ON WHO I MIGHT BE AND HOW I GOT THAT WAY
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)from "Song of Myself"
by Walt Whitman[37] Leaves of Grass: The 1892 Edition, with an introduction by Justin Kaplan (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), 72.
Tovarich, of course, you realize that these letters to you are also letters to myself. That can't be helped if only because we are so separated; we are so ignorant of each other. That's why I am going to become very personal indeed in this letter and tell you something about who I might be and how I think I got that way. Yesterday afternoon when I was thinking about how I'd write to you about this, I thought: how can I tell him who I am when I'm not yet sure myself what I wish to become? And as for the past, like almost everyone, I've got several different pasts that I find variously useful, and comforting; and all of them are equally convincing. Perhaps the best thing to do is resort first to the conventional dodges? Let us see.
I. Growing Up
[38] See "Growing Up: Facts and Fancies," on p. 24 of this book.
Several of your colleagues, Tovarich, last month asked me, "Where did you grow up?" I answered them politely by saying,
You say you did not ask for all that; you ask, "Where did you grow up—meaning come of age?" Don't be so impatient; give me time to become properly intense. Until I was twenty-three or so I lived in Texas, if that's all you want to know. The point is, it was less any twists of childhood than the upheavals of adolescence that shaped me down deep and for good.
Let me try to summarize it all. The son of a white collar man who traveled all the time, I grew up under the projections of a Carol Kennicott of a mother,
[39] Carol Kennicott is the central character of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. She is a bright and imaginative person who admires artistic and intellectual pursuits and feels stifled in a provincial middle-class environment; she transfers her unfulfilled and idealistic aspirations to her children.
was accordingly a sissy boy until my first year of college, and so was sent to a military academy "to make a man of me." It didn't work; it did work; it was a mistake; it was the best: I revolted. Because of certain teachers, the revolt took an intellectual turn. Because of isolation, it made me a kind of spiritual Wobbly.[40] A Wobbly is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The union of the IWW, established in Chicago in 1905, sought to organize skilled and unskilled workersinto one union dedicated to building a new society according to general socialist principles. Wobblies refused to endorse any socialist party, or any other type of political party; they preferred using direct action such as strikes, boycotts, and passive resistance. They were able to organize certain groups of unskilled workers who had been ignored by the established labor unions: lumber and textile workers, copper and coal miners, farmers, and dockworkers, including blacks and newly arrived immigrants. When Wobbly speakers were being arrested in a number of American cities in 1909, Wobblies organized a series of fights for free speech. They sent replacement speakers until Wobblies filled the jails; the authorities were forced to stop the arrests and allow Wobblies to give speeches in public. Bill Haywood, Mary "Mother" Jones, and Joe Hill were well-known Wobbly leaders and organizers.
What are the liabilities of such a biography? That you're very restless, and you tend to make a fetish of energy—in order to exploit the restlessness intellectually you need great energy—and you do grow older. To exploit it morally, you're thrown back upon yourself; that does get tiresome, and you have the need to escape. The asset of such a biography is that you have a real chance to get on top of it, to transcend it and to be self-making. In brief, it's possible, most of the time, to act as a free man.
Stages of Autonomy
There is this curious fact I have never quite understood: a withdrawal as it were from chronological time. I was an adolescent during the thirties: at the midpoint of that decade, I was 19. I don't know how typical I am of that generation in one very important respect: I did not personally experience "the thirties." At that time, I just didn't get its mood. I've got that only later and indirectly. Only with the onset of World War II did I become radically aware of public affairs, or aware in any way. I was, I suppose, too young; I was in an outlying region—Texas. I was not really alert to any sort of politics, studying philosophy, especially logic, at the time. And, above all, it happened that during the thirties I was reading the literature of the twenties.
I sometimes think that during the thirties I was living in the twenties, and that during the early forties, I was living in the thirties. Maybe now I have caught up with "my own time"—although I'm
Ever since I can remember, I have had a constitutional inability to sympathize with the upper dogs, and a temperamental distrust of all of them. At the same time I do not, as a matter of intellectual conviction, or of moral feeling, always admire the underdogs, much less those who speak for them. And as for the middle class, let us be honest: what American boy out of middle-class circles who has reached the level of self-consciousness we call intellectual has not spent half his life—and some of the best of it too—rooting out the inhibiting pretensions and the convenient prejudices that seeped into him before he was under his own control?
