I used to be checking a reference in a guide for one thing I’m writing. The guide is Michael Hirsh, Capital Offense: How America’s Smart Males Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Avenue, 2010. There are numerous passages about Milton Friedman, and the writer had interviewed Milton years earlier.
That is one passage I discovered hanging:
For many of these years of the Chilly Conflict, he remained the chief of a maverick insurgency, remoted and condemned even on the Chicago campus because the Sixties counterculture grew. There have been instances when nobody would eat with him within the school eating room. On the campus bookstore Friedman’s works have been on a backside shelf, far out of view of the Marx and Lenin posters on the partitions. When he gave talks at different schools, he would generally go in by way of the kitchen, the higher to keep away from protesters. Even to some who admired him, he was one thing of an oddity. “I needed to see for myself what that black magician from the Center West was like,” one Harvard graduate introduced to him upon arriving in Chicago. It was a lonely time. Chicago graduate college students couldn’t even get positioned, besides at lesser faculties. “We have been on the outs, the East Coast and West Coast principally had no use for them,” mentioned Gary Becker. “Columbia was the exception; they have been broadminded about it. However Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, they have been hostile to all a majority of these concepts. We have been thought of extremists.” (italics added)
The lengthy years within the ideological wilderness took their toll. Friedman by no means forgot the snubs. “You don’t have any concept of the local weather of opinion in 1945 to 1960 or 1970,” he later advised writer Alan Ebenstein.
This jogs my memory of a narrative a few September 1968 assembly with two mates who had visited Milton and Rose in August. I wrote concerning the assembly in my guide The Pleasure of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey, however didn’t inform this story. These two mates, Michael Prime and my mentor to be, Clancy Smith, together with two others, drove to Capitaf, Milton and Rose’s summer time house in Vermont. Milton and Rose welcomed them warmly. The 4 younger folks began enjoying what I name “Ain’t it terrible,” speaking about present authorities insurance policies and the way dangerous they have been getting. However I nonetheless bear in mind Milton’s reply that my two mates reported: “You need to have been round within the late Nineteen Forties. Totalitarian pondering was dominant in academia.”
By the way in which, I do suppose there was an issue with dates within the quote from the guide. I don’t doubt that Milton mentioned it, however my impression is that Milton was means much less remoted in 1970 than in 1960.
