C. Wright Mills's New Men of Power

...He would "debunk, debunk, debunk," he wrote to his editor at Harcourt Brace, "go back to the Muckraker era, which may be one measure of our defeat...

...M M ANY OF THE key ideas that would later appear in The New Men of Power are found in the wartime essays and reviews Mills sent north from College Park...

...Mills was a partisan of Walter Reuther, an ex-socialist who had already fought his way to the UAW presidency, but when Nathan Glazer—then an assistant editor at Commentary—asked him to write an essay on the auto union, Mills became even more attentive to the outlook and ambience of the young intellectuals and labor militants who made up the general staff of the Reuther caucus within the million-member UAW...

...RECONSIDERATIONS The finished draft was not due at the publisher until early 1948, so Mills had time to send about half a dozen copies to friends and colleagues, including Macdonald, Gerth, Swados, Columbia's Robert Lynd, and William Miller, a historian of business who was one of Mills's best friends...

...As Mills and his staff undoubtedly expected, a larger proportion of CIO unionists than those in the AFL were willing to contemplate formation of a labor party, but not before the 1948 campaign...

...Mills knows that many readers will see sectarian utopianism here in the place of a more achievable, if prosaic, labor program...

...James, and from the left-wing Reutherites...

...Mills saw the relationship between an organized working class and political democracy in stark Germanic terms, as in fact it had played out in 1933 and the years afterward...

...Mills called the Reuther victory at the 1947 UAW convention "a democratic rank-and-file revolt against a disintegrating machine...

...Power, writes Mills, will "shift toward those who are ideologically and strategically prepared for it...

...When Mills published White Collar in 1951, he wrote as if his political enthusiasms of the mid 1940s were some species of ancient incantation...

...He justifies himself, however, by making an existential leap to those "who have decided to throw in with the 'little groups that cannot win.' In fact, the big groups never win...

...What the hell else...

...And that is why Mills found trade union leaders "the strategic elite in American society," even as he also warned, on the very last page, that "Never has so much depended upon men who are so ill-prepared and so little inclined to assume the responsibility...

...Most important, the great industrial unions of that era contained a remarkable layer of alert, politically conscious militants who gave leadership to an industrial underclass—immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants, African-Americans, Appalachian whites, the unskilled and the uneducated— whose voice had long been muted...

...W W HAT REMAINS of this book for our own day...

...We don't know precisely what revisions Mills made, but his attendance at the November 1947 convention of the United Automobile Workers had a large impact on the final book manuscript, especially the two last chapters in which he is both more hopeful and more radical concerning the unions than either his introduction or his survey research might otherwise warrant...

...But he is hardly uncritical of this milieu...

...J.B.S...

...It chilled all ideological debate and put further shackles on internal union democracy...

...Earlier, in applying for a Guggenheim grant, Mills asserted his wish "to rid myself of a crippling academic prose and to develop an intelligible way of communicating modern social science to nonspecialized publics...

...Mills was not uncritical of Reuther—he thought the UAW chief might well "become a 'human engineer' for some sort of state capitalism guaranteeing industry disciplined workers"—but he put these doubts aside to applaud the programmatically coherent victory of the Reuther caucus over the coalition of communists and placeholders with whom they had been at war for a decade...

...Between Jeep excursions, horseback rides, and sessions on a newly purchased guitar, Mills churned out the manuscript, 432 pages in just five weeks...

...It's a "honey" he wrote to Ruth, " 'WE AIN'T GOT NO LEADER...

...TADEN AS A WHOLE, The New Men of Power reflects the dual nature of Mills's labor research project: an empirical set of core chapters that illuminates the character of modern unions and the state of mind of their leaders, enclosed within the more speculative, programmatic chapters that offer a Millsian analysis of the trajectory taken by U.S...

...passive, uninformed "public opinion...

...Mills feared that the fate of organized labor was one of a claustrophobic incorporation into a hierarchically structured political economy...

...The elite's effort to stabilize capitalism and buy off the labor movement contributed to the rise of an essentially authoritarian order, a garrison state sustained through a "permanent arms economy...

...The magazines and newspapers of the liberal center, like the Progressive and the Nation, though repeatedly skewered by Mills, offered the book a good send-off...

