A Look under the Hood of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Conservatives ignore culture scholarship at their peril. Most NEH grants are worthy, but ‘climate resilience’ is for weather forecasters and engineers, not humanists.

T oday I’ll move from sea to shining sea — my last few stories treated the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem on the Atlantic — to the Swamp. That’s Washington, D.C., “D.C.” for “Diavolo Centrale,” as Dante would have said had he imagined so fetid and malefic a place. I’ve skewered the National Endowment for the Arts — a good idea but a faint shadow of its potential — off and on but rarely look at the National Endowment for the Humanities. For a federal government agency, it does lots of good work.

What’s the difference between the NEA and the NEH? Both were established by Congress in 1965. Though, practically, they overlap — I’ve worked on projects that have gotten grants from both — the NEA focuses on the visual arts and exhibitions and programs that come and go while the NEH aims at published scholarly work. It supports book projects, documentaries, archives, fellowships, and high-octane museum exhibitions with scholarships. Its budget this year is a bit under $200 million. That’s not chump change. Yes, it’s less money than was spent on the freak-show Gaza pier that broke apart after a week, but, in the world of pure scholarship, it’s moolah that matters.

For me, one high point of the NEH’s grants so far this year is the $500,000 for the new Thaddeus Stevens historic site in beautiful and historic Lancaster, Pa. I wrote about this last year. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Mary Cassatt exhibition and book got $400,000. This is the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist salon in Paris, so the topic is in the news. Cassatt exhibited with the Impressionists off and on, and though her scenes of women and babies have been sliced and diced as much as a brunoise-cut onion, her working methods haven’t been considered. The top-notch Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh got $500,000 for an exhibition on how the Nile River influenced ancient Egyptians’ thinking about life and death in their religion. Andrew Carnegie notwithstanding, Pittsburgh doesn’t have tons of gold bricks stashed in a pyramid.

Another worthwhile grant is to Stanford University for its plan to create a Braille platform for six ancient languages, which will be a boon to vision-impaired antiquities scholars. Though Stanford is an institutional billionaire, the NEH deserves kudos for supporting this. It also does a lot to support the preservation of Indigenous languages fading into oblivion.

I’m high on the High Desert Museum in Bend, in central Oregon. It’s getting a $500,000 check for a new look at its Native American collection. Bend isn’t the Belgravia of the Cascades. It’s not rich. A grant that big is transformative. I hope the museum doesn’t bore us to oblivion as well as patronize members of local tribes with a dozen variations of “they stole our land” as did the Peabody Essex Museum in reimagining its Native collection.

I do have quibbles with the NEH sending $400,000 to Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., the worthwhile but pet project of the Waltons, the billionaire Walmart family. Crystal Bridges doesn’t need the money. The grant supports its plans to “integrate Native and non-Native American art to explore stories of the American West.” Having written about its take on American art — oppressors beware — I’m skeptical.

A Sampling of Other Grants

KVZK-TV, the public station in Pago Pago, American Samoa, deserves NEH’s $350,000 to digitize its 60 years of programming.

The NEH is helping to preserve digitized archives on how Norwegian-Americans supported Nazi resistance in Norway, with a $297,000 grant. People will actually learn something important about this history.

St. Edward’s University in Austin got $60,000 to teach first-generation college students how to do oral histories. What a wonderful idea.

Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland battled Hollywood studios for contracts that weren’t one notch better than indentured servitude. Research for a book on this topic got a $6,000 summer-research grant, the NEH’s standard award. Only $6,000? From her grave, which I’ve visited, Bette doesn’t say “What a dump” but “What a bunch of skinflints.” Why so little for a fantastic project?

Downright unpatriotic is a $600,000 grant to support a documentary on Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Ask Hanoi Jane to pay for it, or John Kerry can squirt some of his wife’s ketchup lucre at it. By the by, will the documentary consider how Vietnam Veterans Against the War was itself funded? Methinks not.

The world can live without a film about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit. The NEH said “adios” to $600,000 for what’s bound to be a snooze. Haven’t we heard enough about Kahlo, a mediocrity?

Easing my horror — a bit — over money spent to celebrate Vietnam War treachery is $500,000 for renovations to Old Ironsides in Boston.

The NEH has a lively infrastructure-grant program for hard-to-fund improvements like new elevators, ADA access, roof repairs, and new lighting for museums. A $500,000 grant toward the transformation of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh into an educational museum about antisemitism is certainly timely.

The NEH’s biggest grant this year — $1,000,000 — went to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to renovate five historic buildings at the Natchez Center for American History in Washington, Miss. The NEA should have been supporting projects like this for years.

Is it wise to give $168,000 to support internships at the Palestinian American Research Center in Ramallah? Who’s getting these internships? If this is a CIA front, the CIA can pay for it.

A midsize $60,000 grant for a study of hygiene among the Japanese is superfluous. “They’re very clean” says it all.

A $49,000 grant to Emerson College to develop a major in climate and sustainability communications is idiotic and, to state the indisputable, far from the realm of humanities. The NEH needn’t train Weather Channel anchors.

