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Grist for Mills
In his controversial books White Collar and The American Middle Class and The Power Elite, sociologist C. Wright Mills used his Texas upbringing to turn the nation's understanding of democracy upside down.
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Mills fought back with words. He wrote a series of letters, signed “A Freshman,” to the school newspaper, the Battalion, attacking A&M’s ways. “What effect has the overbearing attitude of the upperclassman on the mind of the freshman?” Mills asked. “Does it make the freshman more of a man? Most assuredly not, for there can be no friendship born out of fear, hatred or contempt; and no one is a better man who submits passively to the slavery of his mind and body by one who is less of a man than he.”
After an extremely unhappy year—Mills would later dwell in particular on the effect that his classmates’ silence had on him—he decided to transfer to the University of Texas. It was a decision, he wrote later, that “made me into an intellectual.” Yet, as author Richard Davis Gillam suggested in an unpublished thesis about Mills’s early years, the year he spent at Texas A&M probably had a greater effect on his character that the four subsequent, and predominantly happy, years he spent in Austin. When Mills arrived at College Station, he was a solitary, angry teenager; when he left, he was no less angry but had adopted a protective shell to defend himself from the kind of hostility that he encountered there. For Mills, being an intellectual didn’t mean becoming engaged or activist but cultivating a critical detachment from the world. In a paper he wrote at the University of Texas, he produced a variation of Marx’s famous statement that the duty of philosophers is not to simply interpret the world but to change it. “In an intellectual world that stinks,” Mills wrote, “it is the business of the long-nosed philosopher publicly to hold his nose.”
Mills saw in the academic field of sociology (which at UT was still closely linked to economics, philosophy, and political science) a means of criticizing the world without becoming implicated in it. He threw himself into learning sociology. He read voraciously and excelled in his classes and was soon on a first-name basis with his professors; he became the president of a sociology honor society; and in his senior year, he had a paper accepted for publication in a prestigious academic journal. He subordinated everything to becoming a sociologist. When his parents expressed concern about a girl he was dating, he wrote back, “I’m building a sociological system of science and women have only such place as they themselves make in it.” This attitude would later contribute to three divorces.
Mills cultivated the image of the future professor. He smoked a pipe and wrote his letters home on sociology department stationery. But for him, sociology was still a means, not an end. He worried that the pretensions and limits of the discipline would prevent him from having his say. After he got married to Dorothy Helen “Freya” Smith in 1938, he wrote a journal entry: “There are so many people left that I’ve got to tell to go to hell. And so many of them have purse strings to choke and coerce young married men with radical tendencies.” When he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he initially wrote a letter declining the honor. “So far as I am able to determine PBK has no functional justification for its existence,” he wrote. But he decided to accept the award, because it would allow him to fool “old liberals who hold key positions in university chairs” into hiring him.
At UT, Mills was surrounded by politics and political activists. He himself did research for the New Deal’s National Youth Administration, whose Texas director was Lyndon Johnson. One of his roommates seems to have had some links to the Communists, another worked closely in Johnson’s 1938 congressional campaign, and Mills’s wife worked for the Young Men’s and Women’s Christian Association, a leader in racial integration and labor rights. But Mills did not participate in politics; instead, as he wrote his father about political and religious turmoil on campus, he viewed the turmoil as a “laboratory for sociologists.”
Yet Mills certainly did have political convictions, which were, if anything, reinforced by his years in Austin. Like many Texans born before World War II—from Dan Smoot (the right-wing conspiracy theorist who was Mills’s close friend in high school) to Ross Perot—Mills was steeped in the rhetoric of Texas populism. In the 1890’s populist politics had sunk its deepest roots in Texas and Kansas. For the next fifty years, if not longer, Texas politicians of the left and the right described themselves as the tribunes of the people against the “interests” and the “money power.” Mills grew up listening to these politicians and envisaging the fundamental divisions of society in populist terms, and in The Power Elite he would depict a society divided between the people and the establishment.
This Texas perspective was far removed from the intellectual climate at the City College of New York—the training ground for many prominent post-World War II sociologists. At CCNY, American populism and liberalism were seen as bygone faiths. The main texts were Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, and the main debate was between adherents of the latter two. Future sociologists like Seymour Martin Lipset and Daniel Bell saw America divided between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, not between the people and the economic interests, and the principal question they pondered was how soon, and on behalf of which brand of socialism, the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie.