...Here Mills encountered a vigorous set RECONSIDERATIONS of young historians: Kenneth Stampp, Frank Friedel, and Richard Hofstadter, whose brother-in-law, Harvey Swados, later a wellknown novelist and journalist, would remain a lifelong friend...

...In a 1942 issue of Partisan Review, he hailed Franz Neumann's dissection of the Nazi regime, in which an imbricated set of political, industrial, and military elites created a system of state capitalism and eviscerated an independent working class...

...Trade unions," he wrote, "are the most reliable instruments to date for taming and channeling lower-class aspirations....The old radical faith that the mere enlargement of unions is good because it brings more workers into 'organizing centers' is now naïve, as is the RECONSIDERATIONS belief that winning the white-collar people to unionism is necessarily 'a link to the middle class.' " By the time his last book, The Marxists, appeared in 1962, Mills had written off not just the unions, but the Western working class...

...M M ILLS SAW such men as his natural audience, so in The New Men of Power he worked hard to avoid the language either of academic sociology or of the conventional left...

...He was unconcerned with the geographic mobility of capital and with the kind of technological change that has so dramatically transformed the nature of work and enterprise...

...Mills himself might well have avoided some of his own disillusionment if he had taken to heart the epigrammatic analysis put forth DISSENT / Fall 2001 •I29 RECONSIDERATIONS in the book's introduction...

...It just rolls out," reported Mills to his parents...

...When less than one-tenth of the private-sector working class can speak directly on its own behalf, American politics begins to share some of the characteristics of those societies ruled by more overtly authoritarian regimes...

...Influenced by the Schactmanite Trotskyists, Mills saw within organized labor the potential for the emergence of a third camp that could resist both Stalinist and capitalist oppressions...

...They were a motive force in the world of New Deal labor and 1940s liberalism, in the civil rights movement, and even in the nascent rebirth of femi RECONSIDERATIONS nism...

...Politically, the trade unions defined the left wing of what seemed possible in American politics...

...Mills thrived in the high desert...

...Mills writes that within the labor movement these professional intellectuals "act as leaven, lifting it beyond mere pork-chop contentment," so as to turn the unions into "vanguard organizations...

...When Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., endorsed it as "genuinely democratic and boldly radical...

...But these sophisticated spokesmen for American capitalism were hardly liberals themselves...

...The system was inherently unstable, prone to a recurrent cycle of depression, war, and hothouse boom...

...capitalism and its political leadership, along with his own, barely covert "radical program for America today...

...Mills's outlook, however, was not one of despair...

...He was born in Waco in 1916, and came of age in a Texas devoid of the political passions others found so consuming during the Great Depression...

...likewise, social activists and intellectuals have come to see the revival of a powerful trade union movement as essential to their dreams for a better world...

...Like Schactman, Macdonald, and Swados, Mills did not see the Second World War as a necessary defense against the fascist menace, but as a step toward an American version of the militarized, leviathan state...

...The labor movement had grown nearly fivefold in little more than a decade, and at fourteen million strong the unions then enrolled about one in three non-farm workers...

...Not if "the power and the intellect" are united...

...As historian and contem porary observer, Mills ignored or got some important things wrong...

...Mills took a sociology Ph.D...

...Mills was an anticommunist, but one who saw the enemy as pathetic rather than dangerous...

...Many of the new research people," he wrote in 1946, probably indicating his own feelings, are disaffected and morally unhappy: they will their minds to people they don't like for purposes they don't feel at one with....What some of them really want is to connect their skill and intelligence to a movement in which they can believe: they are ready to give a lot of energy to an organization that would harness these skills in the service of the left...

...Increasingly he looked to the labor movement, "the chief social power upon which a genuine democracy can rest today...

...Mills would not find it difficult to apply a Weberian analysis to the leadership strata of the American trade unions...

...Today, as in 1948, the unions stand on the left side of American politics and culture...

...Had the GOP's Thomas Dewey won the White House, Mills and a goodly number of others on the noncommunist left expected the Democrats to dissolve and a new labor party to come roaring forward...

...Given his cresting expectations, the deflation of his labor-left perspective was swift and thorough...

...Anyway, it shows we can get away with it among the liberals...

...A longer version appears as the introduction to the University of Illinois edition of The New Men of Power, to be published in the fall of 2001...

