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