In 1865, the poet Walt Whitman asked:
I have always loved these three lines from Whitman’s elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which he wrote in the spring of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. I have been thinking about them as we mark the 249th year since the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. The lines distill an essential question that any artist and civic figure who believes American ideals are worth sustaining must ask: How shall we honor, remember and learn from our national past? And how shall we transmit essential values of the past to citizens of the future?
I’ve had Whitman in mind this spring as we’ve watched the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency disassemble the cultural infrastructure of the nation. These reckless and shortsighted cuts have affected our libraries and museums, our public media institutions, our local arts and humanities councils and the longstanding endowments — including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities — that have provided funding for the past 60 years. These institutions are the entities we’ve charged with hanging pictures on the national chamber walls; they were established to represent and to execute on the principle that a great country and a great civilization needs self-understanding, and that such understanding comes not from politicians or congressional allocations but from lasting works of reflection that connect past, present and future.