...We therefore find no reference in The New Men of Power to the bourgeoisie, imperialism, ruling class, the masses, and certainly nothing on the "labor lieutenants of capital...

...Ely Chinoy, then conducting the field research that would generate the classic sociological study of blue-collar mentality Autoworkers and the American Dream, thought the book "demands and accepts a place for trained intelligence not only in providing piece-meal and limited solutions, but also in suggesting major alternatives for dealing with basic questions...

...Unlike the noisy right, this corporate-political elite sought not to destroy the unions, but to tame them by recruiting and rewarding a labor leadership willing to deradicalize its own rank and file...

...Even as Mills read the reviews of his book, he was turning his back on what he would later call the labor metaphysic...

...Enough has changed, however, to make the ideas and speculations put forward in The New Men of Power useful and exciting...

...Meanwhile, in 1950 the UAW, upon which Mills had staked such hopes, signed a five-year contract with General Motors—in Fortune Daniel Bell dubbed it "The Treaty of Detroit"—whereby the Reutherites won a higher standard of living for blue-collar workers, but only in return for their assurance of industrial discipline and stability in GM factories...

...Mills's survey research found that CIO union leaders were much younger than their AFL counterparts, that the industrial unionists were better educated, and that for most workers union activism was a more certain path to upward mobility than recruitment into the ranks of management...

...and he collaborated with Dwight Macdonald in founding politics, the amazingly influential "little" magazine whose critique of the warfare state, advocacy of radical pacifism, and search for new forms of democratic participation prefigured much of the political sensibility of the New Left a generation later...

...But The New Men of Power bears rereading at the dawn of the twenty-first century...

...Here Mills borrows freely from the First World War-era guild socialists, from the circle of American Trotskyists associated with C.L.R...

...Looking with expectation to the Cuban Revolution and other third world insurgencies, Mills now dismissed "wage workers in advanced capitalism [who] have rarely become a 'proletariat vanguard,' they have not become the agency of any revolutionary change of epoch...

...The unions alternately tilt their character toward stolid interest group or expansive social movement, but if and when they do move toward the latter, it is unlikely they will ever fully arrive there...

...The first two, the "far left" and the "independent left" consist of but a few thousand individuals, and as Mills describes them, it is clear that he is talking about his friends, comrades, and erstwhile collaborators...

...The po litical publics are more self-conscious, more politically alert, communities either of ideology or interest that bring to bear a particular sensibility to the issues of the day...

...Hardman was one of the first people Mills looked up in New York, and he proved both a collaborator and a model for the kind of labor intellectual Mills thought so central to the future of the labor movement...

...Mills wants an independent labor party, of course, but he also seeks to infuse the labor-left with a syndicalist spirit...

...T T HE POWER and brilliance of C. Wright Mills lies in his effort to understand the social forces at play in mid-century America and the progressive calculus that might yet generate a democratic combination, even as he remains utterly aware of their reactionary potential...

...Living-wage campaigns, labor teach-ins, and demonstrations against a corporate definition of globalism have helped labor throw off its parochial chains...

...If you read his book thoroughly," wrote Mills, "you see the harsh outlines of possible futures close around you...

...Indeed, the forty-year-old Reuther almost perfectly exemplified what Mills saw as the new union man of power...

...At Wisconsin, Mills also took Selig Perlman's well-attended classes on socialism and capitalism...

...Instead, after only a single generation of labor-capital accord, even the most internationalist and technologically advanced capitalists adopted the exclusionary union-free program, if not the polemics, of the entrepreneurial conservatives...

...The programmatic radicalism of an Irving Howe or C. Wright Mills had little future in mid-century America...

...Mills had to acknowledge some of this— he devotes an entire chapter to the CP's influence within the unions—but like so many of his friends on the anti-Stalinist left, Mills was essentially contemptuous and dismissive...

...every group loses its insurgency...

...Mills, Hardman, and other like-minded 124 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 observers wanted to know if an empirical basis existed for prodding the unions leftward, if and when a new economic or political crisis hit...

...In the penultimate chapter, "The Power and the Intellect," he takes the measure of the salaried middle class...

...Because he fears that the nationalization of industry, as in postwar Britain, will lead to but another form of bureaucratism, Mills posits the "socialization" of industry through a combination of both workers' control and centralized economic planning...

