1. GROWING UP IN TEXAS
1916–1939
Just who are the men with guts? They are the men … who have the imagination and the intelligence to formulate their own codes; the men who have the courage and the stamina to live their own lives in spite of social pressure and isolation.Letter "by a Freshman" to the Battalion,
dated May 8, 1935
Charles Wright Mills, born in Waco, Texas, on August 28, 1916, remained in the Lone Star State for the first twenty-three years of his life. His father had moved there from Florida, but his mother and her parents were born in Texas. Although Mills left when he was a young man, a feisty Texan emphasis on individual autonomy remained in him, along with the psychology of the outlander. On the lighter side, Mills had a recreational interest in novels and movies about the Wild West and, as some of his letters show, he seemed to enjoy dramatizing his Texan roots.
Mills's mother, Frances Wright Mills, also liked telling the stories of her Texas ancestors, although her view of them was quite different from her son's. We would like to share a letter she wrote to us and to our half-brother, Nikolas, one year after our father's death. Frances gave us a romanticized version of our ancestry, the Old West, Irish immigration, and pioneer stamina. Her letter also gives some sense of Frances herself, the mother who remained in Texas after her son moved away. She received twenty-one of the letters published in this book.
San Antonio, Texas
May 19, 1963
I am writing to you, my grandchildren, and endeavoring to tell you about my father, Braxton Wright, because your own illustrious father used him and his greatness as a stepping stone to higher achievement. And this son of mine was much like his grandfather. It relates the life in part of a very simple man who lived and died a long time ago. He never achieved greatness nor honors, yet within him were some of the greatest qualities a man could possess. He understood his fellow man, and he had compassion and love for the down-trodden.
He came in the evening of the roaming Indian, and he told many tales of the Indian. He was a cheerful and dramatic man. He knew
He loved his country. It was made from guts and sweat and the pioneer women he said were very wonderful. He loved the history of America and imbued a magnificent pride within me. He had a great pity for anything wounded or defenseless.
My father left us when your father was a very small child. He used to rock him and tell him and your father's sister about the wild turkey gobblers, and he would call the turkey like the primitive Indians did—much to the children's delight.
Braxton Bragg Wright (father of Frances Wright and grandfather of Charles Wright Mills) was born at Lagarta, Texas. Son of Calvin Wright and Emmeline Cook. The Cooks were Irish, Scotch, and French. She was a French Canadian girl who traveled down the eastern seaboard in a covered wagon with her family to marry Calvin Wright of New York State. He fought in the Battle of Atlanta in the Civil War under his Uncle Braxton Bragg.
[1] The Battle of Atlanta lasted from July to September 1864, ending when the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta and proceeded to lead his troops on the March to the Sea across Georgia. Braxton Bragg was a lieutenant colonel in the Mexican War who became a Confederate general during the Civil War, commanding the primary western army for the South—the Army of Tennessee—from June 1862 to November 1863. After leaving that post, he served as military advisor to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. Grady McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), ix, x. We were unable to confirm a nephew-uncle relationship between Calvin Wright and Braxton Bragg, who had nine siblings.
The family lived in Georgia and Mississippi and finally settled at Lagarta in Texas. Calvin Wright is buried at Lagarta as well as is Emmeline Cook Wright.Braxton Bragg met a tragic death at his ranch, La Chusa, at Tilden, McMullen County, Texas, in 1920
[2] His death certificate states the following: date of death: May 3, 1922; birth date: April 8, 1861; cause of death: "was shot by gunshot" occupation: "ranchman" business: "stockraising."
and is buried on a high hill over-looking the mesquite and cactus land of southwest Texas. He was born April 8, 1860. He had a very colorful life. In 1890, '91, '92, '93, he and his father, Calvin Wright, and his brother, Stonewall Jackson, skinned cattle who died from the terrible drought. At that time the land was unfenced. They took these cattle hides by freight cars to Kansas and sold them. Hides were much in demand for saddles andHe, Braxton Bragg Wright, studied law thru a mail correspondence course and possessed a degree by 1880. He was also interested in medicine, which he practiced. However he never finished medical school. He had a brilliant and inquisitive mind and studied and read constantly. He was considered to be an intellectual on matters of law and politics. He was the father of four sons and a daughter by his first marriage.
