| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 50

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, eds., C. Wright Mills — Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)

THIS IS AN INSIGHTFUL book, well suited to reading in this post-11 September era. C.W. Mills was "an intellectual hero of the New Left, a model of the engaged academic," and a "passionate public citizen" who "wrote to be read beyond the academy." In the post-World War II years, Mills' lucid writings appealed to Americans who were trying to making sense of events in the 1950s: the Cold War, McCarthyism, the threat of nuclear war, and anxieties over Cuba. I found it very readable and personal. I recommend it for two types of readers: those who are not familiar with C. W. Mills, but who are interested in a review of his work, and those who know his works but who want to know more about his innermost thoughts as he wrote.	1
This book, compiled by Mills' two daughters, sketches his private thoughts through correspondence with friends, family, colleagues, and publishers. We read Mills' reflections as he writes his many books and articles, including his famous trilogy New Men of Power (1951, on labour), White Collar (1956, on the middle class), and The Power Elite (1959, on the upper class of decision makers).	2
In his letters Mills details his gruelling daily schedules, his reactions to reviews of his works, his disagreements with researchers such as Lazarsfeld and Daniel Bell, and his hobbies (building and renovating houses, riding and repairing his motorcycle). We follow Mills through his short life, his three marriages, his various academic postings, and his writing. We come to know his candid thoughts on a variety of topics, his hopes and his frustrations.	3
Mills gradually honed his writing skills to appeal to a broader non-academic audience in order to try and help people make connections between their private lives and what was happening in the world. With The Causes of World War Three (a plea for the end of the nuclear arms race) and Listen Yankee (a report on the Cuban Revolution firsthand) Mills developed a large readership. Many sought Mills' writings for insight on issues of war and peace, foreign policy, and their lives.	4
Mills was continually trying to improve his analysis and writing, and seeking a critique of his work by close friends, including Robert Merton and Hans Gerth. He collaborated with Gerth in the translation of some of Weber's works and was highly critical of Parson's translation of Weber. "(T)he son of a bitch translated it so as to take all the guts, the radical guts, out of it, whereas our translation doesn't do that!" ( 53)	5
Unhappy teaching at the University of Maryland, Mills moved on to Columbia University, doing quantitative research for Paul Lazarsfeld in the Bureau of Applied Social Research on the famous Decatur study of influence and mass communications. It seems strange given Mills' later works that he would work for Lazarsfeld, who was the epitome of a "captive academic." Lazarsfeld, as Todd Gitlin has argued, had a knack at gathering research funds, creating "uneasy but mutually indispensable partnerships" between universities, corporations, and foundations. The Decatur study created an awakening in Mills. Lazarsfeld, Gitlin wrote in 1978, became "alarmed at the reach and populist edge of Mills' rhetoric." When he tried to make Mills rewrite his analysis, Mills quit. "Thank God, I feel secure enough to resist this silly domination and manipulation of his.... I've worked on that crap more than on any other book with which I have been associated.... I'd rather not be associated with it. To hell with professional acclaim I lose. Nothing is worth the continual feeling that you're not your own man." (172)	6
In The Power Elite (1956), Mills described the interlocking power relationships between the economic, political and military elites in the US, a concept which "far from accepted knowledge." (189) Eisenhower did not express his concerns about "the growing military-industrial complex" until he left office in 1961. (189) While The Saturday Review referred to Mills as a successor to Thorstein Veblen, in general Mills was disappointed with the reviews of The Power Elite. "NOBODY REALLY TAKES IT SERIOUSLY ... they trivialize my stuff horribly ... I worked pretty hard on this and then it goes into this vacuum. I can only hope that somehow enough people get it into their hands to read it ... (It does seem to sell ...)." (201–2).	7
Mills' 1954 lecture for the CBC and University of Toronto could have been written for the times we now live in:	8
(We are trying to be) rational in an epoch of enormous irrationality. The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness.... We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often the fear of total, permanent war paralyzes the kinds of morally oriented politics which might engage our interests and our passions ... ours is a time when ... atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct.... We see that the people at the top often identify rational dissent with political mutiny, loyalty with blind conformity and freedom of judgment with treason. We feel that irresponsibility has become organized in high places and that clearly those in charge of the historic decisions of our time are not up to them. But what is more damaging to us is that we feel that those on the bottom ... make no real demands upon those in power. (185)
Mills called on his audience to reject "the official myths and unofficial distractions." (186) He argued "we can only truly belong to organizations which we have a real part in building and maintaining, directly and openly and all of the time." (187)	9
