Crosby Kemper: As DOGE targets federal cultural agency I led, its work must go on | Opinion

I was the last director of the federal agency the Institute of Museum and Library Services, just scheduled for serious reduction or elimination by the Trump administration. Relatively unknown and making up only a small portion of library and museum funding nationally, it probably looked like easy pickin’s to the newly dedicated civil servants of the Department of Government Efficiency. So what?

The IMLS, to which I was appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term with unanimous Senate confirmation, is the nation’s largest cultural agency, granting somewhat more money than the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities. And with the turn of Mellon and Gates foundations to social justice and health care, the IMLS is now larger than any other such institution. We have been the quiet, nonpolarizing support of American culture through museums and libraries.

I was one of very few kept on in the Biden administration; they fired the chairs of the NEA and NEH on Day 1. They said I was a “professional.”

What I am really is an amateur devoted to his country, the republic, its culture and the founders’ view of the importance of an informed citizenry. And that is what the IMLS does. In the most Tocquevillian sense, the IMLS does this by funding local institutions to preserve America’s cultural heritage through exhibits, programs, training, preservation and use of technology.

And we provide leadership. When the COVID-19 pandemic started and our webinars with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Johns Hopkins University showed a general muddle of the scientific establishment, we decided to do our own research at the independent nonprofit Battelle, with money generously provided by the Carnegie Foundation, Mellon and the Library of Congress. It helped demonstrate the still underreported importance of air flow, the safety of surfaces and books and computers when exposed to the coronavirus, and was eventually published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.

At the end of the pandemic, recognizing the huge backsliding consequence for children, our first conference — and part of my lifetime work — was about the science of reading, importance of reading, of literacy not only for citizenship, but also for social and economic success and keeping the American dream alive for every child — and the long history of the library’s role in doing just that.

The IMLS has been a leader in spreading the message of Raj Chetty and the nonprofit Opportunity Insights on what is called the “neighborhood effect” on social mobility. The commonsense revelation (which you could also get from reading Tocqueville) is that strong institutions at the local level, and people coming together from all backgrounds to solve problems, make up not only the greatest strength of American democracy, but the greatest opportunity for those struggling to rise.

Keith Sonderling, temporarily appointed by the president to lead the IMLS, has said he is there to promote efficiency, innovation and patriotism. He will find IMLS doing all three.

Community grants to rural areas

The Grants to States is the largest program of the IMLS, granting $170 million with a handful of staff to state libraries, themselves very efficiently staffed, who provide money to exemplar library programs in city libraries and technology, collection or community history and archiving programs to libraries in rural areas and small towns. As you might expect, a little more of this money ends up in red state districts — not for political reasons but because they need it.

The IMLS has funded tech programs using radio wave technologies to provide broadband signals that can penetrate in dense urban environments and go longer distances in rural and tribal areas. And cheaper than current technologies. Innovation, Mr. Sonderling, innovation!

President Trump appointed a bipartisan group to lead the America250 Commission in celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of our nation. I was an ex officio member. As a series of Wall Street Journal articles detailed, the commission got of to a rocky, contentious and poorly funded start. We at the IMLS decided to provide leadership and do our own program, as an example to libraries and museums of what they could for our country’s celebration.

Wide ideological spectrum for 250th anniversary

We reached out to five civic leaders for conversations, including Danielle Allen, author of “Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.” Trump likes to use the word “beautiful.” Mr. President, this is a beautiful book to guide our celebration next year. We invited Yuval Levin, editor of The National Interest and author of “The Fractured Republic,” to the conversation. And Jeff Rosen, constitutional scholar and director of the National Constitution Center; Edna Greene Medford, chair emerita of the Howard University History Department and Emancipation Declaration and Lincoln scholar; and Wilfred McClay of Hillsdale College, author of “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story,” to guide us publicly. They represent great scholarship and a wide ideological spectrum — and yet together offer a deep, coherent view of the importance of the American republic at its 250th birthday.

To demonstrate this, we partnered with Detroit PBS and PBS Books to tell a series of stories in communities around the country. We started with the story of Henry Johnson and the Harlem Hellfighters in World War — an incredible story of battlefield valor. We filmed at Freedom Tower in Miami to tell the story of 640,000 Cuban exiles who came there as refugees from Fidel Castro, and in record time became among the most dynamic and accomplished Americans. Then we went to the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle to tell the story of the Nisei Regiment in World War II, the most decorated regiment in American History, with 4,000 purple hearts. And more than 1,500 of them volunteered, because they couldn’t be drafted — because they came from our country’s Japanese internment camps!

We went to the Heard Museum in Phoenix, where we talked about the stunning, not well known facts that in World War I, the highest percentage of volunteers were Native Americans, as again it was in World War II. In 1917, most Native Americans were not citizens. They did not achieve that until 1924, partly because of their demonstration of patriotism in the war. On the same trip, we took the IMLS board to the Ak Chin Indian Community south of Phoenix. There is a small museum telling the history of the O’odham people. There are three exhibits. One is a series of counts or censuses of the tribe dating back to the 19th century, not unlike the traditional winter counts showing the difficulty the federal government had in even estimating the population. On two other walls were pictures and names — one of those lost to COVID-19 (a very high percentage of the tribe), and one of those who had fought in the world wars and lost their lives (also a very high percentage).

We also visited the little but very well-used tribal library. There, volunteers and staff members were deeply engaged in reading programs partly paid for by the IMLS, of which they were justifiably proud. In my tenure in the federal government, I’m not sure I saw a better use of money in helping members of a poor but resilient community on their way to a better life.

Kansas City’s Negro Leagues and jazz

Our last episode was filmed in my hometown of Kansas City, where we told the story of Negro Leagues Baseball and American jazz at those two wonderful museums at 18th & Vine: Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams and Count Basie creating that uniquely American sound, and Satchel Paige and Buck O’Neil playing their way, with their unique but quintessentially American talents, into Cooperstown.

We finished our episodic journey with a conversation with the Baron of Barbecue, Ollie Gates, over a plateful of ribs and beans, telling the history of a successful American entrepreneur in the heart of America.

The series is called “Visions of America,” and we thought it could tell a story for our time. And for our 250th anniversary, that is the kind of story museums and libraries have always been good at bringing people together to hear and to tell.

The story of the Institute of Museum and Library Services is the flagship for this telling of the American story. Mr. President, it would be a beautiful thing if you keep her proudly sailing.