Three weeks ago, the Trump government ordered the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to cancel all the funding to the fifty State Humanities Councils, which until now played a vital role in stimulating cultural production and education across the land, including in the most remote and impoverished communities. This is only the latest chapter in the administration’s repeated attacks on the liberal and progressive cultural industries and media targeting agents of change who often promoted cultural inclusion. The already marginalized deep red rural America will be deeply affected.
The arts and humanities organizations, led by visionary change agents, do much more than organizing cultural events: they play a crucial role in fostering social bonds, as well as community and local identity and pride. As such, they are vital to social resilience, especially in areas that lack in local resources, as a growing number of communities see essential organizations, such as banking institutions and grocery stores disappear, as indicated by the growing number of “banking deserts” and “food deserts” across the south.
These organizations are also vital to the economic revitalization and wellbeing of many rural communities which leverage them in their local economic development initiatives, ranging from tourism to automotive investment. According to the Federation of State Humanities Councils, “humanities councils work, on average, with over 120 local partners each year and raise $2 in private investment for every $1 of federal support.” All in all, the creative sector generates over $150 billion in annual economic activity, according to Americans for the Arts (AFTA).
AFTA maintains that arts funding from the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is “especially vital for rural and underserved communities” as well as “communities seeking economic revitalization.” For instance, the National Endowment for Arts collaborates with the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs in its Military Healing Arts Network that provides art therapies to enhance the quality of life for military and veteran populations in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. Epicenter, in Green River, Utah, is “rural and proud” and a “creative initiative that combines art, architecture and rural investment in order to build a more resilient, equitable and vibrant local community.” For its part, Humanities Nebraska “partners with hundreds of organizations all across our state every year. If NEH funding goes away, rural areas will suffer the most, as it is more difficult to raise private funds for activities in small communities. We will need to significantly cut back on many different programs that reach people of all ages and walks of life.”
Other organizations and programs that will be affected range from Alabama’s “Road Scholars” program which “helps libraries, schools, historical societies, cultural organizations, and other groups bring scholar-storytellers to their communities”; Tennessee’s “Southern Festival of Books” that for several decades has promoted literacy, writing, and literature throughout the region; North Dakota’s “We the People” program which provides civics education for teachers and students; to Alaska’s “Story Works” program which aims “to uplift youth voices, nurture resilience, and build essential writing and communication skills” in trauma-informed spaces connecting youth and educators.
According to Humanities Arkansas, without NEH funding “students’ literacy rates would suffer, the stories of Arkansas’s past and present would go untold, and nonprofits, schools, museums, and historical societies—particularly those in rural areas—would lose access to crucial programming and support.” What is more, the dismantling of the Department of Education would further erode education opportunities in rural America. The American Federation of Teachers estimates that the six states of the Mid-America Arts Alliance service region stand to lose a total of some $60 million in education funds “for students enrolled in schools in rural communities.”
The dismantling of humanities councils in underserved rural areas will also have chilling effects future generations of art -based change agents, who are being trained and educated as budding “cultural entrepreneurs” in programs that are being shut down. These programs have played a vital role in fostering cultural vibrancy in underserved areas. Their work has been a venue for self-expression and self-realization for many young people, in a context where few economic opportunities are available. These change agents have also been acting as a source of hope and aspiration for young workers who face precarity and the drudgery of routinized work. It is the case not only in red states, but also in distant places such as the island of Saipan where we met with Leo Pangelinan the director of the Humanities Council for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. He described to us the crucial role this organization plays in supporting indigenous culture during the post-pandemic recession on this remote American Pacific Island. Among its programs threatened by the cuts is the Council’s “community grant program” that funds “projects that cultivate thoughtful community engagement, build new audiences for the humanities, innovate new methods in the humanities, and advocate for the importance of the humanities in maintaining a robust democracy. The Council encourages projects to reach diverse audiences through a variety of methods – exhibitions and installations, discussion programs, oral history projects, and interpretive tours – that enable audiences to engage in critical reflection and preservation of human histories, cultures, values, and beliefs.”
In response to the abrupt challenges raised by the Trump administration, a national movement comprising rural Republican Congresspeople from Alaska, Idaho, Oklahoma, and Maine and Democratic Congresspeople, as well as arts advocacy, educators’ advocacy, civil liberties and civil rights organizations, and labor unions, has emerged to resist these culturally and economically counter-productive cuts. For instance, the National Education Association, the largest U.S. labor union and one with a membership base in small-town and rural America, has joined the NAACP in filing a lawsuit to stop the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education. Others joining the coalition include civil rights and school employees groups as well as families and students.
