I was looking for a reference in a book for something I’m writing. Book by Michael Hirsh, Capital Offense: How America’s Smartest Men Changed America’s Future on Wall Street2010. There are various passages about Milton Friedman, and the author had interviewed Milton years ago.
This is one episode that I found amazing:
During most of those Cold War years, he remained a revolutionary leader, isolated and even ostracized on the Chicago campus as the counterculture of the 1960s grew. There were times when no one would eat with him in the intellectual dining hall. In the campus bookstore, Friedman’s works were on the bottom shelf, far away from the posters of Marx and Lenin on the walls. When he gave lectures at other colleges, he sometimes went into the kitchen, the better to avoid the protesters. Even to some who worshiped him, he was strange. “I had to see for myself what that black witch of the Midwest is like,” a Harvard graduate announced to him when he arrived in Chicago. It was a lonely time. Graduates from Chicago could not even be admitted, except in small schools. “We were still out, the East Coast and the West Coast really didn’t care about it,” Gary Becker said. “Columbia was different; they had a broad mind about it. But Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, hated all these kinds of ideas. We were considered zealots.” (italics added)
Years in the wilderness of ideas took its toll. Friedman never forgot the snubs. “You have no idea of the state of vision in 1945 to 1960 or 1970,” he later told writer Alan Ebenstein.
This reminds me of the story of the September 1968 meeting with two friends who visited Milton and Rose in August. I wrote about the meeting in my notebook The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odysseybut he did not 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 with warm arms. Four young people started playing what I call “It’s Not a Bad Thing,” talking about current government policies and how bad it is getting. But I still remember Milton’s response as reported by two of my friends: “You should have been around in the late 1940s. Totalitarian thinking was dominant in academia.”
However, I think there was a problem with the dates quoted in the book. I have no doubt that Milton said it, but my opinion is that Milton was less alone in 1970 than in 1960.
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