Received: from nic.cerf.net (192.102.249.3) by ENGLISH.HSS.CMU.EDU with SMTP (MailShare 1.0b8); Thu, 16 Feb 1995 11:20:43 -0600 Received: from (default38.usa.cerfnet.com [134.24.8.38]) by nic.cerf.net (8.6.9/8.6.9) with SMTP id IAA15981 for ; Thu, 16 Feb 1995 08:18:49 -0800 Date: Thu, 16 Feb 1995 08:18:49 -0800 Message-Id: <199502161618.IAA15981@nic.cerf.net> X-Sender: ealbers@cerfnet.com (Unverified) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable To: contrib@english-server.hss.cmu.edu From: ealbers@CERF.NET (Everett C. Albers) Subject: TESTIMONY ON NEH IN CONGRESS X-Mailer: THE FOLLOWING CONCERNS THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Testimony of Clay S. Jenkinson, Visiting Scholar at the University at Nevada-Reno, before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies on February 16, 1996 Thank you very much for inviting me to testify today. I want to make four simple points this morning: 1) The National Endowment for the Humanities is not a taxpayer subsidy for the elite. It is a populist organization. 2) The National Endowment for the Humanities is one of the most Jeffersonian institutions in American life. 3) One of the missions of the NEH--the encouragement of a dialogue between humanities scholars and the American people--is an exciting and thought-provoking exchange which improves both scholarship and citizenship among those who participate. 4) The NEH accomplishes much more than its limited budget would suggest. Its programs are much better known than the agency itself. My name is Clay Jenkinson. I grew up in western North Dakota. I have degrees from the University of Minnesota and, thanks to Rhodes and Danforth Scholarships, from Oxford University in Great Britain. I have taught at several universities and colleges, most recently at the University of Nevada at Reno. Since 1976 I have participated in humanities programs in more than forty states on more than 1000 occasions. In 1989 Dr. Lynne Cheney presented me with the NEH's Charles Frankel Prize. In 1988 I was named Kansas Humanities Scholar of the Year. I currently serve as a member of the Nevada Humanities Committee. My father C.E. Jenkinson recently retired from his position as a member of the North Dakota Humanities Council. Please accept my apology for speaking about myself. I do so only to illustrate the activities of the National Endowment for the Humanities by way of my experience. On behalf of the NEH and its affiliates, I have presented straightforward lectures, commentaries on films, and first-person historical monologues, in particular scholarly impersonations of Thomas Jefferson. I have moderated discussions of public issues, such as coal development on the northern plains, and the future of agriculture in America, and led book discussions on great texts from Homer to Wendell Berry. I have conducted humanities programs in church basements and open air tents, in palatial hotel ballrooms and in prefabricated senior citizens' centers on the windswept prairie. I have explored humanities themes before the President of the United States and the president of the Rotary Club of El Centro, California. I have discussed American history with Supreme Court justices and auto mechanics, with celebrated Americans and those who merely celebrate America. I have led public discussions of the paradoxes of the human condition in suburban malls and university libraries. I have discussed such issues as race and gender discrimination in inner city shelters and at the summer camps of white supremacists. I have spoken within the ashen walls of maximum security prisons and the glittering auditoriums of Aspen. About half of my public work in the humanities has been conducted in the guise or in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson. At the urging of my friend Everett Albers of North Dakota, I reluctantly undertook to impersonate the Third President from a scholarly rather than a theatrical perspective. My skepticism about the form was soon dispelled. I have come to believe that historical impersonation by scholars, so long as it is rigorous, is one of the most remarkable humanities models in America. Together with Mr. Albers I created the Great Plains Chautauqua, a traveling humanities tent show, which recreates the tent Chautauquas of the turn of the century, but with a steadier focus on the humanities, particularly history. Chautauqua features children's programs, workshops, book discussions, and first-person historical interpretation--all in an open-air tent. The modern Chautauqua is widely considered one of the most remarkable humanities programs in the United States. It has achieved a fifteen-year longevity thanks to grants from the NEH, from participating state humanities councils, and from foundation and corporate donors. I want to begin with a definition of the humanities. One of the problems the NEH must always face is that the terms humanism, humanist, even humanities and humanities scholar are not well understood, sometimes even among practitioners. One of the world's first humanists, Petrarch, provided what I consider the finest definition of the humanities ever written. He said the humanities explore "man's nature, the purposes for which we are born and whereunto we travel." The humanities explore with discipline, fair-mindedness, curiosity, and generosity of spirit the mystery of being human: our relations with the divine, our paradoxical middle state partly in and partly out of nature, the ways in which we relate to each