It was a measure not only of his robust good health but the vitality of his public commitments that Bruce Cole’s sudden death last week came as such a shock to so many people—and that they were shocked to discover that he was 79. He seemed so much younger. Bruce had become one of the key figures in the cultural politics of our times and the most distinguished scholar ever to grace the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he served during most of the George W. Bush administration—making him the longest-serving chairman in the endowment’s history. Although he retired from the NEH in 2009, he otherwise never really retired and was still operating at the top of his game, turning out brilliant essays, in venues such as the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and this magazine, about the future of the humanities and the direction of our public culture. He will prove impossible to replace, either in our public life or for those of us who were privileged to have him as a friend.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once declared that there are no second acts in American lives. But he never knew a guy like Bruce Cole, a quintessential American patriot for whom the great motto attributed to Michelangelo, Ancora imparo—I am still learning—could well have served as his own. Most of those now reading my words will know Bruce primarily from his second act, as a public servant, or his third, which has just been so rudely interrupted. They will know little or nothing of his 30-year career as a professor of art history, mainly at Indiana University—platoons of his beloved and devoted students went on to outstanding careers in the academy and as curators in museums—or of his dozen or so books in his specialty, the Italian Renaissance.
Nor will they know that, for all his refinement and brilliance, he was the least stuffy or pretentious or self-important of men and delighted in his identity as a Hoosier and his roots as a proudly Midwestern American—born in Cleveland but an adopted son of the state of Indiana. He loved Italy with just the same passion as the would-be expatriates of which his profession is full, but he did not aspire to be like them and never played the game of echoing Ernest Hemingway’s supposed gibes against his Midwestern homeland of “broad lawns and narrow minds.” Bruce knew who he was. He and his wife Doreen never gave up their home in Bloomington, and in recent post-NEH years, in response to the plea of then-governor Mitch Daniels, he agreed to a term of service on the IU board, where he did what he did best in his public life: stirred things up, afflicted the comfortable, and looked out for the interests of the general populace—all with his eyes on the university’s larger purpose in American society.
That was his philosophy in running the NEH. If the endowment had any justification for its existence, in his view, it was to be an agency that served the whole American public and not merely the special interests of the connected: the well-heeled research universities and their faculties, the large research libraries and museums, and the projects of public-broadcasting mavens. I served for 11 years on the National Council on the Humanities, the NEH’s advisory board, and Bruce’s tenure offered a stark contrast in that regard to what had come before him and what has come since. He served notice early in his tenure that there was new management in town when he withdrew the imprimatur of NEH from a grant for the book Arming America by Michael Bellesiles, which had been shown to be fraudulent. He encouraged the council to help him in weeding out ideological corruption and academic back-scratching in the endowment’s grant programs, and we were inspired by his intellectual and moral leadership to do just that.
No chairman before or since has involved himself more deeply in the operations of the agency. Bruce attended hundreds of peer-review panels, carefully read thousands of grant applications, and paid close attention to personnel issues—mind-numbing and tedious tasks, but essential to the reform of any bureaucratic agency. In Washington, 70 percent of doing a job well is in creating the conditions to be able to do the job, rather than just hold the office; Bruce was willing to put in the time to accomplish that, rather than just go with the flow. The result was an NEH that one could be proud of, one genuinely serving the national interest. There was complaining here and there, of course, as there always is when toes are pinched and perks withdrawn, but Bruce’s time at the NEH, paired with poet Dana Gioia’s equally inspired chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts, proved to be a pinnacle of excellence for the agency, one it will be hard put to recover after the mediocre and politicized leadership of the cultural agencies in the Obama years.
This perspective took on heightened importance for Bruce with the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent national response. His NEH appointment had been in the pipeline before 9/11, but he was quick to understand how these terror attacks on the homeland necessitated a clearer focus on the agency’s fundamental obligations. “Defending our homeland,” he said at his swearing-in, “requires not only successful military campaigns; it also depends on citizens understanding their history, their institutions, and their ideals.” Properly understood and cultivated, “the humanities show us what it means to be an American, and why America’s ideals are worth fighting for.” But, as he said in a 2002 speech at NYU, “a nation that does not know why it exists, or what it stands for, cannot be expected to long endure. We must recover from the amnesia that shrouds our history in darkness, our principles in confusion, and our future in uncertainty.” Words that ring even louder today.