Several national professional associations and public employee unions—organizations led by visionary change agents and whose memberships are spread across local communities in all regions—are together championing the generative role of the humanities in a participatory democracy and opposing the dismantling of federal agencies that support the humanities in local communities throughout the nation. The American Library Association (ALA) and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) have filed a lawsuit stopping the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), “the primary source of federal support for the nation's libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America's museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. IMLS envisions a nation where individuals and communities have access to museums and libraries to learn from and be inspired by the trusted information, ideas, and stories they contain about our diverse natural and cultural heritage.” ALA President Cindy Hohl defended the IMLS and the lawsuit proclaiming that “libraries play an important role in our democracy, from preserving history to providing access to government information, advancing literacy and civic engagement, and offering access to a variety of perspectives. These values are worth defending. We will not allow extremists to threaten our democracy by eliminating programs at IMLS and harming the children and communities who rely on libraries and the services and opportunities they provide.” AFSCME President Lee Saunders stated that “libraries and museums contain our collective history and knowledge, while also providing safe spaces for learning, cultural expression and access to critical public resources. They represent the heart of our communities, and the cultural workers who keep these institutions running enrich thousands, of lives every day.”
In a lawsuit challenging the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, Democracy Forward teamed up with the American Federation of Teachers, the Service Employees International Union, and the American Association of University Professors to secure and maintain education opportunities for all (in line with the mandate given to the Department of Education when it was created in 1979 under President Jimmy Carte)r. As American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten explained, “that’s what the ‘equal access’ provided for in the statute means. And over the last five decades, Congress has fulfilled this mission to help poor kids, kids with disabilities, first generation college kids, kids who want to work in a trade, and 45 million Americans with student debt. Now, wielding a sledgehammer, this president is destroying that promise for this and future generations.” Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors put it this way, explaining that without the Department of Education “access to education for working class Americans will decrease. Funding for college education will be stripped away, programs for students with disabilities and students living in poverty will be eviscerated, and enforcement of civil rights laws against race- or sex-based discrimination in higher education will disappear.”
Academic organizations are also contributing to the growing momentum of resistance. The American Council of Learned Societies, which has been advocating over the last seven decades in a bi-partisan coalition for federal support of the humanities, recently issued a statement decrying the federal cuts, stating that “we hold steadfast to the belief that sparked the creation of the NEH: that ‘the humanities are not merely our, but the world’s best hope’.” The statement was co-signed by 25 professional societies, ranging from the American Folklore Society, American Musicological Society, American Philosophical Association, American Political Science Association, American Sociological Association, Association for Asian Studies, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, College Art Association, National Council of Teachers of English, to the Society of Biblical Literature. Joy Connolly, President of the ACLS, denounced attacks on the production of knowledge by the Trump administration when she recently stated, “Over the past two weeks, the national landscape for humanistic knowledge has been savaged by slashes in federal support to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Department of Education. The Smithsonian, a consortium of 21 of the world’s greatest institutions of history, art, and science, was attacked by the president in an Executive Order that called telling the historical truth ‘divisive’ and ‘corrosive’.”
Finally, citizens in local communities — rural, suburban, and urban — throughout the nation are also resisting the Trump administration’s reckless dismantling of federal agencies that support inclusive and humanistic participatory democracy. Citizens were penning letters to the editor to defend their library during last week’s National Library – from Moultrie, Georgia to East Aurora, New York. A Utah state poet laureate pleaded his Republican senator, John Curtis, to protect funding for the arts. Retirees were reported to attending a demonstration in Johnson County, Kansas, armed with placards denouncing the Trump administration’s wide-ranging cuts to federal programs, including those targeting the arts and humanities. These efforts add to last week’s “Hands Off Protests” of April 5th, including in red districts such as Tucson, Arizona. It is estimated that over three million people participated in over 1,000 protests.
The Trump administration’s attack on the federally funded humanities and arts infrastructure has galvanized a resistance movement in local communities throughout the nation, in that swath of land running from deep red rural America to deep blue urban America. The mobilization is urgent as the National Endowment for the Arts may be next on the chopping block — its budget has been redirected away toward project that celebrate “America’s greatness.” As political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan have found, mass mobilization signal disaffection toward the power that be and contribute to eroding its legitimacy. This is why ore of it is needed. Viva the visionary change agents who have arisen to secure and sustain the generative role of the arts and humanities in our inclusive and participatory democracy, our “land that was made for you and me,” as the Oklahoma bard once exclaimed!
