The "Power Elite" Two Views

...The dominant committee has high-ranking personnel made up of interlocking and interchangeable parts...

...free medical care, payments of club fees, financial and legal advice, company lawyers and accountants available for tax, financial and legal advice, facilities for entertaining customers, private recreation areas—golf courses, swimming pools, gymnasiums—scholarship funds for sons of executives, company automobiles, and dining rooms for executive use...

...However, audiovisual aids make even functional illiteracy an adequate base for education...

...We have to do with an uneven organization of power...

...There are omissions...

...When in 1952 Stevenson and Eisenhower flew to Kasson for the purpose of promising farmers 90%, or 100%, or if necessary, 150%, parity price supports, they were joined by a number of wealthy husbandmen who had also flown—in their own airplanes...

...Oxford University Press...

...However, I do not feel that a matter which is essentially semantic should be the occasion for apoplexy that it has become in some quarters (cf., the review by Robert Lynd in The Nation...

...Also, Mills does less than justice to the contemporary relevance of Thorstein Veblen, and about this point I could write a book: in fact, I did...

...It is the substance, not the terminology, of Mills' presentation that matters most...

...Neither entertainers nor Congressmen nor labor leaders have any real voice in the ultimate "yes" or "no" that determines whether an H bomb will be dropped, whether we will go to war, whether we will live or die...

...As an explanation of the higher circles in American life, The Power Elite* is enormously valuable...

...What public opinion is no one knows with any exactitude, although Herbert Blumer has said that public opinion is what public opinion polls poll...

...Certain facts, which no other student of American society has troubled to collect with such skill, require even more sifting than Mills has given them...

...Even the most obtuse reviewers have expressed a grudging admiration for The Power Elite...

...A congressman's campaign expenses make it prohibitive for him to operate without big backing...

...They are a powerful troika ruling the United States in tandem and by committee, as other countries and all their institutions are currently run...

...At the very least, it presupposes the existence of controversies and difference of opinion about how to resolve them...

...He eschews the dictum of Franz Boas who said, "Never draw conclusions about anything till you know everything...

...6.00...

...The careful reader might object to his excessive voluntarism (are the rich as free as he makes them out to be, and if riot, doesn't Mills himself intimate that the explanation lies in a general loss of autonomy...

...But businessmen, Mills notes, now fly nearly four million hours a year in private planes, or more hours than all scheduled airlines put together...

...He nevertheless brilliantly anatomizes the small town, and then goes on to illumine the whole American scene...

...Since you obviously never know everything, this study bristles with challengeable, if plausible, conclusions...

...Ike's highly recommended "posture of confidence" appears to matter more than knowledge, a commodity that can always be tapped from the lower levels, or not at all...

...But the dominant themes of their mass entertainment, described later in the chapter, reveal nothing about or grossly distort how that majority live...

...Between the uppermost and the nether ranges of our class system, in this respect, a striking structural similarity has developed...

...Perhaps the power of American Catholicism has been underestimated...

...What does it mean to say that we have a mass society...

...McGraw-Hill has just sent me a sample chapter from its spanking new edition of a popular textbook, Sociology, by Arnold W. Green...

...For Mills has presented his picture against a backdrop of the mass society so ably drawn that it cannot but cause the sensitive to shriek and the less than sensitive to cry, "Foul...

...An impersonal subsidy, whether public or private, permits the Chairman and the Commissar to live it up...

...In this analysis, as in White Collar, sense on social stratification has been carefully disentangled from the nonsense in which it is usually embedded...

...Mills argues, wastefully, that this group should not be called a "ruling class...

...Nothing Mills has done is as important as making clear the social difference between the two...

...Now Mills points to and documents a situation in which, not just Eisenhower and MacArthur but scores of men like them, glide comfortably from military to corporate and political leadership...

...Corporations generally provide the planes, along with other fringe benefits...

...Although a graduate of West Point and not the Harvard School of Business Administration, he will blend naturally into an executive suite...

...Business executives are propertied...

...More data would be welcome—if anyone had them...

...For a long time, one industrial worker could be replaced by another without causing serious dislocation...

...Not satisfied with appropriating Trotsky's phrase, The Permanent Revolution, they now propose to steal from Stalin too...

...General Gruenther is a post-Power Elite example...

...Mills scorns the simple extrapolation from small town to universe that is so common among writers on American society...

...but none of that adds up to the colossal trappings supplied by corporate welfare...

...Nevertheless, he understands the essentially subordinate role of the celebrity...

...I take a typical passage— and it is typical not only of this book but of a standard American unity—from the sample chapter which is on recreation in America: The majority of adult Americans are law-abiding, work hard, save money, spend a great deal of time at home and love their children...

...An academician may think he has reached the end of his tether when a large number of university students need remedial reading courses...

...Atomized individuals are dependent upon mass association and mass communication for the dream image of real...

