The National Endowment for the Arts does not deserve a premature burial, but it’s fair to say things aren’t looking good for it, at least in its current form. While the NEA as it has existed for the past 60 years is being hollowed out by design, it’s entirely possible that not unlike the people inhabited by a collective of alien pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the building and the name may live. But in doing so, it will be a shell taken over by something entirely different.

Having watched the NEA survive some four decades of attacks on its existence, surviving thanks to support from both sides of the aisle, it is startling to think that this could be the true turning point, and that Donald Trump will do what Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich and their ilk could not. If it remains at all, it will be as a sham vehicle through which the administration will fund its favored projects, such as non-Equity shows at the Kennedy Center and Trump’s sculpture garden of who he deems to be heroes.

Around the country, not-for-profits proudly and rightly declare that they will not kowtow to the draconian regulations that still might afford them access to federal funds. They post their stands as white on black texts on social media coupled with calls for the public to make up the difference in money lost. No doubt anyone who has supported arts or humanities programs have seen these stances and requests in recent week. Long-serving, dedicated staffers depart the NEA this week in response to the gutting of the agency.

That makes this a moment when it’s worth examining why the Endowment has proven, at long last, so easily and quickly compromised. For that, we turn to the term “endowment” or more specifically the root of it, “endow.” Dictionary.com defines “endow” as “to provide with a permanent fund or source of income,” and an “endowment” as “the property, funds, etc., with which an institution or person is endowed.” As an example, as Harvard has come under a barrage of attacks on its policies and independence, we have heard so much about their financial underpinning: their $53 billion endowment, which spins off income through investments that supports the work of the college, allowing such programs as financial aid for those in need.

Unfortunately, in the common use of the word, the National Endowment for the Arts is a misnomer. It is not a fund drawn upon each year to support arts programs and institutions. Rather, it is a federal agency, funded through the federal budget each year for its operations and grantmaking. It is that annual appropriation which has made the agency so vulnerable, since each year a budget must be passed in Washington. For many years the NEA has been a favored target for performative ideological cost-cutters looking for supposed waste. The most progressive, even outré, projects funded by the NEA have long made it a locus for the censorious, railing against works like Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, important art but not really representative of the majority of what receives NEA funding, which covers a wide range of organizations in cities and towns, from adventurous to the most family friendly. Over its lifetime, the NEA is estimated to have distributed $5.5 billion in grants.

At the same time Trump, Musk and their wrecking-ball crew were undermining the NEA, NEH and CPB, major philanthropies were steering funding away from the arts as well. As Helen Shaw wrote in her galvanizing article for The New Yorker in April, “When the need seemed greatest, several private philanthropic foundations pulled out the rug. Three of the largest arts funders in the United States—the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Ford Foundation—stopped supporting many components of the arts infrastructure in New York that they helped create. Their reasons were various, but the upshot was the same: extreme turbulence, which has affected organizations big and small.”

With the NEA hobbled and the foundations looking to direct their funds elsewhere, this begs the inevitable question: now what? Yes, every arts not-for-profit can redouble their fundraising efforts, and perhaps in this first fiscal year without NEA funding people will step up – screenwriter John Logan gave $40,000 to Berkeley Rep’s new works center to make up for lost NEA funding – but will the increased giving of recent months be a solution that can be relied upon year after year, or one-time thing?

While federal funding will always be a goal, and perhaps in four or eight years we might see the government funding agencies revitalized, since they are but a rounding error in the federal budget, maybe it’s time for the establishment of a true arts endowment – a foundation dedicated solely to the support of US arts and culture, independent of the government and established in such a fashion that future generations could not turn its attention to other needs. It would, inevitably, grow slowly, but as generational wealth passes into new hands, perhaps some of that largesse could be deposited into an entity with a culture-based mandate and articles of incorporation which prohibit a change – save for the inclusion in the future of new forms of arts expression – to other uses.

