Last week we began looking in on the history of the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington DC.
By late 1955 it looked like a national cultural center might be built, if Congress could agree where to put it. Turned out that was a big “if” for a while. Many of its backers wanted it to be on the National Mall, primarily for symbolic reasons. Others however wanted to use that same spot to build a national space and air museum. That summer both the US and the Soviet Union had announced their intentions to launch satellites within the next two years, and the “Space Race” was getting hot.
Both sides in the debate repeatedly tried to make their claim for the spot. Finally, the Bureau of the Budget, the Commission of Fine Arts, and the Secretary of the Smithsonian himself all testified against putting the National Cultural Center on the site. The site was simply too small for a suitable performing arts center. It was a point that really couldn’t be countered. Eventually the insistence for a location on the mall was dropped entirely. (This plot of land, by the way, is where the Air and Space Museum is today.)
The answer to the location question ultimately came from a different source entirely. Over a year earlier, the Washington, D.C. Auditorium Commission recommended that a National Civic Auditorium be built somewhere on a rambling twenty-seven-acre tract along the Potomac River just to the west of the Naval Hospital on Navy Hill. Congress decided that would be the spot.
On August 1, Eisenhower began urging congressional leaders to support the project and just a month later, on September 2, 1958, he signed the bill creating the National Cultural Center. The government provided nine acres along the Potomac on which it would be built. The Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare said the center would be much more than just a performance hall. It would be a “symbol of the highest cultural interests, achievements, and aspirations of the American people.” It would “be of incalculable value in interpreting America to foreign countries, as well as being an object of pride on the part of all Americans interested in improving the level of cultural activities in the United States.”
The center would be constructed and operated under the direction of a thirty-member board of trustees chosen by the President. Half of them were to be government officials; half private citizens. The bill also created an advisory committee on the arts, members of which were appointed by the President, to advise and consult with the board of trustees on the cultural activities performed at the center. Eisenhower appointed Fred Waring, one of his favorite band leaders, to the advisory committee. But building it wouldn’t be so easy.