other in friendship, in love, in family, in community, and in culture. When the state programs division of the NEH was formed I was skeptical of the idea that the world of Erasmus and Thomas More could be shared with average Americans who might not even have college degrees. My initial skepticism was soon overcome by experience, particularly after one of my humanities mentors, Dr. Bernard O'Kelly, said, of the America people, "Never underestimate their intelligence or overestimate their information, and you'll do well." And hundreds of times since then, I have seen the magic of the humanities in the faces of the people I meet, in the comments they make during and after humanities programs, in the letters they write to me sometimes years after the event, and in the ways they change their lives after encountering great texts. A young woman came up after one of my programs recently and told me that she had cut the cord off of her television set after hearing something I had said five years before. I blushed and asked to borrow her wire cutters! Perhaps the most memorable reminder of the power of the humanities came in a program I did in a rural California town. I was impersonating Jefferson. As usual the audience suspended its disbelief and let itself pretend that it was encountering not a limited midwestern humanities scholar of the twentieth century, but the most remarkable man ever to hold the office of the Presidency of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. As I was discussing deism and natural law I made eye contact with a man in the second row of the audience, and I saw his eyes suddenly light up as he realized that he was not seeing a one-man show or even a historical re-enactment, but was in fact encountering timeless ideas about how humans organize their spirits and their laws in a form that was partly historical and partly spontaneous. He was suddenly bursting with things to say and ask. In the next half hour we conducted a dialogue that was as serious as any I have ever seen. The text of Jefferson had inspired a conversation that was at once deeply serious and marvelously playful. This stranger's questions and comments made me think more clearly about Jefferson's ideas. My characterization of Jefferson's ideas helped this citizen realize that history is not an antiquarian artifact but an invitation for reflection. He made me a better scholar--I hope I made him a better citizen. He sent me back to my books to learn more about Jefferson's mind. I hope I inspired him to read one of the books I listed on the bibliography that was circulated at the program. We have never communicated since, but he improved my life, and I think I improved his. ONE: The historical problem of the humanities has been that they have been available to only a tiny segment of most civilizations. The British historian Alan Bullock suggests that at the height of the Renaissance there were probably no more than 1000 humanists in Europe, and they were chiefly writing to each other, while the mass of people lurched through their lives without the benefit of one of the most clarifying and ennobling of human tools--the humanities. The genius of the American experiment, and in particular the existence of our cultural agencies, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution, and particularly the National Endowment for the Humanities is that they have extended access to the humanities more widely than at any previous moment in human history. It is true that not everyone wants to encounter the humanities--certainly not when they are talked about as an abstraction or a federal agency-- but it is also true that most people like actual humanities programs. And it is indisputable that all people, all Americans, face issues in their lives, public and private, that are the province of the humanities, that are made more understandable and less frightening by the humanities, issues that bind us together as human beings, across the boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity, profession, class, creed, and locality. The NEH has been charged, among other things, with being elitist, but exactly the opposite is true. The NEH and its state affiliates exist to spread the good news of the humanities to every American, not just to the cultural elite, the academy, the wealthy, or those who live in urban places. The public humanities in America take seriously the idea of cultural equality and cultural responsibility: that to be complete citizens each of us needs to know something about the founding principles and documents of American life, that we need to examine our history dispassionately, know both our triumphs and failures as a people, explore the glorious achievement of America and also the costs of the success of America. The humanities are not a taxpayer-subsidized luxury for the wealthy and the cultural elite. Under the unobtrusive leadership of the NEH and its state affiliates, the humanities have been made available to every American who owns a television set, a radio, lives near a public library or museum, a community college or a even a public school. Programs that no single community can afford to create or support are disseminated throughout the United States by the network supported by the NEH and its affiliates. I have seen 450 people turn up for a humanities program in Epping, North Dakota, the population of which is only 125. The people who file into the Chautauqua tents in Kansas and Nevada, California and Oregon are not the