C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s era." It was Mills who popularized the term "New Left" in the U.S., in a 1960 open letter "Letter to the New Left".
Biography
Early life
C. Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas, on August 28, 1916. His father, Charles Grover Mills, worked as an insurance broker, leaving his family to constantly move around; his mother, Frances Ursula Mills, was a homemaker. His parents were pious and middle class, with an Irish-English background. Mills was a choirboy in the Catholic Church of Waco, and he developed a lifelong aversion to Christianity. Although being brought up in an Anglo-Irish Catholic family, Mills strayed away from the church, defining himself as an atheist. Mills attended Dallas Technical High School, with an interest in engineering, and his parents were preparing him for a practical career in a rapidly industrializing world of Texas. His focuses of study besides engineering were algebra, physics, and mechanical drawing.Education
In 1934, Mills graduated from Dallas Technical High School, and his father pressed him to attend Texas A&M University. To fulfill his father's wishes, Mills attended the university, but he found the atmosphere "suffocating" and left after his first year. He transferred to the University of Texas at Austin where he studied anthropology, social psychology, sociology, and philosophy. At this time, the university was developing a strong department of graduate instruction in both the social and physical sciences. Mills' benefited from this unique development, and he impressed professors with his powerful intellect. In 1939, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology, as well as a master's in philosophy. By the time he graduated, he had already been published in the two leading sociology journals, the American Sociological Review and The American Journal of Sociology.While studying at Texas, Mills met his first wife, Dorothy Helen Smith, a fellow student seeking a master's degree in sociology. She had previously attended Oklahoma College for Women, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce.
After their marriage, in 1937, Dorothy Helen, or "Freya", worked as a staff member of the director of the Women's Residence Hall at the University of Texas. She supported the couple while Mills completed his graduate work; she also typed, copied and edited much of his work, including his Ph.D. dissertation. There, he met Hans Gerth, a German political refugee and a professor in the Department of Sociology. Although Mills did not take any courses with him, Gerth became a mentor and close friend. Together, Mills and Gerth translated and edited a few of Max Weber's works. Both collaborated on Character and Social Structure, a social psychology text. This work combined Mills's understanding of socialization from his work in American Pragmatisim and Gerth's understanding of past and present societies.
Mills received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1942. His dissertation was entitled A Sociological Account of Pragmatism: An Essay on the Sociology of Knowledge. Mills refused to revise his dissertation while it was reviewed by his committee. It was later accepted without approval from the review committee. Mills left Wisconsin in early 1942, after he had been appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Early career
Before Mills furthered his career, he avoided the draft by failing his physical due to high blood pressure and received a deferment. He was divorced from Freya in August 1940, but after a year he convinced Freya to change her mind. The couple remarried in March 1941. A few years later, their daughter, Pamela Mills, was born on January 15, 1943. During this time, his work as an associate professor of sociology from 1941 until 1945 at the University of Maryland, College Park, Mills's awareness and involvement in American politics grew. During World War II, Mills befriended the historians Richard Hofstadter, Frank Freidel, and Ken Stampp. The four academics collaborated on many topics, and each wrote about contemporary issues of the war and how it affected American society.While still at the University of Maryland, Mills began contributing "journalistic sociology" and opinion pieces to intellectual journals such as The New Republic, The New Leader, as well as Politics, a journal established by his friend Dwight Macdonald in 1944.
During his time at the University of Maryland, William Form befriended Mills and quickly recognized that "work overwhelmingly dominated" Mills's life. Mills continued his work with Gerth while trying to publish Weber's "Class, Status, and Parties". Form explains that Mills was determined to improve his writing after receiving criticism on one of his works; "Setting his portable Corona on the large coffee table in the living room, he would type triple-spaced on coarse yellow paper, revising the manuscript by writing between the lines with a sharp pencil. Unscrambling the additions and changes could present a formidable challenge. Each day before leaving for campus, he left a manuscript for Freya to retype."
In 1945, Mills moved to New York after earning a research associate position at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research. He separated from Freya with this move, and the couple later divorced a second time in 1947.
Mills was appointed assistant professor in the university's sociology department in 1946. Mills received a grant of $2,500 from the Guggenheim Foundation in April 1945 to fund his research in 1946. During that time, he wrote White Collar, which was later published in 1951.
In 1946, Mills published From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, a translation of Weber's essays co-authored with Hans Gerth. In 1953, the two published a second work, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions.
In 1947, Mills married his second wife, Ruth Harper, a statistician at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. She worked with Mills on New Men of Power, White Collar, and The Power Elite. In 1949, Mills and Harper moved to Chicago so that Mills could serve as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Mills returned to teaching at Columbia University after a quarter at the University of Chicago, and was promoted to associate professor of Sociology on July 1, 1950. In only six years, Mills was promoted to Professor of Sociology at Columbia on July 1, 1956.
In 1955, Harper gave birth to their daughter Kathryn. From 1956 to 1957, the family moved to Copenhagen, where Mills acted as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. Mills and Harper separated in December 1957 and officially divorced in 1959.
Later career
Mills married his third wife, Yaroslava Surmach, an American artist of Ukrainian descent, and settled in Rockland County, New York, in 1959. Their son, Nikolas Charles, was born on June 19, 1960.In August 1960, Mills spent time in Cuba, where he worked on developing his text Listen, Yankee. He spent 16 days there, interviewing Cuban government officials and Cuban civilians. Mills asked them questions about whether the guerrilla organization that made the revolution was the same as a political party. Additionally, Mills interviewed President Fidel Castro, who claimed to have read and studied Mills's The Power Elite. Although Mills spent only a short amount of his time in Cuba with Castro, they got along well and Castro sent flowers when Mills died a few years later. Mills was a supporter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Mills was described as a man in a hurry. Aside from his hurried nature, he was largely known for his combativeness. Both his private life – four marriages to three women, a child with each, and several affairs – and his professional life, which involved challenging and criticizing many of his professors and coworkers, have been characterized as "tumultuous." He wrote a fairly obvious, though slightly veiled, essay in which he criticized the former chairman of the Wisconsin department, and called the senior theorist there, Howard P. Becker, a "real fool."
During a visit to the Soviet Union, Mills was honored as a major critic of American society. While there he criticized censorship in the Soviet Union through his toast to an early Soviet leader who was "purged and murdered by the Stalinists." He toasted "To the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published in the Soviet Union!"