I’ll be first to admit when I first encountered this name I read it as “Forty Niners”. Given it was while reading Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, I should’ve known better. I’ll chalk that up to the brain’s predictive processing and football season. The Friday Niters were not a football team, nor did their interests lie in neuroscience. Instead, they lied in a set of ideas foundational to one of our country’s most critical and underappreciated infrastructures.
Origins of the Friday Niters
In 1899, as a favor to his minister friend, Syracuse Sociology Chair John R. Commons spoke at a meeting of the city’s churches. The topic of baseball came up. Specifically, the right of workers to play on their rest day (Sunday), and the opportunity for the city to charge admission to the games. On the former, Commons agreed the workers should maintain their right to play. On the latter, he did not, suggesting the city should open more parks to support recreation. After word reached the chancellor, he was fired for supporting an anti-capitalist view.
Over the next five years Commons performed several one-off jobs for institutions such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Industrial Commission, and the Bureau of Economic Research, which he founded. In 1904 he came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an economics professor. Here, at 1645 Norman Way, is where the Niter’s story begins.
Madison, WI, Birthplace of the Friday Niters
When Commons arrived on campus, Madison was already a nucleus of progressive activity. Although not branded as such, the Wisconsin Idea had led to a symbiotic relationship between the university, policy makers, and industry. The Idea’s basic principle was the university’s academic and field research should be used to advise policymakers, thus enabling them to better stimulate the state’s industries. Many claim the state’s predominantly German immigrants brought the philosophy from Prussia, along with their beer; Leinenkugel’s was established in Chippewa Falls, approximately 3 hours north of Madison, in 1867. The term’s attribution is still debated. The most common is Charles Van Hise, who in 1904 gave a speech during which he articulated the Idea’s spirit:
“I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every home in the state.”
In 1912 university political scientist Charles McCarthy wrote the book The Wisconsin Idea, aggregating the principles of the faculty and legislators over the prior decades. This is the first public instance of the term. A third attribution is John Bascom, the university’s president from 1874-87. Choose your theory, but note Bascom’s name is on the hill and building in every Madison postcard, and Van Hise’s name is on the tallest building in Madison. Van Hise also created the Wisconsin Extension program still in place today.
Influence of the Friday Niters
The Niters, similar to other salons, began as a small group. Initially it was composed of Commons’ graduate students. However, as the Progressive Movement grew throughout the first decades of the 20th Century, their reputation became national. Its most famous regular was rebellious architect and fellow Badger Frank Lloyd Wright. Unlike other salons, its topics were singular, focused on progressive labor concepts such as unemployment insurance, minimum wage, workmen’s compensation, and progressive income tax. Coming from the era of robber barons, these ideas were truly counterintuitive, and increasingly gaining steam.
High on victory and illegal booze, the Progressive Movement quelled during the 1920’s. The Niters kept going, although sentiment in the group was their reach in Wisconsin had been maximized, with nowhere to expand. The 1929 Crash and subsequent Great Depression would rekindle their efforts. In 1932, Commons, during his final year as a faculty member, played a key role in Wisconsin’s passage of the first state-wide unemployment law. Following Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, an estimated 75 of his colleagues and students, many of them Friday Niters, were appointed to positions within the New Deal administration. Among them was Edwin Witte, considered the spiritual father of Social Security. Although he denied the title, Witte was deeply involved in the Act’s construction. His name is on a dorm.
The Niters in Berlin
In 1928 Arvin Harnack, a student of Commons, and his wife Mildred Fish-Harnack, a graduate lecturer, left the university to pursue their studies in Germany. After a short separation, they settled in Berlin in 1931. There, they formed a complementary group to the Friday Niters dedicated to the study of the Soviet planned economy. Soon after, in 1932, Arvin was hired by the Soviet Union to spy on the Nazi party. Hitler would come to power a year later, causing him and Mildred to flee Berlin. They returned six months later. The club continued throughout the 1930’s into World War II, where it would ultimately end. Both Mildred and Arvin would be captured and killed by guillotine in 1943. Mildred is the only American executed via direct order of Hitler.
The Salon’s Role in Human History
Two of the first pieces I wrote for Becoming Polymathic centered around the Junto Club, a Philadelphia salon formed by the young (21 year-old) Benjamin Franklin in 1727. In his terms, the purpose of the club was “mutual improvement”. They too met on Fridays, but at the local public house, “Pub” for short. Each week Franklin would provide a list of questions to be discussed. The rules of engagement were simple: no absolute language, no closed-mindedness. The club lasted 38 years with only one member, mathematician and glass-maker Thomas Godfrey, voluntarily leaving. Throughout its life the club made significant contributions to Philadelphia including plans for the city’s first library and public hospital, its first fire department, property tax system, volunteer militia, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Perhaps it’s not surprising these two are the third and fourth most read pieces in this outlet’s short history. Salons are a proving ground for revolutionary ideas. Every era, from the Symposiums of Ancient Greece, to the Paris salons of the Enlightenment, to the Junto Club of Colonial America, to the Friday Niters has been underpinned by these fantastic meetings of the minds. For the sake of future generations, I hope they are happening in the shadows, in the back rooms of bars, in our neighbor’s basements, removed from the technology platforms that have defined this era.
Only time will tell.