sort most comfortable in black ties and country clubs. They come in all the Whitmanesque costumes of America: overalls and business suits, summer dresses and sweat pants, starched shirts and shirts with embroidered name tags. Once we took our humanities Chautauqua tent to Saratoga, Wyoming, for five days. It was a Chautauqua which examined the opening of the American West to European/American settlement. A thirty-five year old woman, wife, and mother of three children, after seeing the first day's activities, made a two-loaf stack of sandwiches, placed them in neat piles in her refrigerator, and stuck a note to her family on the refrigerator door, saying, "You're on your own. I'm going to Chautauqua. See you at the end of the week." She attended every lecture, every workshop, every informal discussion, every field trip, and every historical impersonation. This, so far as I know, is the only way in which the public humanities have been corrosive of family values. Her children and husband in fact endured, and she became a steady friend to humanities programs in Wyoming. TWO: Thomas Jefferson believed that democracy is an exceedingly risky form of government and that it can succeed only if certain conditions are met, the most important of which is that the citizenry must be enlightened. Mr. Jefferson had a rather exacting idea of an enlightened citizenry. He envisioned a nation of sturdy family farmers who worked hard by day and read Homer in the original Greek by night. He himself knew seven languages, played several musical instruments, read, at least as a young man, approximately eight hours per day, and distinguished himself in the fields of architecture, ethnology, paleontology, viticulture, scientific agriculture, library classification, and many others. He was also a not inconsiderable inventor. The reading regimen he outlined for young men who sought his educational supervision was daunting even by eighteenth century standards. Jefferson wrote, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." The public humanities are a delightful monument to the vision of Thomas Jefferson. If Chautauqua is, as Theodore Roosevelt said, the most American place in America, the NEH and its affiliates are the most Jeffersonian activity of the government of the United States. For Jefferson the life of the mind is not cultural frosting on the mundane cake of American life, but the very basis for good citizenship, the maintenance of liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That marvelously idealistic and elusive phrase--the pursuit of happiness--is alone proof that Jefferson wanted us to be a civilization and not merely an economy, what he called an "empire for liberty" and a "republic of letters," not merely another nation-state. Jefferson's vision for America is unambiguous--the statesman who sought to reduce our military establishment to what he called "a militia only til actual invasion," counted as one of his three greatest achievements not the Presidency, but the founding of a publicly-supported university in Virginia. We are in 1995 a thoroughly Hamiltonian nation with a thin Jeffersonian veneer. We spend our time getting and spending rather than reading, reflecting, and engaging in community. At a time when our most urgent national concerns are crime, violence, abuse, drugs, the failure of individual responsibility, and the erosion of our common identity as Americans, it makes no sense to disassemble one of the few truly Jeffersonian agencies of our national life. We urgently need to reinvigorate the arts of civilization--especially the humanities--in our schools, colleges, sporting events, recreations, prisons, work spaces, churches, media, and our public life. The humanities not obvious or palpable like bridges and space stations and battle ships, but they are, by Mr. Jefferson's calculation, critical to American civilization, and I wish we funded them at ten times their present level, even in a time of dangerous deficits. This may be unrealistic, but surely it is a mistake to reduce their modest appropriation at a time when we seem to be coming apart at the seams and nobody--from either party--seems to know quite how to put us back together again. It is not that the humanities can alone restore civility to American life, but they play an important role in that process and they have an impact that extends far beyond their meager funding and institutional base. It is not that the humanities can save us from our fragmentation, violence, and despair, but they play an important role in that process and like a barometer they measure the mental health of our civilization. If more of us gave some of our energy to books, careful discussion, reflection, and the examination of "man's nature, the purposes for which we are born, and whereunto we travel," we would surely be a more peaceful, more civil, and more happy nation. THREE: Critics of the NEH are under two misapprehensions about the nature of the intellectual exchange that occurs in a public humanities program. It is sometimes said that the humanities have to be watered down into a thin gruel to be palatable to the American people. And it is sometimes argued that the existence of the NEH and its affiliates puts the United States government in the role of sponsoring an official American culture. My experience teaches me that both of these perceptions are erroneous. The American people are intelligent, sensible, and hungry for the humanities. More than 200,000 citizens of the Great