Mills become close friends with Ralph Milliband, a Marxist scholar who introduced him to members of the "New Left" in Britain and Europe in the late 1950s. He met with dissenting socialist intellectuals in Poland in a "time of growing ferment against the repressive Soviet-style government." (241) Mills' visit to Poland and Yugoslavia "deepened" his own socialism and "hardened" his attitude "towards the triviality and formalism of much 'social science' in the US." (241) Amidst growing tensions between the US and the Soviet Union, he began to write letters to an imaginary friend (Tovarich) in the Soviet Union.	10
Mills cast himself as a "spiritual Wobbly ... the opposite of a bureaucrat, one who doesn't like bosses — capitalistic or communistic ... 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." (252) He argued that you "can use your mind and your sensibilities to try and make fate less unjust ... this is the choice I have made." (253) He saw this as the "moral root of socialism," and defined a "radical" as "one who refuses to accept injustice as fate and whose refusal takes active political and cultural forms ... politics and culture of a radical kind have to do with modifications of a society and so with the control of fate, as history and as biography." (254)	11
In the late 1950s in the midst of the Cold War, Mills was daring and forthright. In "Program for Peace" (1957) he called for the abandonment of the production of nuclear weapons, the recognition of China and all other "Communist-type states" and the development of worldwide educational and cultural-exchange programs. In "A Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy" he criticized Christian leaders for failing to effectively oppose the arms race.	12
Mills had continual money problems throughout his working life. In 1959 he was turned down for funding by every foundation to which he applied to. "I'm just off the list. So to hell with them." (274) Mills saw his writing as political action, and he was angry that intellectuals became easily intimidated, instead of exercising their freedom. He argued that "we must not underestimate what even a small circulation of ideas can do, especially ... comical and inane ideas ... our chief weapons ... are audacity and laughter." ( 280). Perhaps the Raging Grannies take their cue from Mills.	13
With McCathyism, Mills argued that academics should have come together to form a common front, a plan of attack, and forced local news editors to pay attention. They should have laughed at McCarthy . "Laugh to reveal what he (McCarthy) truly was: a ridiculous and silly little man, an opportunist without principles or brains." ( 299)	14
After 11 September 2001, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) created a list that is being compared to McCarthy-era blacklisting. The list includes the names of people who have made what is perceived to be anti-American statements on US college campuses. Professors are being called "the weak link in America's response to the attack."	15
Mills' "Letter to the New Left" (1960) was one of his most well known essays. He provided notes on direct non-violent action in Poland, Hungary, and Russia. In Listen Yankee (1960) he wrote about a Cuban revolutionary trying to communicate with his US neighbours about Cuban life under Batista, the negative impact of US policies toward Cuba and the accomplishments of Castro's revolution, especially in education and healthcare. Mills saw Cuban revolutionary as a socialist, not a communist. He felt that if the Cubans were properly helped they would have a good chance. The FBI were concerned that his book would disarm and confuse public opinion, and it tried to get writers to refute Mills' arguments. Book sales boomed but a death threat followed, and a lawsuit by former Cuban businesses.	16
Stressed and exhausted, Mills suffered a heart attack just before a scheduled TV debate on his book. In April 1961, Cuban exiles, who had been recruited and trained in the US, invaded the Bay of Pigs. Mills was dismayed by the silence of academics on the US violation of neutrality laws. "(T) He one thing I have learned from the entire experience is a terrible thing: that the moral cowardice of the American intelligentsia is virtually complete. I don't of course mean that they should agree with me, but I do demand that they face the moral ambiguity; indeed agony is not too strong a word, which any violence involves." (328) Mills died the following year, only 45 years old. In his eulogy, Hans Gerth commented on Mills' trilogy that it "was the first attempt of an American sociologist to answer the question, whence did we come, where are we going, who are we?" (340) Milliband noted "he was on the Left, but not of the Left ... he occupied a unique position in American radicalism." (341)	17
Although I had studied and knew the works that Mills criticized (i.e. Bell, Lazarsfeld, and Parsons) I had never been formally introduced to Mills except in "The Promise" (from Sociological Imagination). Like Mills, I have been disillusioned by sociologists' often obtuse way of writing, the reverence given to number crunching, and the failure of many (including other academics besides sociologists) to be engaged in studying issues relevant to the here and now. Dorothy Smith's writing complements Mills' work, in her analysis of how the "relations of ruling" control and coordinate our everyday/everynight lives, and how we get caught up in letting this happen. Chomsky's writing in general also complements Mills' work. However, Mills is by far the most lucid writer, and he wrote in a vivid way to appeal to a broader group of readers.	18
Ella Haley Athabasca University

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