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To do that effectively, however, it needs to have its budget increased, not cut. Give it one-quarter the cost of a B-2 each year--$550 million. Let it then compile a target list of the 500 or so performing-arts institutions, along with the instruments of historic preservation (museums, heritage and restoration groups, and so on) that matter most in American culture, across the whole social and geographical spectrum, and see what they (minimally) need.
America leads the world in dance, for instance, and yet an innovative genius like choreographer Twyla Tharp lacks the money to maintain a permanent company. This is a national embarrassment. Such people shouldn't have to go begging in corporate boardrooms. But in America, artists are always on probation.
Yet the chance of getting enough money for the NEA to become truly effective is now very slim; and the punitive funding cuts it has suffered have weakened it so far that in the end, it may not be worth keeping alive. Meanwhile, the NEH seems to have become confused with the NEA in the public mind--as though the National Endowment for the Humanities had suffered the same tsuris as the National Endowment for the Arts. In fact, its record has been excellent. Losing the NEA would be a disgrace; but the loss of the NEH as well would be a cultural tragedy for all Americans.
Since it was founded in 1965, the NEH has awarded $2.9 billion in some 51,000 fellowships and grants, and its Challenge Grants program, in place since 1977, has generated more than $1.3 billion in nonfederal aid for American libraries, museums, universities and colleges. Its net of activities reaches very wide. It funds the study and publication of essential archives, like the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain and Dwight Eisenhower. (Twenty-eight volumes of Washington's papers alone have appeared so far.) It has given more than $1 million to a projected 21-volume documentary history of the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It sponsored Ken Burns' TV series on the Civil War, as well as the definitive edition of the Thomas Alva Edison papers and the first complete printed version of the journals kept by Lewis and Clark on their epic trek across the West. It funds local history centers, educational programs at all levels and the unending task of preserving millions of old documents and brittle newspapers, both physically and on microfilm. And much more, including the great Library of America series of American literary classics, co-sponsored by the NEH and the Ford Foundation.