There’s no question that if successful, especially in the initial years, funds would be given to this foundation, this endowment, that would not be immediately available for arts organizations. But in this moment of contraction, perhaps that’s the best time to weather a change for the long-term goal of a sustaining arts endowment distinct from political pressures and the vagaries of who is in office. If we continue to simply hold out hope for a revitalization of the NEA, we will miss this moment to recalibrate the means of funding the arts, if we don’t take matters into our own hands when the federal government remains to easily manipulated when it comes to our fate, we may be consigned evermore to a constant and likely Darwinian contest for funds, donor by donor, organization by organization, as the vehicles to which we have been accustomed by support are destroyed in the name of partisan ideology and simply left to fend for themselves by the very organizations which helped so much of the current arts landscape come into being.

Maybe this idea is a stretch, but we’d better start coming up with options while waiting for what now seems inevitable.

Donald Trump (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)

If I were given to cynicism, and if I thought I could get away with it, this week I would have submitted the same column as the one published on March 24 of last year. Why? Because we return to the same topic: President Trump and his antagonism of the arts.

The president has, for the second time in his presidency, submitted a budget to the US Congress eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Never mind that the new budget will balloon the national debt above and beyond the long-term damage done to the US by the tax cut passed in December – a plan that rewards the ultra-rich while penalising the rest of the country.

No, the president and his henchmen still want to make a statement against creativity, arts and scholarship. It would be a meaningless save in the context of the budget itself. But it’s catnip to those perceived as his core supporters.

Underlying Trump’s effort to wipe out the NEA, NEH and CPB is the fact he failed to do so last year. He’s hardly the first politician to use these entities as a political punching bag; they have long been convenient targets for the right who see them as pursuits limited to those who are politically on the left.

Certainly if the right, which always proclaims the value of free markets and self-sufficiency, wanted to prove that the arts don’t need federal support, they might have produced a conservative version of Sesame Street for commercial TV. Or perhaps we would have a wildly successful theatre company dedicated to works based on the writings of Ayn Rand and her acolytes. But as we know, that’s not the case.

Oh, sorry, but maybe I am getting cynical. It’s hard to stay fully positive when, in the 35th year of my career in the arts, I realise the NEA has been under some form of attack almost annually since at least 1990 – fully three-quarters of my professional life. Trumpism may have us on ever more heightened alert, but there’s never really been a moment when we could truly relax regarding this issue. If our community did, we were losing ground.

Nowadays, I get calls to action to defend funding for these tiny slices of the federal budget via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and occasionally still from the post office. But I can recall the era when mail, phone calls and faxes – remember those? – were the organising tools of choice to face down these perennial assaults, whether they came from within the Oval Office or under the Capitol dome.

There’s no question that the efforts to minimise or eliminate these agencies have had an effect, since funding today is less than it was 25 years ago. Even with relatively steady funding of late, the net effect is to reduce the federal impact, since costs rise while the available monies remain the same. Should we hit a period of inflation, the impact would prove even greater, even if the numbers on the ledger remain the same.

All these efforts to wear down the agencies’ advocates must take its toll on the detractors too, right? But instead, each side plays its designated role, battling to, more or less, a draw.

Not to diminish the importance of the funding situation, but this exercise in political gamesmanship is almost like some vintage cartoon series, with antagonists fighting in endless variations on the same theme, only to take up their enmity again in the next instalment.

But fight we must. The identity of the wolf at the door may vary, but the goal is the same. The arts, the humanities and the public broadcasting outlets and their supporters cannot let the government wipe an entire professional discipline from its attention and funding programme.

This year, the battle even faces a new twist, since the changes in the tax code have reduced the tax benefits of charitable deductions for many citizens and the impact of that policy won’t be fully known until donations are tallied at the end of 2018.

And so we organise to hold back those who would overrun us. We make the case for our value spiritually, creatively and economically, as inventively, persuasively and as loudly as possible.

While some political pundits have already suggested the president’s budget is dead on arrival and Congress will assemble something at least marginally more saleable – to each other and to the public – we can’t take the risk that this is the year when our interests might get bargained away.

Yet again, to the barricades (to be very clear, not a wall). And to the phones, the computers and maybe even the fax machines.

Even if you’ve never read the quote, you’ve no doubt seen the meme, in all of its arts-affirming, damn the torpedoes glory. Just one small detail: it isn’t true.

I am referring to the story that goes as follows, and here I’ll quote an op-ed piece from TheHill.com, dated February 19, 2017:

At the height of WWII, Winston Churchill was challenged to defend a budget that called for an increase in arts funding.