He went on to become a champion of civic education and to establish a signature initiative, “We the People,” designed to encourage new scholarship and fresh public programs that would deepen and renew our understanding and appreciation of our American heritage. That this was more than ritual flag-waving stuff was indicated by the title of the elegant little book the NEH issued on the project’s fifth anniversary: An Informed Patriotism, which brought together some of Bruce’s most important speeches as NEH chair and detailed the array of programs on the national, state, and local levels to which “We the People” gave rise.
Among these was the great initiative of his second term, “Picturing America,” which brought his art-historian’s sensibility into the task that “We the People” had begun. Recognizing that the wellsprings of patriotic sentiment are fed not only by ideas but by images, Bruce and his staff assembled a selection of 40 important and representative works of American art—from Copley’s Paul Revere to Bierstadt’s Yosemite to Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech and Karales’s famous photograph of the Selma-to-Montgomery march—and made them available in high-quality reproductions to K-12 classrooms and libraries, accompanied by commentary and instructional aids. All of it was free of charge, underwritten by generous sponsors from the private sector. It was an amazing success, the creation of a national iconography that became the largest such program in the endowment’s history and one of the many reasons why President Bush gave Bruce the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2008, for “his work to strengthen our national memory and ensure that our country’s heritage is passed on to future generations.” All of this was accomplished in the second act of Bruce Cole’s life.
That passing-on is never assured, however, and Bruce continued to worry about the state of the humanities in his third act. In a 2016 Public Discourse article, Bruce complained that “humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.” And yet he never ceased insisting upon the essential importance of the humanities and defending them against those who viewed them as dispensable and soft. The battle for the humanities must be fought simultaneously on two fronts, against the excesses of intellectual and ideological corruption on the one hand and against unreflective philistinism and soullessness on the other. Bruce Cole was an eloquent voice on behalf of that balanced ideal. But more than that, he was an example of that ideal in his person.
He simply was immune to what Roger Scruton has labeled “oikophobia,” the fear that afflicts soi-disant cosmopolitans who feel an unnatural aversion to patriotic sentiment, and he sloughed off the charges that what he promoted at the NEH was jingoistic or chauvinist. He was a man thoroughly at home in America, with an admirable marriage, family, and a life in full. He did not feel himself part of an “adversary culture” by virtue of being an intellectual and a historian of European art, and I could no more imagine him raging against “bourgeois values” and “consumer capitalism” than I could imagine him wearing bellbottomed jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt rather than his characteristically natty charcoal-gray tailored suit, set off by an elegant tie and pocket handkerchief.
But he also was thoroughly at home in the larger world, with an expansive perspective that was the fruit of a lifetime of immersion in the highest and noblest and most beautiful things. His was the true spirit of cosmopolitanism, which involves an imaginative sympathy for the homes and hearths of others, not the forswearing of home for oneself. My fondest personal memory of him will always be the chilly spring day that he and I spent in Florence, with my wife Julie and his wife Doreen, prowling the streets and alleys of a city that he knew and loved and commented upon copiously, a running narrative conveyed with all the intimacy and intense affection of a lifelong resident.
Which, in a sense, he was. It was not a stretch for him to think of the fate of America and the Italian Renaissance and the West, all in one moment, within a single frame, in ways that were as personal as they were intellectual. For him and Doreen, any trip back to Florence was a trip down memory lane to their earliest days together as a married couple in the mid-1960s, when Bruce was an impecunious graduate student and they were discovering the sights and tastes and other delights of an ancient city that has stayed a part of their lives ever since. They were there in 1966 when Florence was afflicted with massive floods from the spring rains, and the Duomo and other depositories of irreplaceable Renaissance art were threatened by the rising waters, and they were part of the valiant corps of “Mud Angels” who labored to rescue those precious artworks from certain destruction. They have been rescuing things, or trying to, ever since.
Wilfred M. McClay is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma.
