3. STARTING OUT
College Park, Maryland, 1941–1945
Radicalism comes out in detailed and compelling analysis, not in names and slogans.C. Wright Mills, letter to Dwight
Macdonald, October 10, 1943I bought all, every single one of Veblen's works! They are fine. They sit here a bequest and a challenge.C. Wright Mills, letter to Hans
Gerth, undated but probably early
November 1944
In 1941 Mills completed his preliminary examinations for his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin and began work as an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Robert K. Merton had helped Mills get the position by putting him in touch with Carl Joslyn, who was then the head of the sociology department and a former colleague of Merton's at Harvard. Mills completed his thesis, entitled "A Sociological Account of Pragmatism: An Essay on the Sociology of Knowledge," and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin the following year.
During his stay at the University of Maryland, which coincided with the United States' participation in World War II, Mills's political awareness grew, and he bought his first subscription to a daily newspaper, the New York Times.
[1] Notes from Freya James, undated (1984).
During this period Mills became friendly with three historians who would later become well-known: Richard Hofstadter, Frank Freidel, and Ken Stampp. Meeting regularly for lunch and sharing a critical opinion of FDR, capitalism, and the military draft, the four friends joined forces on academic issues on campus and provided an "intellectual oasis for each other."[2] Susan Stout Baker, Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930's (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985, 177. Based on Baker's personal interview with Kenneth Stampp, April 2, 1981.
While living in Maryland, Mills wrote articles and book reviews for a wide variety of periodicals—from the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review to the New Republic, Partisan Review, and politics. During his three years at the University of Maryland, Mills also collaborated with Gerth on two books: the collection of Max Weber's writings, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated, edited, and with an introduction by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, which was published in 1946, the year after Mills left Maryland; and Character and Social Structure (1953).
The next letter is addressed to Gerth's wife, H I.
To Hildegarde Ide Gerth, from Greenbelt, Maryland, dated December 24, 1941
Dear H I:
It is entirely wonderful of you to frame the picture and gift us with it. It is Christmas eve, afternoon, and we are about to betake ourselves down to the sea, to Annapolis, which is 35 miles away, to the east.
Here the sun is shining and I have been roaming in the woods back of the house all morning in my shirtsleeves, it is so warm. It is very pleasant and smells crisp and Autumnal.
I write you this letter because we won't see you in New York and neither will you see us, which is very bad. You really should have gone.
We've just finished Darkness at Noon.
[3] Novel by Arthur Koestler, trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
Jesus, it is penetrative. There is so much in it that I just had to read aloud in a kind of machine-gun inevitable-like voice. Then, in my seminar, I'd been going over "parties" and "bureaucracies" and so I read certain parts of it there. It is one of the few recent books I've read which on literary grounds meets Eliseo's criterion for good prose! Which reminds me, I just got a letter from Eliseo V[ivas].[4] A philosopher Mills had met while studying at the University of Wisconsin.
He is to commit Matrimony the 31st, and then he and Dorothy spend a few days in Chicago. But I suppose you know. He was so very kind: sent me a letter of introduction to Sidney Hook.[5] American philosopher who had a particular interest in the theory of pragmatism and who taught at New York University. Hook, who had been a graduate student of John Dewey's at Columbia University, began his career as a Marxist scholar, engaging in research at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in 1929 and working with the American Communist Party before helping to found a new radical organization, the American Workers' Party, in 1933. Later he became a neoconservative intellectual who received the Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan in 1983. Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).
When Gerth and I get together in New York, I'm going to try and work out a triangle luncheon, if I can.Oh, yes, another book: Kabloona by de Poncins, about the Eskimos.
[6] By Gontran de Poncins (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941; reprint, St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1996).
I'm using it next term in connection with a course whichJust got back from Annapolis. It is a lovely village: Narrow streets curving around between old houses with high creaking eaves. Many little inlet bays running up into the town, past the tall old houses and full of fishing craft, rusting and full of oysters. It is the kind of village you'd like to lounge around in for a full day, walking and feeling and seeing and smelling its every nook and cranny. It is the first place in Maryland in connection with which one may use the adjective "quaint" without triteness. It is a place to which one could commit oneself; a place, above all, in which to talk of our dilapidated old friend, the cosmos.
Yours truly, Mills
In late June 1942, Mills wrote to Daniel Bell at the New Leader, asking to review Paths of Life by Charles W. Morris, which had just been published by Harper and Brothers. Mills, who was spending the summer in Madison, explained that he was then immersed in pragmatic literature. In an earlier letter to Bell, dated June 18, 1942, Mills described his doctoral dissertation: "I think I told you that I am finishing up this fall, maybe, a sociology of knowledge of pragmatism: from Pierce thru Dewey and Mead. I'm on page 570 and my wife is yelling to stop it, as she is the only one who can read my handwriting (typing). Anyway in this I trace Dewey's stands (political) down the line and, in conjunction with the position on logic and theory of valuation, impute him socially. Pan-logism is a type of formal left wingism; its formality is what is at issue politically and it is this which must be explained in terms of the whole situation of American ‘progressivism.’"
To Daniel Bell, from Madison, Wisconsin, postcard dated July 19, 1942
The copy of Morris arrived OK several days ago. You'll get the piece within a week under the title "The Crisis of Pragmatism: Politics and Religion." […] The guy has done the wrong thing with something potentially swell and we ought to fight him, and hard.
Yours, Mills
To Frances and Charles Grover Mills, from Greenbelt, Maryl****and, dated June 29, 1943, 2 A.M.
Just a line to let you know how things are before I go to bed. Yesterday morning I received a new draft classification of 2-A. This means that I am considered [an] "indispensable civilian" in my present occupation and am definitely deferred for 6 months, that is, until December 17, 1943. At that time another application for deferment is made by the university, and I have no reason to feel that they will not defer me again for 6 months. You will recall that I was not terribly worried when you were here, Fannye; now you see why.
I have not heard anything from the Navy and am undecided as to what I would do if they offered to commission me. They would have to give me just what I want.
Today I mailed you a copy of the article which I wrote while Fannye was visiting us. It was printed sooner than I thought and looks pretty good, although several printer's errors were made, as they always are. Also got another check for $15 today from New Republic for a little 600 word review they printed last week.
[7] "Prometheus as Democrat," review of The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility, by Sidney Hook, New Republic (21 June 1943): 834.
I am now reading up a lot on American history in order that I may teach the Army how it was with the forefathers. I find some of the forefathers rather tough old guys. And they are old enough to be very respectable … now. So I am learning American history in order to quote it at the sons of bitches who run American Big Business. After all, who can deny Patrick Henry or Tommie Jefferson? I'm not reading the books about American history but the "sources," that is, the official speeches and public documents. Old Pat Henry jumped up one day in the house of Burgesses (congress) of Virginia in 1775 and began a speech: "God Almighty! God Almighty, Gentlemen! You say that we are not strong enough to fight so formidable a foe etc. But, sirs, I ask: when will we be stronger? Next week? Next month? Next year? When then? God Almighty!" and so on. He was a great old guy coming from the small farmers and artisans and fighting the Big Holders who ran the government and everybody else. There are a lot of guys like that, but the books don't tell you about 'em. So I'm going to the documentary records and [will] teach American history
good night, MillsCharlie Jr.
[8] Mills typed his name as well as signed it on this and many other letters.
[P.S.] Thanks for the pipe cleaners. Wish I could go out on the ranch with you for a couple of months rest.
[9] Mills's parents lived in a modest house in a neighborhood of small lots. Mills's mother spent part of her childhood on a ranch owned by her father—Mills wrote of his grandfather's life and ranch and how the ranch was lost, in a letter included in part 1 of this book.
In the following letter to Dwight Macdonald, the iconoclastic journalist and critic, Mills responded to Macdonald's plans for starting a new magazine, one that would feature lively dissident political thinking within a leftist context—and an opposition to the mass violence of World War II. Mills had been writing for another political journal based in New York City: the social democratic weekly the New Leader, of which Daniel Bell was managing editor. Bell remembers introducing Mills to Macdonald,
[10] Letter from Daniel Bell to K. Mills, dated August 15, 1996.
and Mills and Macdonald quickly became friends.In the early forties Mills was becoming disenchanted with many of the positions taken in the New Leader, which represented a retreat from the journal's early radicalism.
[11] Gillam, "C. Wright Mills," 182.
