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… if from page 119 of the The Vintage Mencken [2] – a 1955 collection, edited by Alistair Cooke, of some of H.L. Mencken’s writings; specifically, it’s from Mencken’s January 1921 Smart Set essay, “The Archangel Woodrow”; in this essay Mencken lets loose his justified disdain for Woodrow Wilson:
The important thing is not that a popular orator should have uttered such vaporous and preposterous phrases, but that they should have been gravely received, for weary years, by a whole race of men, some of them intelligent.
My colleague Dan Klein likely would explain the popular affection for Wilson and his “vaporous and preposterous phrases” as springing from “The People’s Romance [3].”