mode of giving by industry is in itself a permanent part of our musical scene. The very future of our orchestras, in fact, has become dependent on corporate support. In this era of the vanishing philanthropist and the reluctant governmental body, business and industrial support form the solid financial understructure of musical enterprise. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, Washington, D.C. Hon. STEWART L. UDALL, Secretary, Department of the Interior, DEAR MR. SECRETARY: Along with many other Members of Congress I have consistently supported measures to advance the educational and cultural life of the Nation's Capital and make our Capital City ever safer and more attractive to live in. As a member of the District of Columbia Committee, it has, in fact, been my duty to do this because of the historic intent of the Congress that this great Federal City must represent the best of American life and reflect the deepest educational and cultural aspirations of the people of this Nation. The Nation's Capital in 1950 observed and celebrated the sesquicentennial of its establishment as the seat of government. In connection with and as part of this occasion the Congress authorized the erection of the Carter Barron Amphitheater and appropriated nearly $1 million to build it. The purpose of the Congress in creating this great cultural and artistic facility was-as the records clearly reveal-to advance the cultural, educational, and artistic growth of the Nation's Capital. The Congress lodged the management of this amphitheater in the Department of the Interior. For the full development of the aims of the Congress had in mind, it would perhaps have been wiser to have placed the management within the Smithsonian Institution, a Federal agency concerned more directly with the diffusion of knowledge. I think the time has come if it is not, indeed, long overdue to make a study of the Carter Barron Amphitheater operation which would take into account the major summer cultural programs in other U.S. cities and in leading European cities. The State Department, and our ambassadors abroad in other countries, would be delighted to cooperate, and their reports on summer cultural programs in Europe should be an important part of such a study. The Department of the Interior's stewardship of the Carter Barron Amphitheater as a cultural facility over the years should be subjected to a critical and searching analysis and no attempt to justify sins of omission or commission should be permitted. Nor should any bureaucratic whitewash be attempted. Perhaps a special advisory committee made up of educational, cultural, and fine arts experts and leaders should be set up to help you carry out the study. This would assure the public of its impartiality and the soundness of its conclusions. The major purpose of the study I propose, which I urge you to undertake, should be to find ways to make the Carter Barron Amphitheater a far greater and much more significant educational, cultural, and artistic force in the Nation's Capital than it has ever been. Such a study should certainly show conclusively what other major cities here and abroad do toward encouraging and developing and assisting in the growth of their own local artistic groups, their own talented artists, their own young artists; how much "commercial talent" they import; the role of civic, nonprofit groups similar to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington Opera Society; and whether they import all the talent presented on their summer programs from other cities as the Department of the Interior does in its programs at the Carter Barron Amphitheater. No doubt professional, commercial entertainment of the kind which the Department of the Interior presents at the Carter Barron Amphitheater, including at times, I am told, sick jokes and a burlesque-hall-type of humor which would not be permitted on the family television set (which is significant, I think, at a time when broadcasting is being blamed by irate parents for some of the rising tide of juvenile delinquency), has its place. However, whether that place is in this great cultural facility to the utter exclusion of the National Symphony Orchestra and other civic, nonprofit educational and cultural programs, activities, and groups, would be thoroughly explored by the kind of a study I have proposed. It might well be that it would be found during the course of the proposed study that some of these programs which are presented at the Carter Barron Amphitheater should be presented in a privately owned theater or night club under commercial auspices for private profit and not be given the endorsement of the Federal Government which presentation at the Carter Barron Amphitheater implies. I shall now suggest some additional matters which the proposed study should cover. For instance, I find it shocking that the Department of the Interior has no place in its Carter Barron Amphitheater programs for the National Symphony Orchestra and other nonprofit cultural groups of the Nation's Capital. The National Symphony Orchestra is the only major symphony orchestra in the United States without a summer season. At the present time, the highly talented musicians of the National Symphony Orchestra must turn to other forms of employment to eke out a livelihood. Their resourcefulness in this regard is little short of amazing, though it does little to advance the cultural life of the Nation's Capital. Some of these musicians are summer salesmen, and summer guards carrying guns in Federal buildings including the Library of Congress. This situation persists year after year in the Nation's Capital without any sign that top officials of the Federal Government, who are sensitive to the cultural aspirations of people abroad in other nations, are aware of, or understand, its full implications in a world in which the United States in this cold war period has assumed leadership of the free world. New York City, with