Although Mills continued to contribute book reviews as late as 1944, in 1943 he no longer identified with the journal politically and stopped writing articles for it. In this context Mills was especially supportive of Macdonald's plan to start a new magazine that would provide a forum for independent radicalism with an antiwar orientation.To Dwight Macdonald, from Greenbelt, Maryland, dated October 10, 1943
Dear Dwight:
Just got in from Madison this morning and received your letter and prospectus. Also found out that this Army program in which I'm teaching is now blown up to where I have to give formal lectures in
The outline agenda looks damned good, especially the departments and the general slant on art and culture etc. Have one thing about which I get very earnest and want to plead with you:
For God's sake don't call it "The Radical Review." Get some more innocuous name. Maybe you do not realize how many people you estrange by such publicity of names. In academic circles many people who you might win over as readers and even writers would be alienated by the title, and so needlessly! Radicalism comes out in detailed and compelling analysis, not in names and slogans. It would cost many men in many institutions their jobs if they were to write for a journal with such a name. It does not compromise or "expediencize" your viewpoint if you get a more innocuous title. "The Left" is much better but suffers from the defect of suggesting "left out" or some such. Babylon is too playful and trivial for the level of stuff and the seriousness which you want to achieve. I'm sorry I can't think of any suggestions but I'll write again after mulling it.
You can of course count on me for the first issue. […] I have been working on and off with a sort of general survey of the "dilemmas of the left," which if I have time I'll try and finish and send you. I think you'll find it provocative, although you won't agree with it all. But maybe it is too much of an "Issues Which We Face" stuff and you'll want to do that order of thing in the editorial yourself. If so, or if I can't finish it in time, I'll let you know about a composite set of books for a major review, for I certainly want to be counted in the first issue with you guys. […] I've been thinking of doing a big composite on Soren Kierkegaard, but can't tell yet, for another journal has half offered [that] to me and I can't violate confidence by asking you for [that] until they let me know definitely. But might you be interested in a sociology of knowledge of the guy and the cultural stuff around him?
If we could only clear the copyright stuff, we (Gerth and I) could let you have a translation of Max Weber on "Class and Status" which we've done. […] It's a section from Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tubingen 1922), if I recall correctly. […] It has never been published in English and is not included in part one of W und G,
― 53 ―which Parsons of Harvard has translated and is now in English press. The 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!
[…]
Yours, Mills
In the following letter, Mills continued to discuss the connotations of various proposed names for the magazine Macdonald was founding.
To Dwight Macdonald, from College Park, Maryland, dated October 25, 1943
Dear Dwight:
At first I thought "Gulliver" was damn good because in this world one's childhood is likely to have been more pleasant than one's adult tribulations and Gulliver is associated with one's childhood. Also Gulliver went among big people and little people and was a stranger among them both. But the only attention you would attract by such a title would be, I am afraid, negative. "Cute" titles are also frivolous, or "literary" in the bad sense. People play with them! ("Gulliver" equals gullible; "Left" equals left-out, left-over; and such playful characteristics stick). They can't do it with a title like "Political Review" or even "Politics." Don't try to advertise with these damn titles. Make the title innocuous. The magazines that last and grow in influence have plain titles.
Enclosed are some notices on Amerasia, etc. I take it that these little summaries are to be unsigned. I would prefer it, at least for those I send you. Also it leaves you free to rewrite or abbreviate as your space requires.
I will let you know by next weekend definitely whether or not I can do the piece on "Withdrawal and Orientation" or some such title.
Sincerely yours, Mills
P.S. "The Critic" is too negativistic. "Politics" with some subtitle, I think best.
[12] Macdonald took this suggestion but used a lowercase p.
[…]
To Frances and Charles Grover Mills, from Greenbelt, Maryland, undated (fall 1943)
Dear Momma and Papa:
When I got back to Maryland, I found I was saddled with a big Army class of 150 men in American history. Last term I had thirty at a time and could bull along; this time I've got to prepare formal lectures, come every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, and at eight o'clock too. It is very rough to lecture to that many before you're really awake. I will be an old man when I'm 35. But at least I'll probably live until I'm that old! So what the hell.
The Madison trip was quite successful. Gerth and I got some good work done and I got a little rest from the summer, although not much. All the time I'm not working on the history now, I spend on a new civilian course called PRINT, FILM, AND RADIO which I give. It's on the sociology of communication: why people listen to radios and what it does to them and why there are movies and what it does and why they are like they are etc. I've been working up stuff on art also, which I'm going to present in the course, for that too is communication. When I'm not at these two general jobs, I'm working on the book Gerth and I are doing on social psychology.
[13] Published as Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1953).
Anyway, with all this I don't have time to sleep or write letters very frequently! I go to the office every day now, from 7:45 in the morning until around 6:10 at night. I go on my days off as well as on those on which I lecture. I've got to, what with the work. Anyway Joslyn [Professor Carl Joslyn] gave me a private secretary, a big red-headed Irish woman who works for me about 4 or 5 hours every day and also writes her M.A. thesis on trade unions under my supervision. I took the coffee percolator to the office and we have
Anyway that is what I'm doing and why I am busy and can't write very often. I wish I could see you both, but it looks like it will be a long time. Good-bye. I've got to go to sleep.
Your son, as ever,
M.
Mills
The day before Mills wrote the following letter, the New York Times reported that the philosopher Senator Benedetto Croce and another leading Italian antifascist, Count Carlo Sforza, accused Americans of favoring continued fascism in Italy as a barricade against Communism. Croce and Sforza pointed out that the Allies' occupying southern Italy were prohibiting many civil liberties, such as free speech in newspapers and the right to assemble publicly, thus inhibiting the development of representative government.
[14] "Italian Liberals See Fascist Trend: Britons and Americans Blamed for Badoglio's Rule—Marshall Calls for Arms," New York Times, 6 December 1943, sec. 1, p. 6.
Gaetano Salvemini had made a similar point the previous month when he wrote, "Our ‘realists’ tell us that they are only interested in winning the war and are not concerned with the issue of fascism or no fascism. The truth of the matter is that they are concerned with the issue. They are endeavoring to force the Italian, the American and the British people to choose either a pro-German brand of fascism with Mussolini or a pro-Allied brand of quasi-fascism without Mussolini."[15] "What Price Badoglio and the King?" New Republic 109, no.19 (8 November1943): 641.
In the next letter, Mills's reference to Italian boos at Sforza and Croce related to the news that they had been shouted down at a rally at Naples University when they urged the abdication of the king but also called for a transitional role for a regency prior to the establishment of an Italian republic. The crowd dispersed after a number of fistfights.
To Hans Gerth, from Greenbelt, Maryland, dated December 7, 1943
Dear Gerth:
This afternoon I received the Weber translation. Most of the comments are definitely improvements and I am incorporating most of them and tomorrow the ms. will be sent to Macdonald. If he doesn't want to
[16] Dwight Macdonald did publish "Class, Status, and Party," translated and edited by Gerth and Mills—in the October 1944 issue of politics.
Will let you know.Yes, I saw the item about the Italian boos at Sforza and Croce. The first item the Times ran said "republicans" did it, then the next day Matthews came thru and said "Communists" did it.
[17] "Naples Republicans Break Up Rally Voicing First Open Regency Call," New York Times, 29 November 1943, sec. 1, p. 1; Herbert L. Matthews, "Italian Reds Call for King's Ousting," New York Times, 30 November 1943, sec. 1, p. 8.
(See the expose of Matthews by Salvemini in recent New Republic.)[18] Gaetano Salvemini had discussed Herbert Matthews's years of support of fascism in Italy and his "rather belated conversion." Salvemini wrote that Matthews's book The Fruits of Fascism would allow the American public "to learn that a large part of what they had read about Italy in the New York Times for twenty years had been the opposite of the truth." ("Herbert Matthews' Italy," New Republic 109, no. 21 [22 November 1943]: 723.)
It is disgusting—the whole Goddamn European mess and the way it's being handled. Most of the time I don't think about it, for I cannot do so without great wells of indignation coming up in me and this interferes with the economy of emotion which I'm trying to maintain. The other night, though, I got terribly aggressive at the whole damn political picture and sat down and wrote 14 double-spaced pages on the typewriter. I called it "The Politics of Truth" and I think it is really hot stuff! It is the nearest I have ever come to objectifying the kind of real deep down feeling that I have on political questions on evenings when you're just with one or two other guys whom you trust and before whom you are not ashamed to verbalize political sentimentalities. But there is no one here with whom I can really do that and so I wouldn't think about having it published. On such stuff one has to be one's own critic and to be a good critic on such stuff one must let it soak for at least several months.Carl Joslyn, last week, inherited $50,000. I said fifty thousand. […] What would you do with $50,000? As soon as the war ends I'd buy a little place outside New York, about 25 acres for 8 or 9 thousand dollars and I'd start freelancing and … oh, what the hell.
