I was really looking forward to Yoshie's answer to this, since it probably would have involved gryffins, unicorns, and assorted anatomical references, but this will have to do.
The populist assumption is not that inflation is good for the w.c. It's that an activist monetary policy, with some attendant risk of inflation, is better for wages and employment than a fixed rule policy or god help us a gold standard.
The 70's are doubly irrelevant in the sense you raise because of the oil price spikes, one of many factors which make comparisons with other periods fallacious.
Decade comparisons are not too cool either, since the consequences are heavily dependent on business cycle endpoints.
Regarding the inauguration of the Fed as tantamount to "elastic currency," the Fed is a corporatist institution whose inelastic currency probably had something to do with the Great Depression. Not a good paradigm for democratic money, nor something that should be blamed on the populist movement, which had collapsed twenty years prior. Even so, I'd say the CoG speech addresses class relations pretty well. Better than the Labor Party, even.
mbs