In 1865, the poet Walt Whitman asked:
O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love?
I have always loved these three lines from Whitman’s elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which he wrote in the spring of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. I have been thinking about them as we mark the 249th year since the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. The lines distill an essential question that any artist and civic figure who believes American ideals are worth sustaining must ask: How shall we honor, remember and learn from our national past? And how shall we transmit essential values of the past to citizens of the future?
I’ve had Whitman in mind this spring as we’ve watched the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency disassemble the cultural infrastructure of the nation. These reckless and shortsighted cuts have affected our libraries and museums, our public media institutions, our local arts and humanities councils and the longstanding endowments — including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities — that have provided funding for the past 60 years. These institutions are the entities we’ve charged with hanging pictures on the national chamber walls; they were established to represent and to execute on the principle that a great country and a great civilization needs self-understanding, and that such understanding comes not from politicians or congressional allocations but from lasting works of reflection that connect past, present and future.
It was faith in a “wisdom and vision,” transcending any political moment, that led to the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities: The very term “endowment” is an expression of that confidence. The N.E.H. began in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, and its original mission was laid out in the congressional language that announced the agency’s formation. Devoted to sustaining democracy’s most timeless and transcendent values, the agency was intended to secure and strengthen America’s leadership in the world. As its founding language deliberately stressed, that leadership must not “rest solely upon superior power, wealth and technology” but upon “the nation’s high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit.”
Just what those civilizational values are and how the N.E.H. would support them has always been open to the interpretation of its leaders, as appointed by presidents of either party. Despite perennial doubts among some Republicans about both endowments, all of them have found their way to leaving our culture better, broader, than they found it. Thus William Bennett, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, made “morality” and Western values his platform, criticizing grants made by his predecessors for projects he decried as left-wing. Yet Mr. Bennett also established the beloved Summer Seminars for Teachers and published the initial volumes of the magisterial Library of America. Lynne Cheney, the leader of the N.E.H. from 1986-93, was one the earliest critics of a new cultural phenomenon — political correctness — but it was under her auspices that Ken Burns received funding for one of the most influential television documentary series ever shown, “The Civil War.” Jon Parrish Peede, appointed by President Trump to lead the N.E.H. in 2018, actually increased its budget, which DOGE has now proposed eliminating entirely.
Which entities, then, will ensure the dissemination of the work of great artists, writers and thinkers? Perhaps existing philanthropic entities will fill the gap; we’ve already seen some of the largest cultural philanthropies — including the Mellon and MacArthur Foundations — jump in with funding. The N.E.H. generously supported my own public television series, “Poetry in America,” over three of its five seasons, and I am now, along with nearly every leader of a nonprofit cultural organization, asking private funders and foundations for financing. There are heartening signs they will step up. But we must consider where new springs of support may emerge.
Implicit in the canceling and defunding of grants is the assumption that the market can provide culture as good as or better than any sponsored by the government.
If so, a natural place to look would be the for-profit media and entertainment industry. Numerous other industries support adjacent nonprofit activities: The pharmaceutical industry relies on and funds the basic research of scientists. The nation’s law firms have pro bono practices to advance causes of social justice. Would it not be a natural outcome at this moment of national crisis for the culture industry to give back to the nonprofit sphere? It’s certainly intriguing to imagine the form this could take. Why shouldn’t there be pro bono divisions within film and music studios? Or partnerships with great libraries and museums for archival research, costume and set design?
The alternative to broad-based funding for the arts and humanities begins to look like art by fiat. Mr. Trump has directed the N.E.H. to fund a specific project, soliciting proposals for a sculpture “Garden of Heroes,” and he has provided the names of most of the 250 people he wants to see represented life-size, as well as the materials in which they may be cast, and the acceptable styles of sculpture — realistic or classical, not abstract.
As it happens, Walt Whitman is among the figures approved to be enshrined in Mr. Trump’s garden. I do not think Whitman’s feelings would be hurt if he were left out. The project’s emphasis on individual glory rather than more collective ideals misses what Whitman endeavored to express, and represents a departure from the more democratic values for which entities like the N.E.H. have stood. The plans for this sculpture garden in fact raise more insistently Whitman’s question: What shall we hang on the chamber walls?
Whitman worked as a nurse’s aide in Washington during the Civil War and, after leaving the wards late at night, he’d sometimes walk behind the carriage in which an insomniac Abraham Lincoln slowly rode through the streets. The poet loved Lincoln, and yet the “pictures” he offered in response to his own prompt refrained from sketching or even mentioning Lincoln, and avoided any form of hero worship or portraiture. Whitman favored a broadening panorama, writing of “pictures of growing spring and farms and homes” and “all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.” Whitman’s pictures, deliberately hung on the walls, were pictures of all America, meant to serve as tokens of renewal for all the years to come.
The poet argued, above all, for American memory, and he knew that in the many years hence we would need songs and pictures of our history in all its variety, in all its ups and downs, its eras of heroism and its lesser moments, too. “What shall I hang on the chamber walls?” leads toward a beautiful abstraction, the ideal of a more perfect union. It’s an ideal that has always informed our greatest cultural institutions, the ones now being hobbled and slashed — an ideal for which many of the heroes who might reside in the proposed sculpture garden struggled, and for which we must continue to struggle together.
Elisa New directs and hosts PBS’s “Poetry in America” and leads the Educational Media Innovation Studio at Arizona State University.
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