Last Friday I was working at the office at night on [the] motives chapter
[19] Character and Social Structure contains a number of chapters on the sociology of motivation (see part 5 of this volume).
and sort of collapsed emotionally and "spiritually." For aboutImmediate, though not final, surcease can be found in partially socializing the truth he sees with an intimate other. Then it is more possible to channel the energies in scientific work, although neither the intimate verbalization nor the sublimation into science is satisfying. For the man knows that he is not doing what is required, and that, indeed, there is no "intelligent" way for him to do so. He is enmeshed in his own intelligence and the trained expediencies and calculation of practical matters. He is a hired man and that he remains and will remain.
The above tripe (?) was written last night when I was tired out. Anyway I'll mail it to you; it may be amusing. I wrote a lot more, and even began a short story, or what might turn out to be one: here is a passage from some of the tripe (not yet socialized very fully):
What happened was that the self distance, and the use of self for objective work which was usual with him, had collapsed. It collapsed and he saw another self for a while. And what he saw was a political man. He had not known before that the well of indignation which had become his basic political feeling was masking such strong political
[20] Reprinted in part 1 of this volume.
saw it in the paper, saw the anger on the senior officers' faces as they read it. And all this with pleasure. Then guilt edged its way into the background of the image. It came in the symbol of the editor of that school paper. And the editor said, "You should have signed the letter with your own name. You were doomed anyway.""How doomed?" the man asked. "Haven't I made it?"
"Listen," said the editor. "You were doomed before you wrote the letter, and you are doomed even afterwards, because you would never have written it had you not known that you could and would sign it ‘A Freshman.’"
And so on … What (fascinating?) tripe.
I guess I am pretty tired out! The "productivity" of which you speak is due to the simple fact that I've done nothing else but teach school and work on the ms. I come to the office every day and have for the last several weeks come back after supper at night and worked 'til around 12.
I found out today that there is to be no vacation whatsoever here. I've got to teach right thru the Christmas period, even on Christmas eve. The history lectures are taking more and more time as we get into the modern period, and next quarter, beginning sometime in January, they will take much more. They are such a bore to do.
Anyway I got to take it easier for a few weeks and nurse myself and read some good novels and such, and maybe write some short reviews to make some money to pay for subscriptions to magazines, my lifelines, as all of mine are run out.
I hope to get some nice fat fresh chapters in part two from you to inspire me to further effort!
O, enclosed find a New Republic piece, which I think is really a fine job. I suppose I like it because it satirizes the kind of "English criticism" which stuffed shirts like Becker always make.
[21] A reference to Howard P. Becker.
The translation of Weber was mailed to Macdonald today at noon.
Yours, as always, Mills
[P.S.] Write me a long letter!
Saul Alinsky—the social activist who eventually wrote well-known books on community organizing—was the executive director of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago in December 1943 when he wrote to Mills, saying that he was interested in Mills's article entitled "The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists."
[22] American Journal of Sociology 49 (September 1943): 165–80.
Alinsky asked Mills for comments on a reprint of one of his own articles, which had appeared in the 1937 Proceedings of the American Prison Association, and which, in Alinsky's words, had resulted in his "being attacked in the field as a ‘radical.’"Alinsky's article in the field of criminology had sharply criticized individualistic attempts to explain delinquency, charging that such an approach had instead served as a barrier to understanding human behavior.
[23] "The Philosophical Implications of the Individualistic Approach in Criminology," in Proceedings of the Sixty-seventh Annual Congress of the American Prison Association (New York: American Prison Association, 1937), 156–71.
Alinsky faulted psychoanalysis for an overemphasis on sexuality and a lack of true recognition of the importance of culture, saying that Dr. Freud's viewpoint was limited by its origin in the capitalist class—a limitation Alinsky attributed to modern psychoanalysis in general.To Saul Alinsky, from Greenbelt, Maryland, dated December 18, 1943
Dear Mr. Alinsky:
It was very good of you to send me the reprint. I enclose a copy of the Journal piece. Why didn't you print the article where people could get at it? You know, not so many […] read the American Prison Association! Had I known about it I certainly would have cited
[24] The conclusion of the quote was that "we cannot conclude that [feeblemindedness] is a ‘cause’ of crime, since there are five times as many normal persons in this group as there are defectives. To be consistent we would have to say that normality was the cause of crime!" (emphasis is Alinsky's). From Queen, Bodenhafer, and Harper, Social Organization and Disorganization, 510.
I am ashamed that I missed that. One point of criticism on that point. I would take the "dis" off disorganization in the last sentence of your paragraph below this quote and in the last line of page 170.[25] Mills was referring to the following sentence by Alinsky: "Not to claim normality as a cause of crime, but to carry their thinking to its consistent, logical conclusion that crime is ‘normal’ from the point of view of an expected product of social disorganization." And, referring to criminology based on cultural determinism, "Crime is viewed as a product of general social disorganization."
Second, I wouldn't want to be so rough as you on Freud! (Altho what you say is mostly true, I think.) But the paper is really very fine and penetrating. You know, what we ought to do is broaden these two papers a little, get a political scientist to go over texts in his field, a historian to do likewise, and we'd have a damned nice little book! I already know a historian, who might do it. Well, maybe after the war. Anyway, altho I haven't examined much of the criminological literature, I believe that you are absolutely correct in what you say.As far as being attacked as a radical … well, you are a radical.
[26] Alinsky's books, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, were first published in 1946 and 1971, respectively.
"To be radical is to grasp a thing by the root. Now the root of man is man himself." K. Marx. Which is what I always say.Do you know about Dwight Macdonald's new monthly, politics? You'll want to be in on it from the first. His address is 45 Astor Place, New York and the first issue is coming out Feb. first. $2.50 yr. And why not think of writing something for politics?
Let me know what is going on in the world from time to time.
Yours, m.
P.S. Am finishing up a "pop" piece, "The Politics of Truth." I'll try and get a carbon of it to you for criticism before I finally send it to some magazine.
Saul Alinsky replied that he was indeed interested in the idea of a book project and suggested that they ask Robert Lynd to be a general editor and to write a lengthy introduction or perhaps a conclusion.
[27] Robert Lynd, the sociologist who wrote Middletown (1929) with Helen Lynd.
(Lynd later became an important ally to Mills during his early years at Columbia.) Mills's reply follows.To Saul Alinsky, from College Park, Maryland, undated (probably late December 1943 or early 1944)
Dear Saul (let's begin to skip all the crap of titles):
I drew up a tentative chapter outline of STUDIES IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AND COMMUNICATIONS; you see it has title and all. It runs something like this:
Introduction: by me on "Design for Studies" etc., something I've got about 80 pages on and have been working on for two years off and on: you see, I did my doctors on the sociology of pragmatism.
Part One: five papers, three of them already printed, two to be done on order of content analysis of movies, mass fiction, and so on, including Merle Curti on "the dime novel."
Part Two (these parts are not in this order. I'm at home and the outline is at the office): part two: History. I've got some damned good stuff promised here. A thing on "laissez-faire and democracy, its rise and linkage during the Jacksonian era," by Frank Friedel, good man here at Maryland. "The treatment of the Negro in American history texts" by another good Wisconsin man now here at Maryland, Ken Stampp. Then Hesseltine at Wisconsin, the guy who trained both Frank and Ken on "American History, Southern Style." He will do a bang up job. Writes occasionally for the Progressive now. Dick Hofstadter here at Maryland, a Merle Curti man, on "American History, New Style" locating the post-beard bunch in the first two decades of this century, progressivism and all that.
Then part III: your stuff and mine on criminology and pathologists, and an article on mental hygiene and class structure that K. Davis did for Psychiatry. There is a part on psychology but that is still thin.
In philosophy I think of culling Dewey's entire work for a statement of "classical philosophy" and have him recheck it or revise, if
Understand please, that I have not approached any of these people and have no publisher as yet, although I think Norton would be the key firm or Harcourt Brace, for they did Mannheim's books and made money on them. The thing is all up in the air, or rather, all on paper as yet.
Please let me know if any ideas or possible contributors pop up in your mind. But let's keep it sorta quiet for a while, for there are at least two bright bastards who might like to steal the idea. Such a book as we have in mind would be a little broader than the two pieces we exchanged. It would lay a basis, in empirical research, for new and fascinating disciplines—sociology of knowledge and sociology of communication—and I think would have some appeal for the upper levels of the trade public.
I wish I could say that I would see you in New York, but the truth is I haven't got any money to go. I had to skip the Sociology meeting for the same reason. If I can sell "Politics of Truth" for any decent money, I plan to make the Easter meetings of the Eastern society.
[28] We were unable to find a manuscript or a published article by Mills with the title "Politics of Truth," but see his article entitled "The Powerless People: The Role of the Intellectual in Society," politics 1, no. 3 (April 1944).
