[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 161 (Wednesday, October 18, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15293-S15294]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                 ABDICATING ON THE CASE FOR ENDOWMENTS

 Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I rise to invite the attention 
of the Senate to an article in the October 2 edition of the Washington 
Times entitled ``Abdicating on the Case for the Endowments.'' The 
author is Leonard Garment, a Washington lawyer who has followed the 
issue of Federal funding of the arts and humanities since he worked as 
White House counsel to President Richard Nixon.
  ``That soft gurgling you hear,'' writes Mr. Garment, ``is the sound 
of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities being slowly 
strangled to death.''
  In the article, Mr. Garment lists the abuses of the public trust 
that, in his words, ``denigrate the values of millions of taxpaying 
Americans.'' The notorious Andres Serrano project. The panels that 
judge projects by ideological litmus tests and fund the politically 
correct. The wheelbarrows full of money dumped into frivolous whimsies.
  He concludes that the solution is not to throw the baby out with the 
bathwater--to risk weakening America's cultural treasures because of 
these abuses. Rather, he advocates a clean break with the past. He 
would disassemble and rebuild them from the ground up.
  ``Such reforms,'' he writes ``are not only possible but already on 
the congressional table--in the form of a bill, jointly introduced by 
Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Robert Bennett of Utah, that 
addresses every one of these issues.''
  I am gratified that a man of Mr. Garment's stature and experience 
supports our bill. I recommend this excellent article to my colleagues, 
and I ask that it be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

               [From the Washington Times, Oct. 2, 1995]

               Abdicating on the Case for the Endowments

                          (By Leonard Garment)

       That soft gurgling you hear is the sound of the National 
     Endowments for the Arts and Humanities being slowly strangled 
     to death. The House of Representatives has voted to fund the 
     endowments at drastically reduced levels and take them out 
     entirely in two years. The Senate, while not imposing a 
     similar deadline, has also slashed the endowments' money.
       Yet most fans of the endowments are walking around with 
     ``What, me worry?'' smiles on their faces. Since they 
     survived, they think their arguments worked and that they can 
     just keep making these arguments again and again until their 
     opponents' fervor cools. Then it will be business as usual.
       I fear the endowment enthusiast overestimate the stamina of 
     their friends and underestimate the resentment of their 
     adversaries, in Congress and out. The editorial stalwarts at 
     The Washington Post, for example seem to have quietly tiptoed 
     out of the current debate, leaving it to Jonathan Yardley, 
     The Post's senior book reviewer and distinguished social 
     commentator--a man with cast-iron convictions, by the way--to 
     call for an end to the Endowments (Aug. 28, Sept. 10, Sept. 
     25). During this barrage, the Post gave ``Taking Exception'' 
     time to a wearily hackneyed defense of the humanities 
     endowment by one of its senior officials (Sept. 19). Jane 
     Alexander, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, 
     the lead horse of the cultural troika, appears to have taken 
     a sabbatical powder from public advocacy, apparently content 
     to let matters rock along without risking a misstep that 
     might upset the congressional stay of execution.
       The national endowments are making a miserable mistake in 
     thus defaulting on the attacks against them, letting the 
     once-splendid arts and humanities enterprise fade slowly into 
     history with little more than befuddled whimpers of support. 
     This is a pity, since every legitimate objection made by 
     those who want to pull the plug on the endowments can be 
     answered. What has been missing, as usual, is the creative 
     intelligence and the legislative will necessary to do so.
       After 30 years of reasonably close observation of the 
     spasms of congressional support and hostility toward the 
     endowments, it seems to me that the current mixture of 
     indifference and resentment, reflecting the powerful 
     conservative political tide, involves five major categories 
     of complaint. First, it is said that the endowments have 
     supported artistic and humanities projects that denigrate the 
     values of millions of taxpaying Americans. Robert 
     Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Annie Sprinkle and Her 
     Magnificent Speculum, blah, blah, blah. All true. However 
     these unpleasant projects came to be funded, the relevant 
     fact is that they should not have been. But the chance of 
     such mistakes in the future can be reduced to near-zero if 
     the endowments are prohibited from awarding grants, subgrants 
     or fellowships to individuals. These personal subventions 
     have been the main instruments of the corrosive damage 
     inflicted on the endowments.
       Next, the endowments are called mutual back-scratching 
     societies that use their hundreds of so-called ``peer 
     panels'' to support highly personal and ideological 
     judgements about art and scholarship. True again. But this 
     need not be if we eliminate the large array of narrow and 
     manipulable peer panels and create a small number of cross-
     disciplinary advisory groups, less vulnerable to parochialism 
     and conflict of interest, to advise the endowment leadership 
     on the distribution of endowment resources. The arts and 
     humanities are too important to be left to artists and 
     humanities--who are intensely concerned, and understandably 
     so, with self-expression, not with safeguarding cultural 
     institutions from political harm. Individual grants and 
     fellowships are a fine idea but quintessentially the business 
     of private foundations and corporate or individual donors. 
     And I refuse to believe that an artist or scholar who has 
     something important to say will pack up his palette or PC if 
     he or she is not paid in advance. Just try making the 
     argument for the necessity of individual grants to the hordes 
     of young writers, painters and musicians who work 
     without complaint at part-time jobs to support their 
     particular muses.
       Third, critics contend that the endowments are used by 
     federal arts bureaucracies as instruments for their own 
     private agendas. Also true. To the extent that the law 
     permits, we should clear out these long-timers--who think 
     they, not the taxpayers, own the endowments. We should make 
     the rest accountable to a council subject to Senate 
     confirmation as well. The council should be composed of 
     mature persons required by law to be genuinely ``learned in 
     the arts and humanities.'' Even allowing for the occasional 
     political hack who will slide through, such a council would 
     be very difficult for bureaucracies to roll.
       Front and center for years now, the big complaint is that 
     the endowments try to be all things to all constituencies 
     rather than acting out of their own sense of national 
     cultural mission. For this grievance Congress has a remedy at 
     hand. It can establish by law that the endowments will 
     support only American cultural institutions whose weakening 
     or destruction would mean the loss of irreplaceable 
     treasures. These institutions--there are not that many--would 
     be selected by the national council and would be the nation's 
     indisputable best: The great museums, symphony orchestras, 
     jazz ensembles, art schools, performing arts centers, ballet, 
     operas and theater companies. In short, they would be the 
     emblems of the honor that America gives to its major cultural 
     institutions and of the importance it ascribes to them as 
     instruments of aesthetic education. Congress also can (and 
     should) stipulate that 

