Fifties (87 page)

After Madison, he moved to the University of Maryland, which brought him nearer the nation’s capital. He was taking politics more seriously now, and he wrote to his mother: “You ought to see me clipping
The New York Times
now.” At a time when, because of World War Two, most young men were asking fewer political questions, he was on a very different path. His attitude, as Irving Horowitz pointed out, was something like a plague on both your houses.

He seemed to be saying that the horror of modern Nazism could not be blamed merely on an odd combination of circumstances: frenzied nationalism, the post–World War One depression, and the complete collapse of existing values and German currency and the social anarchy that followed. By his lights, the excesses of Germany were the excesses of capitalism. He saw Germany as the prototype for the modern corporate garrison state. The only thing that might stop it, he wrote, was the powerful force of organized labor. Not everyone agreed: Some thought that labor was just as readily seduced by exaggerated nationalism as any other class. (Some fifteen years later, one of his political descendants in the New Left, Abbie
Hoffman, was told to work on organizing blue-collar workers. “Organize the workers?” he exclaimed. “The workers want to beat the shit out of me!”)

If nothing else, Mills helped reinvigorate the left, which was in decline after the war. Victory in World War Two, the growing awareness of Stalin’s crimes, and the success of postwar capitalism had brought much of the intelligentsia back to the liberal center because fascist Germany and the Communist Soviet Union were so much worse than the United States. Other intellectuals found that America, in comparison with the rest of the world, now seemed less flawed; but Mills was not interested in a comparison with the rest of the world. He was a home-grown radical, bristling with his own native passions and his own very rugged, very American sense of independence.

The enemy, for him and many young leftists who came after him, was the liberalism of the era, so bland and corrupting, so comfortable, that it was essentially endorsed by both major political parties. People did not have to make difficult moral choices anymore. The liberalism of the society of abundance was “without coherent content; that in the process of its banalization, its goals have been so formalized as to provide no clear moral optic. The crisis of liberalism (and of American political reflection) is due to liberalism’s success in becoming the official language for all public statement.”

Maryland was not a particularly congenial place for him. He admired the exceptional group of young historians there—Frank Friedel, Kenneth Stampp, and Richard Hofstader—but he was hungry as ever for greater intellectual growth (on his terms), so he moved now into history, while writing more and more for national magazines, such as the
New Republic.
All of this helped enhance his reputation. Years later he told Dan Wakefield, a student of his at Columbia, that he had used his journalistic skills to escape the University of Maryland, which he found rather stultifying. “I wrote my way out of there!” he said. In 1944 he arrived at Columbia, where he had probably always wanted to be in the first place—a great Ivy League university in a great city, with access to a large and influential audience. “Mills,” wrote Horowitz, “was caught in a cul-de-sac: antiprofessional in public utterances, quite professional in private desire. He coveted the status and glory of elite institutions while despising their snobbery and style.” Mills would later say of
White Collar,
the first of his defining books, that it was “the story of a Texas boy who came to New York.” At Columbia he managed to remain an outsider, with a series of tenuous friendships and shifting allegiances. Dwight MacDonald, the writer, became his first great
friend—they were both, MacDonald pointed out, radicals at a time when it was not fashionable to be so. “We were both congenital rebels, passionately contemptuous of every received idea and established institution ...” Mills, noted MacDonald, could argue with just about anyone on almost anything—and he could do it longer and louder than anyone else. They both had, he noted, a “mixture of innocence, and cynicism, optimism and skepticism. We were ever hopeful, ever disillusioned.”

On campus, he was a memorable figure. In his office was a hot plate to warm soup and an electric espresso machine. He was, thought Wakefield, who eventually became a prominent journalist, “an exhilarating teacher. He stalked the room or pounded his fist on the table to emphasize a point, surprising us with ideas that seem Utopian, except that he was so convinced of their practicality you couldn’t dismiss them as mere theory.” In the Columbia catalog he was listed as a sociologist, but he preferred to think of himself as a journalist—by which he meant someone like James Agee. That was real journalism—graceful and highly intellectual reportage.

