C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writing ed. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills
Jacoby, Russell
C. WRIGHT MILLS, LETTERS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS ed. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills introduction by Dan Wakefield University of California Press, 2000 378 pp $34.95 IN THE nineteen...
...Perlman mocked Mills for signing up "the Carpetbaggers to overthrow the slave system...
...In 1970, Fredy Perlman of the Detroit Black & Red publishing house savaged Mills in The Incoherence of the Intellectual...
...It is no exaggeration to say that since the end of World War II in Britain and the United States smug conservatives, tired liberals and disillusioned radicals have carried on a weary discourse in which issues are blurred and potential debate muted...
...This Mills, who wrote from the heart and the head, we have missed...
...Doubtful...
...He was a man in a rush...
...It was sorta hard...
...Its opening might have been written yesterday...
...It is perhaps most inviting to imagine Mills taking the plunge he pondered, leaving the university to earn his keep as a peripatetic writer and critic...
...His defense of the Cuban Revolution, his criticism of cold war policies, and his impatience with American intellectuals earned him few friends...
...Thoreau celebrating his ability to construct everything he needed for his daily existence...
...setting up the 2 by 8 sill structure and laying in the subflooring...
...If anything, he considered intellectuals a possible source of political change...
...His appendix to The Sociological Imagination, a book addressed to sociology students, is titled "On Intellectual Craftsmanship...
...feet of 5/8-inch plywood on the living room floor in preparation for the rubber tile...
...RUSSELL JACOBY is author of The End of Utopia, The Last Intellectuals, and other books...
...The Wobblies were anarcho-syndicalists with a visceral distaste for authority...
...Unlikely...
...the stress of solitary opposition lodged itself in their arteries and veins...
...And now when all that is either dead or impossible, which amounts to the same thing, I wonder what I'll write and how I'll write it...
...In a letter, Mills explained what being a Wobbly entailed...
...He teaches history at the University of California at Los Angeles...
...You are "one of the very few men whose judgment I respect," Mills wrote...
...I remember wild rice and French fried onions and all the strawberries you could eat...
...I refer less to political orientation than to political ethos, and I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat...
...Undoubtedly, a few sociologists continue to idolize Mills, but it is difficult to identify one who has filled his shoes...
...Mills aptly stressed the spiritual core of his anarchism...
...He had no experience with a radical period and its waning...
...He sprinkled letters to fellow academics with farming and construction information as well as news about drills and saws he purchased...
...Of course, Mills might not have been able to fill his own shoes, as it were...
...In one of his final letters, he wrote about the guns he had acquired...
...To this day, sociologists who resent Mills's success and politics claim that he misused Gerth...
...He left behind a significant body of work, but it is tempting to speculate what Mills would have written if he had lived longer...
...Years after a summer affair in New York, he wrote the lady that coming back uptown he had the cab "swing over" and stop at the curb of their Fourteenth Street apartment...
...Several times Mills contemplated giving up his Columbia appointment to make a life as a writer, a step he hesitated to take...
...Is this something peculiarly American, the intellectualas-carpenter...
...This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is Wobbly freedom...
...And there was worry about it...
...He may have been just that...
...He added that he did these things only in the summer, knowing full well that "come the fall, I'd be safe back at school...
...his father an insurance company agent...
...To be sure, Mills also denounced intellectuals as sellouts...
...After all 14th Street in the middle forties produced White Collar along with so many other things...
...His grandfather had been a rancher, "shot in the back with a .30-30 rifle...
...But do you know what a Wobbly is...
...The intellectual workman forms his own self as he works toward the perfection of his craft...
...The essay closed presciently, "We are beginning to move again...
...He reported to Gerth that he worked hard "all day burning my five acres in preparation for spring plowing and also put down 400 sq...
...In an era of political timidity, their radicalism kept them up nights...
...They would have been celebrated in the later sixties, but did not make it that far...
...It is very proper," Mills commented, "that no intellectual group or agency should send me to Europe but that I should smell it for the first time as an amateur mechanic...
