Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  Arthur Schlesinger and Pierre Salinger urged Kennedy to bring in August Heckscher as a special consultant to inventory the points at which the government intersected with the arts and to recommend a policy. Heckscher had written the essay on the arts for the Eisenhower Commission on National Goals and was director of the Twentieth Century Fund, which was sponsoring the first serious study of the economics of the arts by the Princeton economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, published as Performing Arts—The Economic Dilemma. Heckscher became the two-day-a-week Special Consultant on the Arts and made his report,The Arts and the National Government, on May 28, 1963. While Heckscher’s report dealt with many topics, its main thrust was to create a National Arts Foundation as “the logical crowning step in a national cultural policy.”

  President Kennedy sent up a bill to enact Heckscher’s recommendations, including the foundation. In December 1963, a month following the assassination, the Senate adopted it by voice vote. But the Rules Committee of the House blocked action. President Johnson sent up the bill again in 1964, a rule was issued, and the House passed it 213 to 135. The Senate reaffirmed its earlier action. Johnson signed the National Council on the Arts and Cultural Development Act on September 3, 1964, a toothless statute. It merely created a 25-member council and gave it a pittance to organize itself. There was neither a granting agency nor a fund to support the arts.

  Meantime, a new idea had emerged. The academic disciplines loosely known as the humanities had for years envied the enormous financial support that the federal government had poured into the hard sciences, since 1950 largely through the National Science Foundation. Now the arts seemed on the verge of receiving similar federal largesse. The humanities wanted to come in out of the cold.

  The American Council of Learned Societies, the Council of Graduate Schools, and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa joined to form a Commission on the Humanities under the chairmanship of President Barnaby C. Keeney of Brown University. It reported on April 30, 1964, recommending legislation to create a National Humanities Foundation patterned after the National Science Foundation.

  In his presidential election swing through New England on September 28, 1964, Johnson spoke at Brown on its 200th anniversary. He said, “I look with the greatest of favor upon the proposal of your own able President Keeney’s Commission for a National Foundation for the Humanities.” It sounded like a promise and Johnson won the election. In the first week of the 89th Congress in January 1965, 76 bills were introduced to establish a humanities foundation. Thus, the humanities joined the arts; one program became two.

  By this time the Democratic chairmen of the House Education and Labor committee and the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee were vigorous spokesmen for legislation of this sort. Frank Thompson, Jr., of New Jersey had been the leading champion in the House for years. More recently Claiborne Pell had won a Senate seat from Rhode Island and had persuaded Senator Lister Hill of Alabama, chairman of the parent committee, to create a new Subcommittee on the Arts, which Pell took over.

  On March 10, 1965, the President sent his bill to create the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities to the subcommittee chairmen. The measure was quickly passed by the Senate on June 10. Johnson had to put firm pressure on the Rules Committee to spring the bill out of its clutches. The House adopted several secondary amendments and passed it on September 15. The Senate immediately adopted the House changes and the President signed the statute on September 29, 1965. At a large ceremony Johnson, with characteristic hyperbole, promised a National Theater, a National Opera, a National Ballet, and an American Film Institute, along with many other cultural goodies. “What this bill really does is to bring active support to this great national asset, to make fresher the winds of art in this land of ours.” But the White House seemed to have forgotten the humanities.

  The administrative system was cumbersome. At the top, theoretically, was the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, designed to coordinate the activities of the endowments with other federal agencies. S. Dillon Ripley, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, became chairman of this council. But it does not seem to have played a policy role of any consequence.