On October 3, 1891, several years after the death of his first wife, he married Elizabeth Gallagher. From this union one child was born, Frances Ursula Wright.
Now I shall tell you about your delightful, romantic and beautiful great grandmother, Elizabeth Gallagher Wright (Biggy). She was the eighth child born to Bryan and Margaret Gallagher in the year 1870, November 26th, in a small Irish settlement in South Texas. The Gallagher family are well known in Texas. They came to Texas and made homes during days of drought and hardships. She had seven sisters and four brothers, and most of them are buried in the little cemetery at Gussettville.
My mother was a very beautiful and spiritual woman. She married my father, Braxton Bragg Wright, on October 3, 1891, in the old family home. They lived [in Ramarania, Texas] on a large ranch in a high ranch house where I was born, October 4, 1893. My mother bore a son the year before I arrived, but the child died at birth. In 1898 they moved to San Diego, Texas, and later, when I came to San Antonio to boarding school, they built a home here. Elizabeth Gallagher died on October 12, 1949, at the age of seventy-eight and is buried in San Fernando cemetery in San Antonio, Texas.
Her parents, Margaret and Bryan Gallagher, were born in Leitrim County, Ireland, and together with their parents and many relatives and the McGlains, McMurrays, Shurans, and McMarrows, they crossed the ocean in a second-class freighter. They were driven from Ireland in 1840 by persecution from England on account of their religion (Catholic) and because of the potato famine. They were both seventeen years old. Landing in Galveston Bay after a three-months voyage of cold, hunger, storm, and sickness, they drove through the wilderness with their families by oxen team to Gussettville. The next year,
Back of the lives of these heroic, proud people there is much amazing history. Margaret Gallagher, my grandmother, your great great grandmother, died in her home September 19th, 1901. Her maiden name was McGinnis. Grandpa died May 28, 1909. They both sleep in the Gussettville cemetery.
Charles Grover Mills: father of Charles Wright Mills, born at Blue Lake, Swannee County, Florida, on August 4, 1889. He was the son of Mary Jane Hawkins and Bun Mills, who were born [in] and lived around Live Oak, Florida, and who are buried in the town's cemetery. […] The Mills family were English and Dutch. And the Hawkins were English and Irish.
As you children become older your pride and memory of your own wonderful, brilliant father will increase, and it is good that his memory will be forever green.
I know you will all endeavor to live up to his expectations of you. You have within you the blood of good pioneer stock. From the labors of your ancestors comes this our America.
[…]
Your grandmother,
Frances Mills
Charles Wright Mills was five and a half years old when his grandfather (Frances's father) Braxton Bragg Wright was killed. In contrast to Braxton Wright and his independent life on the ranch, Mills's father, Charles Grover Mills, was a white-collar representative of an insurance company. Mills was forty-one years old when he wrote the following selection from the unfinished manuscript "Contacting the Enemy: Tovarich, written to an imaginary Soviet colleague."
[3] See also "On Who I Might Be and How I Got That Way," p. 247.
Fall 1957
GROWING UP: FACTS AND FANCIES
Let me tell you first about my grandfather and why I am not an oil millionaire.
I grew up in Texas, curiously enough on no ranch but in Waco, Wichita Falls, Fort Worth, Sherman, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio—in that order. My family moved around a bit. The reason I was not stabilized on a ranch is that my grandfather had lost my ranch. He was shot in the back with a .30–30 rifle, always it's in the back, but he really was. I've never got it altogether clear, but Braxton Bragg Wright, I have been told, liked the girls—married and unmarried, Mexican and white. This one was Mexican and married, a bad combination for him.
[4] This refers to one of several different stories surrounding Braxton Wright's death in 1922. An undisputed fact is that the man who shot Braxton Wright was Alex Ewing, one of his hired hands. Some said that Mr. Ewing interrupted Braxton Wright in an amorous moment with Mrs. Ewing, but Mrs. Ewing testified that the violent dispute was caused by Braxton Wright's false accusation that she and her husband had stolen something, and that her husband had defended her honor. Another story features an argument over Mr. Ewing's refusal to join Mr. Wright in making bootleg liquor, and another says that Braxton Wright did not provoke the attack at all. In any case, a jury acquitted Alex Ewing, based on his claim of self-defense. (This information comes from court records and personal interviews by Richard Davis Gillam, "C. Wright Mills, 1916–1948: An Intellectual Biography" [Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, August 1972], 12–14.)