A nearly $150,000 grant to help revise the African American Studies department at Illinois College is economically inefficient. I’d happily do a short and sweet revision plan — “abolish it” — pro bono. No, I’ll amend that. “Abolish them all.” I’ll amend that again. “And the gender-studies departments, too.”

Some of the grants — $75,000 for a study of online misogyny in South Korea — seem suited to foundations specifically dedicated to things Asian or a big South Korean foundation. Aren’t there American topics as worthwhile? The answer’s “indubitably.”

The NEH gives money for what it calls “climate resiliency.” I initially thought this was odd since the agency has no experience, as far as I know, in engineering. When the Little Ice Age seriously ebbed a few hundred years ago, the Dutch built dikes. I’m not sure what edible stew humanities scholars can cook up to serve the cause of what’s called “mitigation.” A $200,000 grant to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, the world’s largest such institution, for a “climate-informed strategic plan” seems based on the ideology of net zero. No amount of spin from that new army of climate-change communicators from Emerson can make this hoax seem smart.

The NEH Succeeds More Than It Fails

I’m being both picky and snarky — rare for me, I know — but, overall, I’m positively impressed with the intelligence and sensitivity the NEH’s program officers bring to their work. NEH applications are exhaustive. Most of the grant winners are doing profound and commendable work, though often esoteric. My dissertation a hundred years ago was on the Spanish subjects of Washington Allston (1779–1843). He did two, interpreted in the context of a play by Coleridge and a poem by Richard Henry Dana Sr., whose son wrote the rollicking “Two Years Before the Mast.” I spent two years before the dusty stacks at Yale’s main library writing the thing. My opus was esoterica concentrate, but serious people need to know how to dig deeply and well.

My point is that the NEH is like a think tank but one that’s not rotten to the core.

Both the NEA and the NEH are legally required to send a chunk of their congressional appropriations as pass-through grants to state arts and humanities boards, which operate as the NEA’s and NEH’s little sisters to spend more or less as they wish. This has been the case since the ’90s, when the NEA was seriously defanged after it sent money to the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition that included photographs of a man with the pile of a whip shoved where the sun don’t shine. At some point I’ll look — with trepidation — at what some of the state agencies are funding. I might start with Vermont, where I live.

I’m writing about the NEA and the NEH in part because there’s an election in November. I never, as my readers know, write about politics. I’m a simple country soul who clings to old-country ways so am apolitical. Over the years, I’ve heard from right-of-center types that “we will abolish the NEA and the NEH.” This isn’t a serious policy because “we” won’t. The Republican platform has promised to extinguish these agencies since 1980 and it’s neither happened nor ever been vigorously attempted. One day, the country might elect a president like the Argentinian with sparkling blue eyes, crazy hair, and a chainsaw, but, until then, let’s be smart.

The NEA fails more than it succeeds, while the NEH succeeds more than it fails, which means a team hoping to win on November 5 needs to have a Day One plan to make them work. After 2016, there was next to no change in either. Together, the NEH, the NEA, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, on whose board I sit, and the State Department’s culture department either spend billions or deliver indemnities worth billions. Conservatives ignore how government funds culture at their peril.

My advice? Don’t be simps or rubes. Get a plan in place for these programs or merrily they’ll go along. The NEH spends that bundle on projects touting the climate-change hypnosis and delusion — for instance, it established a special program on what it calls “climate resilience.” Pulling the fossil-fuel-powered plug on this boondoggle on January 21, 2025, would be a step toward intellectual hygiene and the humanistic thing to do.

The NEH and NEA have White House–imposed DEI plans, too. They’re poison.

I’m afraid the state of the humanities at colleges and universities is a national tragedy. Art-history majors have cratered in numbers since no striving, aesthetically evolved young man or woman wants to wade into the oppression swamp, where seldom is deployed the close study of art. The field is almost entirely composed of women now, a topic for another piece.

Over time, a look at combining the NEA and NEH makes sense. Of the two, the NEH is the more thoughtful, entrepreneurial, and value-added. The NEA looks to me like it’s stuck on a treadmill, at least as far as museums are concerned. Its single exemplary, essential program is the federal indemnity covering insurance for temporary loans for art exhibitions. It’s a well-run program and, over decades, has saved art museums billions.

Shelly Lowe is the chairwoman, or director, of the NEH. I should say “Shelly Lowe (Navajo)” since that’s her official name, according to the NEH website. She’s been a bureaucrat at Harvard and Yale, but, unlike many such figures in government and elite schools, she’s capable and conscientious as well as a doer. I like her.

I’m thinking about transforming into “Brian Allen (Metho-Marchegiano)” in recognition of my joint heritage as a WASP and Methodist on my father’s side and of Italian stock on my mother’s. Her family’s from Marche, the obscure region in Italy from whence came Raphael and Rossini. Seriously, Lowe is an advocate now for the NEH, for national culture, and for scholarship. Ditch the literal tribalism.