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Jennifer Dalio

Professor Barcley Owens

English 112 M-W 5:30

15 December 2017

The National Endowment for the Arts: an Investment in American Culture

As Hallie Flanagan, Director of the New Deal-era Federal Theatre Project, said before

members of the House of Representatives in 1938, “Four centuries before Christ, Athens

believed that plays were worth paying for out of public money; today France, Germany, Norway,

Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Italy and practically all other civilized countries appropriate money

for the theatre” (​Brief​). A nation’s culture speaks perhaps as strongly as any international policy,

but who creates that culture, and how? Sustaining a theatre is a significant fiscal responsibility,

including facilities maintenance, promotion and sales, insurance, maintaining group morale,

planning a successful production season, and acquiring rights and licensing (which is required

even to perform on the street). Theatre operating expenses, as the expenses of many other

businesses, have risen 10.5 percent between 2012 and 2016 (Beckhusen).

On March 16th of 2017, President Donald J. Trump released his proposed 2018 budget

and became the first president to propose not just defunding, but completely eliminating the

Public Broadcasting System, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National

Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts (Nance). Without the

NEA, theatre in America will face serious consequences. Programs for the underserved
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populations in our country will decline significantly, community theatres will struggle to stay

afloat, new playwrights will not be able to find homes for their work, and innovation and risk

taking will decline in these, and other, groups.

The history of governmental funding for the arts here in the United States begins in 1935

with the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project. Robert Breen, of the FTP’s Chicago Unit, “stood

up at a 1935 national gathering of theatre leaders and started preaching the idea of a national arts

foundation.” After World War II, Breen, along with Robert Porterfield, led the American

National Theatre Academy, collaborating with the US Government on the program of cultural

diplomacy that would eventually lead to the formation of the National Endowment for the Arts.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a strong believer in the power of the arts and humanities as

a means of cultural diplomacy. In 1954, he requested $5 million from Congress for an

“Emergency Fund” to that end, citing Porterfield and Breen’s international tour of ​Porgy and

Bess​ as evidence of the impact American art could have abroad. Through Eisenhower’s

administration and into Kennedy’s, bipartisan support for a permanent government arts program

continued. President Johnson signed the National Endowments for the Arts and for the

Humanities into law on September 29th, 1965 (Canning).

In the 2016 fiscal year, expenditures of the National Endowment for the Arts took only

.004 percent of the federal budget. With that amount, according to Jennifer Goulet of

cultured.GR, it awarded 2,400 grants in 16,000 communities, touching every congressional

district in America. NEA grants support poetry, fine arts, music, and theatre. The belief of some

House Republicans, that the NEA supports programming for the rich (Cohen), echos the media

portrayal of theatre as an exclusionary activity, one reserved for people who can afford it. This
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belief, though, is simply not true. 33% of NEA grants are specifically targeted to low-income

audiences, and 40% of NEA-supported activities take place in high poverty neighborhoods.

Additionally, 36% of NEA grants go to organizations that reach underserved

populations--veterans, people in institutions, and people with disabilities (USNEA Funding).

Another criticism of the NEA, that it favors large institutions which could just as easily be

funded by wealthy patrons, also fails to stand up to facts. 47% of NEA grantee organizations are

small, with expenditures of under a million dollars per year, and 38% medium, with between one

and ten million per year in expenditures.

Mirroring many other partisan issues facing America today, conversations around this

topic are dominated by the few with strong opinions. The issue is between a minority who very

vocally support the elimination of national arts and culture programs, and a majority who support

them, but do so weakly. Though William Butler Yeats’ words in ​The Second Coming​ were

written in response to the events of World War I, we would do well to remember that the center

cannot hold “when the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Fiscal conservatives, like David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and

Budget for the Reagan administration, believe that funding the arts should not be a job of

government. Stockman hoped to abolish both the National Endowment for the Arts and the

National Endowment for the Humanities. Although the Reagan administration concluded after

research that both agencies performed a valuable service to the nation, the NEA and NEH, along

with the Public Broadcasting Service and Institute of Museum and Library Services, have

remained under fire since the early 1980s. Socially conservative objections to the NEA relate to

the sacrilegious or profane. Several partially NEA funded visual arts projects in the late 1980s,
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Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, caught the public’s

attention and brought the NEA’s values into question. Notably, after grants to individual artists

were discontinued by congress in 1995, controversies regarding NEA sponsored art became very

rare (Nance). When detractors of the NEA speak of “degenerate art,” in most cases they refer to

events of over twenty years ago. In eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, there is no

benefit but ideological benefit to the extreme end of conservatism. It is true that nearly all

support for defunding or outright elimination of the NEA comes from the conservative wing of

the Republican party. it is important, though, to note that many moderate Republicans do not

favor this plan. Leonard Lance, Republican Representative from New Jersey, is co-chairman of

both the Congressional Arts and Congressional Humanities Caucuses, and had this response to

President Trump’s proposed cuts:

A budget document is merely a blueprint. It does not appropriate any funding at

all. I will be working as hard as I can, internally and publicly, to make sure these

programs are funded. All my peers have arts venues in their districts. This affects

all states and all congressional districts (Avins).

