ABSTRACT
The Roaring Twenties were an interval of highly charged activity between two depressions. One was brief, the other prolonged; but both were unpleasant. The depression of 1919-1922 soon gave way to the boom of the mid-1920s, which in turn produced excesses in the United States that led to a greater depression than has ever been seen before or since. It was into the dark recesses of the twenties and thirties that Keynes directed a penetrating searchlight.1 He did this through his serious writing and his more popular journalism and radio broadcasts. He did it even more energetically through the continuous guerrilla warfare he waged against the financial establishment. This phrase was not used in Keynes’s day, but it describes well the notion of a club of policy-making insiders. The title of this chapter describes Keynes’s battles as guerrilla infighting, a reminder that he was personally a member of this club and fought from a secure position as an insider himself. His marriage in 1925 coincided approximately with the beginning of his battles with the financial establishment, and these events marked the start of the third act of Keynes’s life.
