Testimony on Behalf of the National Endowment for the Humanities Before a House Subcommittee

I am Stephen Nissenbaum, Professor of History at the University of Massachu­setts in Amherst, Massachusetts. I come here to testify about the FY’89 appropriation for the National Endowment for the Humanities. I do so on behalf of thirty-five historical organizations, which collectively comprise the National Coordinating Committee for the Pro­motion of History. (The largest of these are the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians.)

This is a time when many voices la­ment the waning of our sense of his­tory—our collective “American Memo­ry.” But it is also a time when historians, whether as scholars, teachers, or public humanists, have been working assidu­ously and imaginatively to devise strategies to preserve and enrich that collec­tive memory. The National Endowment for the Humanities has played a notable role in supporting our effort. Perhaps the best way I can represent my profes­sion on this occasion is by sharing with you something of how the NEH has affected my own professional work.

The Endowment was established by Congress in 1965. Three years later I earned my doctorate in early American cultural history. Since that time I have been actively trying to make links between my work as a scholar and my work as a teacher, and, more recently, between both of those and what has rather awkwardly been called the “pub­lic humanities.”

There have been three principal occa­sions when my work has been supported by the NEH. First, a dozen years ago, I received from what is now called the Division of Fellowships and Seminars a generous stipend that permitted me to take an entire year’s leave of absence from my teaching duties. (The maxi­mum fellowship stipend at that time was, as I recall, $20,000—an  amount that amply covered what was then my salary for the entire year. To put mat­ters in perspective, the current maxi­mum fellowship stipend is now up to $27,500—a sum that would barely per­mit me to go on leave for a single semester!)

What did the Endowment—and the public—receive in return for its sup­port? First, I completed a book on which I had been working for some years, a book about sexuality, diet, and health in mid-nineteenth-century America—a pe­riod when many Americans became ob­sessed for the first time with physical fitness, and convinced that their well­ being depended on strict control of their dietary and sexual practices. I came to this subject at about the same moment that many Americans were once again looking to fitness as a way to achieve well-being. My book Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America tried to illuminate the tensions of Jacksonian society, but I hope it also offered a historical perspective on the tensions of our own culture.

During the same fellowship year, I collaborated with my colleague Paul Boyer to edit a three-volume collection that brought into print for the first time the complete testimonies and legal doc­uments associated with the Salem witch­craft trials of 1692.

Finally, I made substantial progress that year on a third major project: studying the career of Nathaniel Haw­thorne to explore the development of authorship as a profession in mid-nine­teenth-century America. I later pub­lished several essays about Hawthorne, one of them an introduction to the new Modern Library edition of The Scarlet Letter.

Each of the publications that came out of my fellowship year acknowledges the support I received from the NEH. The Endowment asks for such acknowledgement, and it would be a breach of man­ners not to provide it. But my colleagues around the nation and abroad are well aware that an NEH award also carries the assurance that a proposal has sur­vived a rigorous competition by a jury of one’s scholarly peers. The Endowment’s imprimatur, as one historian has termed it, is a badge of honor.

But that imprimatur is only a side effect of the Endowment’s support and not its purpose. What NEH support is really for is to assist scholars in making broad­ly available to their colleagues and stu­dents, and to the American public, the historical resources (whether in the form of documentary materials, inter­pretations, or teaching strategies) that can preserve and enrich the public memory. For example, the three-vol­ume collection of Salem witchcraft doc­uments I coedited a decade ago has become a basic reference source, used both by professional historians and (as I know from a continuing stream of let­ters and telephone calls) by private indi­viduals who are interested in the witch trials, or in exploring the history of their own families. The documents have also reached a wide audience through text­ books, plays, and even television.

My second major experience with an NEH-sponsored project is a case in point. In 1984 I served as historical advisor to a movie about the Salem witchcraft trials, a three-hour docu­drama aired on the PBS American Playhouse series. It bore the title Three Sovereigns for Sarah, and stared Vanessa Redgrave as a woman accused of witchcraft in 1692. Production of the movie was supported by what I have been told was then the single largest one-year grant ever awarded by the NEH. Three Sovereigns for Sarah was loosely based on a book, Salem Possessed, which I had previously written in col­laboration with my colleague Paul Boyer; and the screenplay also made extensive use of the three-volume col­lection of documents that Professor Boyer and I had prepared during my NEH-supported fellowship year. Be­ cause of the stipulations of the NEH’s grant to the producer, I was able to play a significant role in revising the original screen-play of Three Sovereigns for Sarah, and those same stipulations in­sured that I was also able to be present on the movie set, in constant contact with the cast and crew, during the six weeks the film was in production.