Plains have seen the humanities Chautauqua. I recently lectured about Jefferson before an audience of 3200 Californians. Humanities scholars do not simplify their ideas when they meet the American public, but they are continuously challenged to eliminate jargon from their lectures, to speak as clearly and concisely as possible, and to explain difficult ideas in ways that citizens untrained in the professional humanities disciplines can understand. In other words, humanities programs challenge scholars to be lucid, respectful, and clear-headed--the historic values of humanism. Public humanities programs clarify and distill scholarly research. Indeed, humanities programs have the ability to reclaim many humanities scholars from the verbal excesses that have come to characterize some of the post-structuralist humanities disciplines. Scholars do not water down their ideas in public programs. They rise to new levels of clarity and communication. This is especially important in a democratic culture. Nor does the NEH control cultural discourse in America. With its modest budget and its unobtrusive presence in American intellectual life, the NEH serves as an invitation to public discussion of the humanities on a breathtaking range of ideas and issues. The only control that the NEH exerts on this dialogue is that it be even-handed, non-partisan, open-minded, and that it keep a steady focus on the humanities. To demand less would be irresponsible use of taxpayers' money. To demand more would be to violate the sacred code of the humanities, that our odysseys of the mind should be as free as possible within the broad boundaries of respect and good sense. In all of the hundreds of humanities programs I have conducted, no officer of the NEH, no staff member of a state humanities council has ever told me what to say or what not to say. The NEH and its state affiliates merely set the table: the feast of the humanities belongs to the people and the humanities scholars who come to break bread with them. One of my favorite moments with the humanities occurred up on the Canadian border in North Dakota when I led a discussion of the award- winning film _Northern Lights,_ funded by the North Dakota Humanities Council. _Northern Lights_ is a film about the struggle of pioneer Dakota farmers to control their own economic destiny in the period before World War I. The discussion took place in the senior citizens center in a little village called Wild Rose, North Dakota. It was a cold clear night. About one hundred of us viewed the black and white feature film and ate dinner together: hot dishes, shredded beef, scalloped potatoes, a variety of jello salads, green beans, cookies, bars, followed by sharp black coffee from a huge aluminum urn and rich chocolate cake with a quarter inch of smooth pink frosting. Then we shared one of the most satisfying public discussions I have ever witnessed. We talked about pioneer life, Thomas Jefferson's agrarian dream, the economics of farming before and after mechanization, the pastoral myth of American life, the character of Norwegian pioneers, the strengths and weaknesses of the film, the uses and abuses of drink in Dakota history, the balance of love and politics in a complete life, and the future of agriculture. Men and women who had seen all or most of North Dakota history talked about ideas in heavy Norwegian accents. There were many laughs and some tears. It was the kind of discussion that can only come about in response to a cultural artifact, a text, in this case a film. We were coming to terms with our common history in a disciplined and life-affirming way. When it was over we were all a little embarrassed and ready to go home. It was a town so small that it did not have a motel. Before I drove away to a warm bed forty miles away I walked alone the whole length of the main street of Wild Rose. In fact, I walked out north of town and up a prairie hill. The night was crisp and very cold. When I looked back I could see the yellow lights of the main street, a few cars clustered around the bar, and houses with windows still illuminated. In the other direction was the vast prairie extending north towards Canada--with a farm here and there in the distance. Above me were a thousand million stars glittering in the firmament. It was one of the best nights I ever spent. The film had insinuated its way into the souls of the prosperous farmers of the 1970s in North Dakota. The discussion had penetrated beneath the veneer of cautious politeness that is the North Dakota style. The people of Wild Rose taught me a new way to think about the heritage of my state--the words pioneer and farmer meant something richer and more significant to me thereafter. Although an observer would have said that it was the citizens of that modest town who were grateful for my presence and the existence of the public humanities that night, I was the primary beneficiary. I'll not forget that discussion--or that chocolate cake. The program cost about $250 of taxpayer money. This much we can afford. FOUR: Many Americans who do not know or support the mission of the NEH have been enlightened by humanities programs: they have been moved to exhilaration and tears by Ken Burns' _Civil War_ film series; they have purchased or borrowed volumes from the _Library of America_ project (Benjamin Franklin, Willa Cather, Herman Melville) or from the University of Nebraska's definitive edition of the journals of Lewis and Clark; or they have participated in book discussions