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conform to a sense of common public taste and liking. Watenhall (1988) describes the conflict in <br /> federal government as being whether art was a needless frill on overburdened taxpayers or <br /> whether culture should be democratized and what that might mean. Marie Gee (1996) states that <br /> in the McCarthy era there was a fear on the government's part of funding left-wing artists and <br /> their ideas. In its search for a cultural identity following World War II, many members of <br /> Congress viewed the left wing and communist threat offered by artists and intellectuals as a real <br /> concern. <br /> Starting in the 1960's, with the age of the Kennedy presidency, culture began to be <br /> considered an important part of the Country's ambitions to become a great civilization. Public <br /> support for the arts began to grow as efforts to democratize the arts and to make art accessible to <br /> `everyone'began to flourish. Several programs that had their genesis in the depression-era arts <br /> programs received new life in the 1960's with the formation of the General Services <br /> Administration(GSA)Art in Architecture (AiA) and the National Endowment for the Arts <br /> (NEA) in Public Places (APP). In 1963, under President Lyndon Johnson's administration, the <br /> General Service Administration (GSA) established an Art in Architecture program. This program <br /> reserved one-half of one percent of the estimated construction cost of each new federal building <br /> to commission project artists. This program was established based upon a depression era percent <br /> for art program established by executive order in 1934. It was the Treasury Section of Fine Art <br /> that commissioned I% of a public building's administration construction funds for building <br /> embellishments (Melosh 1991). The program ended in 1943. <br /> The first local "Percent-for-Public Art" ordinance in the United States was adopted by the <br /> City of Philadelphia. A decade later, the City of San Francisco adopted a similar program for <br /> public art. Seattle's King County, adopted an ordinance in 1973 that created a program that <br /> 47 <br />