>> What can you tell me about this group of graduate students, the Friday Nighters? >> I don't exactly know when it started, but it was Commons way of gathering close to him his graduate students and maybe some upper level undergraduates. It is said that he was not a very good lecturer. So his large classes, even the students who went on to become his favorites and his real followers, they would describe his lecture class as pretty disorganized and not terribly interesting. But he apparently really excelled in these sorts of small group gatherings. And again, they were part educational and part social. There would be as many as 50 or 60 people gathered with him. The Friday Nighters is... it's an event, in the sense that these groups meet Friday night at his home, but it also then became the group of people, sort of the alumni of his gatherings, started to refer to themselves as Friday Nighters. So it's an event and it's a group of people. And they stayed close to him, you know, for the rest of his life. And they drew on the things that they learned there in their own careers. >> Can you speak at all about what would have attracted a German student at that time to John R. Commons and his... >> Well, anybody who was interested in economics. Anybody who was interested in how government could or should interact with the economy. He would have been a real logically person to seek out and study with because that's pretty much what he did. And by the '20s or so, some of the kinds of things that he's known for, the factory safety, the workers compensation, some of the public utility regulation things, the concept of having these administrative commissions that, kind of, oversee the workings of some parts of the economy; Those are things that he had worked on, and to a degree, had been implemented here in Wisconsin at least. So he was quite well known at the time. >> How did all this play in to the Wisconsin Idea? >> Well, largely it is the Wisconsin Idea, or it's the embodiment of the Wisconsin Idea; Have academics looking at real problems. Commons worked closely with Robert La Follette Senior, with other political figures throughout the time. There's stories of him taking his class to Legislative Committee hearings, to discuss issues with Legislative Committees. So it's all very practical and all very connected with some of the things that the Progressives who were then controlling Wisconsin government wanted to do. The early Progressive reforms that everybody talks about; from Wisconsin's Civil Service, the Industrial Commission, and that's the body that developed and implemented safety legislation, and Workers' Compensation, he and those who worked with him, they actively participated in the drafting of those laws. >> Can you speak at all on the role that John R. Commons and his students would have played, graduate students, with the New Deal, with the Franklin Roosevelt Administration? >> Yes, and a very clear and a very direct one. You know, by the time of the New Deal in the early '30s Wisconsin had a 20 to 25 year lead time of implementing some of these kinds of programs. The unemployment compensation was actually enacted here a few months before it was enacted by the Federal Government, and it's a direct copy of the Wisconsin program. But the big one, Social Security is also very direct. Several of the people who were called to Washington to design Social Security came straight from that group of Friday Nighters; Arthur Atlmeyer, Edwin Witte, Wilbur Cohen, they came directly from UW-Madison with the charge of designing that Social Security system. >> Finish this sentence for me; in John R. Commons, Arvid Harnak would have found... >> An inspirer and a mentor, as well as a teacher. >> And how so? >> Well, I can only judge from the way others of Commons' students talked about him. They remained loyal. As I said, the Friday Nighters was not only an event but they were a group, and these people who were part of that group remained tremendously loyal to him. In a university setting it's not at all uncommon, in fact it's very common, for professors and their graduate students to become very close and to have career-long academic relationships and friendships as well. So that's not uncommon at all. But with Commons it seemed to be just a step up from what you see in most cases in that regard. >> Do you know much about the University Club here? The Friday Nighters meet there, Arvid lived there at one point, but I'm just trying to figure out, kind of, what role that it might have played at the University in that era. >> I don't really know. Commons actually lived there for awhile too, later in his career after he'd sold his home where they usually meet. You know, a university club, there's a kind of a traditional air and an academic air to it, so that doesn't surprise me. And, of course, if you're going to have a group then you have to have a place to meet. And certainly the University Club would have been more conducive to the kind of atmosphere that I think they were trying to achieve than a classroom would have been, or a lecture room would have been. So it probably fit the bill pretty well. And of course, when they started meeting at his house, he lived in what was then out in the country. The house still exists, it's just south of University Avenue. It's on a high area that overlooks, or at least then, overlooked Lake Mendota. I don't think you can see the lake from there anymore. It was a Prairie Style home, but that also would have fostered the kind of atmosphere that was conducive to the kinds of things he wanted to do. And I think the University Club probably would have as well.
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