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May
10, 2003
How Fear Curdles the Soul
Smithsonian,
NEH, Library of Congress Bureaucrats Click Their Heels; Congress
Librarian's Stricken Cry: "Not Pete Seeger!"
by BRUCE JACKSON
The Smithsonian Institution has decided to move
the exhibit of Subhankar Banerjee's highly-acclaimed photographs
of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from a main floor rotunda
to a smaller, lower room and to cut the text out of most of his
captions. The photographs are from Banerjee's book, "Seasons
of Life and Land, A Photographic Journey by Subhankar Banerjee,"
which, according to the New York Times reporter Timothy Egan,
"advocates preservation of the refuge. It features quotations
from President Carter, the writer Peter Matthiessen, and the
nature poet and essayist Terry Tempest Williams. Some of these
quotations were to be in the exhibit; they have all been deleted."
Interior Secretary Gale Norton has referred to ANWR as "an
area of flat white nothingness." Hardly. During last month's
Senate debate on opening ANWR to drilling, California Senator
Barbara Boxer held up some of Banerjee's photos and urged her
colleagues to look at them so they would have an idea what they
were arguing about. The drilling bill failed, 52-48, after which
Senate Appropriations Committee chair Alaska Senator Ted Stevens
promised personal revenge: "People who vote against this
today are voting against me. I will not forget it."
Smithsonian officials say there was no
political pressure behind the sudden and unexplained downgrading
of what was to have been a major exhibition, that it was just
"routine."
And why were the captions censored? According
to Timothy Egan, Smithsonian spokesman Randall Kremer said "Some
of the captions bordered on advocacy."
Banerjee's caption for a picture of the
Romanzof Mountains, for example, "The refuge has the most
beautiful landscape I have ever seen and is so remote and untamed
that many peaks, valleys and lakes are still without names,"
was changed to"Unnamed Peak, Romanzof Mountains." A
caption that included the quotation, ""Here there still
remain elements of mystery in the unknown which in themselves
have great value in the human perception of wilderness"
was changed to"Rock lichens."
"There was another caption on the
buff-breasted sandpiper," Egan told NPR's Liane Hansen on
Sunday's Weekend Edition. "Mr. Banerjee had a caption saying
that this species was remarkable because it traveled from Argentina
to the Arctic coastal wildlife refuge to nest up there. They've
removed all that. They now just say, 'Coastal plain of the Jago
River and Sandpiper.' So they've taken out any sort of interpretive
stuff about what these animals do, what this wildlife does in
the Refuge."
A Smithsonian spokesman told Egan,"There was no pressure
whatsoever, either from the White House or anyone else."
Silent pressure
A lot of people don't believe that. They
think Ted Stevens called over there and said, "If you don't
cancel that exhibition I'm going to be all over your ass at budget
time," as he promised the world in general after the 52-48
vote.
I don't think anybody had to call the
Smithsonian to tell them to gut the Banerjee show. It doesn't
work like that in Washington. It's not that calls aren't made.
They're made all the time when someone wants to get something,
like having a friend appointed to this or that or wants to be
sure a lucrative contract goes to a pal or a big contributor.
But calls don't have to be made when
powerful people want to destroy something they don't like. For
that to happen, all the powerful people need do is make their
position known and the civil servants and bureaucrats further
down the line will do the dirty work quite on their own.
That way, whatever happens is indeed
just "routine."
The End of History
Into Black Dust
I've seen this happen in government many
times. I remember especially the National Endowment for Humanities
during the Bill Bennett and Lynn Cheney years, when solid grant
applications that received positive recommendations from peer
review panels started disappearing somewhere after they left
the program directors' desks, after which the program directors
and program officers began counseling applicants to stay away
from anything political or unpleasant. "The humanities,"
Bennett famously proclaimed, "are in the past," and
there ended all NEH support for documentary films any closer
to the political and social complexities of the modern world
than the hugely expensive and politically innocuous Burns brothers
productions. Nobody told the peer panels not to vote in favor
of proposals with political substance and nobody told the program
officers to tell applicants not to develop such applications.
No one had to.
I first saw this process close-hand in
the Library of Congress 35 years ago in an event involving some
cylinder recordings made during the first quarter years of the
20th century.
Sandy Ives, an anthropologist friend
who taught at University of Maine in Orono, phoned to say he'd
recently learned that someone in the Archive of American Folk
Song in the Library of Congress had opened the boxes containing
several old cylinder recordings and discovered that many of them
had turned to powdered carbon. The binder had decomposed and
all that was left in the cardboard tubular containers was very
fine black dust. Every year, Sandy said, more and more of the
cylinders were disintegrating. Nobody knew how long it would
take for them all to go, but at some point, they would all be
gone. The Archive, he said, didn't have funds to pay for transferring
the cylinders to tape.
He wasn't calling me in the abstract.
I was then on the board of directors of the Newport Folk Foundation
and Sandy knew that after all the bills were paid for each year's
festival we gave the rest of the money away to folk music connected
projects.