  The two working structures were identical: a National Council on the Arts/Humanities, each with a chairman and 24 members to select projects for support and a National Endowment on the Arts/Humanities to administer the grants. The jurisdictions were broad. The arts program included, but was not limited to, music, dance, drama, sculpture, photography, graphic and craft arts, industrial and fashion design, movies, television, radio, tape recording, and other arts related to them. Humanities included, but was not limited to, languages, linguistics, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, archaeology, the history, criticism, theory, and practice of the arts, and aspects of the social sciences with a humanistic content. Roger Stevens headed both the arts council and endowment. Barnaby Keeney was chosen to chair the humanities council and endowment but was unable to leave Brown until 1966. Meantime Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation filled the position. The arts council included a number of stars—Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, David Brinkley, Agnes de Mille, Ralph Ellison, and Gregory Peck. The humanities council was manned mainly by academics. Both groups, evidently, were very serious about their undertaking.

  Each of the endowments received a basic appropriation of $5 million annually for grants to individuals and groups. In addition, arts got funds for matching grants of $50,000 to each state for the establishment of a state arts program and humanities received an equal amount to match private grants.

  Stevens had his council meeting before the legislation was signed. During the first three years the arts endowment, among many others, made the following grants: American Ballet Theatre, an American exhibit at the Venice Biennale, establishment of the American Film Institute, individual choreographers to create new works for dance, production of plays by professional and university theaters, and classical theater for secondary schools (42,000 New Orleans students, for example, saw Arthur Miller’s The Crucible). Programs were launched in virtually all the states and territories.

  A problem that the arts endowment foresaw and inevitably was compelled to confront was occasional attack from the extreme right on the projects it supported for alleged subversion or pornography. This was already evident in the House when the bill was before it. Republican Representative Harold R. Gross of Iowa introduced the “belly dance” amendment by inserting after “dance” the following: “including but not limited to irregular jactitations and/or rythmic contraction and coordinated relaxation of the serrati, obliques, and abdominis recti group of muscles—accompanied by rotary undulations, tilts, and turns timed with and attuned to the titillary and blended tones of synchronous woodwinds.” When his amendment was defeated, Gross offered to include baseball, squash, pinochle, and poker as art forms eligible for support. It received the same fate.

  The humanities endowment supported less controversial projects: editing and publishing the papers of great Americans; editing and publishing definitive editions of great American writers; archaeological excavations; training programs to improve the quality of the publications of university presses; computer research in the study of foreign languages and in preparing concordances; and assistance to learned societies.

  The establishment of the endowments in 1965 was a dramatic new development in American public policy. Never before had the government systematically supported the arts and humanities. The public and the Congress must have concluded that these programs were successful because they endured, throve, and grew over time.3

  In 1964 Joseph Hirshhorn at 66, having had a heart attack, was feeling the weight of mortality. He had begun to take soundings for the relocation of some of his valuable property that would outlive him.

  Hirshhorn had been born in 1900 in Latvia, the twelfth of thirteen children in a Jewish family. His father died when he was a child. His mother then took most of her family to New York
between 1905 and 1907, where she worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a pocketbook factory for $12.50 a week. “Poverty has a bitter taste,” he would say. “We ate garbage.” As a child he had no toys.

  Hirshhorn dropped out of high school after three months. At 14 he became an office boy on Wall Street. At 17 he went into the Curb Market as a broker and within a year ran $225 up to $168,000. “I’m not an investor,” he said. “I’m a speculator.” At the end of World War I he lost everything but $4000 and started over. Before the 1929 crash, at 28, he sold out for $4 million.

  After World War II Hirshhorn bought land in Blind River, Ontario, and mined for metals. He discovered gold and an enormous uranium deposit at a time when the construction of nuclear weapons and atomic power plants was mushrooming. By the sixties he was said to be worth $140 million. He had a magnificent 24-acre estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, houses in Cap d’Antibes and Beverly Hills, an apartment in New York, two offices in New York and another in Toronto.

