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In 1991 a study by the American Council of Learned Societies found that the NEH provided 64% of the research funding available to American scholars in the humanities (the runner-up was the Guggenheim Foundation, at 18%). Right-wing critics sneer that this is a pork barrel for obscurantist, lefty p.c. historians, but they are wrong. Books published with NEH support include such recent achievements in history and biography as James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Pulitzer Prize, 1988); Laurel Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (Pulitzer Prize, 1990); John Demos' The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (nominated for a National Book Award, 1994); Eric Foner's classic study, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877; Richard Slotkin's brilliant explorations of the myth of the American frontier, and scores of others.
Until the G.O.P. frenzy turned on it recently, the NEH was rightly seen as an exemplary agency. Thus the conservative columnist George Will, writing about the NEH-sponsored Jefferson Lecture given by Gertrude Himmelfarb in 1991, endorsed the NEH as "the best part of the government." But then the party line changed. By last January, Will was baying for the agency's total abolition-- "If Republicans merely trim rather than terminate [NEA, NEH and CPB], they ... will prove that the Republican 'revolution' is not even serious reform."
Also in January, two former chairmen of the NEH appeared before a House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, testifying that their old agency had become an incubator of decadence and should be abolished. William Bennett, chairman from 1981 to 1985, opined that since American culture had not improved since 1965, and since it had been "Marxized, feminized, deconstructed and politicized" partly on NEH dollars, one could "make a plausible case that the endowments have had a deleterious effect on our culture."
Plausible? Only if you believed that post hoc was propter hoc. At the hearing and afterward in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Lynne Cheney, Bennett's successor as NEH chairman, went into a perfect rapture of denunciation, like some goodwife of Salem divining a devil's teat in every rival's wart. The NEH, it seemed, once had its uses, but they stopped when she left. Now it was a pit of deconstruction and misery, rad-feminism and woe, a p.c. hell where tenured profs did nothing but denounce Shakespeare, Dante, Yeats and Matthew Arnold as "icons of the decadent civilization of the West." KILL MY OLD AGENCY, PLEASE, one of her headlines begged.
All this infection must have happened very quickly, within two years in fact--almost Ebola-speed. For Cheney's animus against the NEH contradicted everything she said and wrote about it, both when she was running the agency and immediately after she quit as chairman at the end of 1992. In a parting memo to the NEH staff on that occasion, Cheney overflowed with praise for the endowment for "funding the best of traditional scholarship on time-honored subjects as well as the best of newer approaches on newer topics." She lauded the staff: "No federal agency to my mind has so many capable professionals, so thoroughly dedicated to the idea of excellence." She praised its grant procedures without reserve. And so on, for 4-1/2 single-spaced pages.