...Thus the dedication in The New Men of Power is "for J. B. S. Hardman, Labor Intellectual...

...To vitalize the unions and prepare them for the postwar battles, he founded the Inter-Union Institute for Labor and Democracy (IUI) and began editing a new monthly, Labor and the Nation, which began publication in 1945...

...I did not personally experience the thirties,' " he once remarked...

...This circle soon put Mills in touch with an anti-Stalinist world of writers, intellectuals, and activists centered in New York...

...Nor does the American working class face an immediate, consciousness-changing crisis, such as a new war or a new depression, which Mills himself expected to put the unions at the center of the nation's political thought and action...

...He thought that through the IUI he might have found the vehicle by which radicals such as he could have an impact on the labor movement...

...Here Hardman sought to give voice and coherence to the work and ideas of the DISSENT / Fall 2001 .123 RECONSIDERATIONS anticommunist but socialist or social democratic staff intellectuals, journalists, and academics, who still represented an important current within the unions and among labor's close allies...

...They formulate the ideas and programs that operate on the consciousness of the passive, atomized mass...

...It seems likely that when he retitled his book The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders sometime during the winter or spring of 1948, he was thinking of Reuther and his circle...

...Although the American Federation of Labor was larger than the decade-old Congress of Industrial Organizations, the latter was a more dynamic social formation, whose fractious leadership represented almost DISSENT / Fall 2001 •12I RECONSIDERATIONS every left-of-center political tendency in the nation: FDR liberals, Catholic corporatists, oldline socialists, a handful of Trotskyists, and a far larger communist bloc...

...Thus Mills sharply attacked Macdonald's characterization of the unions as a "bureaucratic net ensnaring the people...

...And when it later became clear that no slump would materialize, the victory of the sophisticated conservatives was assured...

...The survey research itself, both the questions asked and the interpretation of the results, reflects a highly politicized probe into the mentality of the labor leadership...

...Even if the postwar economy did encounter the great slump Mills had prophesied, it was unlikely to generate the lurch leftward that he and so many other radicals had once expected...

...The erosion of democratic institutions in the contemporary United States is organically linked, at work and in the political arena, to the evisceration of the labor movement...

...M M ILLS ENCOUNTERED this laborite universe by a circuitous path...

...This essay quotes extensively from C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings edited by Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills (University of California Press, 2000...

...They are organizing again and recruiting a new generation of young activists who seek to infuse the labor movement with a radical élan...

...To Mills "the most impressive thing about the United Auto Workers union is the spectacle it affords of ideas in live contact with power...

...As The New Men of Power demonstrates, Mills did not share Perlman's anti-Bolshevik hostility to intellectuals as an alien, corrupting presence within labor's body politic, but Mills did take from Perlman's lectures an appreciation of the history and institutional flavor of the American unions, especially as they served to mobilize and sell the labor power of their members, thus making unionism functional to the capitalist marketplace...

...Leaders of both organizations still feared the power and intentions of big business, and Mills found that an extraordinary 69 percent of all industrial union leaders considered fascism to be a definite threat in the United States...

...Unions are far less powerful, in terms of relative membership, raw economic power, and political influence than they were when The New Men of Power appeared...

...Mills expected another slump in just a few short years, And according to this analysis, so too did the most sophisticated representatives of big business, who backed an administratively guided political economy, a sort of postwar New Deal, but with a much more authoritarian, business-oriented elite firmly in command...

...Utopianism...

...In the offing was marriage to twenty-four-year-old Ruth Harper, a Mount Holyoke College graduate whom Mills met late in 1946 when he hired her to work on White Collar, for which he had already begun to assemble research data and interviews...

...The book stood "in total opposition to such current inclinations as qui 12 8 n DISSENT /Fa112001 etism, ideal-community building, advocacy of 'preventive' atomic war, [and] a truce with the right because of fear of Stalinism...

...By 1948 Mills had already completed much of the research and some of the writing for White Collar, so his cautious optimism here is worth noting...

...Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz (Oxford University Press, 1962...

...Hardman (nè Jacob Benjamin Salutsky) came out of the great tradition of Jewish radicalism under the czars...

...Mills describes five such publics, but they are of radically unequal weight...

...NELSON LICHTENSTEIN teaches history at the University of California, Santa Barbara...

...He wrote for Partisan Review, the New Leader, and the New Republic...