What this means, again, is that I have been intellectually, politically, morally alone. I have never known what others call "fraternity" with any group, however small, neither academic nor political. With a few individuals, yes, I have known it, but with groups however small, no. The Old Fighters of American radicalism have known that fraternal feeling. Communists in Europe and America have known it. The New York boys who were in the YPSL [Young People's Socialist League] knew it then and sometimes now they cry for it. It must be quite a thing; they all cry for it after they've had it. But I have never had it; I've never joined any groups much less identified fraternally with any. And the plain truth, so far as I know, is that I do not cry for it.
Now the point I want to make about this is that there have been four stages of my "independence."
At first, as an undergraduate student, it was just something that happened to me: of course, it had roots in a personal situation of home life, in a very sensitive mother who imparted to me, thank God, many "feminine" sensitivities in the middle of Texas, which insulated me, made me repelled by the rural and military crudities of Texas A & M. There was a genuinely moral choice for me at Texas A & M when I turned my back on The Company (maybe you'd call
― 251 ―it "The Collective"?) with which I lived and completely isolated myself. If one thing can be said to have made me into an intellectual, that was it.Then for a time, it became a conscious set of gestures, until Professor Clarence E. Ayres told me that if I felt that way, good, but by all means to "keep my pants pressed," a bit of advice for which I am very grateful.
But then a third stage of the pose began. For after my pants were pressed, I became in due course—what else?—an academic man. As I skirted the edges of the world of learning, looking in now and then, I was fascinated and frightened by what I saw. In some ways it looked like a trap, but in some ways, like a wide-open space. I know now that I was afraid of getting "inside the whale." Not consciously, because of course I didn't yet have a clear view of the sort of man I was becoming. So for four or five years I must have been pretty damned hard to deal with academically. For all I had to lean on, against the trap aspects of the academic world, was that old—and I distort it when I use the words because I didn't have the words then—that old Wobbly feeling.
So in the early part of that third stage, it was all poured into a furor of work, quite technical work in philosophy and a branch of sociology called "the sociology of knowledge."
[41] Mills included the following footnote at this point in the text: "For examples see, ‘Language, Logic and Culture’ and ‘The Methodological Consequences of the Society of Knowledge’" [in Power Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. I. L. Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963)].
And then the war came. What did World War II mean to me? In threatening personal terms, it meant the rural idiocy and militarism of Texas A & M. In intellectual terms, it meant a greatly increased interest in politics. In one sentence: following it closely and thinking about it made a radical of me. Personally, however, I did not take a moral stand; I drifted. So it happened that I woke up early one morning to be rejected by the Army for the physical reason of "hypertension." That afternoon I almost came to believe in divine intervention.Then I was invited to New York City and began to direct a research staff; [at the Bureau of Applied Social Research]. This kind of adjustment is becoming a major academic pattern of success in the profession for which I was trained. The old-fashioned professor who
― 252 ―quietly writes his books and teaches is passing from the academic hierarchy in social science as well as other fields, but that old role was one of the important roles I had in mind. In due course, when the opportunity came to move up in the manner of the new career, I promptly turned my back. It is inconceivable that I should not have. For this—and I knew it at the time—was another moral pivot of my biography. I turned my back on the opportunity offered me to become an administrator and an entrepreneur of large-scale research; and that clinched the main line of my direction, the direction of the independent craftsman.
You think it must be lonely in America? No doubt. But no need to cry about it. There is also freedom in it. Maybe only in it. I think that after you've been through loneliness and have become aware of it, you feel both audacious and free.
Over the last several years I have become quite aware of a certain mixture of personal and political and professional factors which have come together to determine such intellectual roles as I play, and even such intellectual and moral work as I have done and am doing. All these factors, to put it briefly, have constructed in me the ethos of the Wobbly. You've asked me, "What might you be?" Now I answer you: "I am a Wobbly." I mean this spiritually and politically. In saying this I refer less to political orientation than to political ethos, and I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat.
(I want to tell you this in order that you may understand my own values as fully as possible and hence be able to better control your understanding of my letters to you.) I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help. But do you know what a Wobbly is? It's a kind of spiritual condition. Don't be afraid of the word, Tovarich. A Wobbly is not only a man who takes orders from himself. He's also a man who's often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon that he hasn't made up himself. He doesn't like bosses—capitalistic or communistic—they are all the same to him. He wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to follow up. This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is Wobbly freedom.
To Tovarich, from Innsbruck, Austria, fall 1957