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scriptbabe451 's List: Arts & Crafts
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Oct 03, 09
hate america when they aren't running it
Bill Bennett and Lynn Cheney ask for NEH to be defunded-
The attack on the NEH took many by surprise when in January 1995 the Senate voted 99 - 1, in a "sense of the Senate resolution," to oppose the National History Standards. Almost immediately the history standards were linked to the NEH as Mapplethorpe was to NEA. And on January 24 William J. Bennett and Lynne Cheney, both former NEH chairs, called for elimination of the NEH in a House committee public hearing. This marked the transition for the NEH to the forefront of the controversy. It was now publicly known that the NEH, along with the NEA, was a target for the Christian Coalition, Heritage Foundation, and Cato Institute and culture wars press coverage now included the humanities as well as the arts. (33)
Lynne Cheney, chairwoman of the NEH from 1986 to 1993, set forward the conservative critique of her former agency in a March 10 New York Times op-ed piece:
Reading the world history standards, one would think that sexism and ethnocentrism arose in the West, when Western civilization has in fact led the way in condemning the unjust treatment of women and encouraging curiosity about other cultures. The American history standards make it seem that Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism (mentioned 19 times) are far more important than George Washington (mentioned twice) or Thomas Edition (mentioned not at all). So outlandish was the standards' version of history that 99 members of the U.S. Senate voted to denounce them. (34)
Sheldon Hackney, chairman of the NEH at the time, saw the Senate vote against the history standards in an entirely different light. In his view the argument against the standards had been structured in such a way that disagreement with Lynne Cheney and the conservative critics was essentially a "lost cause." In an interview he pointed out that the senators knew that arguing against Cheney was impossible because she described the content in such a way that a vote in favor of the standards was a vote that favored Sojourner Truth over George Washington. "That's really why the Senate voted that way." But the "rapidity and content of the attack floored [the drafters of the History Standards.] They were not ready." (35)No one in the humanities community was ready for the onslaught. Suddenly the humanities, along with public broadcasting, was cast into the center of the press maelstrom. As in the Mapplethorpe-Serrano controversy five years earlier, the media coverage of the endowments reached fever pitch again, although it had never fully subsided after 1990. (Figure 3) What was new was the involvement of the NEH.
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Oct 24, 09
meta media diiscussion how do we know what we know about the thirties and forties...
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