CREDIT: Photo by Yaroslava Mills, courtesy of Nik Mills
IN THE 1950s, when most college faculty were cautious about their political views and lifestyles, C. Wright Mills burst onto the scene, a radical sociologist from Texas who rode a motorcycle to work, wore plaid shirts, jeans, and work boots instead of flannel suits, built his house with his own hands, and warned that America was becoming a nation of “cheerful robots” heading for World War III. In a 1961 article, “Who Are the Student Boat-Rockers?” activist Tom Hayden listed the three people over thirty whom young radicals most admired. They were Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington, and Mills.
The three books Mills published between 1948 and 1956—The New Men of Power, White Collar, and The Power Elite—challenged the widely held belief that American society, having triumphed over the fundamental problems of the 20th century (Depression and war), had become a model of economic success, political democracy, and social well-being. Mills, a Columbia University professor, warned about the dangers of the concentration of wealth and power. Mills’s most influential book, The Power Elite, challenged the notion that farmers, workers, middle-class consumers, small businesses, and big businesses all had equal voices in American democracy. Instead, he described the overlapping circles of business, military, and political leaders who formed a power structure. Their big decisions determined the nation’s destiny, including war and peace.
Today this is the prevailing view, but in the 1950s it was highly controversial. Mills’s was a lonely voice among academic sociologists, but his books sold well, suggesting that at least some Americans were not happy with the postwar status quo.
The Cold War led to what was called the “permanent war economy” to sustain expensive new weapons systems and military bases around the world. At home, the fear of Communists and other radicals led to the hysteria of the McCarthy era, stewarded by business groups who were worried about stronger unions and higher taxes and by politicians who got into office by scaring voters about the Red menace threatening to take over the public schools, unions, Hollywood, and universities.
It was in this atmosphere that Mills began his academic career. Growing up in a middle-class family in Dallas, Texas, Charles Wright Mills studied philosophy at the University of Texas and then earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, where he focused his research on social psychology and social theory. After a brief stint teaching at the University of Maryland, he arrived at Columbia in 1945 to work at the university’s new survey research center and to teach sociology. He remained at Columbia until he died of a heart attack, at age forty-five, in 1962.
At Columbia, Mills mastered social research, particularly the skills of conducting interviews and doing large surveys, and used those skills to carry out several projects that his senior colleagues suggested. But Mills was restless. He wanted to use his academic perch to reach outside academia, influence public opinion, and help build a progressive movement.
In New York, he met a widening circle of radicals and rebels, such as novelist Harvey Swados, critic Dwight Macdonald, and labor activist J. B. S. Hardman, who expanded Mills’s political horizons. He began writing essays for progressive and left-wing opinion magazines, including the New Republic, New Leader, Partisan Review, Dissent, and, especially, Politics, which criticized America’s warfare state and sought ways to invigorate grassroots democracy. In his first few years at Columbia, Mills joined a network of academics who provided research to help union leaders understand the major social and economic changes facing their members. Mills’s ties to the labor movement led to the first of his major books on what he called the “main drift” of American society—The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders, published in 1948.
Union membership had increased fivefold in the decade before Mills wrote the book, and unions represented one-third of nonfarm workers. Mills believed that unions could be a bulwark against America’s drift toward “war and slump” by pushing to convert the war economy to civilian uses, improving workers’ incomes and job security, and giving ordinary Americans a voice in government to challenge big-business power.
The New Men of Power was cautiously optimistic about the labor movement’s potential. But in 1947, while he was writing the book, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, over President Harry S. Truman’s veto. The act weakened unions’ ability to organize. Mills was also disappointed when, in the 1948 elections, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations unions (including the United Auto Workers) endorsed Truman over Henry Wallace and Norman Thomas (whom Mills voted for). In that political climate, few major union leaders were inclined to challenge the Cold War, the arms race, or the attacks on radical dissent. Indeed, most unions would soon purge themselves of their radical leaders as part of the Red Scare hysteria. Mills drifted away from working with progressive labor activists as his confidence in the labor movement gave way to skepticism.
Having examined the blue-collar working class, Mills turned to Americans in the professions and middle management. In his next book, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, published in 1951, he explored the social conditions and psychology of this growing stratum of Americans, living in urban neighborhoods and suburbs and exemplifying the “American way of life” that the nation’s leaders contrasted with the drab and compliant life in Communist Russia.
Based on interviews and surveys as well as on analyses of popular culture, Mills concluded that many middle-class Americans were socially, intellectually, and politically stifled, trapped in offices in large business bureaucracies over which they had no control (including no union representation). Instead of finding pleasure and pride in craftsmanship at work, they pursued happiness and status by buying things they did not need and living without much purpose. He coined the phrase “cheerful robot” to decry the unthinking conformity of much of America’s middle-class culture. Mills believed that such conformity was an aspect of what he called “mass society”—a condition of widespread political apathy that permitted business and political leaders to pursue the arms race and the potential for a nuclear war without much opposition.