...He feared that because his book was "so very political" it would be pigeonholed as merely sectarian...

...And the left to most of them means labor...

...Thus Mills never joined up, even as he took a good bit of his ideological firepower from these neoLeninists: the idea that labor had to see itself as a "third camp" hostile to both capitalism and Stalinism, the concept of a "permanent arms economy," the disdain for the liberal center, and the expectation that when the postwar slump finally came the ranks of the left might well multiply many fold in the contest for power...

...Considering the extent to which these publics monopolized the overt world of mid-1940s politics, Mills gives them rather short shrift...

...trade unionism quickly fell into the shadows...

...W W HEN IT APPEARED late in the fall of 1948 The New Men of Power won largely favorable reviews...

...Then, as Mills's friend Harvey Swados would attest after his sojourn in a mid-1950s Ford plant, the working class itself seemed to have rejected, or forgotten, or psychically buried any spark of radical opposition to the status quo...

...where Mills plays brilliantly with the contradictory character of union officials, reflects the inner history of Hardman's Amalgamated, from pre—World War I insurgency to late—New Deal statesmanship...

...New leaders have ascended to important posts in the trade union movement, and the old iron curtain that once divided official labor and the broad American left—academic, feminist, socialist, AfricanAmerican, Latino, and gay—is rusting away...

...Trade unions are hybrid institutions—half monopoly seller of labor, half nascent social movement—and their leadership is just as mixed, though not always in the same personage: "an army general and a parliamentary debater, a political boss and an entrepreneur, a rebel and a disciplinarian...

...Mills certainly put his politics front and center...

...In the academic journals Mills's book also won respectful readers, despite, or even because, of its politics...

...It is a question where one decides to keep placing one's weight...

...Mills saw as their prime ideological weapons the new language of labor-management cooperation and the soporific rhetoric of contemporary liberalism, both of which served to demobilize labor and its leadership...

...in sociology at the University of Chicago...

...maybe that is all that is meant by winning...

...But The New Men of Power still bears a careful look by a new generation of unionists and social activists...

...Mills was hopeful that the burgeoning ranks of the salaried workforce might yet swell labor's power instead of being fodder for the fascists...

...To counter the main drift, Mills envisioned a new labor-based radicalism, outlined in his chapter "The Program of the Left...

...These were the men who presided over the great New York law firms, the executives who led the largest corporations, and the editors of the nation's most respected papers...

...He is the author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor...

...Indeed, the great set of postwar strikes that began late in 1945 were intrinsically political, designed not simply to raise wages, but to make corporate prices, production, and planning subject to both union demands and government regulation...

...Two decades later, New Left historians would label this kind of manipulation, which effectively created a consensus in so much of American politics, "corporate liberalism...

...By the late 1940s Mills thought Macdonald had moved to a political dead end: they both feared the encroaching power of a leviathan, corporate-military state, but Macdonald had lost faith, not only in the labor movement, but in any political solution to the moral crisis enveloping the modern world...

...Mills became, according to the nomenclature of the 1940s, a radical "anti-Stalinist," but his politics, on topics both foreign and domestic, remained refreshingly unburdened by the trauma and disillusionment that had transfigured so many other left-wing thinkers at the end of the 1930s...

...This is what Mills would call "the main drift...

...He therefore applauded wartime union militancy, defending the otherwise unpopular set of coal strikes led by John L. Lewis in 1943...

...Thus the organization of white-collar workers, which Mills had once seen as a key to a progressive transformation of the middle classes, would now become merely "unionization into the main drift: it will serve to incorporate them as part of the newest interest to be vested in the liberal state...

...He was not interested in the social history of the working class: North or South, black or white, immigrant or native-born, women or men...

...Labor's men (and a few women) served on the War Labor Board, took posts inside the War Production Board, and filled many key positions in the Office of Price Administration...

...Wrote it like free association," he told Dwight Macdonald...

...He had voted for Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas, but his real hopes had lain with the possibility that Reuther and other CIO union leaders would take immediate steps to build a labor-based third party...

...He soon transmuted this radical disappointment into what he held to be a "politics of truth...

...Mills joined the Inter-Union Institute, wrote frequently for Labor and the Nation, and became friends with Hardman, who opened doors for Mills throughout the labor movement and gave him a feel for the social texture of the New York unions...

