I now agree with Warren and Malcolm and apologize to one 
and all for my faulty memory on the mattter.  I think it came from 
the fact that the effort to hire Friedman was associated with his 
report and an effort to improve the teaching of statistics at the UW. 
However, there was no anti-math-econ aspect in the opposition 
to his hiring.  Those who had been teaching stats were in the School 
of Commerce and this would have involved taking the course away 
from them.  There was a broader issue of whether econ would be 
in the Commerce School or not, and those opposing Friedman were 
those who most favored joining the Commerce School.  A basic 
fact is that pretty much everybody in the department then was an 
institutionalist; 7 out of the 9 voting on Friedman's appointment 
were students of either Ely or Commons (and the other two were 
solid institutionalists).  The swing vote was the Department Chair, 
Edwin Witte, father of US social security and the Wagner Act, 
founder of the IRRA, and one of the leading institutionalists of the 
mid-20th-century. 
       I have before me _Economists at Wisconsin: 1892-1992_, 
edited by Robert J. Lampman, 1993, published by the Economics 
Department of the University of Wisconsin (Board of Regents holds 
the copyright), not the UW Press.  It was the last work of Bob 
Lampman before he died of cancer.  As near as I can tell, Lampman 
himself, a student of Witte's, wrote the section "The Milton Friedman 
Affair at Wisconsin, 1940-41" (pp. 118-121).  After recounting the 
general facts of what happened, it then provides six different perspectives 
on it, several from letters sent to Lampman long after the fact, including 
one from Friedman himself, and one from the leader of his opponents, 
Walter A. Morton to Mark Perlman, who of course denied the charge 
of anti-Semitism.  I will quote from the letter Friedman sent to Lampman 
on Dec. 5, 2000. 
 
     "I did not at the time regard anti-Semitism as the major factor 
involved in the affair and I do not now.  Unquestionably, the major 
factor was the controversy between the School of Commerce and the 
economics department, and the desire by the School of Commerce to 
take over the economics department.  However, a minor subtheme 
was indeed anti-Semitism....[Walter Morton's] recollection years later 
of the affair and his letter to Mark Perlman do not alter my view on the 
matter." 
 
      The letter to Perlman (presumably reading this on this list), was 
written on April 28, 1981 and is reproduced in the book.  I shall not 
reproduce it, however a peculiar tidbit is that Morton recalls a discussion 
with then Dean George Sellery, taking credit for Sellery's support of 
Friedman, and quoting Sellery (after the negative departmental vote) 
as saying, "This is not the Third Reich." 
       As a further note on this, Morton was formally censured by the 
department in 1957, although not specifically for his role in the Friedman 
affair.  A strong institutionalist, and the first to introduce Keynesian  
ideas at Wisconsin, he was described as "iconoclastic," "maverick," "irascible," 
"unpredicable," "volatile," and more, and got into many vigorous fights 
over many things with many of his colleagues, although most vigorously 
with Harold Groves, who was Friedman's strongest advocate in 1941 
(for details see pp. 83-85 of cited volume). 
 
       While I am at it I should also correct my account of the Ely affair 
at Wisconsin, which is the ostensible link with Ross and got me on this 
to begin with, as I was also sloppy with it. It is also covered in this book 
Ely had founded the School of Economics, Political Science, and History 
when he arrived from Johns Hopkins in 1982, brought in largely at the 
behest of the historian of the American frontier closing, Frederick Jackson 
Turner.  In 1894, during a bad recession accompanied by radical labor 
unrest, Ely was attacked in print in a journal called the Nation (unsure if 
it has any link with the current periodical of that name, but it was quite 
conservative) as an "anarchist" by Oliver E. Wells.  Mr. Wells was the 
state superintendent of schools in Wisconsin, a Democrat, and also a 
member of the University of Wisconsin's governing Board of Regents. 
The article truly fulminates in a way that shows where Joe McCarthy 
came from, but specifically charged Ely with being a "socialist" (in fact, 
Ely was associated with the Christian socialist movement), and made 
more specific allegations of providing advice to an "agitator" who led 
a printers' strike.  It was Wells who instigated a formal hearing by the 
Board of Regents to fire Ely.  Crucial to the dismissal of the case was 
the fact that the agitator in question apparently had spoken with a 
student of Ely's and not Ely himself.  Regarding the socialism charge, 
based on selective quotations from Ely's voluminous writings, his 
defenders produced quotations from the writings of Adam Smith 
and other pro-market luminaries, taken out of context, which would 
make them look like socialists also.  Just to get this right I will quote 
the very famous final two sentences of the Board of Regents report, 
portions of which are now in the plaque on Bascom Hall, placed there 
in 1915. 
 
      "In all lines of academic investigation it is of the utmost importance 
that the investigator should be absolutely free to follow the indications 
of the truth wherever they may lead.  Whatever may be the limitations 
which trammel inquiry elsewhere we believe the great state of Wisconsin 
should ever encourage that continual sifting and winnowing by which alone 
the truth can be found." 
 
       Ely's own recounting of this affair appears on pp. 59-66 of the book 
cited above. 
       Finally, given the upcoming AEA meetings, let me note that Ely  
founded the AEA in 1886 as a counterweight to the Political Economy Club, which 
had been founded by Ely's longtime rival, James L. Laughlin with Simon 
Newcomb.  This club strongly supported laissez-faire and the emerging 
neoclassical theoretical position.  Laughlin would serve as longtime Head 
of the economics department at the University of Chicago, retiring in 1916. 
The account in this book (pp. 52-55) credits him with establishing the 
"Chicago School" path that continues today.  The Political Economy Club 
dissolved in 1905, perhaps because its members perceived that they 
would be successful in taking over the AEA (Witte would be the last 
"old" institutionalist president of the AEA, in 1956, unless one counts 
John Kenneth Galbraith).  Although I do not know this for sure, I suspect 
that the name of the Chicago-based Journal of Political Economy is the 
last remnant of that group, now formally deceased for a full century. 
      Again, I apologize for shooting off my mouth based on half-baked 
memories.  Hopefully, the record is now straight and reasonably accurate. 
 
Barkley Rosser