Michael Joyce, RIP

Michael Joyce was perhaps the most influential conservative in Wisconsin in my lifetime.

The Bradley Foundation's impact is clearly nationwide, yet they have never lost their focus on Wisconsin.

John Miller writes:

In 1985, Rockwell International bought Milwaukee’s Allen-Bradley Company. One result of the purchase was to pump nearly $300 million into the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The suddenly enriched philanthropy recruited Joyce to lead it, with a mandate that he turn it into what one of the board members called “Olin West.”

To the extent that the Bradley Foundation funded conservative intellectuals, Joyce stayed true to this objective. Yet the Bradley Foundation was not simply a clone of the John M. Olin Foundation. Instead, it was committed to supporting local initiatives in Wisconsin. Joyce’s genius was to leverage conservatism’s best ideas and apply them on the state, county, and city level, where they wound up nevertheless having a national impact.

At the Olin Foundation, for instance, Joyce helped Charles Murray secure a grant that contributed to the success of Losing Ground, a landmark book on welfare. At the Bradley Foundation, Joyce worked with political figures in Wisconsin, such as Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, to push through welfare-reform measures that were inspired by the work of Murray and others. This in turn helped create the conditions for Congress and President Clinton to overhaul welfare at the federal level in 1996.

Joyce was even more closely connected to school choice, which has achieved greater success in Milwaukee than anywhere else. Earlier this month, Wisconsin’s current governor, Democrat Jim Doyle, agreed to raise the number of Milwaukee students who can use public money to attend private schools from 15,000 to 22,500. It is safe to say that without Joyce’s influence at the Bradley Foundation, few of these voucher kids would have had an alternative to the city’s government-run schools. Moreover, the very cause of school choice would not be nearly as prominent as it is today — it might still be a fantasy in the mind of Milton Friedman rather than a reality in one of America’s big cities.

In Milwaukee, Joyce also gained a deep appreciation for the importance of faith-based organizations in the lives of the poor, whether it was church groups that provided job training or Catholic schools that offered an education. Through his work on welfare and school choice, Joyce became a founding father of “compassionate conservatism” — a term that may mean many things, but one that also would have been nearly impossible for George W. Bush ever to utter without Joyce’s work at the Bradley Foundation. After Joyce left the foundation in 2001, he worked in conjunction with the Bush administration to promote the president’s agenda on faith-based initiatives. At a speech in 2002, Bush praised Joyce and his legacy: “The Bradley Foundation has always been willing to seek different solutions. They’ve been willing to challenge the status quo. They’d say, ‘Where we find failure, something else must occur.’”

“Mike was a populist in the best sense of the word,” said Frank Cannon of Capital City Partners, who cooperated with Joyce on faith-based programs. “He believed that people are able to run their own lives from the bottom up, and that this is preferable to some government’s running them from the top down.”

Joyce may go down in conservative history as one of its most important philanthropic spenders, but in fact he was a great builder — a builder of ideas and institutions that already have outlasted him and almost certainly will outlast the rest of us.

Immediately upon graduating from the UW, I worked at a think tank that received support from the Bradley Foundation. I had the good fortune of meeting Michael Joyce from time to time and have seen his impact on major public policy over the last twenty years.

Truly, a good man.

May he rest in peace.

*** Update.
Charlie Sykes knew Joyce well. His initial take is here. I'd expect more from him in ensuing days.

And watch the classless left use the tragic news of his death as a vehicle to rip the Bradley Foundation, School Choice, welfare reform, etc...