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… is from page 241 of the 1997 Johns Hopkins University Press edition of H.L. Mencken’s indispensable 1956 collection, Minority Report [2]:
The pink young pedagogues who used to leap out of the American colleges at frequent intervals, to the tune of loud outcries, always tried to make it appear that their radicalism had prevented their promotion. The facts really ran the other way. It was lack of promotion that made them radicals. When the New Deal came in it summoned thousands of them, and they had a chance to shine. But all that that golden opportunity achieved for them was to reveal their incurable inferiority. With power in their hands, they used it idiotically; with a free hand to execute their ideas at the taxpayers’ expense, all they accomplished was to prove that those ideas were silly.
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