the solid backing of the city administration and the mayor, has its summer music programs and its free Shakespeare in Central Park. Other U.S. cities have summer programs in all of the arts, many of them free to the public or available at nominal sums. Philadelphia's Robin Hood Dell concerts are world famous, and the city of Philadelphia contributes $75,000 annually to make them possible. The St. Louis Municipal Opera, the Hollywood Bowl concerts, the Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., these and a hundred other famous summer music programs are in the mainstream of the tradition established by the free band concerts on the common or the courthouse squareone of the oldest and most universal of American cultural institutions. You may rest assured, Mr. Secretary, that any step you may take to broaden, deepen, and to raise the educational and cultural, and artistic level of the fare offered at the Carter Barron Ampitheater will meet with powerful and respectable support from all sections of our country from people in all walks of life who are fed up with the tawdry, the cheap, and the spurious cultural values and fare which are so easily available to them and their children. They want something better, something nobler than the art factories of New York's Broadway, and Hollywood, and radio and television offer in such massive doses. They want something vital, alive, and close to the American dream and the American promise. The sweep of history has made the United States the leader of the free world, and we must compete with the Soviet union for the minds and the hearts of men everywhere in the world. The Nation's Capital must take its rightful place beside other capital cities of the world in cultural matters if we are successfully to carry forward our high mission. That the Department of the Interior, in its management of the Carter Barron Amphitheater, has not been able to accommodate the National Symphony Orchestra-or even the Washington Civic Opera Association-is nothing short of preposterous. It is high time that a study was made of how such groups could use this great cultural facility in view of the statements made repeatedly by national publications that the Nation's Capital is a "hick town" behind even such a provincial capital as Tiflis, U.S.S.R., in the fine arts. A second step which you could take would be to create immediately an advisory panel of civic, educational, cultural, and fine arts leaders to help to develop a challenging and significant cultural and artistic program at the Carter Barron Amphitheater which would rise to the level of some of the world-famous cultural festivals in this country and in Europe. The Pablo Casals festival in Puerto Rico should be an inspiration and a guide to you in developing a major cultural program for the Nation's Capital at the Carter Barron Amphitheater and in the other facilities controlled by the Department of the Interior. Sincerely yours, CARROLL D. KEARNS. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, Washington, D.C. Hon. STEWART L. UDALL, Secretary, Department of the Interior, DEAR MR. SECRETARY: It is always instructive to us "old hands" in the Congress to have replies shot from the hip at us by minor officials in Federal departments and agencies which hit the front pages of the newspapers whenever we write to the heads of those agencies; and even before we get an official answer. I wrote to you on June 1 pointing out, among other things, that Puerto Rico, in the Pablo Casals festival, had a much higher cultural content to that program than the Capital City of the richest Nation in the world had in the Carter Barron Amphitheater program run by the Department of the Interior. So far, I have had no reply to my letter. You are advised that my letter was hand-delivered to your office on May 31. This morning I have had a reply of a kind to my complaint that the Department of the Interior "has no place in its Carter Barron Amphitheater programs for the National Symphony Orchestra and other nonprofit cultural groups of the Nation's Capital. The National Symphony Orchestra is the only major symphony orchestra in the United States without a summer season." In a front-page article in the Washington Post of June 5, 1961, we find the following information: "We would love to have them there," T. Sutton Jett, Superintendent of the National Capital Parks charged with administration of the amphitheater said, referring to the National Symphony, "but we can't afford them." A study made by the Library of Congress in 1959 and inserted in the Congressional Record by both Senator Hubert H. Humphrey and Representative Harris B. McDowell, Jr., showed that the Nation's Capital spends annually on the arts the fantastic sum of $16,000. This is the lowest amount of any city in the United States except Hagerstown, Md., which spends $12,500 on the fine arts, according to the study. In the 86th Congress bills were introduced by Senator Humphrey, Senator Morse, Representative Harris B. McDowell, Jr., and Representative Frank Thompson, Jr., setting aside 1 mill, or one-thousandth of a dollar, out of local taxes for cultural programs. It was estimated at the time that this would raise $185,000 at a minimum for cultural programs. This year, Senator Clark, of Pennsylvania, Congressman Frank Thompson, Congressman Powell, of New York, Congressman Chelf, of Kentucky, and Congressman Celler, of New York, have introduced legislation providing a Federal-State grant-in-aid program to help the fine arts. I have cosponsored this legislation and I am happy to advise you that $100,000 would be provided annually for the District of Columbia art programs, including those at the Carter Barron Amphitheater. However, since the Department of the Interior has the largest cultural facility in the Nation's Capital in its charge it should have come to the Congress for the funds necessary to properly present the National Symphony Orchestra and other nonprofit