Amer

ican F
o
lkl
ife C
enter
, L
i
brary o
fCongress
B
ess L
omax H
awes C
ol
lect
ion (
AFC 2
014/008
)
f
o
lder 21
.13
w
rit
ings
a
r
tic
les
, u
npub
lished
Bess Lomax Hawes
Sustainable Folklore Conference Opening Remarks (
rewritten
)
July 26, 1995

Politics and Culture. This i

s r
eally a hectic time to be

talking about those two phenomena. Events are moving with

s
uch rapidity down such previously uncharted courses that

every day I have said to myself "Well, maybe tomorrow I

'll

understand i
t a l
ittle better." And now tomorrow i
s here.

What can I possibly offer that i

s at l
east a bit d
ifferent?

Perhaps two things. One i

s my experience of 1
5 years with the

Folk and Traditional Arts Program

, s
imply because i
n that

office a never-ceasing wave of ideas, problems and pressures

swirled past us. Not that we could s

olve them
, not that we

even understood them

, but we d
id get an enormous i
nput i
n a

very short time. I

t didn't make us particularly wise, but i
t

did give us a k
ind of possibly helpful breadth.

The o
ther c
onsideration i
s that I
' m probably o
lder than most

of my audience. And that doesn't make me wiser either but i

t

d
id make i
t possible f
or me to have s
een things that younger

people haven't. The very f

irst day I s
tarted a
t the

Endowment, I remembered being j

ust out of college and going

down to Washington to see my f

olks. And when I got to

Washington, the WPA was gone. The last time I had been to

town, i
t had been there, and many people I knew had worked

there over the years, off and on - - Charles S

eeger, Ben

Botkin, my f
ather. And now i
t was gone - - typewriters, f
iles,

the whole thing. And when I remembered that, I thought to

myself, by gum
, I
' m going to have to work f
ast in this

Endowment, because i
t might not be here the next time I c
ome

i
n. And that f
eeling never l
eft me - - the possibility that

today could be the last chance to use whatever l

ittle

perspective I might have or to take care of whatever l

ittle

problem. "
It may be the last time, I don't know." That's a

f
eeling that, once i
t gets i
nside you, makes you a l
ittle
d
ifferent f
rom others who have the l
ovely vision, a
s most

children do, that everything i

s going to go on f
orever.

S
o now that things are changing f
aster than most of us can

possibly keep up with, I

' m going to try to address the

s
ituation by s
peaking mostly in generalities, which i
s

certainly a heck of a way to s

tart off a conference. However,

I think we require an effort to gain a l

arger perspective,

because most of us deal a

lmost entirely with the particular.

I know that your particular problem a

t the moment i
s that

j
erk they moved i
nto the f
iscal office making a million r
ules

that hold you up every time you want to buy a pencil, and the

very f
irst thing you have to do i
s cope with him f
or he i
s s
o

prominent in your l
ife that you can't get back from him and

think in larger terms. But if we are to get anywhere a

t this

meeting, we must think bigger and use our i

ndividual

experiences a
s guides rather than a
s s
olutions or a
nswers.

S
o I myself s
tarted out l
ooking up s
ome general l
arge-scale

quotations that might help s

et the tone. That's a very o
lder-

generational thing to do, by the way; actually a year ago I

bought myself that new dictionary of quotations f

or my own

personal birthday treat. S

o when I realized that f
or this

talk I had to talk about politics (

when f
or 1
5 years I had

been told by the Hatch Act not to do any such thing

) my heart

f
ailed me a bit. But my trusty new dictionary helped out; I

l
ooked up "politics", and I did f
ind s
ome i
nteresting

r
emarks.

One was f
rom John Buchan. He s
aid "
Politics i
s s
till the

greatest and most honorable adventure." Now that s

urely

r
eflects an o
lder generation. I myself was brought up with

the idea that the highest honor a person could earn was to

work f
or the government. And when I got a government j
ob, I

was thrilled
, I thought I really had i
t made, and that
f
eeling has g
iven me a very d
ifferent perspective o
n the

r
esponsibilities of being a public officer.

People brought up in later generations than mine mostly

believe politics to be a crooked

, venal profession, and

"
politician" has become a kind of dirty epithet. A d
istinction

was even made between "politics" and "

statesmanship", But I

thought that a
ll government work was honorable, that I had an

enormous opportunity to s
erve, and that I was r
esponsible to

every s
ingle c
itizen i
n the United S
tates. Quite a
n

a
ssignment.

