>New York Times Book Review >July 9, 2000 > > The Spiritual Wobbly > ______________________________________________________________ > > The sociologist C. Wright Mills did not fit in with either Marxists > or liberals. > >By JOHN B. JUDIS > >C. WRIGHT MILLS: Letters and Autobiographical Writings. >Edited by Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills. Introduction by Dan Wakefield. >Illustrated. 378 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press. $34.95. > > The anxious, conformist 1950's, it now appears, were a high-water > mark in American social criticism -- from David Riesman, William F. > Buckley Jr. and Dwight Macdonald to James Baldwin, Paul Goodman > and, of course, C. Wright Mills. Mills, a hulking Texan who taught > undergraduate sociology at Columbia University, wrote at least two > books, ''White Collar'' and ''The Power Elite,'' that are still > well worth reading. He was, by his own description, one of those > ''outlanders who came late in life to big cities and 'discover > them.' ''His best books are about the transition from an older > Jeffersonian government of independent entrepreneurs and patchwork > federalism to a new America dominated by giant corporations and a > centralized government and staffed by a new middle class of > property-less white-collar workers. > > Mills rode to Morningside Heights on a BMW motorcycle from a house > that he had built himself in the country. He wrote prolifically, > was married four times (twice to the same woman), quarreled noisily > and continually with his colleagues and died in 1962 at 45 of a > heart attack. He is a good subject for a biography, but has been > favored by only one extended work, ''C. Wright Mills: An American > Utopian,'' by Irving Louis Horowitz, which is primarily devoted to > the explication of his work. Now Mills's daughters, Kathryn Mills > and Pamela Mills, have published a selection of his letters and > unpublished writings, including an autobiographical series of > letters to Tovarich, an imaginary Russian friend. These letters > don't stand on their own as literature or as social analysis, but > they reveal parts of the man that are not readily apparent from > reading his books. > > In a hostile review of ''The Sociological Imagination,'' the > sociologist Edward Shils described Mills as a ''burly cowpuncher on > the long, slow ride from the Panhandle of Texas to Columbia > University.'' But Mills had a far more ironic view of his > upbringing. He grew up in Waco (his father sold insurance on the > road), and he graduated from the University of Texas, after one > miserable year at Texas A & M. ''I did not grow up with cowboys on > a ranch. For this I shall always be grateful,'' he tells Tovarich. > He mocks the prevailing sentiment about the Texas cowboy: ''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.'' > > BOOK EXCERPT > > "There is no movie like a cowboy movie. All the cowboys on the ranch > in Texas where I could have grown up looked just like Gary Cooper. > They were tall and slim, and they had that same steely eye, those long > arms, and of course the great guns hanging. Every one of them, at one > time or another, had taken the long walk in the dusty street before > the wooden fronts of the stores behind which merchants trembled and > villains lurked unseen but well located for obscene aggression. All my > cowboys had come through that, and now they were men, quiet, unafraid > men. Tested in that way, certain of themselves, they were each a > compact being, just like the voice of Marshall Dillon." > > -- from the first chapter of 'C. Wright Mills' > > Mills's Texas was not distinguished by its frontier past, but by > its provincial backwardness. ''I sometimes think that during the > 30's I was living in the 20's, and that during the early 40's, I > was living in the 30's,'' Mills tells Tovarich. When he comes to > Columbia in 1946, he doesn't fit in either among professional > sociologists or among the City College Marxists. ''What this means > . . . is that I have been intellectually, politically, morally > alone. I have never known what others call 'fraternity' with any > group, however small, neither academic nor political,'' he writes > Tovarich. His isolation probably contributed to the novelty of his > work, allowing him to avoid academic sociology's ''statistical > stuff'' and ''heavy-duty theoretical'' nonsense as well as the New > York left's celebratory liberalism and anachronistic Marxism. > > Mills's political outlook was a visceral anti-authoritarianism. > Even as a freshman at Texas A & M in 1935, he is complaining in a > letter to the school paper of the ''oppression and the suppression > of free thinking'' and of ''the feudal autocracy at college'' that > forces a rebel ''back into the folds of automats from which he > tried to escape.'' Two decades later, writing to Tovarich, Mills > calls himself a ''spiritual Wobbly'' who ''doesn't like bosses -- > capitalistic or communistic -- they