"What this country needs is more unemployed…

“What the country needs is more unemployed politicians” has been credited, in 1982, to artist Edward Langley (1928-1995). The quotation was credited, in 2000, to political activist and professor Angela Davis (citing an unspecified “1967” speech).

The earliest citations (in the 1980s-1990s) of the anti-government saying all credit Edward Langley, without giving a source.

Google Books
The 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said
By Robert Byrne
New York, NY: Atheneum
1982
Pg. ?:
What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.
Edward Langley

Google News Archive
22 August 1987, Kentucky New Era (Hopkinsville, KY), “Watching the Parade” by Joe Dorris, pg. 4A, col. 5:
What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Google Books
1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said:
Many amusingly illuminated by antique etchings and line cuts
By Robert Byrne
New York, NY: Fawcett, Columbine
1988
Pg. 61:
What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.
Edward Langley

Google Books
The Mocking of the President:
A history of campaign humor from Ike to Ronnie
By Gerald Gardner
Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press
1988
Pg. 61:
Said Edward Langley; “What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.”

Google Books
The Quotable Woman:
Words of wisdom from Mother Teresa, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Eleanor Roosevelt, Katharine Hepburn, and more
By Carol Turkington
New York, NY: McGraw-Hill
2000
Pg. 135:
What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.
—ANGELA DAVIS, Speech, 1967

Google Books
The Quotable Politician
By William B. Whitman
Guilford, CT: Lyons Press
2003
Pg. 26:
What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.
ANGELA DAVIS, AMERICAN POLITICAL ACTIVIST AND AUTHOR (1944-)

“What this country needs is more unemployed politicians”