Re the Krugman dialogue, many strains of radicalism were powerful in English
and American culture and politics before Keynes. In Edwardian England the
Radical Liberals took over the Liberal Party. Fabians and single-taxers
contested with Marxists to lead the left. Upton Sinclair exposed the sins of
Chicago meat-packing, and won a vast following plus the Pure Food and Drug
Act, 1906.  Ida Tarbell and Henry D. Lloyd exposed the sins of J.D.
Rockefeller, to great applause, triggering the trust-busting of the
Progressive Republicans (yes, really, there were such people). The air was
rich with socialists, Populists, inflationists, syndicalists, single taxers,
pacifists, unionists, anarchists, etc. Historian Elliott Brownlee of UCSB
has shown how the income tax act of 1916 was bent by a coalition of
socialists, single-taxers, unionists, and others left of center, exempting
almost all wage income and imposing steep rates on higher incomes - mostly
from property. Socialist Dan Hoan was Mayor of Milwaukee, 1916-40, and
generally hailed as the best Mayor in the U.S. In 1920, Socialist Gene Debs,
running from a prison cell, got one million votes for President, running
with socialist Job Harriman, who probably would have won the Mayoralty of
L.A. earlier, had it not been for the McNamara bombing case. In 1924
renegade Republican Bob LaFollette won 4 million votes for U.S. President.
In the 1930's the voices of Huey Long, Fr. Charles Coughlin, and Francis
Townsend came from the depths to frighten FDR into preempting some of their
programs. Coughlin popularized the 1931 Encyclical of Pope Pius XI,
*Quadragesimo Anno*, powerfully reinforcing Leo XIII's revival of Thomist
economics from 1891, and Msgr. John Ryan, an economist, became a power with
FDR.

It was in the academies, rather, that such voices were dissed and stifled.
There is a wide literature on the subject, published after the fact. The
AAUP was founded in an effort to create the idea of academic freedom that we
now take for granted - not fully realizing, perhaps, how precious and how
imperiled it is at all times.

We in the academic subculture would benefit from being more aware of and
more respectful of the great social movements outside the ivied walls.
Keynes' discovery of endogenous faults in the market spoke to our somewhat
snobbish predecessors less because it was new than because he was an upper
class Englishman, socially acceptable.

Mason Gaffney