I think I'll do a paper on the white collar strata in [the] US for it; although Lynd hasn't asked me to do it yet. Anyway I'll let you know of all developments on this stuff (also "Politics of Truth").Enclosed is agenda for POLITICS.
goodbye. Charlie W.
[P.S.] More on the book plans, which I forgot last night, or was rather too worn out to remember:
Will try to get Lynd to do a chapter on "Ideologies of Middletown,"
As far as we know there was no further correspondence concerning a possible collaboration between Mills and Alinsky. Alinsky's biographer, Sanford Horwitt, commented, "Nothing more came of this discussion. […] Mills must have realized that Alinsky was not particularly good at developing sociological theories or writing abstract formulations, that he was not a scholar."
[29] Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky—His Life and Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 132–33.
In the next letter Mills mentioned Katherine Anne Porter's marital history. Mills and Porter were both Texans who sometimes told stories that dramatized their own lives. Enrique Hank Lopez wrote that Porter's conversation revealed her life as she perceived it, which was "not always the life that was led."
[30] Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter: Refugee from Indian Creek (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1981), xii.
To a lesser extent this was also true of Mills's conversation; so when he made statements about Porter's life it is difficult to know where one Texan's exaggeration ends and where another Texan's tall tale begins.In any case, by the time Mills met Porter, she had been married and divorced four times. She eloped with her first husband when she was sixteen years old.
[31] Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 89. Also Lopez, Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter, 31–32.
When she was forty-eight, she married her fourth husband, a twenty-six-year-old English professor and the managing editor of the Southern Review.[32] Givner, Katherine Anne Porter, 311; and Lopez, Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter, 227, 231–32.
Born on May 15, 1890, Porter was almost fifty-four years old when the following letter was written. Mills was twenty-seven.
To Hans Gerth, from Greenbelt, Maryland, undated (probably February or March 1944)
Saturday Night
Dear Gerth:
Just a note. First a couple of questions: did you receive from Macdonald the copy of politics? It was understood, at least tacitly, that both of us were to get free subscriptions for the Weber stuff.
[33] Max Weber, "Class, Status, Party," trans. and ed. Gerth and Mills, politics 1, no. 9 (October 1944).
But I did some anonymous stuff in addition for the magazine. I'm not certain that you got [a] copy. Let me know. I will tell you in a few days the fate of the translation. [The] first issue of politics was, incidentally, disappointing, to me at least. But it will get better. I've a rather long essay under my own name in the next, second issue.[34] This must have been "The Powerless People: The Role of the Intellectual in Society." As it turned out, the essay appeared in the third issue.
Please tell me your reactions, sometime, if you should ever write. But this is not what I wanted to write about.I read a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald this afternoon, The Great Gatsby, and it saddened me horribly. It is hard to talk about as a book, out of the context of my personal reaction, something for conversation and not letters, but there are little lines in it that call up so goddamned much. If you've not read it, try it sometime; only two or three hours.
I met Katherine Anne Porter the other night. She is utterly charming and so full of little sensitivities and innuendoes (or however you spell it). Chronologically she is fifty; body: 30; face: lovely early forty with white hair. Full of "life" (four husbands so far, all much younger than she!) and full of odd little ideas that make sense only as she says them, things that fade away when you try to remember them. Little wisps of fancy. Trying to remember them, you only see her saying them in that low, husky, Margaret Sullivan kind of voice! Had I time, money (it would not be expensive) and perhaps the talent, I should attempt to transfer my heavy load of Oedipus to her. Too late, too late! Ah! It makes one, as the Japanese say, "know the sadness of things."
But before I get too confessional to a guy who has forgotten me and doesn't write ever, and talk about the dim light of the little towns in Wisconsin blurred by the frost on the train windows as you go by them,
[35] Compare to "When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air." F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925), 177.
I'd better close. I've been reading Lecky, Spencer still, and Lester Ward;[36] W. E. H. Lecky, the Irish historian; Herbert Spencer, the British social philosopher who was often considered one of the first sociologists; and Ward, the American sociologist, botanist, and geologist.
engrossed in all of them; also have 20, yes 20 girls in my seminar working on the DAB [Dictionary of American Biography] entries, mainly businessmen, bankers etc: Business Elite.goodbye, Mills
To Hans Gerth, from Greenbelt, Maryland, undated (probably early spring 1944)
Gerth:
[…]
I am at work on chapter six [of Character and Social Structure], now weeding the two drafts together. I think your suggestion about breaking up the uniformities of action (convention, law, etc.) and scattering them into institutional orders and social structure discussion is good and am attempting to do this. The stuff on where the role expectations is focused: ends and means, ends, means had better be dropped altogether from chapter six and spliced back into a previous chapter in part one under person etc. As for getting all our eggs together, it is better to have scrambled eggs properly seasoned than over neatly fried in their own juice!
I used to have eggs very often in the little tri-cornered room in the dark Victorian house on Murray Street. Remember? Wine was cheap then, I think about 60 cents a bottle, and I would eat eggs with wine and lots of pepper on the eggs. There was no war and there was no tension that couldn't be provided for rather quickly, and I suppose
I know it was real because remembering it now, it still seems more solid than most other things. I think maybe it was the only time when I saw a lot of things never seen before or since. True, I worked then, very hard and fast and got stuff done too, but there were other things than work, and work itself was somehow different. Before then there had been unawareness, a vast unawareness, and after that there has been the collapse of all things into work, attempting to remove all tensions and to escape by work. But that was a time when work meant increased and very fresh awareness that was growing and wonderful always and that was before work itself … enough!
Forgive me, for these little free associations heaped on you who must have ones of your own, enough and more than enough.
As ever, M.Mills
To Hans Gerth, from College Park, Maryland, undated (probably March 1944)
Dear Comrade:
I have been drafted.
I wonder how many guys have begun letters like that! It seems that no "appeal" is possible, for the little card said 1-A and was signed by the appeal board by a vote of four to nothing, although I didn't appeal. Which shows that the appeal stuff is now a fake and appeal and local are collapsed into one unit.
I got the filthy thing this morning, so one doesn't know when the ax will fall. Freya and Pam have made no plans as yet,
[37] Pamela was then about fourteen months old.
although IOne feels like Stephen Dedalus at the end of Portrait of the Artist, with a few modifications:
I go forth to recreate the old world, and to forge in the smithy of my soul the created bitterness of their race.
[38] The original version of this quote from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is: "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (1916; reprint, New York: Viking Press, 1964), 252–53.
Two fears grip slightly, and they are all I feel so far: 1) about Freya and Pam, especially Pam, and 2) that being in the army God knows how long, perhaps 4 or 5 years, I shall so lose touch with things intellectual, in the many ways in which this is possible, as never to be able to get back into all that I have known so far.
In the meantime there are several weeks at least. The typist I've hired is now finishing up two more chapters [of Character and Social Structure]: the "Political Order" and the "Symbol Sphere." The "Political Order" is still very rough, but the "Symbol Sphere" now incorporates the first two drafts with your additions of last year on my manuscript and seems to me to be in fairly good shape. These are the last two I shall do for some time. You'll get copies of them in a few days.
I hope to God they don't get you; let me know how things go.
Yours, M.Mills
As the next letter shows, Mills did not stay drafted for long; he was disqualified after his medical exam.
After three years on the teaching staff at the University of Maryland, Mills
To Dr. Thomas C. McCormick, from Greenbelt, Maryland, dated July 15, 1944
Dear Dr. McCormick:
I was about to write you a personal letter when Mildred's request for a "personal data sheet" arrived. It has been filled in and is enclosed. Perhaps you will hand it to her.
The other day they examined me for the draft: I'm 4-F, or rather 2A-F, which is a sort of double thing. My pulse and blood pressure are too high. They told me I ticked too fast inside. Afterwards I went to an ordinary physician, who said it was OK, only I really shouldn't try to work 14 hours a day! Well, anyway, now I don't have to worry about child, wife, and self, or so I suppose.
Enclosed is a copy of an article, "The American Business Elite," concerning which I would very much like your opinion. Since it is rather heavily statistical—or as you would say in this case, has a lot of counting in it!—I'm not too sure about it. Anyway, I don't want to submit it for publication until you let me know I've made no giant blunders, or straightened me out. You may be interested to know that of the 25 seniors who worked on the project with me for three months, six of them have decided to take M.A.'s with me. Apparently, if you "work them" they ask for more. The difficulty in such matters is keeping your own enthusiasm contagious, and in letting them know that this isn't like a physics experiment, where the instructor knows what you're going to get but is just mean and won't tell you! I'm convinced that seniors and even juniors can do just as well as first year graduate students if you expect it from them and give them the opportunity. Will you let me know your criticism of the essay? Part III is, I think, the best: it concerns what should have been done had the data for it been available!