He published
White Collar
in 1951 and
The Power Elite
in 1956. In these books he saw the new middle class as affluent but without purpose and cut off from its Calvinist past, from taking pride in craftsmanship. In
White Collar,
he seemed to bemoan the decline of the rugged American individualist and the growing frustration of the new America. He viewed history as a constant collision between competing forces that vied for power.

As an analyst of the stratification within the democratic society, Mills was without peer. Certainly, there were others writing about some of the same changes taking place in American society. David Riesman and Nathan Glazer published their important book
The Lonely Crowd,
about the inner-directed and the outer-directed new Americans, who increasingly seemed to take their signals, their values, and even their ambitions not from their own desires and beliefs but from a received value system around them. These people wanted to be a part of the larger community so much they would adjust their morality and ethics to those of the community almost unconsciously; in the end, they seemed to take on the coloration of their institutions and neighborhoods with frightening ease. Was it possible, Riesman and Glazer wondered, that America was producing a class whose sudden economic advancement, coming as it did within a generation, had outstripped the social and psychological preparations that might normally precede it? Had the very speed overwhelmed the capacity to enjoy and fully understand such affluence? Riesman himself
clearly thought that Mills had touched on something important, but he was also dubious that the new white-collar class was as alienated as Mills suggested.

White Collar
was, in general, favorably reviewed. As Horowitz noted, it hit on a powerful new theme that seemed to beguile American society: the growth of ever greater American power externally, alongside a feeling of a decrease in personal power among its citizens. Certainly, the new white-collar men in Mills’s book seemed to be carried along by forces outside their control. They were voraciously ambitious without entirely knowing why. They never carefully considered their goals but simply plunged ahead to the next benchmark.

Yet Riesman felt Mills had a tendency to generalize and create pat, if convincing, stereotypes. From the outside, white-collar workers might indeed appear largely banal, frustrated with their lives as Mills might have been frustrated had he been forced to live similarly. Riesman thought there was a danger for someone like Mills in transferring his own need for intellectual stimulation into the minds and aspirations of people whose needs might be considerably different. Riesman pointed out that one should not underestimate, for example, the satisfaction generated by the pride of people who always had been blue-collar workers but who had finally moved up into the white-collar managerial world. Similar reservations were voiced in a letter that Richard Hofstader wrote to Mills about
White Collar.
There was, he said, a lot of human ugliness in the book, which he said was caught up in the jacket description of the book as a “merciless portrayal” of a whole class. There might be, Hofstader said, some people and perhaps even some classes “that may call for merciless treatment, but why be so merciless with all these little people? ... Why no pity, no warmth? Why condemn—to paraphrase Burke—a whole class?”

In
The Power Elite
Mills went further, spotting early some of the forces that were coming together to create America the superpower. He pointed out the growing connection between the military and the industrial sectors—the military-industrial state that Eisenhower himself would warn of a few short years later. In addition, Mills had a strong intuitive sense of the dangers that might come, politically and socially, from a nation suddenly wielding so much power and affluence. But even here some critics thought he undermined his own work by being too simplistic. Yes, there were groups wielding considerable power in America, but American politics was so pluralistic that even as one group became too powerful, others came together to limit that power. Indeed some groups, supposedly with common
interests, might in fact be bitterly opposed to each other; others that were supposed to be adversarial might get on well. For example, corporations and labor unions, traditional antagonists, might well want the same thing in the new power structure, and indeed labor unions, which Mills had once seen as the savior from domination of American life by the corporations, might in fact be a willing partner in the growth of too large a defense economy. But as Daniel Bell pointed out, there was not a clear community of interests in the power elite, as Mills would seem to have it. Often there were surprising conflicts. In Korea, Bell pointed out, the military, Wall Street, and the federal government were often at cross-purposes. The sands of American power shifted constantly: As soon as any one group began to overreach its place, it automatically came into conflict with some other group. Bell’s criticism stung the sensitive Mills, who at one point wrote a friend, “Dan Bell is here now with
Fortune.
I’ve seen him only once or twice and don’t look forward to meeting him again. He’s full of gossip about how he met Luce for lunch and what Luce said. [Bell is a] little corkscrew drawn by power magnets; really pretty vulgar stuff.”