My grandmother, Elizabeth Gallagher Wright, on the other hand, cared less for men than for the big city of San Antonio, and she loathed ranches.[5] In fact, Mills's grandparents were divorced in 1919.
So my grandfather was shot and I did not grow up with cowboys on a ranch. For this I shall always be grateful. I do not want it, but still, late one night, sitting in a bar in Munich, and one afternoon in New York, and again one morning in August in the Hotel Angleterre in Copenhagen, I have thought about the cowboys of my native province.My God, what men they are. Or were. Or must have been. Or ought to have been. There is no movie like a cowboy movie. All the cowboys on the ranch in Texas where I could have grown up looked just like Gary Cooper. They were tall and slim, and they had that same steely eye, those long arms, and of course the great guns hanging. Every one of them, at one time or another, had taken the long walk in the dusty street before the wooden fronts of the stores behind which merchants trembled and villains lurked unseen but well located for obscene aggression. All my cowboys had come through that, and now they were men, quiet, unafraid men. Tested in that way, certain of themselves, they were each a compact being, just like the voice of Marshall Dillon.
They cared less for women than women cared for them. In their world some women were altogether bad and some were very good indeed, and all their lives my cowboys were looking for a truly good woman, who at first seemed bad.
About men, my grandfather on his ranch in Texas used to say: "Let them stay just a little on the other side of Winchester-rifle range. Lots safer for everybody that way. And then we'll all be good neighbors." Since he did get shot dead a few years later, he may have had a point. Let them stay just the other side of rifle range.
I don't mind climbing a mountain when I come to it, although I'd not go out of my way to do it. I don't mind swimming a little creek or even building a little boat to get across a big one, although I'd rather a bridge were there. But I don't at all like all these silly little men in uniform all over the frontiers of the world stopping me and holding up travel to see who I might be, or to see whether I'm carrying two or five bottles of French cognac, or whether I've a stamp on a piece of paper, put there by some other little men in other uniforms. It's not really any of their damned business. All this national boundary stuff is a kind of highway robbery, isn't it? And a kind of spiritual robbery too. In a situation of human revolt, notice how quickly the boundaries fall to pieces. So let everyone stay just a little outside of Winchester-rifle range, but let each move along the edges of this range.
"Forgive me," you say, "but you really are wandering. I am trying to find out what sort of man you might be and something of how you came to be whatever you are. Won't you please tell me?"
Yes, but you must let me tell you in my own way and you must not interrupt. The facts will come out, so far as I know them, but it is not altogether pleasant or easy to confront some of them. Surely you must understand that. I've got to clothe them just a little, at least in the beginning. What I was leading up to was that I suppose I could make a big thing out of this cowboy stuff, like a certain kind of good Limey novelist who writes about the "real England," saying what it is and is not. Now Tovarich, let us not do that sort of thing.
I have driven trucks in the East Texas oil fields; I've helped dig a ditch between Long View and Talco; and I've driven a tractor hauling a combine in the wheat fields up in the Texas Panhandle. All that is true. But all of it is also a damned lie—like the lies of executives who claim they started at the bottom of a corporation of which their father, uncle, or brother owned the biggest hunk. I did do those things, but
It is so easy to pose, to fake. How can I tell you? How can I know exactly how it was, how it is? I think it may help if I say: externally I've always had it very easy indeed, and I've often felt vaguely but undeniably guilty about that. Troubles I've usually brought on myself, and the fact that I have is of course related to the guilt arising from easy and unearned circumstance. Other men, I suppose, live for money, women, fun, comradeship. I seem perversely to like trouble better. I seek it out, and if I do not find it, I try to make it up. I am what any decent executive type or aspiring executive type would automatically call a born troublemaker. I am both presumptuous and, as my grandfather used to say, "as good as any damned body anywhere." But that's merely posing again—perhaps even seeking a "background," or trying to invent one or imagine one. In truth, I don't know a single thing my grandfather ever said, and I doubt if anything he might have said is at all memorable. My grandfather to me is a distant biological fact and nothing else whatsoever.
