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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.
Too many social scientists write incomprehensible articles on inconsequential topics for journals that no one reads except their own colleagues. (The lead article in the March 2000 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is titled “The Instability of Androgynous Names: The Symbolic Maintenance of Gender Boundaries.”) But there have been notable exceptions—from Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey to John Kenneth Galbraith—who have sought a wider audience and embraced a broader purpose in their work. C. Wright Mills was one of these. Born in Waco in 1916, educated at Dallas’ Technical High School and at Texas A&M and the University of Texas, he taught sociology in the fifties at Columbia University. Perhaps no sociologist in the past half century has had so much influence over how Americans think—or aroused as much ire from his colleagues.
Mills wrote in a time of popular apathy but great intellectual ferment. Along with David Riesman, Dwight Macdonald, and William F. Buckley, Jr., Mills understood that America had turned a corner in its history. It had inherited global responsibility and had become a country of big government and big business, many of whose citizens no longer worked on their own farms or for small businesses, but in large glass office buildings. While Mills’s academic colleagues often dwelt on the effects or symptoms of change, Mills, whose motto was to “take it big,” wanted to know what it all meant. Half a century later, his answers continue to resonate.
As Mills’s motto suggests, his intellectual approach clearly bore the traces of his Texas upbringing, but because he was often characterized as a provincial by his critics, he was loath to discuss his Texas roots publicly during his lifetime. But now, with the publication of C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, edited by his daughters Kathryn and Pamela Mills, we can learn in Mills’s own words how profoundly his upbringing in Texas contributed to his later life and work.
Mills, who died of a heart attack in 1962 at age 45, wrote two books that are still widely read: White Collar and the American Middle Class, which came out in 1951, and, better known, The Power Elite, which was published in 1956. A third, The Sociological Imagination, is treasured by academics who, like Mills, don’t fit their profession’s stifling mold. He also wrote two books on foreign policy, The Causes of World War Three and Listen, Yankee, that, to the benefit of Mills’s reputation, are no longer available in bookstores, except perhaps in Havana.
The Power Elite turned the high-school-civics-class view of American political power on its head. Mills argued that American politics was ruled not by citizens controlling their government by the power of the vote but by an “intricate set of overlapping cliques” that occupied the “command posts” of the country’s great economic, military, and political institutions. He called them the “power elite.” “In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them,” Mills wrote. His theory was hotly debated, but many of its essentials are now conceded: how on a critical international issue, such as permitting China to enter the World Trade Organization, the top leaders of business and finance will suddenly close ranks with the upper echelons of the State and Treasury departments, many of whom came from the same circles.
In White Collar, Mills subverted the prevailing fifties view of America as a Horatio Alger land of farms and factories. Instead, he portrayed an America shaped by a new white-collar class—from secretaries and schoolteachers to salesmen and accountants. The rise of this new class defied the Marxist prediction that America and other advanced capitalist countries would be increasingly divided between a large and potentially revolutionary blue-collar working class and a small and corrupt ruling class. But it also defied the American dream that every citizen could expect, on his or her merits, to rise from worker to owner. “The twentieth-century white-collar man has never been independent as the farmer used to be, nor as hopeful of the main chance as the businessman,” Mills wrote. “He is always somebody’s man, the corporation’s, the government’s, the army’s; and he is seen as the man who does not rise.” Mills called him “the new little man in the big world of the twentieth century.” His critique of American democracy and his vision of a white-collar America would endure. They still remain the radical guideposts, the “con” of the pro and con, in the continuing debate over political power and economic opportunity in America.
During his lifetime, Mills’s critics would frequently attribute his political heresies or methodological transgressions to the impediment of having grown up and gone to college in Texas. An acerbic reviewer of The Sociological Imagination conjured up an image of Mills as a “burly cowpuncher on the long, slow ride from the Panhandle of Texas to Columbia University, carrying in his saddle-bag some books which he reads with absorption while his horse trots along.” Mills was enraged by this kind of ad hominem attack. He wrote the editor of the American Sociological Review, which had published the article, “I haven’t been in Texas for twenty years, except to lecture once or twice; I am rather frightened of horses and certainly wouldn’t attempt to ride one.” In 1960 he wrote in a letter to the publisher Carl Marzani, “I am not ‘a Texan’ any more than I am ‘a New Yorker.’ In fact there are several places where I feel much more ‘at home’ than either, all of them outside the USA.”
But in his correspondence and unpublished autobiographical writings, some of which take the form of letters to an imaginary Russian friend that he called Tovarich, Mills fully acknowledged how important his Texas roots were. He believed that he could see America more clearly because he came from a region that was still experiencing the changes that had already occurred in New York or Chicago. What was hidden to others by its very ubiquity was still witnessed by him as a vital process. In a letter to Tovarich, he wrote, “I was in an outlying region—Texas. . . . I sometimes think that during the thirties I was living in the twenties, and that during the early forties, I was living in the thirties.” He described himself as one of those “outlanders who came late in life to big cities and ‘discover them.’”
Growing up, Mills experienced the conflict between the older ideal of frontier independence and the emerging reality of white-collar America. Mills’s grandfather on his mother’s side was a rancher and a cattle driver, a large brawler who was killed in 1922 in an altercation with one of his ranch hands. Mills’s mother married Charles Grover Mills, who had arrived in Texas in 1910 from Florida and who traveled as an insurance agent for Banker’s Life of Des Moines, Iowa. Banker’s Life not only required Mills’s father to be constantly on the road but also shuffled him from one branch office to another. As a result, Mills moved around the state during his childhood, living in Waco, Wichita Falls, Fort Worth, Sherman, Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas, where he went to high school. Mills admitted later that he first got the idea for White Collar when “I was ten years old and watched my white-collared father getting ready for another sales trip.”
Mills also got his metaphor of the “little man” from his father, who was of medium height but slight compared to Mills, who was built like his grandfather, well over six feet tall and two hundred pounds. Mills was raised by his mother and older sister, and he described himself as a “sissy boy until my first year of college.” He cared far more for books than for sports. But if Mills didn’t get into physical fights, he got into battles over ideas, even at an early age. He was a lonely, rebellious child. Having discovered Clarence Darrow’s atheism, he rose up against his Catholic mother and fundamentalist Texas. During high school, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Dallas Morning News denouncing a local fundamentalist for his rejection of science, causing embarrassment to his family when friends assumed that his father was the author.
According to Mills, his father sent him to Texas A&M “to make a man of me.” It pretty much had that effect, although not in the way that Mills’s father seems to have intended. It strengthened Mills’s resolve to go his own way and also endowed him with an aversion to military life. During World War II, Mills’s unwillingness to enlist stemmed as much from his memory of Texas A&M as from opposition to the war itself. “What did World War II mean to me?” he later wrote. “In threatening personal terms, it meant the rural idiocy and militarism of Texas A&M.”
When Mills attended Texas A&M, students were required to wear uniforms and obey strict military discipline. Freshman, who were called Fish, were severely hazed. Mills was called Fish Tarzan because of his size. He later recalled one incident. “I was reading when three heads appeared in the door. ‘How do you do,’ I said. ‘What the hell do you mean—listen bastard, when sophomores walk in this god damned room, you get up. When juniors pass by, you get up damned quick, and when you see a senior a block off, get up and stay up until they’re a block past—now get up.’ Then the three beat my butt.” Later in the year, Mills was ostracized by his classmates after he accidentally injured another student in a wrestling match. The school decreed that Mills receive the silent treatment, after which only one professor would talk to him.
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