The National Endowment for the Humanities has sponsored some fine projects over the years. But honesty requires me to say that the NEH has also sponsored projects unworthy of taxpayers’ funds. And in a time when we are looking at general cutbacks in funding for many groups, including welfare mothers and farmers, it is time to cut funding for cultural elites. But it is not just the state of our national budget that leads me to this conclusion; it is also the state of the humanities. The humanities--like the arts--have become highly politicized. Many academics and artists now see their purpose not as revealing truth or beauty, but as achieving social and political transformations. Government should not be funding those whose main interest is promoting an agenda; and, as chairman of the NEH, I was often able to keep this from happening.

I remember one film project that used a most decided double standard to judge Western civilization. It declared Christopher Columbus guilty of “genocide,” while portraying the Aztecs, who practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale, as a gentle, peace-loving people. When I vetoed this project, the historical establishment rose up to denounce me roundly for, ironically enough, “politicizing the NEH.” But, in fact, I had kept the taxpayers’ money from being used to promote a political viewpoint.

It is impossible, however, given the current state of the arts and humanities, always to be successful at this effort. People will come along and declare their allegiance to objectivity and to providing projects that are balanced; but once they get the money, they will use it in ways quite different from what they promised. Two such instances stand as bookends, of a sort, to my career at the NEH. When I first arrived at the NEH in 1986, I found myself faced with a nine-part TV series called The Africans. It had been funded by one of my predecessors, as well it should have been. The application promised to present a wide spectrum of views on Africa, an abundance of opinions about its history, art and politics. The panelists who evaluated the project gave it uniformly excellent grades. But between the time the funds were granted (a million dollars, I believe) and the series was in final form, a sea change occurred.

Instead of a variety of opinions, we had the idiosyncratic opinions of one man--Prof. Ali Mazrui--who blamed every economic, moral and political failure that had ever occurred in Africa on the West. I remember one particularly bizarre point in the film that showed Sgt. Samuel Doe of Liberia murdering his rivals on a beach. The voiceover blamed the murders on the West--because the West had invented the guns that Sgt. Doe and his goons were using in the killings. That was one of the first NEH projects I had to deal with. One of the last-- the National Standards for History--involved the same kind of intellectual shell-game. The application promised to build standards on the basis of a previously published document, Lessons From History, that presented the story of the U.S. and Western civilization fully and frankly. As I outlined in an Oct. 20 article on this page, the standards that were produced bore little relation to the promises made about them.

What may be the single most irresponsible part of the standards comes in the World History Standards for fifth- and sixth-graders. In the section about the end of World War II, students are encouraged to read a book about a Japanese girl of their age who died a painful death as a result of radiation from the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. And this is all that they are encouraged to learn about how the war was ended.

No mention is made of why American leaders decided to drop atomic bombs, about the casualties that they believed would have been suffered in an invasion of Japan, for example. No mention is made of the death and destruction that the Japanese inflicted on others. The rape of Nanking is not discussed, nor is Pearl Harbor, nor is the Bataan death march. What fifth- and sixth-graders would be likely to carry away from the World History Standards is that their country was guilty of a horrible--and apparently unjustified--act of cruelty against innocents.

These bookends to my chairmanship are related in another way. One of the recommended resources for the World History Standards is The Africans. Mistakes in the humanities have a very long half-life.

When things went wrong at the NEH, my response as chairman--and as former chairman--was to talk about the problem, even to write op-ed pieces explaining the issues at hand. The American people deserve an honest accounting, not only about how their dollars are being spent, but about why the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts are in the trouble that they are. I think it is very important that the public understand, for example, the disastrous effects that a prolonged period of postmodernism has had.

It is easy enough for grant recipients to toss objectivity to the winds, since the postmodern view is that objectivity is an illusion--one that the white male power structure uses to advance its interests. In a world where there is no objectivity, there are no standards outside ourselves by which to judge our work, not scholarly ones and not aesthetic ones. Anything that has been designated as a standard becomes an object of mockery; and so major art museums exhibit works that are contemptuous of ideas like originality and formal coherence, works whose subjects are chosen to be as disgusting as possible: puddles of vomit, piles of excrement, photographs of corpses.

The American people deserve to understand this--to understand why their money supports artists who submerge a crucifix in urine and hang out in morgues. I must say, however, that in the years I spent down the hall from the arts endowment, I had no impression that they were interested in providing this enlightenment. The idea, or so it seemed to this close observer, was never to admit to a problem--indeed, to try very hard not even to know when there was one. This seemed to have been ingrained in the culture of the NEA from its earliest days.

In his biography of the NEA’s first chairman, Nancy Hanks, Michael Straight tells about a time in the 1970s when Ms. Hanks was ill and Mr. Straight, then deputy chairman, was asked to award grants to artists who wanted to do such things as “make a loop tour of the Western U.S., dripping ink as I go, from Hayley, Idaho, to Cody, Wyoming.” When Mr. Straight refused to make the awards, Ms. Hanks got out of her sick bed to sign the letters, and she subsequently made a change in the program.

According to Mr. Straight: “From that time on, artists were not required or even asked to tell us what they would do with the thousands of dollars which we might give to them.” He adds: “Plainly, Nancy felt it was better not to know.” The cause of the humanities is not advanced by the hundreds of thousands of dollars that were spent on the National History Standards. The cause of the arts has not been served by supporting artists who have nailed themselves to Volkswagens or smeared chocolate and bean sprouts on their bodies. Government funding in such instances is, in fact, counterproductive--encouraging fads and trends that without taxpayer support would soon fade away.

What of the good things that government funding of the arts and humanities has made possible? It would be better to direct private support to them. In the case of the NEH, some of the most valuable projects are those that preserve our national heritage and the heritage of Western civilization--the papers of Benjamin Franklin, for example, and those of Jane Addams and Frederick Douglass. The Dante database at Princeton, supported by the NEH, is an invaluable scholarly tool. I have recently become chairman of a charitable organization called the National Alumni Forum. The organization has several purposes, but one is to point alums--who are tired of having their gifts used to perpetuate the radical revisionism that is becoming common on our campuses-- toward the sound and serious scholarship that is also being undertaken and encourage them to support those projects that help preserve the fullest memory of our nation.

Let me also suggest that if the arts and culture lobbyists now working to increase public subsidies were instead to turn their energies to securing private funds, the good projects of the NEH and NEA would be in no danger at all. We could look forward to a renaissance of art and learning. The idea that the federal government does not belong in the arts and humanities is not just a Republican opinion. In 1993, the Progressive Policy Institute, an offspring of the Democratic Leadership Council, published Mandate for Change, a book that President Clinton called “a bold new course for reviving progressive government in America.” In it, author David Osborne divides government programs into a number of categories, including one called “no federal role is justified.” It is exactly there that he puts the arts and humanities, and he is exactly right.  

Lynne V. Cheney is a senior fellow at AEI. This article is adapted from testimony to be delivered before a House Appropriations subcommittee today.