...Irving Louis Horowitz, who edited Mills's essays and wrote a biography, long ago surrendered any association with him...
...The bright and ambitious Mills absorbed European social theory...
...After his first heart attack, and a year before his fatal one in 1962, he confided to his mother that he did not fear death in "the slightest...
...Mills labeled the intellectuals "the Swiss Guard of the Power Elite...
...White Collar, which laid out the transformation of the independent to dependent middle class, was at least partly autobiographical...
...It's a kind of spiritual condition...
...Gerth, you don't fight it enough...
...He always saw himself as the kid from Texas living in the big city...
...What comes across in Mills's letters, lovingly edited and annotated by his daughters, is his effort to open windows...
...In an introduction to Thorsten Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, Mills wrote that this iconoclastic critic was "a masterless, recalcitrant man and if we must group him somewhere in DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 113 BOOKS the American scene, it is with those most recalcitrant Americans, the Wobblies...
...In an appreciative afterword to a new edition of The Sociological Imagination, Todd Gitlin mentions the old critics of Mills, such as Daniel Bell and David Riesman, but names no successors or even followers...
...He wants to be, and wants everyone else to be, his own boss...
...He never had the chance...
...Alvin Gouldner, author of The Crisis in Western Sociology, may have had a claim, but he also died relatively young...
...Unlike card-carrying members of the IWW, he had limited faith in direct workingclass action...
...Increasingly, he saw himself as writer, not a sociologist or professor...
...Would he have aged gracefully to become a chaired professor of sociology...
...he spent several summers constructing vacation homes from scratch, doing with his wife virtually all the woodwork and plumbing...
...As he became more politically engaged he also felt more beleaguered, as if he alone carried the weight of the world...
...After Macdonald reviewed White Collar, ridiculing its prose, Mills bandaged the hurt and asked him for concrete suggestions...
...Yet he calls on "these fragmentary men" to become "Promethean history-makers...
...He was never happy with standard leftism, disciplinary boundaries, or scholarly jargon...
...I looked the place over and I remembered what it had meant to me...
...I have lost my friend, as the Romans used to say, my 'alter ego...
...He complained to E. P. Thompson, the English historian, of the mounting "pressure" to defend Cuba...
...Nevertheless, Mills denounced intellectuals because he believed in them...
...the sickness of complacency has prevailed, the bi-partisan banality flourished...
...Mills was born and raised in Texas, and 112 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 BOOKS went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where he encountered Hans Gerth, a refugee scholar from Germany who had been a student of Karl Mannheim...
...At a memorial Gerth spoke warmly of Mills...
...and it might be revealing that Gitlin himself moved 114 . DISSENT / Spring 2001 BOOKS from a sociology department to one called culture and communication...
...He's also a man who's often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon...
...Mills wanted to write well and evocatively—and sometimes he did...
...they could spearhead political resistance...
...There is no hurry," he wrote to Ralph Milliband, the English socialist, a year earlier "except I am in a hurry...
...Mills always remained something of the ornery straight-shooting frontiersman...
...Would he have become a conference-going theorist of gender, class, and race...
...Even early in his career he applied for a Guggenheim grant, boldly explaining, "I have never had occasion to take very seriously much of American sociology...
...Mills himself once satirized this pose, plumping his own credentials...
...he wrote and lived at a fevered pitch, penning a dozen books and marrying four times...
...Perlman decried that the astute Mills would write off the workers, that Mills could blast intellectuals as toadies of power and turn around to treat them as the political answer...
...I've got four, yes four books bubbling inside me...
...He doesn't like bosses—capitalist or communistic—they are all the same to him...
...And he said, "Yeah, it's always hard...
...Mills called himself a Wobbly or follower of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World...
...I have to do it . . . because nobody else will stand up...
...A Wobbly is not only a man who takes orders from himself...
...Mills writes of his "own craft" and how beginning sociologists should exchange baroque theories for a handson approach...
