(5 of 11)
Why not, indeed? Because in America, the arts have always had to prove how moral they are. Ever since the Puritans got to Massachusetts in the 17th century, American culture has had an iconophobic streak: prelates and politicians felt that though God (like them) spoke through the Word, the visual and performing arts were in some sense the devil's work, best left alone by a virtuous polity. This has combined with America's extreme loathing of tax--for American independence began with a tax revolt, when the tea chests were tossed into Boston Harbor in 1773. Put them together, and you get to hear House majority leader Dick Armey proclaiming, without a shred of evidence, that federal arts subsidy "offends the Constitution of the U.S."--without, of course, suggesting which clause or amendment it offends.
There is no such clause, because America's Founding Fathers had no doubt about the necessity of the arts in a democracy. They were radicals and revolutionists who believed that the arts should be available to the many, not the privileged few (as in 18th century Europe, where they were left to the alite "private sector," to whose corporate equivalents the G.O.P. wants to return them today). "I must study politics and war," wrote John Adams to his wife Abigail, "that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study ... navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture ..." Their son John Quincy Adams amplified that in his First Message to Congress. For government to refrain, he wrote, from "promoting the improvement of agriculture, commerce, manufacture, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanical and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature ... would be treachery to the most sacred of trusts."
Intelligent appreciation of the arts and the humanities was part of the democratic promise. Learning, no less surely than the Kentucky rifle, supported freedom. The case for federal interest in fostering it was plainly put by James Madison 200 years ago. Americans, he said, owed it to themselves "and to the cause of free government, to prove by their establishments ... that their political institutions are as favorable to the intellectual and moral improvement of Man as they are conformable to his individual and social rights."
Other Americans, whether ordinary, shortsighted materialists or mere yahoos, have often opposed this noble idea. Hence tax-financed culture has always seemed a "soft spot" in government budgets.
In 1814, after the British burned the Congressional Library and Jefferson offered to sell Congress his own books as a replacement, angry voices in Congress denounced the idea: it was immoral to spend federal money on "philosophical nonsense" collected by a notorious freethinker, on volumes that were "worthless, in languages which many cannot read, and most ought not." Wisely, Congress voted over its seated bigots and populist lowbrows, as it should today. It bought the books, for $23,950. This, as historian David McCullough pointed out to the House Appropriations Subcommittee last February, "may be seen as the beginning of federal involvement in the arts and humanities, to the everlasting benefit of the country."