I have often wondered why so many of my political colleagues need to adopt such postures as they do. It is possible to find out what one may really be about at any given time and how one got to be that way; it is possible to conduct this inquiry, this finding out, without being overwhelmed by attitudinizing. The trick, I think—although it's less a trick than a means of self-awareness—the trick is explicitly to include in your work the various postures you tend to fall into, report them, and exploit them intellectually.
You say, "Isn't there some kind of theme that runs through your biography—that shapes it in some way?"
Yes, in time I suppose I sought out certain self-images; at least certain kinds of circumstances began very early to accumulate, so that I think there may be a theme.
First, I never really lived in an extended family. There was just my father, who traveled much of the time, my mother, and one sister three years older than I, whom I've not seen in years. (There was also grandmother Biggy, who seems always to have been around.) The social point is this: I didn't really know the experience of "human relations" within a solid, intimate family setup, certainly not continuously.
My parents as a couple had few if any friends. In fact for long periods, when I was in Sherman and Dallas, going to high school, my
[6] After spending one year at Texas A & M, Mills transferred to the University of Texas at Austin.
This isolation of my family was a prototype of my own isolation. In grammar school and high school and college—in fact, until my first marriage
[7] He was married at the age of twenty-one, while he was an undergraduate.
—I never had a circle of friends. There was for me no "gang," no parties. I had a single "chum" in Wichita Falls and another in Sherman—the most important boyhood friend, with whom I spent one or two summers on his elder brother's wheat ranch; at A & M, there was no one. What happened there was that the group I began to care about, to seek approval from, shifted to several professors, a librarian, an English professor, the French professor, and an agricultural economist. Even before that—in high school—the shift had been made to a teacher of architecture and an instructor of psychology.My "background" contained no intellectual or cultural benefits. I grew up in houses that had no books and no music in them. At least the only music I remember ever hearing in the house was a hillbilly version of "How You Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm?" and I was in the second year of college when I first heard classical music. It was Tchaikovsky's Pathetique used in a demonstration of some equipment in a physics laboratory. The first stage play I ever saw was also that second year of college: The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov. (Isn't it curious that they were both Russian in origin?)
The first books I remember ever reading—in the last year of high school, when I suddenly became awake for the first time—were a set of small books, bound in pale blue, and entitled, I think, "The Psychology of Success." They were all about Will-Power-by-God, which my father had or borrowed in connection with his work as
[8] Charles Horton Cooley was an American sociologist. George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher and psychologist.
in terms of which I first came seriously to begin to analyze myself.Thus intellectually and culturally I am as "self-made" as it is possible to be. As a friend of mine used to say, "a mushroom." The fact that I seized these academic standards and internalized them deeply meant, in turn, a further cutting off of self from my family background and the social setting at large as well. By the time I went to college, I think no one I had previously known, including family members, really counted for me as a point of reference. I was cut off and alone, and I felt it at the time.
All this also meant that my education was quite poor. There was no context, no background to prepare me for it. To become educated—in the sense in which I first became more or less fully aware of what that might be, at Texas A & M—meant to create myself as if in a vacuum, to find sources of approval for it and models for that kind of life where no standards, models, expectations had existed at all on any cultural level.
A friend of mine from the University of Texas had some inkling of all this: my friendship with him was intellectually and morally the closest I had had up to then. (Of course, one never has any friendships so consequential as those of adolescence.) But its major consequence was to sharpen the focus of all my drives towards work, specifically intellectual work, as my very salvation. I remember the moment when he and I exchanged intellectual roles and I became intellectually ascendant, at least in my own mind, in the relationship. We were walking along in front of the YMCA and I was stronger in some argument. Whether it's true or not doesn't matter. I felt it. At the time I didn't know it, but this meant that again I was alone—or at least very much on my own—my own leader.