He told me how much he thought the transfers from cylinders to
tape would cost. I no longer remember the number, but it didn't
seem like a great deal of money and I was surprised that the
federal government wouldn't come up with it to preserve so obviously
important a part of our musical heritage. I presented the proposal
at the next Newport board meeting. Everyone-Pete Seeger, Theo
Bikel, Judy Collins, Fred Kirkpatrick, Jean Ritchie, Oscar Brand-said
yes immediately. They said Newport would pay for the transfers,
whatever they cost.
I told Rae Korson, then head of the Archive
of American Folk Song (she held the job from 1956 through 1969),
about the grant. Rae was the widow of George Korson, who had
done two important books about coal miner's songs. I liked her;
everybody liked her. She was a nice person. She seemed very enthusiastic
about the Newport grant to transfer the cylinders to tape. She
said it was such a good thing to do because the material on the
cylinders was so valuable, it was unique, and so forth.
"How do we do it?" I asked
her.
"What do you mean?" she said.
I told her that we didn't know how to
give money to a government agency. Newport had an accountant
who would write the check, but how should it be made out and
to whom should it be sent? We know how to give money to people
or businesses or nonprofit corporations or the IRS, but we didn't
know how to give money to a small specific agency deep within
the Library of Congress. Rae said she'd get back to me with that
information.
But she didn't.
I wrote her a few more times. She didn't
respond to any of the letters. When I saw her at meetings I'd
remind her that we needed that information before we could send
a check and she'd always say,"Oh, gosh! I'll do that as
soon as I get back to the office, Bruce." She never did.
After about three years we couldn't justify
sequestering the money any more and it went for some other project.
There were always more worthy projects than we had money for.
Bad money
Then, some time after that (I don't remember
how many; across this expanse of years they telescope), I saw
Rae at another meeting. I said, "Rae, how come you never
told me how to give the Archive the Newport money to save those
cylinders?"
"Oh, we couldn't take that money,
Bruce."
"You couldn't take it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Pete Seeger was on the Newport
board. We just couldn't have taken that money."
It quite took my breath away. Rae was
in charge of protecting those archive holdings, she was the official
responsible for finding ways to make the material they had accessible
and gathering under the Library's roof material that needed protection,
and she had, knowingly, permitted recordings that were unique
in all the world turn to powdered carbon because Pete Seeger
was on the Newport Folk Foundation board of directors.
The reason Rae was so terrified of Pete
Seeger was because in 1956 Pete had refused to provide names
to a congressional witch-hunting committee. He had been called
because professional informer Harvey Matusow had named him as
a communist. Instead of claiming the Fifth Amendment protection
against self-incrimination, Pete claimed the First Amendment's
protection of freedom of speech. He had nothing to hide about
his own acts or beliefs, he said, but he wasn't going to be forced
into saying things he didn't think it was right to say. Along
with playwright Arthur Miller and seven other people, Pete was
cited for contempt by a House vote of 373 to 9. He was tried,
convicted and sentenced to a year in prison in 1961. His case
was thrown out by US Court of Appeals on technical grounds, but
mostly because the whole thing was stupid.
By the time the Newport board offered
the Archive of American Folksong the money it needed to preserve
those unique recordings, Pete was just about respectable again.
He was no longer blocked from performing in major concert halls,
he appeared regularly in concerts around the country, he was
for many people an American hero. The communist witch-hunts were
over and the House and Senate committees that engaged in them
had few defenders, even on the right. The Newport Folk Festivals,
the source of the money, were hugely popular affairs, as American
as apple pie. Pete would eventually be awarded the National Medal
of the Arts, one of a grateful nation's highest honors.
But Rae Korson, a decent person of no
particular political ideology that I ever saw, wouldn't touch
Newport's money. Because Pete Seeger was on the board.
Years later, the American Folklife Center,
which incorporated the Folklore Archive, did find money to begin
rescuing those disintegrating cylinders. Some of the cylinders
Sandy Ives had called me about were copied to tape in the mid-1970s,
a decade after Rae Korson didn't accept the Newport Folk Foundation
money. By the time Tip O'Neill appointed me to the board of trustees
of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress in
1990, a project was underway to transfer to tape the surviving
recordings of Native American performances on cylinder and to
give them to the tribes. I was never present for any of the returning
ceremonies, but one staffer told me that at one of them an old
woman listened to the tape, burst into tears, and said, "That
is my grandmother. I haven't heard her voice since I was a little
girl."
Calls that don't have
to be made
I am sure that no one ever told Rae Korson
to avoid accepting the Newport check. No one had to. It was just
routine. I doubt anyone from the White House called over to the
Department of Education last week and told them to scrub their
web sites of anything that might contravert White House policy
or party line. That purging of uncomfortable information was
just routine too. And so was the downgrading of Subhankar Banerjee's
Arctic National Wildlife Reserve exhibit and the censoring of
his captions.
The Senate oversight committee is going
to have a hearing to find the smoking gun in the Banerjee affair.
They won't find one. There's no need to find one. In these affairs,
no gun is needed. The victims do it all themselves. And the bullets
never miss.
Bruce Jackson,
former chairman of the board of trustees of the American Folklife
Center in the Library of Congress, edits the web magazine BuffaloReport.com.
He is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University at Buffalo.
His email address is bjackson@buffalo.edu.
Yesterday's
Features
Julie
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