Red-Baiting Keynesian Textbooks

What economists know now is influenced by what they could teach in the past. Perhaps where we are now has something do with interventions in the past from outside of academic economics. I think, for example, of the suppression of Lorie Tarshis' full-throated Keynesianism.

Lorie Tarshis was a Canadian who attended Cambridge while Keynes was working out the General Theory. He attended Keynes' annual lectures from 1932 to 1935. With others, he brought Keynes' economics to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tarshis was at Tufts. He later wrote the first introductory textbook to incorporate Keynesianism. I gather this textbook, Elements of Economics (Houghton Mifflin, 1947) predates Samuelson's textbook. Let's look at a reaction to the use of this textbook in teaching the introduction to economics at Yale:

"Marx himself, in the course of his lifetime, envisaged two broad lines of action that could be adopted to destroy the bourgeoisie: one was violent revolution; the other, a slow increase of state power, through extended social services, taxation, and regulation, to a point where a smooth transition could be effected from an individualist to a collectivist society. The Communists have come to scorn the latter method, but it is nevertheless evident that the prescience of their most systematic and inspiring philosopher has not been thereby vitiated.

It is a revolution of the second type, one that advocates a slow but relentless transfer of power from the individual to the state, that has roots in the Department of Economics at Yale, and unquestionably in similar departments in many colleges throughout the country. The documentation that follows should paint a vivid picture." -- William F. Buckley, Jr. God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, Henry Regery, 1951, p. 46-47

Buckley applies his ideologically-charged nonsense to textbooks by Tarshis, Samuelson, and a few others.