“How can you propose this at a time of extreme national crisis?” asked one member of Parliament.

Churchill replied, “I do it, sir, to remind us what we are fighting for.”

That’s one of the longer versions of the account. You may have seen it as, “During WWII, Churchill was asked to cut funding for the arts. He replied, ‘Then what are we fighting for?’,” or, “When Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he simply replied, ‘Then what are we fighting for?’”

There are countless iterations.

They are all fake history, recycled endlessly by arts advocates because the story fits a narrative we want to tell, because support of the arts in the face of the horror of the Holocaust and World War II is just so perfect. So it figures that it’s too good to be true.

Many times when you see this quote, you’ll even see a source. But those sources never lead you to a piece of primary research proving that Churchill said it, or a video clip of him actually saying it. Instead, it’s one big echo chamber, in which people cite other people who shared the quote, none of whom provide a footnote as to its veracity.

That said, a bit of online searching will bring you to generally reliable sources that claim to have researched the quote and found it wanting. Now to be fair, there’s a certain circularity in the debunking as well. Snopes.com has a piece dated just weeks ago, which cites historian Richard Langworth debunking the quote in a 2009 blog post, “Safeguarding The Arts.” The recent inquiry from Snopes prompted Langworth to refashion his answer under the banner of The Churchill Project at Hillsdale College in Michigan, but save for replacing who asked the question of him, his answer is consistent.

Andrew Eaton, writing in The Scotsman in 2011, allowed that the provenance of the quote was in dispute. An article from The Conversation.com says the quote is fake, sourcing it to a piece in the Village Voice in 2008, but their source, if you follow the links, is once again Langworth.  Fortunately, Snopes also checked with the International Churchill Society, where a representative declared the statement “quite bogus.”

Using this quote in fighting to stave of arts cuts in the US is, ultimately, a disservice to the effort. Why? Because if the quote cannot be unequivocally verified, then its deployment counts as fake news. That opens up anyone who uses it to having all of their arguments, no matter how valid the others may be, dismissed out of hand. The very people who are quick to brandish the pejorative “fake facts” against things with which they simply disagree will have a field day with claims that are demonstrably false, even if veracity isn’t central to their own arguments. One anti-liberal bias site, also looking to Langworth, took this on in 2012 when Chris Matthews cited the quote, so this isn’t exactly flying under the radar.

This should not discount the idea that Churchill didn’t support the arts. Reliable sources quote him as saying, at an April 30, 1953 Royal Academy Banquet, “The arts are essen­tial to any com­plete national life. The State owes it to itself to sus­tain and encour­age them…Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the rev­er­ence and delight which are their due.”

One must wonder why the British Churchill, who died at almost 90 years old in 1965, perseveres as the go-to defender of the arts in America today. Looking closer to home, even if the remarks were the work of a speechwriter, President John F. Kennedy, whose White House regularly welcomed artists to perform, has a series of quotes about the arts emblazoned on the rear balcony of The Kennedy Center, all suitable for memeing.

“This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.”

“I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.”

“To increase respect for the creative individual, to widen participation by all the processes and fulfillments of art — this is one of the fascinating challenges of these days.”

“There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts.”

As mentioned previously, the specious Churchill quote made perhaps its most recent appearance in an op-ed at TheHill.com. Regrettably, the authors of the piece are Earle I. Mack is chairman emeritus of the New York State Council on the Arts, Randall Bourscheidt is president emeritus of the Alliance for the Arts, and Robert L. Lynch is president and CEO of Americans for the Arts. A Google search on their version of the quote reveals only a single match, namely their article. Their use doesn’t even mirror other faulty citations.

 By all means, let’s write our own words in defense of the arts, and arts funding, and let’s cite the very best comments made by others in support of that case. But unless someone produces irrefutable proof that Churchill said what he is so often quoted as saying about “what are we fighting for,” it’s time to put it away for good. Opposing the truism advanced in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, we cannot afford to print the legend, we must stand with the objective truth.

P.S. If anyone actually can prove that the “what are we fighting for” story is verifiably true, please shout the proof out loudly.