Out of all this came the search for, the demand for, absolute autonomy. The great energies the search has demanded and created,
After graduating from Dallas Technical High School, Mills entered a large military school, Texas Agricultural & Mechanical College.
[9] The school has since added graduate programs and changed its name to Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University.
Later Mills thought his father had not believed his son was sufficiently masculine; military college was intended to help make a man of him. In any case, Mills was deeply disappointed with his year at Texas A & M.Mills and his roommate, who shared the post of freshman class president, also shared the task of stirring up trouble on campus by collaborating on the following letter to the college newspaper, concerning the distribution and use of power within the student body at the college.
[10] This according to interviews conducted by Timothy Chester.
(Many years later Mills reflected on what this early effort meant to him, in a letter to Hans Gerth, dated December 7, 1943, which appears on p. 55.)To the Battalion, published in the issue dated April 3, 1935
STUDENT FORUM
Digressions on College Life
There are some vital questions which are always a point of issue in every place where men live together. Discontent and unrest can be
Observation and experience have led me to believe that the influence of living social conditions on the campus upon the students is more harmful than beneficial. I do not aim to take the pessimistic point of view and say that these conditions cannot be changed and so we may as well get used to them. Nor am I going to follow the suggestion to get out since the climate here does not suit me. I propose rather to write down my thoughts on what goes on around me in the hope that they may in some way help to bring about the change which is so necessary for the welfare of the student body.
What effect has the overbearing attitude of the upperclassman on the mind of the freshman? Does it make the freshman more of a man? Most assuredly not, for there can be no friendship born out of fear, hatred or contempt; and no one is a better man who submits passively to the slavery of his mind and body by one who is less of a man than he. Since when has it been true that oppression and the suppression of free thinking have become acceptable to the American youth? Can it be that he accepts these because he has grown indifferent to the problems facing him and takes the easiest way out? It would be hard to believe that this should be the case, in fact. I am sure it is not. The freshman submits to the will of the upperclassman only because he has been led to conceive a distorted idea of sportsmanship and true manhood. He is afraid to defy them and stand alone not so much because of what they might do to him but because of what they might think of him. And so we have the freshman living a life of mental unrest and stress, unwilling to do that which he believes is wrong, and yet forced to do it by his fear of public opinion.
College students are supposed to become leaders of thought and action in later life. It is expected they will profit from a college education by developing an open and alert mind to be able to cope
On the student alone rests the responsibility of making A and M free from sham, hypocrisy and feudalistic customs which can bring harm only upon themselves.
By a Freshman
An anonymous upperclassman defended the traditions at A & M in a response that was printed the following week in the Battalion. The upperclassman wrote that a look at the lives of A & M graduates will "show that a finer bunch of citizens never lived" the A & M experience taught students to lead and be led and it "turned out smart men who raised hell and had a lot of fun." The letter stated that, like religion, the status quo at A & M was "good enough for our fathers so why should we try to change it." The student went on to say that A & M builds men, indeed cadets, who "used to have a little guts," who were treated with some respect by the authorities. In closing, the upperclassman wrote that in "the ridiculous article" the freshman had claimed that "some freshmen come through it all with crushed spirit, no will power, and other rot. […] If you want the things you advocate, why didn't you go to Texas, or Tarleton instead of trying to help the rest of your crowd finish ruining A and M?"
[11] "Student Forum: College Life," Battalion, 10 April 1935.
The rejoinder follows.To the Battalion, published in the issue dated May 8, 1935
STUDENT FORUM
Another Viewpoint
Recently there appeared in these columns the most delicate and subtle of satires. I have no doubt that it was written in an inspired moment of a great thinker's life. So beautifully subtle was it and so diligently at study (and busy disciplining the men who have been here only seven months or so) are the great majority of our student body that the thought has occurred to me that perhaps this bit of everlasting though subtle truth was read in much too hasty a manner.
And so assuming that some of the more rapid readers took this thing literally in case they did not see the obvious weakness (I am sure it was intended to be obvious) of its arguments, I am going to be a bit more blunt in expressing my opinion of the juvenile techniques in which the majority of our students indulge. (And if you don't care to hear my opinion this Bat has many other interesting things which you may read. So go read them and don't ask me why I came here, or if I don't like A and M, why don't I go to another school. Such questions are obviously insane, for the highest form of patriotism is criticism. I am interested in the potentialities of this institution and I intend to do my small share toward their development.)
