MILLS, C(harles) Wright 1916-1962

PERSONAL: Born August 28, 1916, in Waco, TX; died March 20, 1962, in Nyack, NY; son of Charles Grover (an insurance agent) and Ursula (Wright) Mills; married Dorothy Helen Smith, 1937 (divorced, 1940, remarried, 1941, divorced again, 1947); married Ruth Harper, 1947 (divorced, 1959); married Gloria Yaroslava Surmach, 1959; children: (first marriage) one daughter, (second marriage) one daughter, (third marriage) one son. Education: University of Texas at Austin, B.A., 1938, M.A., 1939; University of Wisconsin, Ph.D., 1942.

CAREER: University of Maryland, associate professor of sociology, 1941-45; Columbia University, New York, NY, director of Labor Research Division of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, 1945-48, assistant professor, 1946-50, professor of sociology, 1956-62. Visiting professor at University of Chicago, 1949, Brandeis University, 1953, and University of Copenhagen, 1956-57.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellowship, 1945-46; Fullbright grant.

WRITINGS:

Small Business and Civic Welfare, U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, DC), 1946.

The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders, Harcourt, Brace & Co. (New York, NY), 1948, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2001.

The Puerto Rican Journey: New York's Newest Immigrants, Russell & Russell (New York, NY), 1950.

White Collar: The American Middle Class, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1951, reprinted, 2002.

The Power Elite, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1956, reprinted, 1999.

The Causes of World War Three, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1958.

The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1959, reprinted, 2000.

Castro's Cuba: The Revolution in Cuba, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1961.

Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in SociologicalThinking, Braziller (New York, NY), 1960.

Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1960.

The Marxists, Dell (New York, NY), 1962.

Power, Politics, and People: Collected Essays, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1963.

Sociology and Pragmatism, Paine-Whitman Publishers (New York, NY), 1964.
C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, edited by Kathryn Mills, with Patricia Mills, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2000.

Contributor of introduction to The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen, Macmillan (New York, NY); translator and contributor of introduction to From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, by Max Weber, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1946. Several of Mills' works have been translated into Russian and Spanish. His papers are housed at the University of Austin, Texas.

SIDELIGHTS: Radical American intellectual C. Wright Mills was a controversial social scientist and critic of twentieth-century American society. Influenced by Max Weber and Karl Marx, Mills wrote a number of influential works. Among them were three famous books on social stratification: The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Power Elite.

After earning bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Texas, Mills earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. He spent his career teaching at the University of Maryland and Columbia University. During the 1940s and 1950s he was a charismatic university professor, lecturer, and member of the New Left. He published his views on the separation of knowledge from the holders of power in a trilogy of works. The New Men of Power is Mills' portrait of American labor leaders, while in White Collar he discusses the growth of white-collar jobs and how the holders of these jobs impact other areas of society, such as democratic institutions. A critic of the military-industrial complex, Mills examines power structures in The Power Elite. He maintains that a small coterie of military and business leaders have an inordinate amount of political power and that this unfair concentration of power is immoral. Similar in thought to that of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato were Mills' views on the ideal power structure. He maintained that a group from the academic elite, the social scientists throughout the world—though specifically in the United States—would be better suited to hold power by virtue of their knowledge than the elected but unqualified officials of democracies. Yet the academic elite as Mills knew it is corrupt because it serves the military-industrial complex. He argued for transforming the existing academic elite but within his work did not present a process for doing so.

In his 1959 offering, The Sociological Imagination, Mills focused on young radicals and intellectuals, who he viewed as potential agents of change in a society whose power structures do not meet the needs of the masses. For the general public, Mills published such works as The Causes of World War III and Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba, in both of which he discusses the rapid pace of change in society, international cold war politics, and global interconnections.

Mills died from heart problems before he was able to provide methods for renewing the academic elite. Yet his analysis of power structures in the United States has been the focus of further study.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Aptheker, Herbert, The World of C. Wright Mills, Kraus Reprint Co. (Millwood, NY), 1960.

Contemporary Issues Criticism, Volume 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982.

Domhoff, William, C. Wright Mills and the PowerElite, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1968.

Eldridge, John, C. Wright Mills, Tavistock Publications (New York, NY), 1983.

Horowitz, Irving Louis, C. Wright Mills: An AmericanUtopian, Free Press (New York, NY), 1983.

Oakes, Guy, and Arthur J. Vidich, Collaboration,Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1999.

Scimecca, Joseph, The Sociological Theory of C.Wright Mills, Kennikat Press (Port Washington, NY), 1977.

Tilman, Rick, C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical andHis American Intellectual Roots, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1984.

World of Sociology, Volume 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

periodicals

American Prospect, May, 1999, Alan Wolfe, "The Power Elite Now," p. 90.

American Sociologist, spring, 2001, Kim Sawchuk, "'The Cultural Apparatus': C. Wright Mills' Unfinished Work," pp. 27-59.

Change, May, 2000, Harold Orlans, "A Painful Collaboration," p. 9.

Choice, December, 2000, N. B. Rosenthal, review of C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, p. 786.

Contemporary Sociology, July, 2001, William Form, review of C. Wright Mills, pp. 327-328.

Dissent, fall, 2001, Nelson Lichtenstein, review of TheNew Men of Power, p. 121.

International Journal of Social Economics, January, 1995, Rick Tilman and John H. Brown, "Thorstein Veblen, C. Wright Mills, and the Possibilities of a Public Administration," pp. 3-15.

Journal of Sociology, May, 2001, Barbara A. Misztal, review of The Sociological Imagination, p. 104.

Labor History, November, 2001, Dan Geary, "The 'Union of the Power and the Intellect': C. Wright Mills and the Labor Movement," pp. 327-346.

Library Journal, April 15, 2000, Ellen Gilbert, review of C. Wright Mills, p. 113.

Nation, October 9, 2000, John Summers, "'The Big Discourse,'" p. 43.

New Statesman, August 21, 1998, Laurie Taylor, "C. Wright Mills Was a Master of Self-Persuasion, but He'd Never Walked up Snowdon with Irene," p. 51.

New York Times, May 19, 2002, Orlando Patterson, "The Last Sociologist. The Decline of a Discipline That Used to Think Big," p. WK15.

Publishers Weekly, April 17, 2000, review of C. WrightMills, p. 67.

Society, September-October, 2001, Dennis H. Wong, "C. Wright Mills Recalled," pp. 61-64.

Sociological Inquiry, fall, 1990, Barbara H. Chasin, "C. Wright Mills, Pessimistic Radical," pp. 337-352.

Sociological Quarterly, spring, 1990, Norman K. Denzin, "Presidential Address on The Sociological Imagination Revisited," pp. 1-22.

Sociology, February, 1996, Colin Campbell, "On the Concept of Motive in Sociology," pp. 101-114.

Sociology Review, April, 1996, "Key Thinkers: C. Wright Mills," pp. 23-24.

Times Higher Education Supplement, November 26, 1993, Mary Evans, review of The Power Elite, p. 24; August 12, 1994, Ann Oakley, review of The Sociological Imagination, p. 17.

online

C. Wright Mills Web site,http://www.cwrightmills.org (June 24, 2002).

University of California Santa Barbara Department ofSociology,http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/ (June 24, 2002), Howard S. Becker, "The Story of C. Wright Mills."

Working Minds,http://www.working-minds.com/ (June 24, 2002), "C. Wright Mills."*