I went to New York last weekend and got $300.00 advance from Prentice-Hall for a book I'm doing on THE WHITE COLLAR MAN:
― 69 ―A Social Psychology of the Salaried Employee in the United States.[39] Published with the title White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951).
It's to be a "trade book." I suppose Blumer, who is the college editor for Prentice-Hall, gave me a little buildup; he has been awfully generous with me about such matters. I didn't really want to go into a contract for the book yet, as G [Hans Gerth] and I want to finish some projects, but this university has no money for research or for typists even for me and I had to have a little money for both purposes. I've some six or seven seniors going after interviews this summer in the Washington-Baltimore area … on various white collar occupations. Some of the material really does look nice. You may have seen the copy on the Macy saleswomen, which I got from an ex-floorwalker—for ten years—who worked at Baltimore night school with me last year.I suppose Gerth mentioned to you that the Weber translations may be published.
[40] From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed., and with an introduction by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
I had lunch with the trade editor of the Oxford University Press while I was in New York. If the copyright stuff can be cleared, he'll give us [a] $200.00 advance for final editing of the manuscript. This is, however, a sort of secret, until we know for sure, so please don't mention it.As you will see from the above, and from the enclosed agenda and bibliography, I'm shifting somewhat from articles to books. One just can't get going in an article length piece. I've learned a lot about writing as such in doing these nontechnical essays, but now I'm ready for some larger research projects and book length presentations. Which brings me to a statement and a request:
The statement is about my present job: It was very nice when I first took it three years ago. But it is not so good now. Carl Joslyn, one of the finest men I've known, resigned over the unhappy administrative situation and because he had a way out: inherited money. Well, now there is no head and probably won't be. The Business Administration dean—of all people—seems to want to gobble up the department as one aspect of business training! Then sociology would be geared to community and business services, and there would be no sociology as a science. The entire administration is quite badly handled; the men that run it are, well, they're just not very intelligent
― 70 ―men. I work my head off recruiting graduate students and expanding sociology here. I get no raise after three years, during which I've held, and in some instances upped, enrollment in the department despite the sharp decline in total enrollment in the university this past year. There is no money for research, not even for a typist! I taught the Army for four semesters without one cent of pay, and teach all summer—last year and now this one—without any compensation, even though the basic contract of $3,000.00 a year does not include summer session, much less a full summer quarter! And now they mutter about sociology being put under Business Administration. Really it's too much.My request is: If you run into any openings in some university, preferably in the Midwest, which offers some possibilities of a small research budget and a graduate school, will you give me a lead? I don't care much about the money; $3,500 is enough. The rank would probably have to be the one I have, associate, or maybe assistant if the school is big, and there would have to be some assurance about the future, at three or four years, as I have life tenure here. Bob Lynd has given me two good leads, but they were filled before my draft status was clarified and so I lost the opportunity. Something will undoubtedly show up pretty soon, but if I could I'd like to make the shift this September. I'd really appreciate any leads you'd throw my way. Wasn't there something happening at Michigan or Iowa?
Well, I guess that's all for now. Please give my regards to everyone. With best personal regards to yourself.
Cordially,
Mills
To Robert K. Merton, from College Park, Maryland, dated July 26, 1944
Dear Bob:
As you may have heard, the University of Maryland is a sinking ship. Since Joslyn left, matters have deteriorated to such an extent that were the war not under way as an excuse, I do not believe the institution could or should be accredited. I will not bore you with the details, for I am sure these things follow regular patterns, and I am sure that you
What I really wanted to write you about was the possibility of a job somewhere in New York for a young woman who is completing her B.A. with me this summer. I wanted very badly to get her some sort of fellowship here at Maryland, but due to the situation here, including the fact that Miss Lucille Stein, the girl in question, is of Jewish parentage, she has been turned down for an individual who definitely does not measure up to her qualifications. I really feel that she should be given a chance, as she does not have enough money to finance her own way and is of very pleasing personality as well as intellectual promise. Do you know of any openings within or outside of universities in the New York area for a research assistant?
Cordially, C. Wright Mills
Associate Professor
In Merton's reply to this letter, he wrote, "When Carl left College Park, I began to suspect that all was very far from being well. However, your note is the first inkling I've had that the University of Maryland should be written off the books, at least for the immediate future."
[41] Letter from Robert K. Merton to Wright Mills, dated August 3, 1944.
Robert K. Merton and later Paul Lazarsfeld helped to arrange Mills's employment in New York City: they hired Mills to start work at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research in April 1945, with temporary summer teaching responsibilities that year at Columbia.
In the next letter Mills refers to Edward Shils, a sociologist who had been helpful to Gerth in the past. (Years later, during the Cold War, when Shils was active with the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
[42] Letter from Norman Birnbaum to K. Mills, dated August 13, 1998.
he became a harsh critic of Mills.)[43] See E. P. Thompson's analysis of Shils's vehement criticism of Mills in E. P. Thompson, "Remembering C. Wright Mills," in The Heavy Dancers (London: Merlin Press, 1985), 269–70.
Mills also mentions Miss Toda, who was typing and helping edit Gerth and Mills's
To Hans Gerth, from Greenbelt, Maryland, undated (probably October 1944)
Dear Gerth:
I am about thru the "Science as a Vocation" and want to give you the following reactions by way of "appreciation." It is true that this translation, in being closer to the German, is in English clumsier than is Shils's. But precisely for this reason, I honestly think it is a better job. I notice in comparing them, and remembering the "texture" of other, more closely literal translations from Weber, the little idiosyncrasies which are retained in this draft. I have deliberately tried to retain them within the limits of clarity and grammar. In the last passages, I think you tried to get a sort of biblical flair into it, or rather bring that out, and I have tried to follow this lead even more, here and there (for instance, with the use of sentences beginning with "And"—short sentences like that after a cascade). After all, one could "translate" W into New Republic style, or even New Yorker style (has not Mr. Lasswell done so?), but we should honor neither Weber nor ourselves by doing it that way. I like it a little clumsy here and there. Maybe W didn't etch so much as block out in charcoal; and in any event it looks better in English if one doesn't use too fine an acid.
I write this because I detected a slight "worry" in your last letter about this piece and the fact that we had a draft of Shils's. Incidentally, I first went thru it without looking at Shils's, and then compared the two. I found in several places I had shifted stuff to where it looked like adaptations from, or the same as, Shils's. These I have changed back more like they were or done them in a third way. I do not think we need have any worry about accusations, simply because they are neither true nor do they appear to be true.
Miss Toda is doing India now. Then she will get on "Science as Vocation." I haven't received all the China stuff yet. The China stuff worries me. The literati sections I've received do repeat things said
[44] In a letter dated October 2, 1944, Gerth wrote that he had finished the first draft of a translation of a chapter on China that dealt with the literati, and that he was sure Mills would like it.
Yours,
W.
Mills
[P.S.] Later at school: I got your letter. Thanks.
To Hans Gerth, from Greenbelt, Maryland, undated (probably the first week of November 1944)
Dear Gerth:
Thursday evening. I have just received the communication about Shils, and his reaction to the piece in politics.
[45] Weber, "Class, Status, and Party."
Forgive me if I am pedantic in this letter, but it is just my "German" way! Now let us review the case.First, tho', let me say that I stand with you to the end in the matter, because no matter what you have seen of Shils I know that the translations now being typed up and to be published are fresh translations; they could not be otherwise because they have my ugly paw on every line of them so far as stylistic and linguistic stuff goes. Second, there is no need whatsoever to have any guilt feelings about anything that has happened or about anything that can happen because of the simple truth that we are in no way guilty of doing anything dishonorable. Now what does Shils say in this letter; he says two things:
He expresses a hurt that anybody else is doing anything with Weber in English. He feels, in this connection, that you are indebted to him; that is why he mentioned his getting the Nazi party articles in shape for publication (you are aware that he went out of his way to tell me what a mess it was in until he fixed it up … here in Washington, I think the first year he was here). Now he knows that he has no rational case here. Thus all he feels entitled to ask is that you tell
― 74 ―him what is to be included in our edition "so that we can avoid overlapping." He does not reproach you for getting out an edition directly. Now what are the consequences possible from this feeling on his part that we've done him dirt? Nothing, except that it will motivate his doing anything which has a seemingly objective basis to discredit or wreck our project. Thus, he did not comment on any resemblance which he says he saw in the mimeograph edition of "Class, Status, and Party" at the time; nor does he accuse us of any such trick with reference to what we have printed. But when we have printed a translation, he then accuses us of copying a draft he made in our mimeographed editions! You may be sure that, had he seen any real grounds for accusing us of cheating in the printed translation, he would have done so, rather than refer back to some mimeographed edition. So, this feeling that he has been done dirt will and can lead to nothing in itself; it can and will operate as a motive for his search for some objective basis for some accusation.I do not know enough of your relations with Shils to judge his sentimental claim that you've done him dirt. (I say "you" here rather than "us," because I don't really know Shils and certainly feel no ties or bonds of any sort with him as a person. And secondly, [neither] he nor any agent of his has ever publicized the fact of his doing a translation. As long as he has not done so, and your letters from his colleagues don't even mention it but even debunk the idea of doing translations … why, I am in no way bound, nor are you on any objective basis of professional ethics.) As I said, I don't know enough of your relations with Shils to judge his sentimental claims that you've done him dirt. But I know enough about you and I can (unfortunately) see from your letter to him that you feel guilty. Now, Gerth, that is your affair, and I wish I could talk with you about it, but the step has been taken and now you have to stand up to the consequences. Surely you knew that a lot of guys, Shils and Parsons especially, were not going to wire congratulations upon hearing that we got out an edition of Weber. As long as our work has been honest, as it has, I frankly think your letter to Shils was entirely too "apologetic." You have got to show a little brass. No matter what one might feel in his innermost, we are working under certain conditions in US universities, and there is an intellectual market with competitive features. Your job situation is affected by getting out the Weber and upon that stand certain obligations to wife and child, etc. Therefore, I urge you
― 75 ―to take a stronger stand, with more indignation in it. Not only is that indignation based on appropriate feelings, but it is necessary because of the reactions which one may expect from others if you don't.