One of the ironies of postwar American capitalism was that most owners of companies were making more money than ever before, expanding their size constantly, but that even as their wealth and their seeming influence increased, the leaders felt themselves less powerful in terms of their control of their own factory floor. As such they became ever more resentful of the society around them. They found a largely unsympathetic view of themselves in the mainstream media, which was, of course, owned by large corporations. What made America’s power structure so interesting in the years after World War Two were its contradictions, most of which defied the traditional dogma of either the left or the right. Where Mills was most effective was in his journalism; where he was least effective was in his judgments and his occasionally simplistic projections of how different groups would in fact behave.

By the end of the decade, the gap had widened between him and most of the traditional academic community. He was appalled by the way altogether too many intellectuals, including many liberals, had enlisted in the Cold War and failed to criticize their own country for its excesses. The rise of Fidel Castro and the Eisenhower administration’s hostile and clumsy attempts to deal with him only convinced Mills of the lightness of his vision. If its behavior toward Cuba turned out to be an appalling stereotype of the worst of American foreign policy, it was a perfect fit for Mills’s view. America, he
thought, was on its way to becoming something of a garrison state with the concurrence of what he called, with great contempt, “the NATO intellectuals.” More and more, as the decade ended, he was drawn to the issue of Cuba and his radicalism deepened.

Late in the decade, Mills’s health began to fail him. In 1958 he suffered the first of at least three heart attacks. He continued to smoke and drink heavily; he liked to boast that he had more women in one month than Don Juan had had in a lifetime.

His work had always been passionate, but now it was downright evangelical.
Listen Yankee!
was the title of his last book—on Cuba. He wrote his parents in 1961, after one heart attack, “Lying here all these weeks and having damn near died, because this thing was pretty damned close, well it’s made me much stronger, and made me think about myself which I’d not had the chance to do before. I know that I have not the slightest fear of death. I know also that I have a big responsibility to thousands of people all over the world to tell the truth as I see it and tell it exactly and with drama and quit this horsing around with sociological bullshit.”

In March 1962 he died, at the age of forty-five, of a heart attack. He was at the height of his powers, his audiences steadily expanding. “Mills,” as Irving Horowitz wrote of him, “began to think of himself as the social bearer of mass beliefs; he became a movement unto himself. Armed with an Enlightenment faith that truth will out, he also became convinced that he was the bearer of the truth.” When he died, he had already become something of a mythic figure to a new generation of young American radicals and it would turn out that his posthumous influence was to be even greater.

THREE

THIRTY-SIX

O
N THE EVENING OF
December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks’s entire body ached—her feet, neck, and shoulders were especially sore. Parks was a tailor’s assistant in a Montgomery, Alabama, department store. Hers was an exhausting job that paid a minimal salary; she made alterations and had to handle a large commercial steam press as well. On this particular day, she finished work and walked a few blocks as usual to the bus stop. The first bus on her route was so crowded she realized that there would be no place left to sit, and she desperately needed to get off her feet. She decided to wait for a less crowded bus. That gave her a little time to waste, so Parks walked over to a nearby drugstore to look for a heating pad, which might help ease the pain in her sore muscles. Not finding anything to her liking, she returned to the bus stop. Eventually, a bus arrived that had a fair number of seats available. She paid
her ten cents, boarded the bus, and took a seat in the rear, or black, section of the bus, near the dividing line between the white and black sections. On Montgomery’s public buses, the first ten rows were for white people, the last twenty-six for blacks. In many cities in the South, the line dividing sections on buses was fixed. This was not true in Montgomery; by custom, the driver had the power, if need be, to expand the white section and shrink the black section by ordering blacks to give up their seats to whites. First come, first served might have been the rule of public transportation in most of America, but it was not true in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. To the blacks, it was just one additional humiliation to be suffered—because the system did not even guarantee the minimal courtesies and rights of traditional segregation.