are all the same to him. He > wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all > times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to > follow up.'' > > This vision underlay Mills's separation of society into ''the > little man'' of ''White Collar'' and ''the high and the mighty'' of > ''The Power Elite.'' But it also contributed to his disastrously > simple-minded view of international relations. During World War II, > he regarded the Allied and Axis powers as bent equally upon > creating a new militarized corporate capitalism. Mills, who was > excused from service because of high blood pressure, expressed his > antipathy to America's role in the war tentatively in articles he > wrote for Partisan Review and The New Republic, but much more > clearly in his letters. ''It's a goddamned blood bath to no end > save misery and mutual death to all civilized values,'' he wrote > his parents in March 1945. During the cold war, Mills's > anti-authoritarianism led him to embrace an equally unfounded > equivalence between Eisenhower's ''Amerika'' -- Mills's spelling in > a September 1957 letter to Harvey Swados -- and Khrushchev's Soviet > Union and to romanticize the anti-American rebel Fidel Castro as a > spiritual Wobbly who was ''neither capitalist nor Communist.'' > > For most of his life, Mills was not a political activist, but a > writer and intellectual. During World War II, he most worried that > if called into the Army, he would ''lose touch with things > intellectual.'' Mills feels indignation, he writes his parents, > toward ''the sons of bitches who run American Big Business,'' but > he regards his own vocation as portraying vividly their and his > place in the American firmament. He describes ''White Collar'' to > his parents as ''my little work of art. . . . It has to be a thing > of craftsmanship and art as well as science.'' He labors over his > writing and worries that he is not up to the task. ''I'm a writer > without any of the cultural background and without much of the > verbal sensibilities of the 'born writer,' ''he tells Tovarich. > ''Accordingly I am someone who has worked for 20 years to try to > overcome any deficiencies in the practice of my craft, and yet > remain true to whatever I am and how I got that way and to the > condition of the world as I see it.'' > > Mills's view of his work as art and literature probably helped him > to attain a certain objectivity even in the midst of his > indignation. Only in the late 1950's, with the publication of ''The > Causes of World War Three'' and ''Listen, Yankee,'' in which he > writes with the voice of a Cuban revolutionary, does Mills begin to > see himself as a political activist whose words will lead directly > to deeds. When Mills describes ''Listen, Yankee'' to his former > student Walter Klink as ''a pivotal book for me, and not merely a > pamphlet,'' that really signals his undoing as a social theorist > and his emergence as an actor in the drama he is attempting to > depict. A year later, he is dead. > > Mills's daughters have selected 150 letters from more than 600 that > are available. To protect the privacy of ''family and friends still > living,'' they have deleted parts of letters and entire letters > that touch upon Mills's personal life. That is understandable, but > it makes it harder to grasp the connection between Mills's life and > work. Mills hints darkly in one letter of ''monstrous tragedies'' > in his life and writes in another of ''troubles I've usually > brought on myself,'' but we never learn what these are. > > W hile the editors have published letters of questionable interest > -- for instance, a letter in which Mills details his travel > schedule to his publisher -- they have not published letters that > show Mills's legendary combativeness toward his colleagues and > erstwhile political allies. Mills himself refers in one letter to > the ''sociological brawl at Columbia,'' but we get to see very few > punches thrown. Such correspondence appears to exist -- Horowitz > quotes, for instance, from an exchange between Mills and Lionel > Trilling and also from Mills's correspondence with the editors who > published Shils's review of ''The Sociological Imagination'' -- but > these letters, and letters like them, are not included in the > current collection. > > There may have been a good reason for excluding these sorts of > letters, but the effect of their omission is to produce what seems > like a sanitized version of the man. That's too bad, because C. > Wright Mills, like Paul Goodman, Dwight Macdonald and other social > critics of that era, was a kind of difficult genius whose vices > seem to have been integral to his virtues. > ______________________________________________________________ > > John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and the author > of ''The Paradox of American Democracy.'' > > <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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