But then I r
ead that O
tto von Bismark, i
n 1
867, had s
aid

"
Politics i
s the art of the possible." That quotation

impressed me, because as s

oon a
s I actually began public work

I had to realize that though I was responsible to everybody,

I couldn't do everything evrybody wanted me to. How c

ould

those requirements be reconciled? One way we tried i

n the

Folk Arts Program - - and i

t i
s a way used by many people,

possibly without their recognizing i

t - - was to balance

r
igidity with f
lexibility. We couldn't do everything, s
o we

decided that we would do THIS f

or anybody l
egally qualified

to apply.

Now the opposite of that s

trategy i
s to go the o
ther way

around
, to say "We'll do EVERYTHING - - - but only f
or a

particular group." That's not a bad s

trategy e
ither. I

a
lways f
elt that those two s
trategies distinguished the Folk

and Traditional Arts Program f

rom the Expansion Arts Program.

Expansion Arts f
ocused on a particular population and

was f
lexible about what that population could do with their

f
unding. Folk Arts f
ocused on a particular group of

activities, but i
nvited everybody that wanted to do those

things to come in and apply. S

uch balancing makes survival

possible. If you don't have some tightness, you' re going to

be spread s
o f
ar that you are i
neffectual and everybody will
quickly r
ealize that. On the o
ther hand
, if you don't have

any f
lexibility, you become the characteristic bureaucrats

that everyone f
usses about. Sucn a perspective i
s helpful i
n

f
iguring out f
uture s
trategies, and this brings u
s to my

third quote.

Henry Adams s
aid, "Modern politics i
s a
t bottom a s
truggle

not of men but of f

orces." That i
s a tough one, because the

i
ncredible pressures to take care of the particulars a
lso

often make us pass over the underlying f

orces a
t work. But I

am convinced that the s

trategies we adopt emerge out of our

conscious or unconscious r
eactions to the f
orces that are

operating upon us. One of the things I f

ound out i
n my l
ong

years in this business i

s that if I began to worry about

s
omething, if I came to have a gut-level uncomfortableness

about s
omething, I
' d better take a l
ong hard l
ook a
t i
t. That

gut f
eeling i
nvariably turned out to be my r
ecognition that I

was involved with f

orces I hadn't understood
, hadn't

analyzed
, hadn't recognized.

I
'll give you an example. A number of years back, I

began to get an uncomfortable f

eeling about a whole amorphous

s
ection of the population that Folk Arts didn't s
eem to be

doing anything much about; and that was a k

ind of rural,

small-town, f
arm, Anglo, mid-western, s
outhern chunk of

f
olks. I didn't even know if i
t was an identifiable group.

But my worry hit me f

irst when I was testifying before a

Congressional committee on the American Square Dance

S
ociety's bill to make the square dance the "National Dance

of the United S
tates". I
t was an awful idea, I thought, a
nd I

went up to the Hill l

oaded f
or bear. I
t was d
ivisive, i
t

suggested an imposed cultural unanimity, i

t was r
igid; i
t was

everything I didn't want.

But i
t was while I was up there testifying and l
ooking

a
t all those square dance people i
n their l
ittle c
ostumes

that I thought, "Gee, these are really a

ll my f
olks, a
ll

these nice people f

rom California and Georgia a
nd T
exas." And
 they had all testified s
aying things l
ike "
Oh boy, we want to

have a national dance and we want everybody to come." And I

s
aid, "But there are a l
ot of people i
n the country who don't

want to square dance' and they said, "Gosh, if they j

ust
tried i
t, they' d love i
t."

I kept knowing I was r

ight but f
eeling that I was

s
tabbing my own f
olks in the back somehow
, and I talked to

J
oe Wilson who told me he was having s
ome of the s
ame

f
eelings. S
o, s
ince I didn't understand them
, I j
ust went o
n

back to the Endowment and worked on 4

2 o
ther d
ifferent

problems. But this one kept on coming back in many o

ther

c
ontexts, and one day I l
ooked a
t i
t square o
n.

I was preparing a s
tatistical analysis of the grants

the Folk Arts Program had given out during the previous year,

and one of the charts broke out the grants according to what

groups were f
eatured. We had i
ncluded a f
ew regional groups

l
ike Appalachians and a f
ew occupational groups l
ike cowboys

and s
o on, but mostly there were e
thnicities - - Bulgarian-

Americans, African-Americans, American I

ndians broken down by

tribe, et cetera. As a survey of the U

.S. a
s a multi-cultural

nation, the chart was very impressive, and a

t the end there

was a bunch of miscellaneous grants l

umped together,

consisting mostly of mixed events where no s

ingle group was
f
eatured.