Well, what is to be done?
We go ahead of course on the Weber and we go ahead fast. Goddamnit, I have been trying to pressure you into speed. Please don't spend so much time with the first two introductory chapters. As they stood when I mailed the drafts to you, they were quite neat. Today I mailed you the "Science as a Profession." Check it again against the Shils, which I also returned. Go ahead and get it typed along with all the rest and then I will travel to New York and deliver the manuscript to Hatcher.
[46] H. T. Hatcher, their editor at Oxford University Press.
I will feel (gently) out what, if anything, Hatcher has heard of slander. I will of course mention nothing, but I will say that this stuff ought to be published now because we know it is a competitive situation and if he wants to sell he's got to print, etc. I'll do it gently, but firmly. I have found out by experience that Hatcher only reacts to personal appearances, not to letters. So in spite of the money, I'll have to go and see him and pressure him.
In the morning I will write a draft of a letter to Shils. I will enclose it with this letter. You check and send it back airmail, pronto as hell, and I'll get it off to him.
What we do not do:
In no way do we act guilty, Goddamnit, nor especially apologetic. We have done nothing wrong. Forget mimeographs: what matters and only what matters is printed materials.
We do not show anything to anybody. To do so is only to display guilt. What they see is what's printed and nothing else and not until then. Communicate, by phone if necessary, any new developments which either of us hear.
Now let me read the letters again. Note, additional on Shils letter: for his damn secrecy, he too has to stand the consequences. He had plenty of chances with you, with the public, and even the two or three times he has seen me, to publicize the fact of his translations in detail. He did not do so. I personally have never made any secret to anybody about our doing translations and it has been announced
Concerning the "Status Groups and Classes," the last chapter in part one: Do not under any conditions admit anything. It is not necessary. Send Shils, if he insists, the stuff that is going into the book: the complete redrafting which I did, and which you checked and had typed, of this chapter (you have a carbon copy). Destroy all mimeographs of this anyway.
After rereading your letter to Shils, I take back the comment above. It seems to me quite nice and decent. But you must know that nothing, nothing, nothing you can ever do will make him hate you less. You may as well realize that and get along in the world without his friendship. Too bad, but inevitable. If he writes again and asks for this or that, no matter what it is, the tone of your letter ought to be something like: "Listen, Shils, I wrote you that I was sorry about this tangle and I am, but what's done is done. And your secrecy is as much responsible for it as anything else. I am, frankly, becoming angry at your intimation that I or Mills would copy or lean upon any translation which you have done and cause such things to be printed under our name. If you do not know me better than that, you are less perceptive than I have always thought. If upon reading our translations in print you feel anything underhanded has been done, then you should bring the matter to the attention of the public. I do not fear this in the least because I will print nothing but the work which I have done or my coauthors have done. Again, I am sorry that you feel as you do. Yours truly." Something like that. Shift the discussion always to published materials because that is what matters so far as [the] reputation of Shils or of you or of me is concerned and is the only legitimate grounds for any kick.
Now let us get on with our work.
As ever, M.
[…]
[P.S.] I am very tempted to phone you tonight and let you know I don't feel there is anything to worry about. But I'll airmail this to you. Take it easy. Everything's going to be all right.
[47] From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology is still in print more than fifty years after publication.
Anyway, I'm mad at you. You don't tell me you're glad about my clinching the Columbia job for next summer! But I know this thing has upset you.
O, listen Gerth, forgive the tone of my last letter about the Christmas meeting paper. I realize now that you didn't know the implications of whatever you wrote La Pierre. I can't back out; I've already done that once after my name was on a program. And it will help you at Wisconsin, too. So we'll do it definitely. I will come to Madison as soon as I can before the Christmas meeting and we'll get a few days to polish it, but we've got to write it now. I'll write a first draft if you'll okay my suggestions in last letter and indicate some outline if you want, stuff you think ought to be in it. Let's not make any footnotes at all. Just write out how it is in this matter! We'll fix it up slick in my new style I'm working on (I've been practicing) and read it in a forceful clear way. We'll make a big show at Chicago, Gerth. Honest.
Come on, smoke a pipe, have a drink, get a good night's sleep and think how really bad off we could all be. This is America, so smile. And be happy.
[48] Gerth, a German of Christian background, had immigrated to the United States in 1938.
Freya comes home this Saturday. She sent me your letters to her, and I have been thinking. I'm gonna be good. She's a wonderful girl, I know that, always known that. Gonna be good to her.
A fool gave me 25 dollars for working over a draft of a speech (Democratic); local stuff, and I bought all, every single one of Veblen's works! They are fine. They sit here a bequest and a challenge. I feel like Whitman said:
| Beginning my studies the first step pleased me so much, | |
| The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion, | |
| The least insect or animal, the sense, eyesight, love, | |
| The first step I say awed me and pleased me so much, | |
| I have hardly gone and hardly wished to go any farther. | |
| But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs. |
After we get thru with these ten tons of work we've got to do, I'm gonna quit science and all that and write a novel. You don't believe that H I? You wait. I sent an outline of the plot to Felice Swados
[49] Harvey Swados's sister, who was a novelist married to Richard Hofstadter.
and she says it'll do. The setting is in San Antonio. But you don't want to hear about that and I am too drunk now on this Navy stuff to tell it right.One more point before I go to bed. Lasswell phoned me up after our meeting the other night; phoned me two days later and told me he really meant it about the Guggenheim and to go ahead and apply. So I sent for an application and have now drafted out a project. Next Monday I'm to have him look it over and then mail it off. Now, I do not believe I'll get it. Somebody will bitch me and besides I don't deserve one yet. But IF I should get it, it will mean this: the project is under the title of white collar man, cause that project is solely my own, but practically it will mean this: I'll spend six months with Ernst Kris and the New York Institute of Psychoanalysis. Then I'll spend the last six months in and between Madison and New York and we'll do some more work on something.
I've played up Perlman as my key teacher at Madison, saying, "He knows what there is to know of my work at the University of Wisconsin." I hope he doesn't get scared by the psychiatric dimension of the project, a copy of which they'll send him, and bitch me. Maybe he won't. I don't believe I can get it, but who knows. Well, we'll know next April or so. Blumer, Lynd, Lasswell, Perlman, Gentry, Joslyn, are my recommenders.
[50] The full names and affiliations as listed in the application were: Herbert Blumer (professor of sociology, University of Chicago), Robert S. Lynd (professor of sociology, Columbia University), Harold D. Lasswell (consultant, war communications research, Library of Congress; Institute of International Studies, Yale University), Selig Perlman (professor of economics, University of Wisconsin), G. V. Gentry (professor of philosophy, University of Texas at Austin), and Carl S. Joslyn (independent research, Worthington, Massachusetts; formerly professor of sociology, University of Maryland at College Park).
goodnight,
M.
Mills's doubts about Selig Perlman's response were not borne out; in fact Perlman's recommendation was strongly positive and prophetic in its identification of Mills's potential. Perlman wrote, "I consider Mr. Mills one of the most promising young sociologists and students of social movements. He is intellectually venturesome and not likely to be one of the ‘herd,’ whether of the cultists of ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ sociology or the conversational radical variety. He permits his mind to ‘play’ over the material, but his native shrewdness will guard him from hatching a whimsy of his own."
