The column antisymmetrizer of a Young tableau is the group algebra element
On the Young permutation module it has one-dimensional image .
The symmetric group acts transitively on the tableaux of a fixed shape. Thus every is for some , and the definition of a polytabloid gives
Since the Specht module is spanned by all , it is the cyclic -module generated by .
The symmetric group acts transitively on the Young tableaux of a fixed shape. Moreover, for every permutation , so every polytabloid is a translate of any fixed one. Hence the Specht module is a cyclic module generated by .
It remains to see that . In its expansion, the coefficient of the tabloid is one: if and , then . Thus the generator, and therefore the module, is nonzero.