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When the American history painter John Trumbull was paid $32,000 for the four scenes of the American Revolution, including the Declaration of Independence (1818), that adorn the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, a loud outcry arose against their cost. But does anyone alive today think it was wrong to spend public money on jump-starting the Library of Congress with Jefferson's 6,500 books or creating America's first monumental paintings of its own history? Was Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, which gave jobs to numerous good American artists in the Depression years, a bad idea? American government has supported the American arts--spottily, inconsistently, but always with some general sense of obligation to a larger sense of polity--almost from its beginning. The claim that the NEA and the NEH, founded in 1965, had no historical precedents in America is simply a lie.
Who begrudges the $1 million a year in federal funds for the upkeep of the Lincoln Memorial, with its huge, Zeus-like figure of the dead President by Daniel Chester French? Yet from there to Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial--a focus of intense collective feeling and reverence today, but bitterly denounced by many a flag-wagging conservative as "a black gash of shame"-- there has scarcely been a significant American public sculpture commemorating things Americans care about that hasn't excited fierce opposition, usually in the name of patriotism and values.
Trying to find common public images in the midst of the pandemic discord of American democracy has never been an easy task. Sometimes, as now, it has seemed all but hopeless. One recalls the morose words of John Trumbull in 1793, lamenting how "the whole American people" had become "violent partisans ... the whole country seemed to be changed into one vast arena ... on which the two parties, forgetting their national character, were wasting their time, their thoughts, their energy ... In such a state of things, what hope remained for the arts? None."
This atmosphere passed, but 200 years later a similar dementia prevails. Its obsessive objects this time are not the Terror in France and the war between France and England, as they were in 1793. They are moral--or, to be more exact, they are about the rhetoric of morality.
Our present "culture wars" do not exist in liberal democracies on the other sides of the Atlantic or the Pacific. The intolerance of these clashes is aggravated by the deep anguish that descended on America after it won the cold war and found itself no better off. The Manichaean universe, divided between right (us) and wrong (Soviets), dissolved. The apocalyptic scenario, so frightening and yet so consoling, fizzled. But the mind-set it fostered remains, particularly since America is the only country in the Western world with a strong, and vengeful, current of Fundamentalist apocalyptic religion. With the death of communism, new Antichrists and minor devils have to be found inside America. The two p.c.s--patriotic correctness and political correctness--have mutually fostered this search, creating an atmosphere of inflamed accusation; scholarship and the arts then become scapegoats, grotesquely politicized culture-war stereotypes.