Funding for the arts is such a small percentage of the American fiscal budget that its

elimination could not significantly benefit another program. The previously mentioned .004%

statistic is equal to 46 cents a year for the average taxpayer (Goulet), and that investment is well

spent by many measures. Goulet shares a statistic from Americans for the Arts: the arts employ

4.8 million workers, with a larger contribution to the gross domestic product of the United States

than the transportation, tourism, and agriculture industries, and a trade surplus near $30 billion.

Most people who go into this field do so because their lives have been changed by art.
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Community theatre saved my life when I was 12 by providing a safe place to explore emotions

and attitudes about the world, to learn social skills in a safe space, and to create something from

nothing. Dana Michael Harsell of “PS: Political Science & Politics,” puts it more formally: “Arts

and cultural funding… serves democratic society in the form of fostering social capital.” He

defines social capital as the networks that are formed by people engaged in their communities,

which lead to shared norms, collective action, and high levels of civic engagement. “High levels

of social capital,” claims Harsell, “undergird healthy democracies.” My first community of

engagement was the Old Town Playhouse, a community theatre on the corner of Cass and 8th

Street in Traverse City, Michigan. About 50 percent of OTP's annual $800,000 budget comes

from ticket sales and tuition, meaning $400,000 comes from grants, corporate sponsorship and

donor funding (Arts).

Without the support of the NEA, programs serving low income and otherwise unserved

populations will disappear or shrink significantly. Theatres will be forced to raise their prices to

make up for lost funds, making performances and other services accessible to a much smaller

audience. Diversity in the theatre has been moving in the right direction, telling more of our

American stories, and the loss of these programs will have a significant negative effect. The

National Endowment for the Arts runs on a minimal budget, and with that small amount it

promotes our nation’s culture, creates relationships, and fosters new ideas.

“Human beings creating and experiencing a story together in a room—that’s not going

away,” says Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Bill Rauch, a Harvard graduate quoted

in Craig Lambert’s ​Harvard Magazine​ article “The Future of Theatre,” “In some ways there is

even more hunger for it now.” Americans who support arts funding must become more vocal.
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The preamble to the bill that became the National Endowment for the Arts reads thus:

The world leadership which has come to the United States cannot rest solely upon

superior power, wealth, and technology, but must be solidly founded upon

worldwide respect and admiration for the Nation’s high qualities as a leader in the

realm of ideas and of the spirit. (Canning).

If we are to lead again in the realm of ideas and of the spirit, Americans who support federal

funding for theatre and the other arts must speak out. We can do better than this:

(USNEA Office)
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Works Cited

“Arts Organizations Get $500,000 in Grants.” ​Traverse City Record-Eagle​, 3 Nov. 2017,

www.record-eagle.com/news/local_news/arts-organizations-get-in-grants/article_f4d87a3

c-f7f2-5f3b-82b8-e16412383833.html.

Avins, Jenni. “Who Will Lose If the US National Endowment for the Arts Is Eliminated?”

Quartz​, Atlantic Media Group, 16 Mar. 2017,

qz.com/932332/who-will-lose-if-the-us-national-endowment-for-the-arts-is-eliminated/.

Beckhusen, Theresa J. “Priority Report: Theatre Facts 2016.” ​American Theatre​, Nov. 2017, pp.

30–36, www.americantheatre.org/2017/11/21/priority-report-theatre-facts-2016/.

Brief Delivered by Hallie Flanagan Before the Committee on Patents, House of Representatives,

February 8, 1938.​ Image. Retrieved from the Library of Congress,

www.loc.gov/item/farbf.00040002/.

Canning, Charlotte M. “The Arts Race: Theatre’s Leading Role in the Founding of the NEA.”

American Theatre​, Oct. 2017,

www.americantheatre.org/2017/10/06/the-arts-race-theatres-leading-role-in-the-founding

-of-the-nea/.

Cohen, Patricia. “N.E.A. Funds Benefit Both Rich and Poor, Study Finds.” ​New York Times​, 5

Feb. 2014, p. 2,

www.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/arts/design/nea-funds-benefit-both-rich-and-poor-study-fi

nds.html.
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Goulet, Jennifer. “Federal Dollars, Local Impact: Investing in Arts, Culture and Creativity Is

Vital to Michigan--and Our Nation.” ​MLive.com​, MLive.com, 13 July 2017,

www.mlive.com/entertainment/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2017/07/federal_dollars_local_imp

act_i.html.

Harsell, Dana Michael. “My Taxes Paid for That?! Or Why the Past Is Prologue for Public Arts

Funding.” ​PS: Political Science & Politics​, vol. 46, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 74–80.,

doi:10.1017/S1049096512001266.

Lambert, Craig. “The Future of Theater.” ​Harvard Magazine​, 2012,

harvardmagazine.com/2012/01/the-future-of-theater.

Nance, Kevin. “NEA at Risk: The Future of Arts Funding Under Trump.” ​Poets & Writers​,

2017, www.pw.org/content/NEA_at_risk.

United States, National Endowment for the Arts, “Funding the Arts|NEA.” ​Funding the

Arts|NEA​, 2015. www.arts.gov/infographic-nea-funding-the-arts.

United States, National Endowment for the Arts, Office of Research and Analysis, et al. “How

the United States Funds the Arts.” ​How the United States Funds the Arts​, 3rd ed., 2012.

www.arts.gov/publications/how-united-states-funds-arts.

Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” ​The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats​, 1933, p. 186,

archive.org/details/WBYeats-CollectedPoems1889-1939.