The Right Stuff: About $250,000

As every American prone to envy already knows, each year the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation offers $500,000 checks to twenty or thirty writers, graphic artists, social scientists, real scientists, public officials, basket weavers, political activists, and general-purpose busybodies, in return for which the recipients are expected to do . . . nothing. The genius grants famously come with “no strings attached.” And sure enough, the reporter for Crain’s managed to follow up on a select group of genius grant recipients, those in the literary arts, and found that nothing is exactly what the recipients produced after they cashed their checks.

Well, I’m exaggerating. “Genius grants don’t pay off in literature,” said the Crain’s headline. The article noted that the financial freedom offered by the grants was intended to “help writers produce their best work.” But it doesn’t! “Crain’s determined that 88 percent of the MacArthur recipients wrote their greatest works before being recognized. . . . The sheer number of books produced by the writers declined, too. . . . ” The report cited, among many other examples, the novelist Ernest J. Gaines, who published his best-known novel, A Lesson Before Dying, the same year he got a genius grant, 1993, and hasn’t published anything since.

MacArthur publicists dismissed the Crain’s story with the hauteur you’d expect from people who dangle money before geniuses. What the recipients produced, or whether they produced anything at all, was a matter of indifference to the foundation, the publicists said. The foundation declines to follow up on the grants and assess the impact they might have had on the grantees. “Creativity is not a quantitative matter,” said a MacArthur spokesman.

Money, on the other hand, is a quantitative matter, and no conservative could have been surprised at the result reported by Crain’s, being aware, as conservatives are, of the “moral hazard” involved in an enterprise like the genius grant. Slinging around great bags of money, with no expectation of return, and then professing uninterest in the effects the windfall might have, really does seem like one of those ideas that only a liberal could think was terrific. The entire domestic policy agenda of Lyndon Baines Johnson was based on it, with well-known consequences. Conservatives are made of sterner, or at least more realistic, stuff.

They are, aren’t they? So you might have thought, until the Bradley prizes were conceived. Founded in Milwaukee in 1985, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is, according to its mission statement, “devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles and values that sustain and nurture it.” For twenty years, it has funded a raft of worthy endeavors.

The first four Bradley prizes were handed out in late 2003, and from the start it was plain that the similarities with the MacArthurs were intentional. As with the genius grants, nominations for possible recipients of the Bradley prizes are offered by 100 “prominent individuals” who, despite their prominence, remain anonymous. A much smaller selection committee of even more prominent individuals then winnows the nominees down to the happy four. Like the genius grants, the awards are given with no strings attached, and are bestowed according to imprecise, not to say mysterious, criteria–“achievements that are consistent with the mission statement of the foundation.” And as with the genius grants, every eligible human being would knife his grandmother to get one.

But there are important differences between the two awards, too. Genius grants go for $500,000; whether as a nod toward fiscal conservatism or simply as a reflection of shallower pockets, Bradley prizes are $250,000. Genius grants are handed out in relative quiet, with the dissemination of a press release. Bradley prizes entail splashier arrangements, designed for maximum publicity. Last year the ceremony was held at the Library of Congress, but that affair was deemed too snoozy. This year came the Kennedy Center ceremony, an extravaganza with musical performances, video interludes, and even an “anonymous glamour girl,” as Pia Catton put it in the New York Sun, to escort the lucky winners with their trophies off stage. The glamour girl was dressed in an evening gown, in the paleoconservative manner. Comedian Chris Rock served as master of ceremonies.

But the biggest difference with the genius grants–I’m kidding about Chris Rock, by the way–lies in the recipients themselves. Unlike MacArthur’s grantees, the Bradley recipients are political or cultural conservatives, each an estimable personage of genuine accomplishment. They are well-established in their fields, admired by their colleagues, and secure in their professional positions. Genius grants more often than not go to people in obscure or humble circumstances. The Bradley prize, in a unique twist, is awarded to people who don’t need it.

For that matter, the prize amounts to a parody of what liberals say conservatives always want to do anyway–in tax cuts, for example: boost the circumstances of people whose circumstances don’t need boosting, pass lots of money to people who already have lots of money. Among this year’s winners was George Will, who is not only the most talented, tireless, and famous columnist of his generation but also the highest paid. (Accepting his award, Will told the Kennedy Center audience that winning the Bradley was “even better” than winning the Pulitzer. Well, duh. The Pulitzer comes with a check for $10,000. The Bradley is $240,000 better than the Pulitzer.)

Another of this year’s winners, Ward Connerly, became well known for his public opposition to racial quotas. He is also a wealthy businessman who receives generous compensation in salary and benefits from his own tax-exempt political organization. Robert P. George, a greatly gifted political philosopher, holds a tenured position at Princeton and serves as director of the university’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Last year’s winners, too, were dominated by tenure-holders: Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard, Leon Kass of the University of Chicago, and Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. Also included last year was another Pulitzer prize-winning columnist, Charles Krauthammer.

Of all the Bradley winners, in fact, only one fits the profile of a person who might greatly benefit from a sudden gusher of munificence: Heather Mac Donald, a writer, thinker, and reporter of imperturbable courage and intelligence whose professional affiliation–she is listed as “a contributing editor to City Journal“–doesn’t exactly scream “lifetime job security.” Otherwise, those 100 anonymous and prominent nominators solicited by the Bradley Foundation seem to have ranged over a field limited by an astonishing lack of knowledge and imagination. They really do need to get out more. Even now there are small, conservative intellectual quarterlies struggling to stay afloat for lack of money. And just off the top of my head I could name two dozen worthy individual recipients–young and energetic writers and academics and artists, working in relative obscurity and eager for a breather from financial necessity to continue work that would, in all likelihood, make a contribution to “the values that sustain and nurture” American civilization. Not all of them work at The Weekly Standard.

Of course, this is not the first time that conservatives have taken a liberal idea and, aping it, managed to make it dumber; Republicans on Capitol Hill have been doing it for years. But it’s still true that the justification most often heard in defense of the self-evident absurdity of the Bradley prizes–“Liberals do it too!”–is pretty weak. The most obvious response to such reasoning is to paraphrase the retort offered by mothers since the beginning of time: “If liberals went and jumped off a cliff, would you do that too?”

Wait. Don’t answer that.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.