While the film-maker did not accept all my suggestions, I believe that Three Sovereigns for Sarah has helped its viewers understand that the Salem witch trials were not some senseless aberra­tion, but rather that they were the trou­bled and even plausible acts of ordinary and even well-meaning men, woman, and children. Drawing on Salem Pos­sessed, the film suggested that the accu­sations of witchcraft were part of a larg­er social crisis in colonial New England, and not merely the product of supersti­tion or hysteria. (Do we use such words when we wish to reassure ourselves that it is only people who are not fully “hu­man” who are capable of doing terrible things?)

My third major experience with the NEH has been with the Division of State Programs. That experience began in 1985, when I was elected a member of my state humanities council, the Massa­chusetts Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy, and it continued last year when the Foundation board elect­ed me their president. The MFH&PP provides a splendid instance of collabo­ration among humanities scholars, the public, and a federal agency. It is also a microcosm of the NEH itself. The Mas­sachusetts Foundation operates on a rel­atively small scale, and with what I be­lieve is remarkable efficiency. Our total regrant budget  for   FY’88  is  just over $300,000. Major grants rarely exceed $15,000; and “minigrants” are for no more than $1,500. A very large propor­tion of our funds go to support histori­cal projects: for example, a series of lectures about the history of Jewish women in America; a conference on the history of Afro-American women and the vote; a museum exhibit displaying the long history of Boston’s black popu­lation; a portable bicentennial play called The Other Boston Tea Party and a specially commissioned film about Shays’ Rebellion-two projects that cele­brated the Constitution’s bicentennial. Most recently, the Foundation has con­ducted a major project, supported most­ly with nonfederal funds, which has placed scholars in five declining indus­trial communities in Massachusetts­ scholars who will explore the changing nature of work over the past fifty years, in active collaboration with residents of the five communities. I can think of no better example of historical scholarship transformed into and generated by the public humanities.

As a humanities scholar who has now worked on both sides of the desk—as a recipient and also a grantor of public monies—I can assure you that this sys­tem works. It is productive. It makes a difference. And it is lean and account­able, depending on many hours of vol­unteered time and skill. Another point I wish to emphasize is the willingness of scholars to donate their time to the NEH, by reading proposals, for exam­ple, or serving on panels.

Take the board of the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy, for example. Ours is a working board, whose twenty-four members carefully read, discuss, and act on close to 100 proposals each year. For all this time and work we receive no financial compensation. We do it out of conviction that we must give something back in return for the support each of us has received. But we also do it out of the conviction that our service is important, that it makes a real difference in the shape of public policy and the texture of people’s lives.

This year, for the first time, President Reagan has recommended level funding (rather than massive cuts) for the NEH. I applaud that. What disturbs me is that the President’s funding recom­mendation actually contains a cut of about $800,000 in four of the Endow­ment’s Divisions: the Divisions of Edu­cation (a $200,000 cut), Fellowships and Seminars ($200,000), General Programs ($300,000) and State Programs ($100,000). To offset these reductions, there is a proposed increase of $700,000 in the administration of the Endow­ment, to be used primarily, as I under­stand, for the purpose of upgrading computers and increasing staff salaries. That increase is needed, and I support it, but not at the expense of program funds. In fact, the four programs that would be redacted by the President’s proposal happen to be the very four that have directly affected my own work (and which are most likely to benefit the work of other academic historians). I ask you to oppose those program cuts.

Please understand how difficult and important it is for scholars, in the midst of teaching and academic service obliga­tions, to find the solid blocks of time required for concentrated research and writing. Those activities require as much hard work as the most strenuous physical  labor, and as much careful preparation as any athletic event. At my own institution, the University of Massa­chusetts, faculty members are expected to be productive scholars, but we can expect to receive only a single semester of compensated leave every seven years.

During the nineteenth century, my own period of historical specialization, the public provided even less support for humanities scholarship. Ralph Wal­do Emerson, writing about “The Ameri­can Scholar” in 1837, described a bleak situation. A truly original scholar, Em­erson suggested, “plies the slow, unhon­ored, and unpaid task of observation,” and stands in a “state of virtual hostility” to American society. As for those in power, Emerson lamented that “public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat.” But that may be as far as the parallel goes. Today there surely is much work for those who are neither “decorous” nor “complaisant.” For twenty-three years the National Endowment for the Humanities, as cultural representative of the people, has done its part to help insure that even though the work of the American Scholar nec­essarily remains “slow,” it is no longer wholly “unhonored” or even “unpaid.” Emerson would be pleasantly surprised at what the Endowment—and the Con­gress—has  done to help preserve our public historical memory. For that I thank you in the name of my colleagues, and I urge you not to let us down now.