at their local libraries, or enjoyed NEH-funded exhibits at national, state, or local museums, or listened to cowboy poetry gatherings in Elko, Nevada, or Medora, North Dakota. The NEH's presence in American life has been understated--just what one would expect of the humanities--but the fact is that in one form or another the work of the NEH has become virtually a household presence if not a household name in America, and most Americans would be sorry to see disappear the NEH-funded programs that have appealed to their intellect and imaginations. The humanities will not go away if the NEH declines, but they will be less well coordinated, less efficient, less interesting, and I think less excellent. If the NEH ceased to exist the humanities would be impoverished spiritually throughout the United States and bankrupted financially in many districts, particularly in rural America where citizens have more interest in than access to cultural events. It is very important to remember that some of the best humanities programs have occurred far from centers of population and power. People who live in densely populated areas will always have some access to the humanities, but in rural America--in Minden, Nebraska, in Salida, Colorado, in Post Falls, Idaho, or Fallon, Nevada (all places that have changed my life), the publicly-funded humanities are often the only show in town. Every American would feel the loss of NEH programming, but the real victim of diminished support for the humanities would be the heartland, rural America. If the network of the NEH disappears and the humanities are forced to pay their own way in the open market--a condition that has never occurred in the history of western civilization--not in Pericles' Athens, not in Papal Rome, not in the Florence of the Medicis, not in Shakespeare's London, not in Emerson's Boston or Concord or in Sandberg's Chicago, and certainly not in Ely, Nevada; Marmarth, North Dakota; or Sharon Springs, Kansas; or Logan, West Virginia--the humanities and the arts will cease to be the birthright of all Americans and will become again the luxury of the privileged. Without public funding they will go the way of Aspen and Telluride and Santa Fe--beautiful but essentially off limits to average Americans. C.P. Snow decried the gulf between the sciences and the humanities--that problem continues to plague the West and it is a continued focus of the humanities. But the danger in our time is that in the absence of national encouragement the humanities will retreat to the groves of the academy and the great mass of our citizens will have no choice but to settle for MTV rather than NPR, the Simpsons rather than Joseph Campbell, miniseries written by John Jakes rather than the brilliant documentaries of Ken Burns, and Hollywood's simplistic slave-raping caricature of Thomas Jefferson rather than the more complex and elusive Jefferson of actual history. In their present form the NEH and its affiliates are a kind of pilot lamp for the humanities in American life. They are not themselves the humanities, but they have in thirty years created a modest flame that is poised to flare up into illumination whenever earnest citizens breathe forth their curiosity and enthusiasm at the mysteries of the human heart and the perplexities of our common past. Not everyone at any given moment wishes to turn up the heat on our cultural heritage, but so long as you (meaning we) continue to provide modest funding for the humanities in both their national and state arenas, we need not flail blindly in the dark. I want to close by pointing to just one humanities text. When the aging King Lear is challenged by his evil daughters to explain why he needs even one bodyguard in his regal retirement, he cries out: Oh Reason not the need. Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life is cheap as beasts.=7F In other words, need is not the measure of human dignity. Surely we can "get by" with fewer cars, television sets, football teams, lobster dinners, books, vacations to Florida, and fewer arts and humanities programs. All we need is a few hundred calories per day and some minimal shelter to survive. But the measure of humankind, says the Renaissance Lear, is to be found in its celebration of the "superfluous," the extravagance of spirit that lifts us above the reach of mere animals. It is what we do, what we create, and what we accumulate beyond mere need that makes humankind what Shakespeare calls "the beauty of the earth, the paragon of animals." Those energies which transcend the merely utilitarian are what define us as fully human--a civilization. We do not need public support for the humanities any more than we need a Lincoln memorial or a national art gallery or a Library of Congress. But the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, a nation in which we spend $5000 per capita every year on automobiles, $7.50 every time we attend a movie, and $140 every time we purchase a new pair of tennis shoes, can afford, if it believes in the Jeffersonian imperative, 68 cents per person per year on the humanities. I urge you not to cut but greatly to increase taxpayer spending on the humanities. Why? O reason not the need! Thank you for your time. ealbers@cerfnet.com Everett C. Albers Executive Director ND Humanities Council 2900 Broadway E., Suite 3 PO Box 2191 Bismarck, ND 58502-2191 FAX: 701-223-8724 TELEPHONE: 701-255-3360 HOME PHONE: 701-258-9787 TOLL-FREE OUTSIDE BISMARCK: 1-800-338-6543 E-MAIL ealbers@cerfnet.com .