S
o I was looking a
t the overall chart and I suddenly

r
ealized that we didn't have any grants to Anglos i
n there;

we had Scots, and I

rish, even Welsh, but no plain down-home

Anglos. Where were they? Well, they turned out to be in the

miscellaneous lump a
t the end. They didn't even appear i
n our

s
tatistics. We j
ust hadn't noticed that we were f
unding a

great many projects that were baseline American Anglo

traditions including shape note hymn s

inging. They didn't

show up in this chart, f

or those f
olks apparently d
id not

exist f
or us a
s a group; they weren't enough of a minority I
s
uppose.
 Well, I have to s
ay that these are the f
olks that a
re

raising s
o much cain r
ight now. I don't think this i
s because

the Folk and Traditional Arts Program did not f

eature them. I

do think the Program was responding to underlying f

orces

r
equiring us to work r
eally hard f
or the ignored e
thnicities,

getting everybody who had been l

eft out i
nto the national

picture. And i
n that process we managed to overlook the

enormous number of people ordinarily thought of a

s the

majority. I don' t think we were the only ones who d

id that;

i
n fact I think i
t was the whole s
ociety that d
id i
t, a
nd we

j
ust went a
long.

Now when Folk Arts noticed that there was no Anglo

category, we put i
t into our s
tatistics; f
or we had g
iven

their activities grants, we j

ust hadn't recognized their

category. Admittedly, such recognition i

sn't going to make a

big difference to anybody who i

s enraged and l
iving out i
n an

I
owa or Alabama f
arm community. S
till, i
t was the r
ight thing

to do, and I can' t think why i

t took us s
o l
ong, except that

we were responding to some pretty deep s

ocial f
orces.

On a s
imilar point, we need to consider, I think, that

we l
ive in an age where what I call l
inear thinking has

become s
o dominant i
t may s
oon drive us a
ll crazy. By l
inear

thinking, I mean that if you punch button A i

t i
s going to

produce result A
'; B y
ields B
', etc. And that's the way many

things work, certainly most machines and most computers.

But when we take that s

traightforward principle and

apply i
t to everything we do, we wind up j
udging the success

of an exhibit or a c
oncert on how many people a
ttend
, because

that f
igure appears to be i
ts "
result". The event might

actually have resulted in 1

7 o
ther things a
s well, perhaps,

but we l
ook a
t this a
ttendance number a
s i
ts proximal r
esult.

And now with the help of computers we are s

eeing not

j
ust one proximal result but 1
73 re-analyzed and r
e-computed

proximal results that are a

lso produced in a very d
irect

l
inear off/on kind of way. And we' re getting s
o many of them

that we' re going a bit berserk because no one can keep s

o
much data i
n mind. The c
omputer groups i
t f
or us very n
icely,

but i
t's s
till the s
ame s
traight-ahead k
ind of thinking. I
t's

s
till "A produces this bunch of A
' results."

I believe that with art you have to think i

n o
ther k
inds

of ways, and I
' m not terribly good a
t i
t; I
'm j
ust a
s l
inear

a
s anybody else. As example, f
or years I have griped (
as a
ll

of you know who know me well) about the tendency of people

who produce f
olk concerts to open programs with the o
ldest

piece of music or dance and proceed i

n an orderly d
irection

to the newest, so that a

t every c
oncert's end you have the

biggest amplified band s

ound that has ever been heard. And

the implication of such programing i

s that e
lectronic music

i
s the glorious f
uture to which we a
ll must march, l
eaving

the pitiful weak sounds of the past behind. "By-bye. We' re

going this-a-way." And I know that' s wrong, but how to f

ix

i
t?

Well, the American I

ndian Dance Theater i
s a very

professional group, a multi-tribal dance theater that I s

aw

performing actually on Broadway. And those programmers d

idn't

g
ive one whoop about any k
ind of explanatory infomation and

they didn' t plan their program to go anywhere except to knock

their audiences dead. Their printed programs had about one

s
entence about each dance, and they s
et up i
ts order

according to aesthetic criteria s

uch a
s wouldn't i
t be n
ice

to have a s
olo dance here and a group dance next or a s
ong

that s
ort of thing. S
o everything was s
ort of j
umbled

together.

They would put on a piece of a very ancient Z

uni

ceremony f
ollowed by a really hot up-to-the-minute Plains

competition dance f
ollowed by a walk-around by elderly

tribesmen dedicating the performance to Vietnam veterans.