In Mills's application for the Guggenheim grant, he responded to a question about his accomplishments and principal teachers with the following discussion of his intellectual development.
To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, from College Park, Maryland, dated November 7, 1944
RESEARCH EXPERIENCE AND TRAINING
My work has been concerned with the social sciences and philosophy. I have not been able to stay in any one social science and have done more reading cross-field than within the subject I happen to teach. Indeed, I have never had occasion to take very seriously much of American sociology as such; in a paper, American Journal of Sociology, September 1943, I have systematically criticized what I take to be its central tradition. In sociology my main impulse has been taken from German developments, especially the traditions stemming from Max Weber and, to a lesser degree, Karl Mannheim. Since beginning an independent teaching career I have developed courses and supervised graduate research in the following fields:
orientation in the social sciences
sociology of knowledge
sociology of communication
social stratification
sociology of occupations and professions
design of investigation in social science
social psychology
In terms of "specialties," such "contributions" as I have made are primarily in the sociology of knowledge, a borderline field of philosophy, psychology, and social science, concerned with the social bases of intellectual and cultural life. Articles documenting this line of reflection have appeared in the American Sociological Review, October 1939, and the American Journal of Sociology, November 1940 and September 1943.
During the last two years I have experimented with essays for the journals of opinion and various "little magazines." This I have done out of interest in the topics discussed, and even more because I wished to rid myself of a crippling academic prose and to develop an intelligible way of communicating modern social science to nonspecialized publics.
My formal training at the University of Texas was primarily in American philosophy and modern logic. I took an M.A. degree in these fields. The men with whose work I spent my time at Texas were the pragmatists, especially Charles S. Pierce and G. H. Mead. My key teacher was George V. Gentry, a student of Mead's. He was my first real intellectual stimulus, and he knows what there is to know of my work at Texas. The second man who was decisive for me at Texas was Clarence E. Ayres, with whom I studied the work of Thorstein Veblen, as well as general economic theory and history.
The only teacher at the University of Wisconsin who was decisive for me was Selig Perlman, with whom I studied institutional and labor economics. He knows of all my work in Madison. I was examined for the Ph.D. in economics, philosophy, and anthropology, as well as the several fields of sociology, especially theory, social psychology, and the history of social thought. My doctorate thesis was entitled "A Sociological Account of Pragmatism: An Essay on the Sociology of Knowledge."
At Wisconsin I came in contact with Hans Gerth, who had been Karl Mannheim's assistant in Germany. We have become research colleagues and collaborators, and through him I have come into what I think is a live and fruitful contact with German sociology and philosophy.
In one way or another, I have been decisively influenced by the six men whom I have listed as "references." I believe them to be in
On April 8, 1945, the Guggenheim Foundation notified Mills that he would receive a grant of $2,500 to fund research during the calendar year of 1946; his manuscript in progress was published as White Collar in 1951.
To Frances and Charles Grover Mills, from Greenbelt, Maryland, dated December 22, 1944
Dear Mother and Dad:
First let me thank you very much for the lovely tie. It is really a honey and I've worn it almost every day since I got it. Freya won't open hers [her present] until Christmas! She'll write later. The other day I got you a year's subscription to a magazine called POLITICS. It is quite left-wing and very stimulating. A very good guide to what is going on in the world. I am sorry as hell that we can't give you all something really nice but God everything is so high, I mean living expenses, we just exist.
About the only thing happening to me is still work, work, and more work. I am writing all the time, trying to get these books thru. I believe that I've already told you that I have delivered a book Gerth and I did to Oxford Press, it ought to be manufactured by next Sept. at the latest.
[51] From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology was published in 1946.
Last week I went up the Hudson River from New York City about 100 miles to see a little school called Bard College. They have offered me a job at $4,000 a year, and they paid for my trip to be interviewed, etc. Despite the increase in pay, I have about decided that I won't take it. You see, the college is like a country club, out in the beautiful woods, but there is no research library there and it takes too long to get to New York; also it is very exclusive (it costs a student about $2,200 a year to go to school there: they only allow 200 students), and I don't like exclusiveness. Why should I waste my time pampering the sons and daughters of plutocrats? To hell with them.
Freya has written you that I am invited to teach two graduate seminars lectures at Columbia University this next summer session for 6 weeks. I get 100 a week for the job and of course a hell of a lot of prestige. I am probably the youngest guy ever to act as associate professor in Columbia.
[52] "It's a hell of a big break for a kid 28 years old. The average age of associate professors is 45," Mills wrote in another letter to his parents (undated).
It is of course one of the three biggest schools in the U.S. So I haven't quite gotten over it yet.I bought a model airplane kit the other day and I am making a little model plane (40 inch wingspread) in order to relax at night. I am also trying to read a little bit of Henry James. All his novels are wonderful.
Pamela and Freya are both well.
My friend, poor Dick Hofstadter's wife [Felice Swados], is dying slowly of cancer. […] Dick is in Buffalo, NY, with her. Poor girl: she had finished one novel and was on another, a very talented and lovely creature.
[53] House of Fury (New York: Doubleday Doran, 1941), which was reprinted as Reform School Girl (New York: Avon Diversity Romance Novel edition, 1948) and made into a movie.
Please know that even tho I don't write often, I think of you both often, that I am well and fairly content in this lousy damn bloodbath of a world. Take care of yourselves.
Yours as ever, with love, MILLS
Felice Swados and Richard Hofstadter were born in Buffalo, New York, and married when they were at the University of Buffalo (now State University of New York at Buffalo). Hofstadter took a leave of absence from his post at the University of Maryland and spent the academic year 1944–45 caring for Felice and their one-year-old son, Dan, in Buffalo, at Felice's parents' home.
[54] Dan Hofstadter is the author of several books, including Temperaments: Artists Facing Their Work (New York: Knopf, 1992), Goldberg's Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), and The Love Affair as a Work of Art (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996).
Felice died there on July 21, 1945, at the age of twenty-nine.In 1947, the young father married Beatrice Kevitt, and they remained together until his death in 1970.
[55] Beatrice Kevitt was an editor who worked on several books by Hofstadter, three books by Mills (New Men of Power, The Puerto Rican Journey, and White Collar), and later four books by Theodore H. White, whom she married in 1974. See also Great Issues in American History: From Reconstruction to the Present Day, 1864–1981, ed. Richard Hofstadter and Beatrice K. Hofstadter, rev. ed. (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1982).
Richard and Beatrice K. Hofstadter had a daughter named Sarah Katherine.To Frances and Charles Grover Mills, from Greenbelt, Maryland, dated January 1945, Sunday evening
Dear Mother and Dad:
Thanks a lot for the can of chile; I ate it with great gusto; and it was mighty fine. Very soon, I shall be somewhere which has genuine Mexican restaurants; we are moving to New York City within four months.
Yes, I have accepted a job in New York, right in the middle of Manhattan Island, at $5,000 a year plus $800 extra for this next year for teaching during the summer session. I am to be a Research Associate at Columbia University. That is, I won't teach but will just do research all the time! In the next ten months I will be in complete charge of a research budget of $25,000 for a research job on opinion leaders in a midwestern city, probably Cedar Rapids. I will stay in New York, of course, with only a trip or two out there (expenses paid) to set up the fieldwork and to check on my staff from time to time. This is the offer they made to me yesterday in NY and the chances are that I will take it. However, I am anticipating another offer from Yale, which should pay about the same amount; since I don't know the details of the Yale job yet, I am stalling the decision at Columbia. But I think now it will be Columbia. That is what I've been waiting on and this is it. Within ten days the decision will be made. I shall stay at Md. until the end of this quarter—that would be April first—but would run to New York for one day a week, beginning around February first. I'll have a staff of around 15 interviewers
It was great fun talking to these guys [Robert K. Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld]. I had no idea what they wanted to pay, but they started throwing money around, spent $20 on a dinner for three of us,
[56] In 1945 this was a very expensive meal.
and all that. After they had laid out the job and said: "Well, that's it; we want you. Will you come?" I said (holding myself in with bursting joy at the whole idea; Christ I'd go for food and shelter) anyway I kept the face immobile and just said, "For how much?" They wouldn't say, but replied, "You know what you're worth, name it." To which little Charlie said very quietly, "I won't charge you that much, but I couldn't think of it in terms less than $4,500." Immediately the guy said, "Then your beginning salary will be $5,000," to which the appropriate reply was: "That is closer to what I'm worth." And everybody laughed and felt good. (My salary at Maryland is still just $3,000.)After this $20 meal, we broke up and I went up Fifth Avenue and cut across to Times Square and wandered into a restaurant and ate another huge meal! I didn't realize what I was doing until I was half through with it. It cost me three bucks, but it was worth it.