Mills’s critique was not unique. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, there were other indications that many Americans were starting to question the nation’s moral and psychological condition. The 1955 novel The Man in the Grey-Flannel Suit (made into a film the next year) disparaged the lifestyle of middle-class managers. J. D. Salinger’s popular 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye; the 1955 film starring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause; and Paul Goodman’s 1960 book Growing Up Absurd all depicted the alienation of middle-class youth, raging against “phonies.” Malvina Reynolds’s 1962 song “Little Boxes” poked fun at the look-alike housing developments in postwar suburbs and at the complacency of the people who lived in them. Best-selling books by sociologically oriented journalists—William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) and Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Status Seekers (1959)—expressed alarm, during the height of the Eisenhower administration, at the influence of corporate employers, advertisers, and suburban developers in shaping the daily lives of American families. Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman struck a similar chord. In 1952, two left-wing writers, William Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman, launched MAD, a comics magazine of political and social satire that became an instant sensation with the baby-boom generation. It poked fun at middle-class suburbia, the Cold War, and advertising. Its slogan, “What? Me worry?” was intentionally ironic, because many Americans were quite worried about the escalating arms race, the proliferation of fallout shelters, and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust.
The Power Elite, published in 1956, was the most radical, controversial, and widely read of Mills’s three major books. It caused a firestorm in academic and political circles. America has a ruling elite, Mills wrote, and its most active members—top corporate executives—have little sense of social responsibility. Rather, they work collaboratively with the top military leaders and their allies in Congress and the White House (former general and World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower was the Republican president at the time) to shape the nation’s major priorities based primarily on greed and self-interest. The various interest groups that could contend for power—farmers’ organizations, labor unions, big-city mayors, and others—fight over crumbs left over after the big spending decisions, particularly the military budget, have already been decided.
Mills pointed out that the corporate, military, and political elites were not separate spheres but, rather, overlapping groups at the “command posts” of society. Top corporate executives (such as Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, former General Motors CEO Charles Wilson) were recruited to serve in the cabinet and on numerous committees providing advice to the White House and Congress. Retired generals and admirals (whom Mills called “warlords”) went to work for major defense corporations, using their influence to argue for bigger military budgets, new weapons systems, and government contracts for their new employers. Corporate executives and Pentagon leaders lobbied members of Congress to increase the military budget, pointing out that jobs would be created in defense plants and military bases in their districts.
Mills was particularly concerned that few newspapers, academics, or religious leaders spoke out against this concentration of power. Instead, most went along with the power elite’s ideology—a stance Mills called “crackpot realism,” in which dangerous, irresponsible ideas are accepted by the public as normal. One such idea was the concept of “mutually assured destruction”—that a world war could be averted if both the United States and Soviet Union had enough weapons to destroy the other. Mills hated Soviet totalitarianism, but he thought the United States and the Soviet Union could cooperate to avoid a costly arms race and a possible nuclear holocaust.
Mills’s critique of America’s power structure was dramatically at odds with the prevailing view of American democracy taught in high schools and colleges at the time. But Mills found unlikely validation in President Eisenhower’s farewell address on January 17, 1961, which warned about the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex,” an assemblage of influential players very similar to the power elite.
Along with Floyd Hunter’s Community Power Structure (a study of Atlanta, Georgia, published in 1953), The Power Elite inspired hundreds of studies by academics and activists, exposing the overlapping networks of corporate influence on local and national politics. A half century later, most Americans now recognize that the biggest corporations and the very wealthy have disproportionate political influence.
By the time he wrote The Power Elite, Mills had given up hope that a resurgent labor could revitalize American democracy. He seemed oblivious to the burgeoning civil rights movement that had erupted in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. (In fact, his writings indicate that he was oblivious to issues of race.)
But Mills’s books, particularly The Power Elite, resonated with the growing mood of discontent in the nation, particularly on the college campuses. Its influence can be seen in the Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society, written in 1962. During the last few years of his life, a few trends—the rise of student activism in the United States and Europe, the Cuban revolution in 1959, and the awakening of anticolonial movements in Africa, Asia, and South America—gave Mills a new sense of hope.
Energized by these movements, he wrote two short books—which he called “pamphlets”—aimed at a wide audience. The Causes of World War Three (1958), an impassioned plea for an end to the nuclear arms race, sold over 100,000 copies. Listen, Yankee (1960), a sympathetic look at the Cuban revolution from the viewpoint of a Cuban revolutionary, sold over 400,000 copies. In the fall of 1960, he published a “Letter to the New Left” in the British journal New Left Review, encouraging young radicals around the world.
Mills’s writing combined analysis and outrage. He was a meticulous researcher, but he did not wish to be what he called a “sociological bookkeeper.” He wrote about the fundamental questions facing American society and he had strong opinions. “I try to be objective,” Mills wrote, “I do not claim to be detached.”
Toward the end of his life, the mainstream media began asking Mills for his views on major issues of the day. In December 1960 he was invited to appear on the NBC television show The Nation’s Future to debate A. A. Berle, a spokesperson for the newly elected John F. Kennedy administration, about US policy in Latin America. On the eve of the program, Mills suffered a heart attack and had to cancel the debate. He never fully recovered his remarkable energy. A second heart attack on March 20, 1962, was fatal. He never lived to see the emergence of the student and antiwar movements that his work helped inspire.