Mills, C. Wright 1916-1962

MILLS, C. WRIGHT 1916-1962

Social thinker and theorist

Dissenter

C. Wright Mills has been referred to as America's "foremost dissenter"; he rose to prominence during the 1950s as a dynamic liberal social thinker. David Halberstam observed that he provided an intellectual bridge between old Left—the Communists of the Great Depression and their sympathizers—and the New Left of the 1960s.

Early Life

Mills spent an alienated and lonely childhood in West Texas and then Dallas. In college he studied sociology and philosophy, first at the University of Texas at Austin and then at the University of Wisconsin. Throughout his academic career he impressed his professors with his brilliance, his appetite for knowledge, and his brashness. One professor said of him, "The prevailing legend about him is to the effect that he takes people up and pursues them furiously until they get so tired of it they rebuff him (or until he has milked them dry and drops them). Mills received his doctorate in 1942, the same year he was rejected for service in World War II because of high blood pressure.

Outsider

Mills imagined himself as the perpetual outsider, and from that position he developed his theories of American life. His first book, The New Men of Power, was published in 1948. In 1951 he published White Collar, an important look at the new middle class of the postwar era. His most famous book was published in 1956—The Power Elite. In it he discussed the forces that dominated American life: he believed that all decisions on national issues were made by an interwoven body of the executive branch of the government with its army of bureaucrats, military policy makers, and corporate leaders. Since they controlled all access to power, those outside the power elite are denied any influence. While the country seemed to be growing stronger, then, most Americans felt that they were less in control of their own lives. Mills did not propose that there was a conspiracy among the power elite; since they all had the same interests at heart, it was only natural that they cooperated.

Radical Social Critic

The Power Elite was widely discussed and brought Mills to national prominence as a radical social critic of the status quo. He relished the notoriety and cultivated an image of himself as different from other intellectuals. Throughout his writing career he was also a maverick professor at Columbia University: he rode a motorcycle to campus and stomped into the classroom in big leather boots and a lumberjack's shirt. He was a capable carpenter who built his own home. He believed in hard living, and his heavy drinking and smoking aggravated the vascular condition that had kept him out of military service. Mills had his first heart attack in 1958; he died of heart failure in 1962.

Early Death

Because of his untimely death, Mills was unable to see the impact his thinking had on the radicalism of the 1960s. For that generation the enemy to society was the entrenched "military-industrial complex," to which President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave its name, but Mills had already anticipated in The Power Elite.

Sources:

David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993);

Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York: Free Press, 1983);

Rick Tilman, C Wright Mills: A Native Radical and His American Intellectual Roots (University Park & London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984).