Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
That’s around the first time I heard it, around 1986-87. It became a topic of conversation right around that time. Truthfully, I thought it was so Orwellian, so unamerican, so warped to the radical left, that it would eventually and rather quickly be culturally rejected. After all, this was America! We wouldn’t stand by and tolerate such an unseemly, creepy, suffocating kind of “mindthink” being imposed on us, right?
Yet here we are in 2014, and it has grown a thousand-fold in size, enveloping every aspect of culture and life. Where even daring to oppose it, like expressing the view that marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman will conceivably get you fired, sued, and deemed a social outcast.
Back in the day, I always thought of “political correctness” as a stuffy Miss Manners of political discourse for the uptight. I never dreamed it would morph and grow into the huge thought-control-monster it has become.
Looked for the precise reference on Ask/Google/et al. but came up empty. I know the quote can be found in one of Omar Kazemzadeh's Russian history texts (because I used it in college).
The first time I encountered the concept in popular culture was under the Billary administration. I don’t recall them calling it such; they just did it,some media type saw the trend and named it. The rest is Herstory.
Lind's article is well worth the read especially if you have kids approaching college age. I ran across it about 15 years ago. He's also written some essays on the coming next civil war which will put ethnic groups against each other.
Lind used to co-host a TV show called The Next Revolution with Brad Keena {Janet Parshalls brother IIRC} and they would get into some real good discussions.
To answer your question it came from Marxist which Columbia University invited here in the 1930's after Hitler booted them from Germany. They came here to take over our government via our education system. Read it. It's a good article and he gives good details.