...At home the executives can also ride around in company-owned and chauffered automobiles .. . Lately, its encomiasts have taken to calling the American economy by a strange name...

...They are notably humanitarian in impulse, cooperativeand gregarious...

...What matters is that Mills has demonstrated the presence of a highly active class consciousness, inculcated in childhood and systematically sustained thereafter, in the ruling circles of American society—and has demonstrated this more fully and with greater contemporary relevance than those who criticize him for not using the concept of class...

...or, 2) a man attempting to buy votes for a special interest...

...The luckless student, who is legion, will have to absorb this pap with correlated movies...

...A company dedicated to keeping its officers happy,' one reliable observer recently noted 'can with all propriety have a company airplane for business trips and a yacht and a hunting-fishing lodge in the north woods to entertain its biggest customers...

...And the schools will not help, since they too are becoming a mass medium...

...What we have, Rakosi help us, is a People's Capitalism...

...until only the core is left for us to contemplate...

...No doubt the celebrity occupies a place of honor greater than that accorded his predecessors at any other time in human history...

...Most of their lives are lived within groups, organized and informal...

...Pugilists and publicsts advise the President on how to combat juvenile delinquency while the criminologist is ignored...

...That they should also have been stung and, as most of them put it, "infuriated" by the book was only to be expected...

...Conventional observers have habitually distracted us from the upper to the middle levels of power, confounding one with the other...

...While, at the center, pressure groups establish a kind of balance, in the top echelons of government, as in private corporations, the rule realistically stated by Mills is co-optation of one's own kind...

...they do have goodly incomes...

...They have helped to create a special style of tax free social life...

...One can scarcely overpraise C. Wright Mills for this latest installment in a series that, if continued, may assume almost Balzacian proportions...

...This is the star system, and Mills abominates it...

...Lesser breeds have to repay those who help them, and those who help them are at the command posts of modern American civilization...

...ity that is built into their foggy worldview...

...By contrast with American workers, the elite is a compact social and psychological entity whose members "accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike...

...How far we have moved toward the destruction of public opinion may be measured by 1956 as an election year without a single substantive issue that politicians are ready to debate...

...But all such criticism is picayunish in the face of Mills' extraordinary accomplishment...

...We see "the warlords, the corporation chieftains, the political directorate" in proper perspective...

...It strips away whole layers of folklore, chapter by chapter, * The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills...

...My opinion is that the old label still fits, and that his book provides the best evidence as to how it still fits...

...The publisher's pitch includes pointing pridefully to new study aids such as "Six motion pictures with sound track" that "have been produced in correlation with the text...

...or, 3) a criminal needing protection for himself and the underworld...

...Newspaper accounts indicate that, in view of his business opportunities, he felt obliged to relinquish a mere general ship out of consideration for his wife and children...

...Like Ike's homey references to a "family" of little weapons with atomic warheads, these terms are used unblushingly...

...Voluntary associations, in order to be effective, take on the shape and quality of mass organizations...

...Not that he is invulnerable...

...Charlie Wilson was in earnest, as always, when he suggested Arthur Godfrey, a man without wit, talent or intelligence, but one who prizes humility in his employees, as propaganda chief for the Cold War...

...For one thing, it means that the great American Public is becoming more and more inconsequential...

...The People's Capitalism in a permanent state of Revolution provides the "joy of suffering" for unemployed automobile workers, as an official of the government has so neatly put it, and perquisites like those alloted to the Soviet elite, for its leaders...

...For the reading public, that fraction of a fraction not afflicted with saddle sores from riding the new Patriotic hobbyhorse, here, thank heavens, is a book by C. Wright Mills...

...A crowd may be manipulated from centralized points of control where the Public becomes processed cheese, and a mass mind emerges into which new attitudes are pumped overnight...

...The public, already a phantom thirty years ago—Mills reminds us of Walter Lippmann's phrase—has been converted into a crowd with at tendant loss of critical self-consciousness...

...The movers, or at least, the shakers, of American society are a very mobile lot—in the sense that they travel a great deal, and not in the sense that they have all risen from humble ori gins (a myth, and one among several, adroitly exploded by Mills...

...In a rare burst of candor, the Washington correspondent, Roscoe Drummond, noted recently that the campaign contributor is likely to be: 1) a man seeking personal aggrandizement of some sort...

...Neither saints nor millionaires are ordinarily attracted to the Congress...

...Resolutions rammed down everyone's throat by the AMA or the American Legion, reflect the members' impotence and their virtual loss of identity...

...Clearly, it is only a stone's throw from NATO to BBD and O. If no extensive technical training is required of underdogs, very little, perhaps less, is demanded of their betters...

...Thus, strictly speaking, there can be no public opinion, although there may be a great deal of private opinion, in a totalitarian society...

...Among those aids to gracious living enumerated by Mills, if not by the Department of Internal Revenue, are the following...