  Hirshhorn discovered modern art in the twenties and was immediately hooked. He became an obsessed collector. He developed, Abram Lerner wrote, “that inspired greed for art which has dominated so much of his life.” In 1945 he came to the AC A Gallery in Manhattan, where Lerner was working, quickly bought four paintings, and left. Lerner had been an artist, was a veteran of the federal arts project, and had studied fine arts at New York University. They became warm friends, shared similar tastes, and Hirshhorn increasingly relied on Lerner’s artistic advice. In 1956 Lerner came on board as curator of the Hirshhorn collection and the latter continued to buy furiously. Lerner spent much of his time keeping an inventory of the works, which were variously housed in Greenwich, in an office on 67th Street in Manhattan, in a warehouse on 10th Avenue, or on loan to museums around the world.

  By the sixties the collection was immense and had became hard to track, and Hirshhorn and Lerner began to talk about making it publicly available. The former said, “I want my own museum.” Lerner agreed. They started with the city they knew best, New York, but could not find a proper location. There were discussions about the Doheny estate in Beverly Hills, but that fell through. The British government offered to build a museum in Regents Park in London. There were soundings from Baltimore, Zurich, Florence, and Jerusalem. More interesting, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, himself a collector of modern art, offered a museum built by the state at the new state university campus in Purchase, only a short drive from Greenwich.

  S. Dillon Ripley, who had become secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in February 1964, entered the bidding. An ornithologist, he had been a professor of biology at Yale and director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. His mother had helped found the Museum of Modern Art and had imbued him with a passion for contemporary works. The Smithsonian was the administrative parent of the federal art museums in Washington—the National Gallery, the Freer Gallery, the National Collection of Fine Arts, and the Renwick Gallery. The notable gap in the nation’s capital was a museum of modern art. For Ripley the obvious and efficient solution to this problem was the Hirshhorn collection. He searched the legislation of earlier bequests and found that Congress in 1938 had accepted Andrew Mellon’s gift for the National Gallery and his collection of old masters and had also established a $7000 prize for a plan for a modern museum. A competition was held and Eero Saarinen had won, but the Capital Planning Commission had disapproved because it wanted nothing modern on the Mall. Ripley made indirect contact with Hirshhorn through Roger Stevens.

  On June 15, 1964, Ripley wrote Hirshhorn of his dream and said that he hoped to “explore the concept” with him. He went to Greenwich to view the art and open discussion. He concluded that he needed help. He informed the President that he hoped to bag Hirshhorn’s collection, “valued then at $40 million.” That was the kind of art discussion Lyndon Johnson could understand.

  Early in 1965 Sam Harris, Hirshhorn’s lawyer, with Max Kampelman, a partner in his Washington office, came to see Ripley. The latter asked whether the collector would consider giving his art to the Smithsonian. Harris said, “He would want his name on the museum.” “That,” Ripley replied, “is simply the identification of a building. … “ Harris continued, “On the Mall.” “I don’t see why not.” Harris was astonished. “You mean a Hirshhorn Museum on the Mall?” Ripley answered deliberately, “This is 1965 and I think America has grown up.”

  Ripley was concerned about the competition. He suggested to Abe Fortas, a friend of Hirshhorn’s, that a White House luncheon would help. Knowing of Lady Bird Johnson’s strong interest in having a Thomas Eakins painting in the mansion’s collection, Ripley notified Liz Carpenter, her secretary, that Hirshhorn owned 32 of the painter’s works. Ripley wrote Hirshhorn that the collection under Smithsonian guardianship would be assured of independent identity and that it would have more viewers than in any other place in the world, some 12 million annually.

  Ripley, Stevens, Hirshhorn, and Harris met to discuss the site. Stevens would have preferred the bank of the Potomac adjacent to his baby, the Kennedy Center. But the others insisted on the Mall at Constitution Avenue and 9th Street.

  Ripley was carried away by his enthusiasm. He informed the White House that the collection would be “frightfully important for the cultural growth of Washington.” It could do for the city what the Museum of Modern Art had done for New York. “My mother was on the first women’s committee of the Museum of Modern Art, when it was four rooms with a police dog as a guard in the Heckscher Building in New York in 1932.” He was impressed by the precedents. James Smithson gave his fortune to the United States to establish the Smithsonian Institution. Charles Freer gave his oriental art collection and provided funds for construction of the gallery (cost in 1922 was $2 million, now equivalent to $9.5 million), and an endowment for operation. Andrew Mellon gave his magnificent collection of old masters and $15 million for construction of the National Gallery (current equivalent $45 million) along with an endowment.

