The NEH is under threat right now, which got me thinking about its establishment. I'm aware that in 1963–64, three humanities associations sponsored a committee recommending a national humanities foundation, making way for NEH legislation the following year. The committee's report makes some breathtaking claims about how the humanities are vital to America's national life, and how without the humanities, America would be reduced to a nation 'skilled only in gadgeteering'. Humanities, the committee claimed, present a need 'no less serious than that for national defense'.

These sound like lofty words from a group of tweed-coated professors, but the committee also included a senior partner from Sullivan and Cromwell (international lawyers), a former chairman of New York Life Insurance, the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, and the chairman of IBM! Add to it that the committee began its meetings during a year when the President was deploying troops from Alabama to Vietnam—the very year that JFK was assassinated—and that it concluded its recommendations the year that Barry Goldwater coined the phrase 'law and order' in his race against LBJ. I can't imagine that these references to national defense and an American way of life were dropped offhandedly into the commission's report.

What's amazes me just as much, though, is that Congress and the President bought into these arguments. The NEH legislation proclaims: 'the world leadership which has come to the United States ... must be solidly founded upon ... the Nation's high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit'.

My question is: Can we take this language seriously? There was so much going on in the early 1960s, did people—academics, business leaders, and politicians—really see the humanities as part of the way forward? And if so, where did these opinions come from? Or was this all just political fluff, covering concerns that didn't make it into the texts of these documents?