At UT, Mills was deeply influenced by Veblen, the Midwesterner who, in The Theory of the Leisure Class and other works, criticized the excesses of American capitalism with an ironic detachment that Mills sought to emulate. Veblen had largely been forgotten in many elite Eastern universities, but Mills learned economics from a Veblen disciple, economist Clarence E. Ayres. In the spirit of Veblen, Ayres wrote in The Divine Right of Capital: “The present order of society can be saved, and there is much to be said for saving it. But it can be saved only by the abandonment of capitalism as it is conceived by capitalists and their spokesmen, present and past,” which explains why the Texas Legislature kept trying to get him fired.
Mills’s combination of populist criticism and ironic detachment suited him well in the years after World War II, when the profession was dominated by arid academic jargon. Many of his ex-Marxist colleagues had to spend years unlearning the lessons of Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed, while many of the newer sociologists who would graduate in the early fifties were schooled in what Mills called “statistical stuff and heavy duty theoretical bullshit.” Mills avoided both. His detachment and his perspective as an “outlander” prevented him from getting caught up in what he called the “American celebration” of the decade. He saw the threat to democracy and the American dream that was unfolding beneath the prosperity of the post-war years and that would soon contribute to a decade of tumultuous revolt.
After Mills left Austin, in 1939, he returned to Texas for only a few brief visits. He got his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, and after teaching at the University of Maryland during World War II, he joined the sociology department at Columbia. In the East, Mills displayed the curious ambivalence toward his upbringing that is often characteristic of Texas expatriates—at once denying its influence and defensively exaggerating it. He didn’t ride horses, he insisted—but he did ride motorcycles and would regularly make the trip from his house in the country (which he built himself) to Columbia on a BMW cycle. He didn’t wear cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat, but he arrived at Columbia in work boots and a leather jacket. He didn’t get into barroom brawls, but he got into verbal fights with almost all of his fellow sociologists. The Sociological Imagination was a book-length polemic against the “cloudy obscurantism” and “formal and empty ingenuity” that dominated sociology. As he lay recuperating from a heart attack in 1961, he got only one card from his colleagues at Columbia.
Mills understood the roots of his own unruly behavior. In his private musings, he acknowledged and made fun of the influence that his Texas past had had over him, characterizing its influence in terms of the movie westerns he frequented. He wrote Tovarich, “So my grandfather was shot and I did not grow up with cowboys on a ranch. For this I shall always be grateful. I do not want it, but still, late one night . . . I have thought about the cowboys of my native province. My God, what men they are. Or were. Or must have been. Or ought to have been. There is no movie like a cowboy movie.” In a letter to a friend, he parodied his own behavior toward his colleagues at Columbia, as if he were playing the hero in a western: “‘I don’t hate nobody,’ he said. ‘I’m just tired of the bullshit.’ He said it slowly so they’d all hear it good. Then he swung a couple of chairs into the bar, one following the other like one smash; knocking the bottom off a whiskey bottle and (the cameraman) moved in close.”
If there was a way that Mills’s Texas upbringing limited him that he didn’t acknowledge, it was in his understanding of the world beyond America’s shores. Still seething from his experience with Texas A&M-style militarism and patriotism, he adopted a kind of frontier isolationism disguised as left-wing internationalism. He opposed American participation in World War II. He characterized the war in a letter to his parents as a “goddamned bloodbath to no end save misery and mutual death to all civilized values.” During the cold war, he treated the United States and the Soviet Union as moral equals. The United States, he wrote, must acknowledge Soviet communism as “an alternative way of industrialization.” And in his last years, he championed Cuba’s Fidel Castro, insisting that “the Cuban revolutionary . . . is neither capitalist nor Communist.”
These were clearly shortcomings, but you can’t have everything in a social theorist. Some foreign policy experts—Henry Kissinger comes to mind—don’t seem to have the foggiest grasp of what is going on in their own countries. What Mills displayed in The Power Elite and White Collar was an uncanny ability to see through the fog that shrouded discussions of American democracy in the fifties. And much of the reason he was able to do so was because he saw the country as an “outlander.” Although he never would have acknowledged it to one of his colleagues at Columbia, Mills knew his own secret. When a correspondent asked him in 1952 how he had avoided the pitfalls of American “conformism,” he replied. “I am not really a regular American, but a Texan.”
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