  Mrs. Johnson held a luncheon for the Hirshhorns at the White House on May 21, 1965. In anticipation, the collector wrote a long letter to the President and his wife on May 17:

  I have had a number of conversations with Dr. Dillon Ripley and Mr. Roger Stevens concerning my art collection. Both of these gentlemen have seen a portion of my collection and have urged that I donate it to the Smithsonian Institution. Their thought is that my collection would be housed in a modern museum to be named the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum, which would be erected on the plot of land on Constitution Avenue between 9th and llth Streets … ; that the collection and museum would be maintained, preserved and developed in perpetuity by the Smithsonian Institution under my name; and that the museum would be operated by a Board of Trustees on which I have appropriate representation. …

  My collection has been built up over … more than 40 years and I believe … that it is one of the finest collections of modern sculpture and paintings in the world.

  I own more than 1,500 pieces of sculpture, produced by such world famous sculptors as Rodin, Bourdelle, Maillol, Manzu, Degas, Daumier, Sir Henry Moore, Lipschitz, Brancusi, Sir Jacob Epstein, Renoir, Picasso, Calder, Giacometti, Marini, Matisse and others. My collection includes 63 works by … Moore, generally acknowledged to be the greatest living sculptor. … My Giacomettis and Matisses constitute the largest holdings in a single collection in America. Rodin is represented … by 16 works, including a major cast of the Burghers of Calais.

  [There are] … over 4,800 paintings and drawings by scores of American and European artists. I have always sought to encourage young artists—particularly American … by purchasing their works. … [There is] a thorough representation of the realists, the expressionists, the romantics, and the abstractionists.

  … the better known painters who are represented: Picasso, Eakins, Hassam, Munch, Bellows, Sloan, Kuhn, Hopper, Sawyer, Wyeth, Beckmann, Marin, Weber, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, Maurice Prendergast, Dali, Francis Bacon, Larry Rivers, Eilsh
emius, Kline, de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Kuniyoshi, Milton Avery, Philip Evergood, Stuart Davis, Feininger, and Hans Hofmann. …

  I would be pleased to contribute my entire collection to the Smithsonian Institution under the conditions mentioned above. In addition to my collection, which is worth many millions of dollars, I would be prepared to contribute $1 million towards the construction of a museum on the indicated site. …

  Lady Bird Johnson asked the Hirshhorns to come half an hour early for a tour of the White House. She much admired Eakins and hoped he would put one of the painter’s works in the mansion. She had invited Ripley, Stevens, Harris, and Fortas with their wives. At the luncheon Stevens estimated the cost of the museum at $10 million and architect Nathaniel Owings was said already to be at work on the design. Ripley called the gift the greatest to the nation since Andrew Mellon’s.

  In the middle of the luncheon, Mrs. Johnson wrote, “Lyndon came in, met everybody, thanked Mr. Hirshhorn, and boldly said what I had been wanting to say and couldn’t—that it was wonderful that the people of the United States were going to be able to enjoy art works, but that it would be downright selfish if the White House itself didn’t get an example.” She received the Eakins, a portrait of a little girl, in 1967.

  The President, Fortas later recalled, “had a selling job to do and he did it magnificently.” He put his arm around Hirshhorn and said, “Joe, you don’t need a contract. Just turn the collection over to the Smithsonian and I’ll take care of the rest.” The collector almost succumbed. “Once the President puts his arm around your shoulder, you’re a dead cookie. … I knew then there was going to be a deal.” But he turned to Harris and said, “What do you think, Sam?” Harris said, “We ought to think about it.”