My high school English teacher pal John Lillig unearthed this brief clip from a very (very) long conversation between Chicago poet Carl Sandburg and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, on the lost virtues of Thomas Jefferson, who Wright says “was as near the aristocrat we need, and we should produce, as any figure that I can imagine.”
“How are you going to have an aristocrat in a democratic society?” asks the moderator.
Comes Wright, “You can’t have anything else, my dear Allistair.”
Interesting that Wright went on to say: “You haven’t got a democrat until you have an aristocrat. But not by privilege, not something given to you, but it’s something you are and work out from within yourself, because you are free.”
To which the moderator says: “I can hear Henry Mencken flapping his wings at this moment.”
Classic. Thanks for sharing that.