Well, you see the good blood and bones and brash you all put into me began to come through a little. Incidentally, Columbia's research office is doing a lot of war and direct Army research,
[57] The Bureau of Applied Social Research
so it's absolutely as near draft proof as anything in the US today.Yours in appreciation of good early training and heritage.
Your son,
M.
Charlie M.
[P.S.] The January issue of "politics" has a wonderful cover picture.
[58] The cover picture was a collage of newspaper clippings in the shape of a Trojan horse, with headlines such as "Britain: Tanks Fire on Greek Leftists," "Spitfires Strafe Leftists in Athens," "Freedom of Speech," "Freedom from Fear," and "Freedom from Want."
I met the Italian boy who made it last night.When Oxford University Press announced publication of From Max Weber, the credit in their catalog listed Mills's name before Gerth's. Needless to say, this upset Gerth. Mills wrote to their editor at Oxford, H. T. Hatcher, on February 5, 1945, asking him to correct the order of their names in all future releases concerning the book. Unfortunately, Meyer Schapiro subsequently made the same mistake and listed Mills's name first when—in an essay in politics—he responded to the publication of Gerth and Mills's translation of Weber's "Class, Status, and Party" and the accompanying note on Weber. The issue of credit was a sore point, especially since Gerth had wanted to have sole credit for the long introduction in From Max Weber; Mills had insisted that the introduction represented the thoughts and efforts of both of them and that his own contribution was more than simply writing and organizing what Gerth had to say. Gerth, whose first language was German, had translated the Weber essays into rough English, and Mills had edited the English versions, consulting Gerth in order to assure continued accuracy.
In Schapiro's essay for politics he took issue with the notion that Weber was a prophetic political thinker, stating that Weber feared the left and was drawn to nationalist and strong leaders. Schapiro wrote that if Weber had lived after 1920, "it would have been a cruel dilemma for him whether to accept or reject the man who was re-establishing German power and preparing for a war against the national enemy."
[59] "A Note on Max Weber's Politics," politics 2 no. 2 (February 1945): 44.
In the context of the assassination of Liebknecht, Schapiro stated that "like many others who support the violence of the state against the working-class, Weber laid the responsibility on the victims."[60] Schapiro, "Note on Max Weber's Politics," 47.
To Hans Gerth, from Greenbelt, Maryland, dated February 7(1945), p.m.
Dear Gerth:
Enclosed are advance proof sheets of Schapiro's essay on Weber, which is to be published in politics, presumably in the next issue. You will note that Schapiro has, good God, mixed up the order of our names. I have therefore just written a card to Macdonald telling him to correct the matter. This I cannot understand at all, in view of the fact that the translation as printed in politics clearly reads, "Gerth and Mills." However, the deadline for the issue is Feb. 15th, so I think we have no need to fear that it will not be corrected.[…]
I am sorry Gerth, but I have nothing to do with this; I have never even seen Schapiro, and the piece in politics was, of course, in the correct order. I don't know what I can say beyond that, except that I am very sorry that such an erroneous impression should recur. As you see, I am prompt to correct it.
Now, my suggestion on how to handle the Schapiro essay is this: We need not and must not appear to "champion" Weber, and we cannot write a full length essay for politics, as we have the Oxford Press to think of and the success of our book. Therefore the question is: how can we "defend" ourselves from the thing insofar as it is an attack upon WHAT WE HAVE PUBLISHED ABOUT WEBER? The answer, so far as my spot reaction goes, after only two readings of Schapiro's proofs, is: concentrate on just two points and then refer the readers of politics to the forthcoming book in which these issues are more fully discussed. Above all, I see no need to appear to "fight" with Schapiro. Enclosed therefore please find a rough draft of about one-half or one-third of the "reply." The deadline on the issue is February 15th. We probably can't make that. So, unfortunately, the comeback will have to appear in the issue after the Schapiro piece. Nevertheless, please get back to me as soon as is possible [with] your reaction and emendations and additions to the note I began here.
Finally, Gerth, let me say flatly to you, in view of the recurrence of the mix-up in the order of our names, that I am most sincerely in full and intimate agreement that you are the senior author in all that we have done with Max Weber,
[61] They worked on From Max Weber over a period of five years.
that I am not only content, internally and externally, with being the junior author of the book, but am most grateful to have had the chance to learn what I have of Max Weber while acting as the junior author in collaboration with you. There is really nothing else I can say; but you may be sure that I shall jump to the correction in print and in conversation whenever the occasion to do so arises.Yours as ever,
Mills
[P.S. …]
"Max Weber's Politics—a Rejoinder," by H. H. Gerth, was published in the April issue of politics. In response to Schapiro's comment that Max Weber may have had difficulty deciding whether to support or oppose Hitler, Gerth's rejoinder said, "If we may playfully venture a retrospective prediction about Schapiro's assumed ‘cruel dilemma,’ we feel Max Weber in 1933 might rather have become a colleague of Schapiro's than a Hitlerite." The rejoinder discussed Weber's responses to the politics of his time and ended with this conclusion: "Today Weber may well furnish any party of freedom ‘with a mass of valuable material,’ as the late Nikolai Bukharin has put it. May the reader of our forthcoming volume of translations judge for himself."
[62] politics 2, no. 4 (April 1945): 119–20.
In February of 1945, Mills took on a new project on the topic of small businesses versus big businesses and their respective effects on civic welfare. The Smaller War Plants Corporation was apparently interested in showing the superiority of small businesses in order to fight the trend toward increased economic concentration,
[63] Gillam, "C. Wright Mills," 261.
and they wanted Mills to do the research.To Hans Gerth, from Greenbelt, Maryland, undated (probably February 1945)
10 P.M. Good God! The telephone just rang and it was a guy in the Smaller War Plants Corporation, headed by Maury Maverick. He said (I'm so god damned excited I can hardly write!) two or three guys had recommended me and he wanted me to do a special job for a Senate hearing. To do the study and then appear as an "expert" before the committee hearing on setting up a small business agency on a permanent basis. The hearing will be sometime in April. I'm to see him this Saturday, and if I can, to start work next Monday or Tuesday. Here's what they want: a man to integrate and supervise a spot study on four or five small towns: these towns to be selected with the help of the Census boys in various parts of the US, ranked according to whether small businesses with the owners living there predominate or whether "central office groups" of outside corporations dominate the towns, industry and retail trade. The job is to get hold of the differences between communities characterized by those two general types of industry and business. The time is so short that all they want is the basic
Good night.
As ever,
Mills
PS: After a very careful study I have just discovered that one of the towns is bound to be in Wisconsin very near Madison. See you soon. And thanks for helping me make up my mind in this letter!
Taking a leave of absence from the University of Maryland, Mills moved to New York City in early 1945, with Freya and Pamela joining him a few weeks later. At the time, Daniel Bell and Mills were still on friendly terms, and Bell helped the Millses obtain an apartment on East 11th Street in the same building in which the Bells resided.
Soon afterward, Mills went on the research trip he discussed in the previous letter to Gerth.
To Frances and Charles Grover Mills, from "Washington Airport, 1:10 A.M., Wed.," undated (probably March 1945)
I flew in from Boston this morning, having spent almost one week in New England, mostly in New Hampshire (a lovely state). I'm now waiting for a flight to Atlanta, GA. I'll spend 2 or 3 days there and in Birmingham, and then fly across to Los Angeles. I'll probably have a stop over in Dallas. Maybe an hour, maybe two, not longer, and I won't know how long or on what date. Depends upon time of success in Atlanta and on connections. On airlines today, you've got to take your chances, and even tho' I've got a senatorial priority, generals and admirals outrank me!
From Los Angeles, I fly to Butte, Montana; then to Michigan—several towns there, and then on in to Washington. I've got to get back here before March 28th.
I tried to select a town near San Antonio as one of my stops, but it didn't come out that way. If I get a stop over in Dallas, I'll ring Ursula,
[64] Mills's only sibling.
and also will ring you in San Antonio. But I can't say when it'll be.My work is fascinating and I'm learning a lot—talking with police chiefs, sociologists, Chamber of Commerce secretaries, labor leaders, preachers, etc. I'm all things to all men, but Irish to most. And I'm getting the information the Senate wants. I eat enormous meals and sometimes 5 a day, and sleep 4 or 5 hours. I feel well and all alert and keyed up.
Stopped by to see Freya and Pam in NYC last night (4 A.M.–5:20 A.M.!). They are doing well. And they had good news: my draft board has permitted me to accept the Columbia University job, which begins April 1st. Of course I'd already moved there, but I was worried. I guess this Senate thing impressed them somewhat. Like I told you 3 years ago. I'll sit this one out. It's a goddamned bloodbath to no end save misery and mutual death to all civilized values.
Got to go now.
Good-bye.
Your son,
Charlie M.