SOURCE: "Prometheus Patton," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 21, No. 2, Spring, 1945, pp. 273-80.

In the following essay, Johnson draws upon statements made by Patton, as well as ideas expressed by José Ortega y Gasset, to make predictions concerning the postwar world.

The appalling thing about the late Big Bill Thompson, sometime Mayor of Chicago, is not how wrong he was, but how nearly right he was in some of his most unpleasant manifestations. Bill's contribution to diplomatic protocol, you remember, was a promise to bust King George in the snoot if that potentate ever stuck his nose into Chicago. He was wrong; but his error was in picking his objective. It shouldn't have been King George. In the first place, that blameless monarch never evinced the slightest desire to interfere with Chicago; and in the second place, the King is not an Intellectual with a capital "I" and...