MacArthur Awards: In Praise of America’s Genius

Every year now, after the Academy Awards, after the Pulitzer Prizes, around the time of the Tony Awards, come the MacArthur fellowships. The “MacArthur” is one of Ameri ca’s glittering prizes, given to the best among us, the brightest, the people who might change America, the people who should be our true heroes.

Last week, MacArthur prizes were awarded to 20 Americans. As in years past, and since the award’s inception in 1981, the list of winners is a zany mix of tenured academics, artists and social activists. Winners are given grants that vary from $150,000 to $375,000, spread over five years. (One of the quirks of the awards: The older you are, and the more established, the more money you get.)

The media has dubbed the MacArthur prizes “genius awards,” a label foundation officials reportedly find embarrassing. But the language of the MacArthur Foundation grandly describes the awards as going to “exceptionally talented and promising individuals.”

It reminds me of that TV show from the ‘50s--”The Millionaire.” Each week, an anonymous rich man would dispense a cashiers check for $1 million to an unsuspecting citizen. In the 30 minutes that followed, Americans who had bought their tract house with an FHA loan and new Chevy for no money down, Americans would watch what happens when sudden good fortune drives up to the front door. It was like watching the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes winner.

Academics are gossips. People who nominate candidates for the prizes are not secret, as the foundation would wish. One hears, in detail, about committee meetings. The allure of the MacArthur, nonetheless, is its fiction of secrecy and its whimsy--a mimicry of divine providence.

Every year, one looks for a logic. Why does that elderly Southern writer get a MacArthur? Why that political scientist? A juggler wins, or a clown. Why? One might as well try reading the mind of God.

Critics of the award have noted its leftward tilt and East Coast bias. If one were to believe the MacArthur Foundation, the majority of American geniuses live east of the Mississippi, are white, male. Latino geniuses tend to be social organizers; black geniuses to be writers. There is a startling absence of Asians. But to make such observations is to buy into the logic of the MacArthur Foundation.

A woman who works as an agent for several sculptors and painters tells me that prizes like the MacArthur make artists crazy. “Imagine what it is like to have talent, real talent, and yet to go unrecognized; while around you, people as gifted or less gifted are winning awards, giving each other awards.”

In the TV show, one never saw the face of the millionaire. One heard his voice--a stately baritone--Hollywood’s version of the voice of God.

Prizes are given to people who apparently can use the money (social activists) as well as to the famous and tenured. The prizes are most distasteful for having about them the quality of an experiment. Zeus at play. What would happen if we gave that person five years without money worries?

In the 14 years the prizes have been given, no one has turned down the money. Which is a bit of a surprise, if only because one would suppose genius wouldn’t trust the distraction of money, would fear the temptation of money.

My suspicion is that true genius is fiendish. The real struggle for the person of great talent is not financial but one of direction. (How shall I finish this novel?) Once direction is found, then the genius will pursue it, and damn all obstacles! Money is the least of it.

On the other hand, I know choreographers, actors, activists, poets (always so many poets) who give up their vocation for lack of next month’s rent. The burden of the small bill, the shrill voice of the collection agent demanding the check for $200, is what deadens the soul. A manuscript gets put into the drawer for lack of money enough to pay PG&E.;

John D. MacArthur was different from the Ivy League types who run his foundation today. MacArthur was an eighth-grade dropout. A billionaire by the time of his death, he made his bucks in real estate and insurance. We like to describe such people as “self-made.” We imagine the type: gruff, plain-spoken, direct.

It was only after his death, and because of his son, that the MacArthur Foundation became mainline liberal in its goals. Yet, there remains about the MacArthur prizes a faith that is deeply Protestant, individualistic and capitalistic. Give the artist big money and you will get big art.

Genius, in the opinion of the MacArthur Foundation, is the achievement of the individual. Old John D. MacArthur would perhaps be horrified by some of the labor organizers and activists who have gotten his money. But the curious thing is that the foundation specified that grants will go only to individuals, not organizations.

The assumption is that the talented organizer creates organizations, not the other way around. So while an educator can win a MacArthur, it is not possible for a grant to be given, say, to a Catholic grammar school in Bedford-Stuyvesant that routinely saves 6-year-olds.

The logic of the MacArthur prizes borrows from the “trickle-down” theories of the Reagan years. Give the genius an opportunity to spread his or her creative wings, and the entire society below will feel the benefit of the achievement.

But there is also the logic of the “best and brightest”--that faith that flourished during the Kennedy years and that survives in the Clinton White House. Get a group of Yale Law School graduates or Rhodes scholars together and they can solve any problem.

It comes down to this: Do you believe that genius--like the mythic self-made businessman--is a singular achievement or do you believe that genius gets created and sustained by an entire society?

My guess is that America is the creation of individuals, but individuals constantly shaping one another, creating one another. A genius happens because his mother worked for the phone company to send him to school, or a grade-school teacher took dirt wages to teach him to write.

The crisis in America, the big shots back East keep telling us, is a crisis in leadership. We need great people to lead us out of the forest.

In Asia today, on the other hand, the stress is on elementary-school education. In America, because we believe so much in the individual, the stress is on higher education. We concentrate affirmative-action programs at the university level. We think America needs more brown and black leaders. We talk of the importance of role models. We assume the few will change the lives of those at the bottom.

Thus do we get the MacArthur prize winners. The talented and the gifted are honored with money that will beget more foundation money. All the while, every day in America, talent dies. Genius dies early. It dies, often, in first grade. It happens quietly, as boredom and despair deaden a young child’s eyes.*