...To Mills the most formidable public was that of the sophisticated conservatives, to whose analysis he returns throughout the book...

...This was a worthy calling, and it would inspire a generation of New Left radicals a decade hence, but the Millsian perspective no longer sought the fruitful interpenetration of social power and critical intellect that had so animated The New Men of Power...

...And in a letter to William Miller, who questioned the definition of the word "intellectual," much used in The New Men of Power, Mills responded, "by intellectual here we mean humanitarian socialist...

...If the unions cannot substitute themselves for the left—an independent party is certainly needed, or at least an independent political voice—they are nevertheless essential to the health of the democratic polity...

...130 n DISSENT / Fall 2001...

...Nor did Mills foresee the capacity of Keynesian fiscal policies to stabilize U.S...

...Organized labor seemed a stagnant force, largely defenseless against the political and economic hammer blows that befell the rank and file during the 1970s and 1980s...

...But the interwoven fate of the labor movement and a viable democracy need not be so Manichean...

...Most important, Mills made too much of the distinction between the sophisticated conservatives and the practical right...

...These conservatives wanted "a New Deal on a world scale operated by big businessmen" that would keep open European and Latin American markets in order to forestall the coming depression...

...He caricatures both the ardent liberals and the fervent conservatives, missing the nuances that divide each camp and underestimating their staying power, most notably that of the practical conservatives, whose influence would grow dramatically in the years after Barry Goldwater rose to prominence...

...Consumer cooperatives, neighborhood price-control committees, and a thoroughgoing shop democracy are all part of his near-revolutionary vision...

...Mills is much harsher on the independent left...

...The liberals read the Nation and the New Republic, pine for FDR, and look to Henry Wallace with some favor (Mills wrote just before the Truman revival of 1948 had begun and before the apogee of the liberal, anticommunist assault on Wallace, who was then running for president on a communist-backed Progressive ticket...

...The middle classes may well side with architects of the main drift, especially if and when the great slump arrives, but a bold labor program, designed to keep prices low and the DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 12.7 RECONSIDERATIONS corporations on the defensive, might well forestall a white-collar flight to the right and in its place generate a far more inclusive and dynamic labor movement, one that could truly set the national agenda...

...The first was Hans Gerth, a left-wing German émigré who introduced Mills to the great European social theorists, especially Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim...

...Although Perlman disdained the left, or any sort of self-conscious intellectualism within the unions—his famous "job conscious" interpretation of the labor movement left little room for a visionary transformation of society—his brand of economistic institutionalism coexisted easily with a Weberian emphasis on functional role, legal constraint, and social status...

...They were far less influential than their corporate counterparts, but in a political economy in which the idea of tripartite governance, involving organized labor, corporate management, and representatives of the New Deal state proved ideologically potent, unionists were reaching for a kind of societywide power well beyond the traditional world of firm-centered contract bargaining...

...Today, most historians recognize that whatever the Communist Party's relationship to Soviet power, the party's social, cultural, and laborite ambitions represented something organic to the traditions of the American left...

...Eager to get out of College Park, Mills leaped at the chance to take a research post at Columbia University early in 1945...

...His real exposure to a radical understanding of labor's potential came at the otherwise provincial campus of the University of Maryland...

...By the mid 1950s few observers would have called American unionists "a strategic elite," as Mills had once argued in a book whose very title now mocked the waning influence of a labor leadership firmly wedded to the Democratic Party, cold war orthodoxy, and the collective bargaining routine...

...At the core of Mills's analysis was a crisis theory of capitalist development...

...There was, of course, much basis for such a doleful perspective...

...The defeat or expulsion of communists from the CIO did not just eliminate an unpopular political current...

...This was not value-free sociology...

...Mills was probably most gratified by Irving Howe's piece in Partisan Review...

...In 1947 the UAW was the nation's largest trade union confronting the very largest corporations in the world...

...Even as a pro-union radical, Mills remained acutely aware of the organizational logic and economic forces that made for conservatism and defensiveness within these institutions of the working class...

...Mills remained at odds with the power wielded by America's elite, at home and in the world...

...Writing in mid-1949, in his last essay for Labor and the Nation, he argued that the unions were becoming but "another vested interest, an agency of political regulation at an economic price...

