I checked a reference in a book to something I’m writing. The book is Michael Hirsh, Capitalism: How America’s Wise Men Entrusted America’s Future to Wall Street2010. There are several passages about Milton Friedman, and the author had interviewed Milton years earlier.
This is a passage that I found striking:
For most of those Cold War years, he remained the leader of a wayward insurgency, isolated and condemned, even on the Chicago campus, as the counterculture of the 1960s grew. There were times when no one wanted to eat with him in the faculty dining hall. In the campus bookstore, Friedman’s works were on the bottom shelf, well out of sight of the posters of Marx and Lenin on the walls. When he gave lectures at other colleges, he sometimes entered through the kitchen to better avoid demonstrators. Even to some who admired him, he was the odd one out. “I had to see for myself what that black magician from the Middle West was like,” a Harvard graduate told him when he arrived in Chicago. It was a lonely time. Chicago graduate students couldn’t even get placed except in elementary schools. “We were right on the edge, the East Coast and the West Coast really didn’t have anything to do with it,” Gary Becker said. “Columbia was the exception; they were open-minded about it. But Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and Yale were hostile to all such ideas. We were considered extremists.” (italics added)
The long years in the ideological wilderness took their toll. Friedman never forgot the comments. “You have no idea of the climate of opinion in the period 1945 to 1960 or 1970,” he later told author Alan Ebenstein.
This reminds me of a story about a meeting in September 1968 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 Odysseybut didn’t tell this story. These two friends, Michael Prime and my future mentor, 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 “Isn’t It Awful” as they talked about the current government policy and how bad it was making it. But I still remember Milton’s response that my two friends reported: “You should have been there in the late 1940s. Totalitarian thinking was dominant in the academic world.”
By the way, I think there was a problem with the dates in the quote from the book. I have no doubt that Milton said it, but my impression is that Milton was much less isolated in 1970 than he was in 1960.