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     a substantial part of the federal arts and humanities budgets will be 
     distributed, by formula, to states and local governments for 
     the support of local equivalents of the national treasures, 
     mandating substantial community outreach as a condition of 
     the award of public support. This money would also be subject 
     to a categorical ban on individual grants.
       Finally, the endowments are said to be overloaded with 
     administrative costs and redundancies in areas, such as film 
     production, already supported by the Corporation for Public 
     Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting System. A final 
     ``true.'' To solve this problem, the two endowments (and the 
     Institute for Museum Services) should be consolidated into a 
     single endowment under unified leadership, with a presiding 
     chairman and three deputies for the arts, humanities and 
     museum services components. This merger would save millions 
     of dollars, and each of the constituent organizations would 
     benefit immensely from the enhanced cross-disciplinary 
     scrutiny. The humanities section of the new endowment could 
     be constructively pared by at least a third of its present 
     budget with that money redistributed to meet large and urgent 
     arts and museum services needs. (Thumb through the annual NEH 
     catalogue of humanities grants; if you can explain 10 percent 
     of these mystifying projects, you should be the next dean of 
     Harvard College.)
       Such reforms are not only possible but already on the 
     congressional table--in the form of a bill, jointly 
     introduced by Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Robert 
     Bennett of Utah, that addresses every one of these issues. It 
     would be a shame if partisans of the endowments ignored this 
     bill and thus missed the opportunity to anticipate and block 
     the future proposals that will otherwise lead inevitably to 
     the evisceration of the endowments. It may be too late in the 
     budget cycle to consider structural reforms'' right now; but 
     reauthorization or deauthorization time will soon roll around 
     and a deep breath and a careful look at the history and 
     future structure of the endowments will be in order.
       The national endowments are powerful symbols of an American 
     commitment to the support and dissemination of the arts and 
     humanities at a time when a horrifying junk culture pervades 
     our public spaces. Even aside from this concern, abandoning 
     the endowments would be a shabby act, utterly unworthy of a 
     great nation. Their massive 30-year contribution to American 
     culture dwarfs their mistakes. They furnish unequaled 
     cognitive tools for early education for the children of what 
     will be the largest and most complex multi-cultural nation in 
     the world.
       Ways and means can be debated; what I believe unarguable is 
     that the endowments should not be destroyed--slowly, swiftly 
     or at all--simply because aggressive cultural predators and 
     self-indulgent members of the federal bureaucracy have 
     occasionally corrupted the work of the agencies over the past 
     three decades. And if these persons and organizations now 
     hope to stave off reform, believing responsible defenders of 
     the endowments will simply go away, those of us who care for 
     the arts and humanities and understand their importance 
     should not let them get away with it.

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