...THE NEW MEN OF POWER is a study of trade unions and their leaders, the American political scene, and the prospects for a radicalized democracy in the years just after the Second World War...

...Mills called it "a union amazed by itself...

...If the unions are once again to become key elements of a new progressive movement, it is important to recognize that they are not in and of themselves radical institutions...

...In stark contrast to the Reutherite intellectuals so hopefully come to power, Mills charged the politics circle with drift and hopelessness, "oscillating between lament and indignation...

...Mills also sensed the exhaustion of Marxian language in his time, and he tried to come up with alternate words and phrases, even if his ideas were still thoroughly meshed with those of the socialist tradition...

...Although Mills was ideologically close to Schactman's Workers Party (Harvey Swados was a member), he found the Trotskyists to be "bureaucrats without a bureaucracy" and adherents to a "popish set of ideas...

...The membership was militant and the leadership young, fractious, and highly political...

...Although the United States never became the kind of authoritarian society he believed the main drift would inexorably generate, he was much too sanguine about the labor policies of the managerial elite that ran America's largest corporations, staffed its most prestigious law firms, and sat upon its highest courts...

...But without a powerful set of allies, or the prospect of such, his only stance was one of moral rectitude and intelligent dissection...

...The labor intellectuals are crucial to this great turn, however, for without the ideas and program of engaged, practical union thinkers the labor leadership would drift with the conservative, bureaucratic tide...

...It was written at a ranch outside of Reno, Nevada, where Mills was staying while awaiting a divorce from his first wife, Freya, whom he had married when he was an undergraduate at the University of Texas...

...At the time I just didn't get its mood...

...A similar sort of creative excitement infused the union movement in the mid-1940s when Mills began his study of the labor unions and their leadership...

...Mills does not use the term "power elite" in The New Men of Power, but these conservatives practically define it: "they work in and among other elite groups, primarily the high military, the chieftains of large corporations, and certain politicians...

...Faced with a world of global production, a nearly useless labor law, and a corporate opposition that remains intransigently anti-union, many otherwise conventional union leaders have been forced to look for new allies and new ideas...

...Conversely, where democracy has been reborn in recent years—in Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, and Brazil— its revitalization has been synonymous with the reemergence of a powerful, independent labor movement...

...This begins in the first chapter, "The Political Publics," where he offers a panoramic view of what he sees as the decisive points on the postwar political compass...

...By 1945 Mills was reading Labor Action, the revolutionary broadside published by the "third camp" Trotskyists in Max Schactman's Workers Party...

...In The New Men of Power we rediscover what Mills knew so well: the democratic stakes are always high when the labor movement charts its future...

...capitalism, at least in the first quarter century after the Second World War...

...Knowing what they want, wanting it all the time, and believing the main drift is in their favor, these sophisticated conservatives try to realize their master aim quietly...

...Mills throws the communists into the catfight between liberals and conservatives...

...There Mills juggled two or three projects at a time, supervised almost a dozen researchers, and spoke before both academic audiences and the unique New York world of labor intellectuals and radical activists...

...Though not uncritical—Howe thought the book suffered from a "certain lack of maneuverability in argumentation"—he nevertheless anointed Mills for resisting the pessimistic tide then sweeping the ranks of onceradical intellectuals...

...The practical conservatives, identified with main-street business and small-town virtue, find their champions in Robert Taft and the congressional Republicans, who in 1946 had swept the Democrats out of power for the first time in sixteen years...

...At various points in The New Men of Power, Mills calls this "a corporate form of garrison state" or "a state capitalism with many corporate features," but whatever the nomenclature, it is "the main drift" that leads eventually to what Neumann called "totalitarian-monopolisticcapitalism...

...Later they would collaborate to translate and publish the writings of Weber, whose fruitful impress upon the Millsian worldview is evident in almost all his work...

...Exiled in 1908, Hardman sailed for New York where he moved easily from radical, Yiddish-language journalism to editorship of the Advance, organ of Sidney Hillman's Amalgamated Clothing Workers...

...This is not because the contemporary labor movement has regained the power held by union leaders in the 1940s, when Mills and his associates made the surveys and drafted the chapters that went into the book...

...The unions that made up the CIO and the AFL were collective bargaining institutions, but in an era of New Deal social regulation and wartime economic controls, their function had become political to the core...

