Between Humanity and the Homeland: The Evolution of an Institutional Concept

Speaking in Jackson, Mississippi, on the occasion of the inauguration of Republican Haley Barbour as governor in January, 2004, Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), recalled another inauguration. "In his Inaugural Address," Cole said, "President Bush called on all Americans to be citizens, not spectators . . . to serve our nation . . . to embody the ideas that gave our nation birth. That call," he said, "took on new meaning after the attacks of September 11."¹ On that day, Cole noted, citizens countered evil with "acts of courage and compassion"; and within a matter of months, a righteous nation "defeated a murderous regime, liberated an oppressed people, and literally unearthed a tyrant." All these things were well known to his audience; what might have been less obvious was the critical role played by the humanities.

If any were uncertain what a scholar was doing there on this occasion, Cole was not. For, as he understood the matter, the humanities were at ground zero of American civic life. To begin with, he argued, the essence of the citizenship displayed on 9/11 by firefighters, police, and ordinary people was revealed by the humanities, to which we look for the key to "what makes us human: the legacy of our past, the ideas and principles that motivate us, and the eternal questions that we still ponder." Before any other response, the first responders had responded to the humanities, which help us cultivate the sense of beauty, reveal to us our traditions, and give meaning to abstract concepts such as justice and goodness. The NEH, he pointed out, had been "founded in the belief that cultivating the best of the humanities had real, tangible benefits for civic life," including a deepened understanding of our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In America, where "wisdom and knowledge" are "essential to our national identity," the humanities are particularly important. Indeed, from one point of view, the humanities were the true object of the 9/11 attacks. As Cole put it,

the values implicit in the study of the humanities are part of why we were attacked on September 11. The free and fearless exchange of ideas, respect for individual conscience, belief in the power of education . . . all these things are anathema to our country's enemies. Understanding and affirming these principles is part of the battle.

Such knowledge is part of our homeland defense.

If any humanists were in the crowd, they might have been made a bit uneasy by the facility with which Cole described their work in terms of eternal truths, beauty, justice, and the mystery of what makes us human; they might also have been uncomfortable with the smooth transition from timeless values to American national identity and from there to the political and military projects of the current administration. They would almost certainly have been alarmed to hear that they had been the objects of the 9/11 attacks.² And they would, one can safely say, have been astonished to hear that the knowledge they professed was a vital part of homeland defense.

From another point of view, however, the really remarkable fact about this speech was that the NEH was being so stoutly defended in the state of Mississippi, at the inauguration of a former chairman of the Republican Party as governor. As recently as 1997, the very survival of the NEH, and that of the even more controversial National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), had been in doubt. Enemies of these agencies included Newt Gingrich (who targeted them explicitly in the Contract with America), the Christian right, the Heritage Foundation, the libertarian Cato Institute, the National Association of Scholars, and even former NEH chairs Lynn Cheney and William Bennett, who charged that the NEH was wasteful, anti-American, antifamily, and elitist.³ The problem lay not in the subject matter of the humanities, but in the ideologues who taught and wrote about them and in their enablers at the NEH who funneled tax dollars to them. In the end, the NEH survived, if only just barely...