...lacquer on the hair and thousands of bobby pins and the smell of wellkept offices at noon...
...Mills loved building things and tinkering with his motorcycles...
...yET MILLS did possess a toughness and self-reliance that his colleagues lacked, and perhaps this derived from his half real and half mythic Texas identity...
...He may have been right, though today these charges exude the stale air of basement leftism, which was foreign to Mills...
...As a model for intellectual work, he took the craftsman, a skilled laborer who could design and complete a project...
...I remember the ferryboats and the pictures shows...
...wrote a tough-minded critique of the sociological profession, The Sociological Imagination...
...I've helped dig a ditch between Long View and Talco...
...one chapter of White Collar is titled "Brains, Inc...
...Not, however, soon or fast enough for Mills...
...he also surpassed the career of his troubled mentor, who never found his feet in America and published little...
...the strength and appeal of his oeuvre derive in part from the can-do, hands-on Yankee ethos that few of his intellectual colleagues shared...
...I am outside the whale, and got that way through social isolation and self-help...
...Despite his wide contacts and international invitations, he felt "very much isolated and alone"—and perhaps he was...
...A oneman show from the hinterlands—a rebel in an American vein—he raged against apathy and conformity...
...The craftsman produces not only a valuable object, but him- or herself...
...What kind of sociologist would he have become...
...Among various projects, he wanted to write "a very strange kind of book" about "that part of my life" omitted from his other publications, a book of European travel impressions...
...he sensed "a big responsibility" to "tell the truth as I see it and to tell it exactly . . . and quit this horsing around with sociological bullshit...
...With White Collar and The Power Elite, he published two of the few sociological best-sellers in the post–world war years...
...His collected essays, Power, Politics and People, assembled after his death (and lamentably out of print) bristle with intelligence...
...Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills introduction by Dan Wakefield University of California Press, 2000 378 pp $34.95 IN THE nineteen fifties and early sixties, C. Wright Mills cut a wide swath through the intellectual and political terrain...
...The myth of the cowboy-novelist or the trucker-poet flourishes in America...
...DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 115...
...He sought support for academic research in Europe, but when he finally visited the continent, he accompanied BMW motorcycle mechanics traveling to the Munich factory to hone their skills...
...He closed a letter exulting that, as he motorcycled across Europe, he encountered a "thousand faces I'll never forget...
...To the end of his own life he urged Gerth to publish and resist the bureaucratic university...
...And way up in the Norwegian hills a village with only two big stores: a flower shop and a bookstore...
...Perhaps he paid a price for coming to political maturity in the unpromising fifties...
...and I've driven a tractor hauling a combine in the wheat fields up in the Texas Panhandle...
...Or he recounted his week's activity: "lifting telephone sized poles for the foundation and chopping them while still wet and soaked from water...
...On exactly this score, Mills earned the wrath of other anarchists...
...His sometime political compatriots like Dwight Macdonald and Irving Howe emerged in the thirties and could weather a cold decade...
...In 1960, he drafted a "Letter to the New Left," originally published in the New Left Review...
...and, before he was struck down by a heart attack at age forty-six, brought out a series of hard-hitting booklets on American foreign policy such as Listen Yankee and The Causes of World War Three...
...Mills complained of exhaustion and the need to rest, but hardly slackened his pace...
...and a skeptic might put down Mills as a variant, a phony mechanic-carpenter-sociologist...
...I said to the cabbie, "That's where I grew up...
...I have driven trucks in the East Texas oil fields...
...He could be situated among 1950s radicals who died of heart attacks in their prime—people like Robert Lindner, the psychologist who wrote Rebel Without a Cause, and Paul Baran, who coauthored Monopoly Capital...
...Mills could not...
...Mills went on to teach at Columbia and cavort with New York intellectuals, but he never surrendered his identity as an outsider...
...What other twentieth-century intellectuals have combined a commitment to writing with frontier crafts...
...He also co-edited a splendid Max Weber anthology, From Max Weber...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