...WE'RE ALL LEADERS.' That has just the right irony for a book on labor leaders...

...So I'll say so in some innocent, hard-boiled way...

...And it was in Nevada that Mills encountered an old Wobbly who provided the epigraph for the book's frontispiece...

...In The New Men of Power much of the introduction, "What Are Labor Leaders Like...

...By 1944 Hardman, like Mills, had also come to see the need for the projection of a more programmatically radical agenda within the house of labor...

...Thus his search for a new language of class and politics was designed to win him the broader audience he craved...

...Mills thought Gerth "the only man worth listening to in this department...

...stimulating and fruitful," Mills sighed with relief: "Well...

...Writing in a 1955 issue of Dissent, Mills argued that the independent intellectual must serve as "the moral conscience of his society...asking serious questions, and if he is a political intellectual, he asks his questions of those with power...

...His excitement was justified...

...It is therefore a tribute to Mills's courage that even as he turned away from the labor movement, he made no peace with what he conceived of as the main drift...

...The phrase "poDISSENT / Fall 2001 n 125 RECONSIDERATIONS litical publics" is important to this typology, and the vitriol with which he attacked its premain Mills's mind is quite distinct from the more ture proponents...

...But Mills did not just use Hardman for insights into the structure of the unions...

...at the Univer 122 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 sity of Wisconsin and quickly moved on to his first academic job at the University of Maryland...

...Weber valued property, order, and individual liberty, but he nevertheless sought to trace out the multifaceted process of bureaucratization and rationalization that was a characteristic feature of modern capitalism...

...Here Mills found the "union-made intellectuals," not the New York variety, "intellectuals without fakery and without neuroticism...

...One suspects his animus is largely directed at Dwight Macdonald and the circle of politics writers and readers, of which he was once a founding member...

...But in the wake of the election Mills saw such a prospect as "quite dead...

...As these developments snuffed out the prospects for a more expansive set of laborite politics, Mills elevated to canonical status the conservative, but contested, trajectory he had hypothesized for the unions in The New Men of Power...

...But unlike his politically acute, agenda-setting volumes published during the 1950s, of which White Collar and The Power Elite are the best known, Mills's equally expansive probe into the meaning and future of U.S...

...Of course, Mills also foresaw the possibility of this Weberian devolution, which may account for 126 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 m m ILLS IDENTIFIES the Sturm and Drang of headline politics with the next two publics: the liberals, whom he finds "continuously excited and upset" but programmatically incoherent, and the practical right, who have no well-worked-out ideology, but see politics as an immediate source of economic gain, legislative advantage, and anti-union muscle...

...In June and July 1947 Mills finished what he described as "a fairly good draft" of a book then entitled "The Labor Leader: Who He Is and What He Thinks...

...Among them were Nat Weinberg, the UAW's new research director, who came out of City College, and Jack Conway, Walter Reuther's top assistant, who had studied for a Ph.D...

...In Madison, Mills encountered two teachers who would have a large impact on the questions he would ask in The New Men of Power...

...Instead we find phrases such as "the main drift," or "the grand trend," to describe the trajectory of a militarized capitalism...

...indeed, Mills thought their victory led inexorably toward an American version of Neumann's Behemoth...

...He would have served if the military's doctors had passed him through—high blood pressure and a weak heart would later kill him—but Mills still thought the war "a god dammed blood bath to no end save misery and mutual death to all civilized values...

...From his Columbia perch, Mills saw the party as composed of Union Square hacks and an evershifting pool of lower-middle-class enthusiasts, whose influence was less on the labor movement, where they were being eliminated, than on the excitable liberals, to whose political sentimentality they appealed...

...Mills's relative disinterest derives from his expectation that when the postwar slump really came, these noisy combatants would fade from the scene, subordinating themselves to those who advance a more systematic set of political ideas...

...The questionnaires Mills collected from hundreds of labor leaders lend little support to the idea that unionists and managers embraced a postwar "labor-management accord," at least not before 1948...

...Mills was sorely disappointed by President Truman's unexpected reelection...

...When C. Wright Mills published the book in 1948, it identified a newly empowered set of strategic actors, who led the nation's most important progressive institutions, "the only organizations capable of stopping the main drift towards war and slump...

...and from letters and manuscripts held in the Mills papers at the University of Texas...