cultural programs such as the Washington Civic Opera Co., the Children's Theater of Washington, the Washington Ballet Co., and other groups at the Carter Barron Amphitheater. The present appropriation of $16,000 for the fine arts won't be raised unless the Congress, which is in charge of the purse strings regarding local appropriations of the city of Washington, raises it. It won't raise it to anywhere near the sums spent on the arts by other cities until you, Mr. Secretary, and others, including the District of Columbia Recreation Department-which is charged by the Congress with carrying on cultural programs in the Nation's Capital together with the Department of the Interior-seriously get down to the business of developing the kind of cultural program which the Congress authorized in the Carter Barron Amphitheater Act, and the act establishing the District of Columbia Recreation Department. It was with this in mind, Mr. Secretary, that I suggested in my letter that a special advisory committee made up of educational, cultural, and fine arts experts and leaders should be set up to make a study of how the Carter Barron Amphitheater could be made a major cultural force. I said that the Department of the Interior's stewardship of the Carter Barron Amphitheater "as a cultural facility" over the years should be subjected to a critical and searching analysis, and no attempt to justify sins of omission or commission should be permitted. Nor should any bureaucratic "whitewash" be attempted. In view of the evident feeling at the Department of the Interior that the richest Nation in the world can't afford a worthy cultural program in the Carter Barron Amphitheater which was the gift of the people of this Nation to the Nation's Capital for such programs, the special advisory committee should undertake a study of how such programs are financed in other major cities of the United States and Europe. The Federal Government cannot continue any longer to occupy its present anomalous position which, by its control of the purse strings, denies to the people of Washington, D.C., the right to appropriate their own tax funds for the support of cultural activities, and by its control of the major summer cultural facility denies its use for the National Symphony Orchestra, the Washington Ballet Co., the Washington Civic Opera, the Children's Theater, and other local cultural groups. You must know, Mr. Secretary, that the Watergate is no longer suitable for cultural programs due to the fact that at least one great 4-engine airplane flies immediately overhead every minute as the landing field at the National Airport is approached. The Federal Government shows not the slightest concern for this situation, and has consistently supported the airplanes over culture. Having made the Watergate unsuitable by the airflight landing patterns, it now says that it cannot afford to use the Carter Barron Amphitheater for major cultural programs. If this situation doesn't cry for a broad-based inquiry then nothing does. No doubt sick jokes and burlesque hall humor pays its way. This is the way with things in our society where educational and cultural programs are crowded out of the television programs by soap operas, westerns, and a myriad other items which are able to find wealthy sponsors, who can write their cost off as business expenses. As I said in my letter of June 1, which I hope you will soon find time to answer even though it might keep you from a hike up the canal in this beautiful weather, the American people want something better than is so easily available to them and their children in the Carter Barron Amphitheater and over the television stations. They want something vital, alive, and close to the American dream and the American promise. I wrote you, too, that "the sweep of history has made the United States the leader of the free world, and we must compete with the Soviet Union for the minds and the hearts of men everywhere in the world." The United States, and its National Capital "must take its place” beside other nations and other capital cities in support of cultural matters. That the Nation's Capital is behind, even such a provincial capital city as Tiflis, U.S.S.R. should and must be a matter of concern to you, Mr. Secretary, just as it is to me if only because of the cold war and the competition of the Soviet Union. I shall look forward to hearing from you personally on this matter, Mr. Secretary. I enclose herewith a copy of the Library of Congress study to which I have referred. Sincerely yours, Hon. HUBERT H. HUMPHREY, CARROLL D. KEARNS, Member of Congress. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, DEAR SENATOR HUMPHREY: In Mr. Coombs' absence, I am replying to your letter of April 25 in which you ask for his views concerning Harold Weston's proposal for a national conference on the arts and government. We have studied the outline of the proposed conference as well as the suggestion as set forth in Mr. Weston's letter to Pierre Salinger that such a conference be held under White House auspices. We believe that a conference which would help to define and clarify the appropriate role of Government in the arts is very much to be desired and agree with you that Mr. Weston's particular suggestion has a great deal of merit. The conference itself appears to be well conceived. Its objective statement of the issues invites impartial consideration and the broad participation for it appears to include all interests concerned. Mr. Weston's proposal that the conference be sponsored by the White House is also fitting. That President and Mrs. Kennedy have already identified themselves so closely with the arts has had an exhilarating influence on American cultural life. Their association with such a conference would visibly confirm this personal interest and would symbolize at the highest level of the Government's recognition that this is a national problem in which it must carry a share of responsibility. |