The Isolated Milton Friedman

I was checking a reference in a book for something I’m writing. The book is Michael Hirsh, Capital Offense: How America’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street, 2010. There are various passages about Milton Friedman, and the author had interviewed Milton years earlier.

This is one passage I found striking:

For most of those years of the Cold War, he remained the leader of a maverick insurgency, isolated and condemned even on the Chicago campus as the 1960s counterculture grew. There were times when no one would eat with him in the faculty dining room. At the campus bookstore Friedman’s works were on a bottom shelf, far out of view of the Marx and Lenin posters on the walls. When he gave talks at other colleges, he would sometimes go in through the kitchen, the better to avoid protesters. Even to some who admired him, he was something of an oddity. “I had to see for myself what that black magician from the Middle West was like,” one Harvard graduate announced to him upon arriving in Chicago. It was a lonely time. Chicago graduate students couldn’t even get placed, except at lesser schools. “We were on the outs, the East Coast and West Coast basically had no use for them,” said Gary Becker. “Columbia was the exception; they were broadminded about it. But Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, they were hostile to all these types of ideas. We were considered extremists.” (italics added)

The long years in the ideological wilderness took their toll. Friedman never forgot the snubs. “You have no idea of the climate of opinion in 1945 to 1960 or 1970,” he later told author Alan Ebenstein.

This reminds me of a story about a September 1968 meeting with two friends who had visited Milton and Rose in August. I wrote about the meeting in my book The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey, but didn’t tell this story. These two friends, Michael Prime and my mentor to be, Clancy Smith, along with two others, drove to Capitaf, Milton and Rose’s summer home in Vermont. Milton and Rose welcomed them warmly. The four young people started playing what I call “Ain’t it awful,” talking about current government policies and how bad they were getting. But I still remember Milton’s answer that my two friends reported: “You should have been around in the late 1940s. Totalitarian thinking was dominant in academia.”

By the way, I do think there was a problem with dates in the quote from the book. I don’t doubt that Milton said it, but my impression is that Milton was way less isolated in 1970 than in 1960.

 

 

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