In none of these controversies of principle do the writers seem to pierce the root of our problem. The effect of our system is not so detrimental during our first year as it is during the other three. Outside of taking his time from study or creative leisure, the character of the freshman is not to any extent negatively changed (assuming, of course, that he is not influenced by "the men who have guts"—as last week's writer so artistically labeled our rougher element). And then he trades one for three. For three years he shouts and feet hit dormitory floors; for three years his room is cleaned up and his laundry taken and got by other men. For three years he can, if he wishes, use his class distinction to satisfy his individual prejudices; can force his ego and will upon other men. For three years we run his errands, carry his cigarettes.
And the excuse for all this is that it develops leadership.
If this is leadership then my sociology text is very wrong—because this sort of control is based on nothing save force. Any social
No one with common "horse sense" can stand on the two feet of the genus Homo and distinctly say that three years of being waited on does not affect an individual … true one finds it hard to think of any good effect.
And so if it's good enough for ole pappie, it's good enough for us! What wonderful irony … nothing could be more obviously leaky. Then why, my old traditionalist, do you not ride in buggies? Your granddad did. The more intelligent students here are not content with our present system. And tomorrow A and M shall also rise slowly from its foolish buggy and enter a streamlined roadster.
Just because a thing has been done by a number of people over a number of years does not make that thing necessarily good. The hand of the past has its functions; it stabilizes; it held conquered territory. But with it alone there can be no progress, no advancement toward sane and more rational techniques. We must criticize and change.
Lots of verbiage has been slung about men with "guts." Before we use a term, let's put Plato on it. Just who are the men with guts? They are the men who have the ability and the brains to see this institution's faults, who are brittle enough not to adapt themselves to its erroneous order—and plastic enough to change if they are already adapted; the men who have the imagination and the intelligence to formulate their own codes; the men who have the courage and the stamina to live their own lives in spite of social pressure and isolation. These my friends, are the men with "guts."
By a Freshman
After his freshman year, Mills transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where he completed his B.A. in sociology and his M.A. in philosophy. In October 1937, as a twenty-one-year-old student in Austin, Mills married twenty-four-year-old Dorothy Helen Smith from Oklahoma. A friend of Mills's who was studying literature and knew Norse mythology nicknamed Dorothy Helen "Freya," after a Norwegian goddess. Freya was the second of four children born to a banker and his wife, a former teacher. After graduating from Oklahoma College for Women in 1935 with a B.S. in commerce, Freya enrolled in the master's program in sociology at the University of Texas, where she met Mills. When she and Mills married, she stopped studying so
During his last year as a student at the University of Texas, Mills submitted an essay entitled "Language, Logic and Culture" to the American Sociological Review. On February 23, 1939, Read Bain wrote Mills to let him know that the journal would not publish the essay, although they would be willing to consider a condensed version of it. He also jokingly mentioned that Mills had not included postage for the return of the manuscript unless it had been confiscated by Howard P. Becker,
[12] Howard Paul Becker, the American sociologist (born in 1899), not to be confused with another, more well-known American sociologist, Howard Saul Becker (born in 1928).
who originally received the package. Mills sent the following letter with his revision of the article.To Read Bain, from Austin, Texas, dated March 2, 1939
Dear Sir:
Much that was dear to my heart I have unselfishly cast aside! I have cut and cut and cut, and this is as short as I can make it.
Believe me grateful for your specific suggestions for deletion. I have found them good, and in the main I have followed them. Hence, if you decide to publish the article you may affix to the title a footnote to that effect. […]
Thanks for your considerations, and go easy on Becker. He swiped no postal funds. I remain the unashamed culprit.
Cordially,
C. Wright Mills
"Language, Logic and Culture" was published in the October 1939 issue of the American Sociological Review. This was Mills's first professional publication; when it came out, he promptly sent a copy to Robert K. Merton, asking for comments and initiating a correspondence and professional association that, as the reader will see, extended throughout Mills's career.