I have not worked directly in the arts-development field since that time, but I learned a lot in  those years, and have followed subsequent events as closely as an interested non-participant can. In particular, I have remained stubbornly devoted to the notion of the High Culture—which also tends to be the non-profit culture—as a public good, worthy of significantly greater public (i. e., governmental) support than it receives. There have been two periods in American history when that idea made some headway. The first was born of poverty, in the 1930s, and the second in riches, in the 1960s. The poverty-inspired one, symbolized by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), did not make high-born discriminations between Highcult and Pop-or-Folkcult classes of art. Its goal was employment, jobs. But on that basis, it also did not exclude the classical arts. Serious theatre and classical music were allowed (though then, as now, preferably on a “relevance” basis), and other forms seen in relation to them. Apart from subsistence aid and performance opportunities for individual artists who went on to fruitful careers, it can’t be said that this need-based support did much for opera. It established no long-term opera companies, and produced no operatic works of notable quality. (Please don’t tell me again about The Cradle Will Rock.) Its life was short, and it succumbed to political opposition at just the time when the country was moving from the Depression to the high-mobilization wartime economy. But it did introduce into the American mentality, in a way that hadn’t happened before, the idea of direct governmental arts subsidization, and that idea continued to have some impact—the founding of the New York City Center of Music and Drama as a civically initiated “people’s theatre,” for instance, was certainly an outgrowth of that Thirties energy.

The riches-inspired “public good” movement, in which I played my bit part, was more helpful to opera. This was due, at least in part, to the fact that it did make class distinctions about art. It assumed that the classical arts, and contemporary efforts aspiring to classical status, were top of the line in their disciplines, and that this should factor heavily in evaluations of requests for support. This attitude was analogous to the provisions of our tax code that allowed for indirect public arts funding—the allowance of “charitable giving” exemptions for individual contributions under what was then a far more progressive rate structure (encouraging charitable enterprise at the heavily taxed high end), and the stipulation that the tax forgiveness granted to non-profit arts entities was contingent on an “educational” purpose. What we might call these “Western Civ” assumptions with respect to the worthiness of an arts project or organization, and as to what might be deemed “educational,” were not in question, except perhaps at the social and political fringes. They were taken as givens. And of course, bylaws notwithstanding, selected persons had to make the judgments of worth, and do the deeming.

The expansion of the American classical arts universe was well underway before the establishment of the national arts and humanities Endowments in 1965. It was enabled by this country’s great postwar prosperity and the parallel burgeoning of higher education—an unprecedented broadening of personal wealth and cultural awareness, in an atmosphere of rising expectations following nearly two decades of all-consuming financial depression and world war. In addition to the heightened levels of individual giving, our major private foundations (themselves creatures of our tax-inducement, indirect-funding system, and with holdings many times over what the Endowments would ever command), committed extraordinary resources to arts development. Nonetheless, the advent of the NEA and, contemporaneously, of the arts councils in many of the states, constituted a giant stride forward for the American cultural mentality. The arts, with their classical canons as tacit reference points for judgment, were for the first time dealt some bankable chips at our capitalist-democratic gaming tables, not only on the basis of employment and public-project rationales, as in the ’30s, but for their own intrinsic value, as “merit goods.” We’d progressed in our thinking, it seemed, from the New Deal to the Great Society.