I
t was j
ust all mixed up, with no particular points being

made and I f
ound myself saying "Gosh, they' re r
eally missing

a great educational opportunity here." But the more I l

ooked

a
t that program
, the more I realized that they were s
aying

s
omething e
lse - - they were saying that a
ll these dances and
a
ll these people are s
till active, they' re a
ll going on a
t

the same time i

n our world. Amongst American I
ndians there

are l
ots of generations l
iving together a
ll mixed up, and

s
ome f
olks do the o
ld s
tuff and s
ome do the new s
tuff and

s
ome the middle s
tuff, and s
ome borrow f
rom each o
ther. I
t's

a
ll concurrent.

That was a profound i

nsight f
or me. I was s
o t
ime-

oriented in my thinking i
t had never occurred to me that a

s
imple s
olution to my programming problem was j
ust to throw

everything i
n together, I
t was very much, I think, a Native

American solution - - I don't know

, I
' d have to a
sk one of my

I
ndian f
riends. But i
t c
ertainly wasn't an Anglo s
olution;

mine had been j

ust to gripe.

Besides,time l
ines are often useful Ethnomusicologist,

Fred Lieberman once s

uggested that Folk Arts s
taff might try

not thinking s
o much in terms of blocks of cultures but

i
nstead in systems - - f
or example, what does i
t take to move

f
rom here to there. Specifically, take the s
equence of

actions that have to occur to produce a c

oncert or an

exhibit, and l
ist them out. He said, "
It doesn't s
eem to me

that you will f

ind that large i
nfusions of money are needed

a
t every point along the l
inethat have to be done.You may

need to put money in here but not there; here you might need

extra amounts of human effort, that part you can l

et go a
long

on i
ts own," I
n o
ther words, consider the activity i
n terms

of movement a
long a time l
ine rather than the l
arger s
tatic

units of cultural groups and their power relations that most

of us use - - and s
ome impracticable things may thereby

become f
easible.

As you s
ee, I haven't any r
eal answers, j
ust s
ome

c
ontradictory ideas. But this kind of r
e-examination of o
ur

thinking patterns may be f

ruitful now because of the unusual

territory we f
ind ourselves in, where the national

c
onversation has s
topped being about whether s
omething i
s a
ny

good or worth doing but instead a

sks "
Can we possibly get r
id
of i
t, or not do i
t a
t a
ll?" And that's a very hard question

to f
ield; we' re not used to thinking about things that way.

History tells us, though, that you can get r

id of the

program or the agency or the institution, but the work, our

work, i
s a constant. I
t will never go away. We will never

f
inish i
t. We are dealing with an ongoing problem
, and many

s
olutions are yet to be tried. We may f
ind ourselves doing

our work in different places, under different sponsorship or

with different a
llies, but i
t will occur.

If our work i
s not paid f
or, i
t will be done by people

who are not paid-- probably not a

s well a
s i
t might be done,

but i
t will be done. I
' m thinking now about the l
ong period

of time when this work was done by people who never got a

nickel f
or doing i
t; they did i
t because i
t needed to be done

and they loved i

t and believed i
n i
t.

Now I am not saying that we will not i

n f
uture have

i
nstitutional support. Actually, I think we will, because one

of the things that has happened i

n the l
ast f
ew years i
s a

real change in the perceptions of the American people. They

appear to be thinking with depth and appreciation about their

history, their traditions, and what i

s holding them together.

And that suggests to them that the k

inds of things we are

working on are important and should s

omehow be kept going. I

think we will be working in many c

omplicated and i
nteresting

c
ombinations, f
or i
t's not c
lear now how much room the

government i
s going to have f
or us on any l
evel - - s
tate,

f
ederal, or l
ocal. But i
t s
eems to me that we must take good

cheer in the f
act that this work that we' ve been doing

together has a
lways been done, and I do believe we' ve been

getting smarter and better a

t i
t a
ll the time.

S
o - - go with your gut thinking. Try and mix toughness

and f
lexibility, a s
ense of your important purpose with a

s
ense of inclusion. Try and s
tir up your thinking patterns

and don't be afraid to change them. And try and hang in

there. Those are the things I have to say to you. And f

inally

(
the nice thing about the d
ictionary of quotations i
s that
y
ou can browse around
) i
n a recent browsing expedition, I

f
ound a l
ovely one: "
The f
irst l
aw of tinkering i
s to s
ave

a
ll the parts."

We are r
eally worth s
aving, and I hope you know i
t.