I was referencing a book I was writing, and that book is by Michael Hirsch. Death Sentence: How America’s Greatest Men Spent America’s Future on Wall Street2010. There are various accounts of Milton Friedman, whom the author interviewed several years ago.
This is the passage that made an impression on me.
For much of the Cold War, he remained a lone wolf insurrectionist leader, isolated and stigmatized on Chicago’s campuses as the counterculture of the 1960s grew. There were times when no one would eat with him in the faculty dining hall. In the campus bookstore, Friedman’s books were kept on the bottom shelf, far from the posters of Marx and Lenin on the walls. When he spoke at other universities, he sometimes entered through the kitchen to avoid protesters. Even to those who respected him, he was a bit of an oddball. “I had to see for myself what this black magician from the Midwest was like,” one Harvard graduate told him when he arrived in Chicago. It was a lonely time. Chicago graduate students couldn’t even get jobs at any other university than the lower ranks. “We were ostracized, and the East and West Coasts basically didn’t want us,” Gary Becker told me. “Columbia was the exception, they were tolerant. But Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale were hostile to all of this type of thinking. We were considered radicals.” (emphasis added)
The long years in the ideological wilderness had taken their toll, and Friedman never forgot the snub: “You have no idea what the atmosphere of public opinion was like from 1945 to 1960, or even 1970,” he later told the writer Alan Ebenstein.
This reminds me of a story I told myself about a meeting I had with two friends who were visiting Milton and Rose in September 1968. I wrote about that meeting in my book. The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Adventurebut we didn’t talk about it. The two friends, Michael Prime and my future mentor Clancy Smith, drove with two others to Capitaph, Milton and Rose’s summer home in Vermont. Milton and Rose welcomed them warmly. The four young men began playing what I call “terrible stories,” talking about current government policies and how they were getting worse. But I still remember Milton’s answer, relayed to me by his two friends: “You should have been around in the late 1940s, when totalitarian thinking was so dominant in academia.”
Incidentally, I think there is a problem with the date of the quote from this book. I have no doubt that Milton said it, but my impression is that Milton in 1970 was a lot less isolated than he was in 1960.
