted wound. Indeed, as the House Republicans present a kind of guerrilla theater on the Hill, with the recent coup attempt against Gingrich, the NEA’s own solid performance over the past few years has ensured that its show will go on.