My column this week looks at National Arts and Humanities month (which is this month) and the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, the anniversary of which the event was initially created to celebrate. Here’s an excerpt:
The 50th anniversary of the NEA itself came at the end of last month. On September 29, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill creating endowments designed to provide federal grants to the arts and humanities. “Art is a nation’s most precious heritage,” Johnson said in a Rose Garden Ceremony packed with over 300 enthusiastic spectators, “for it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a Nation.”
Then, sounding like he was predicting the way in which conversations about public education would, fifty years later, be dominated by the acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), the President acknowledged “we in America have not always been kind to the artists and the scholars who are the creators and the keepers of our vision. Somehow, the scientists always seem to get the penthouse, while the arts and the humanities get the basement.”
It’s not hard to understand Johnson’s interest in the NEA once you associate it—as he always did—with his vision of a Great Society. Go HERE to read the whole thing in this week’s Waco Tribune-Herald.
LBJ signing legislation to create the National Foundation on Arts and Humanities, September 29, 1965.