Fifties (86 page)

With that, he decided to write full-time. Eventually, he returned to New Canaan, Connecticut, and took a long, hard look at it. It was, he thought, a world he had come to hate. In fact, all the other men in publishing and advertising he knew who lived there hated it, too: three hours a day on the commuter trains; working in corporations where the internal politics seemed endless and where everyone
was obsessed with playing up to his immediate superior. Talent, all too often, was pressed into service for pure commercial gain without regard to the larger consequences. Almost everyone he knew in New Canaan was trying to get out; it was a rat race, and all the participants dreamed of hitting the jackpot by writing the great American novel and selling the rights to Hollywood. If they did that, they would never have to get on a commuter train again. One friend came to symbolize this entire world to Wilson: He had only recently flown forty combat missions, and his uniform had been bedecked with World War Two medals. Now he worked for an advertising firm. One of his accounts was a cereal company and the question he was working on was whether the people who bought the cereal would prefer to find a tin frog or a rubber spider inside the box as the surprise.

Ironically, the greater one’s success in this world, the harder it was to escape. Salaries would go up, and newly minted executives would merely find themselves paying more taxes, burdened by a more expensive life-style, and inhabiting ever larger houses. “For a time,” he remembered years later, “I was insatiable myself—I wanted ever bigger houses and more cars.” In New Canaan, Wilson thought people changed houses the way other Americans changed cars. The worst thing was that these fancy jobs were supposed to offer some sort of security, but in fact they did not. The more successful you were, the deeper you were in debt and the more exposed and more perilous your position often became at work. The process was the reverse of what it was supposed to be: Ostensibly, a young man would work hard to gain some measure of success; the better he did, the more secure he and his family should have been. Instead, the higher you went, the more people there were who were after your job—so work became more stressful.

When
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
appeared in 1955, it hit a vital nerve. “I wasn’t thinking about what was happening to the country when I wrote it. The only thing I was thinking about was what was happening to me,” Wilson said thirty years later. It was a major best-seller and soon became a movie starring Gregory Peck—an ideal choice, with just the right amount of decency and moral ambivalence. Even the title,
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
suggested someone who was sacrificing his individuality to become a part of the new more faceless middle class. As it turned out, the book was published just as a major intellectual debate was forming on the issue of conformity in American life, particularly as the modern corporation became ever bigger and became an increasingly important
force in American life. The debate seemed to focus on the question of whether, despite the significant and dramatic increase in the standard of living for many Americans, the new white-collar life was turning into something of a trap and whether the greater material benefits it promised and delivered were being exchanged for freedom and individuality. Was this what the new definition of success meant? More of everything except individuality? Were we as a nation already well on our way to becoming faceless drones, performing bland tasks that demanded no real skill save managerial obedience? Was America losing its entrepreneurial class to cautious, gray managers, men afraid to make mistakes and take chances? At the center of the debate were the writings of one of the most important intellectual figures of the period: C. Wright Mills. Though he was on the faculty of Columbia University and nominally a sociologist, he cut across many disciplines—philosophy, history, economics, journalism.

A man of fierce physical and intellectual presence, Mills was remembered by his friends (who more often than not ended up as his adversaries) first and foremost for his energy and combativeness. Academics were expected to be genteel and solicitous of their colleagues; most professors at Columbia wore the academic uniform of tweed jacket, flannel slacks, and bow ties. But Mills seemed determined to provoke and antagonize his colleagues. He dressed as a lumberjack—in khaki pants, flannel shirts, and combat boots—and would arrive for class from his house in the country (which he had built himself) astride his BMW motorcycle. His style, body language, and pronouncements seemed calculated to rebuke the more polished world around him; he was from the real world, his manner seemed to say, as the others in academe were not. Brilliant and egocentric, Mills was the classic loner. He had few close friends. “I have never known,” he once wrote, “what others call ‘fraternity’ with any group ... neither academic nor political. With a few individuals, yes, but with groups, however small, no.” His writing was as incisive a post-Marxist critique of America’s new managerial capitalism as existed in the country at the time, even if on occasion he painted with too broad a brush and was prone to exaggerate. Mills’s work was important, the historian Stanley Katz later noted, because it told important truths about America’s new class strata and about the development of capitalism after the war and yet could not be attacked for being Marxist.

Mills eventually became the critical link between the old left, Communist and Socialist, which had flourished during the Depression,
and the New Left, which sprang up in the sixties to protest the blandness of American life. He found hope not in the grim rigidity and authoritarianism of the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in Eastern Europe, but in the underdeveloped world, which had been victimized by European colonialism and American imperialism. Cuba, as Castro came to power, fascinated him as Poland and Czechoslovakia did not. The old left had been born of the injustices of capitalism during the Great Depression and thrived because the Communists’ voice in Europe, and the United States had been the first to warn of the rise of Nazism. But the movement had been badly undermined by a number of things: the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact; the domestic crimes of Joseph Stalin and his concentration camps, which only the most slavish Marxist could ignore; the imperialism of the Soviet Union as it brutally crushed its satellite states and left those countries with repressive, totalitarian regimes; and of course, the stunning success of postwar capitalism in the United States. Mills’s books were hailed in the Communist world as brilliant critiques of American society, but he was hardly enthusiastic about this often unwanted praise. At one point late in his career he visited the Soviet Union and was toasted at a dinner as the foremost critic of contemporary American life. When it was his turn to respond to the toast, he rose and said, “To the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published in the Soviet Union!”

The combination of the grimness of Communism as it now existed in Europe and the success of American capitalism had essentially devastated the traditional left. By the mid-1950s, only J. Edgar Hoover seemed to think Marxism was a powerful force in postwar America. With the triumph of capitalism and the threat of the Cold War, traditional American politics had, if anything, narrowed; the differences between the Republican party and the Democratic party were seen as marginal by many serious social critics of the time. Yet the success of capitalism did not mean the end of alienation; it simply meant a different kind of alienation. Alienation, Mills and others were suggesting, could be just as powerful in a comfortable white-collar existence as it was in a harsh working-class one. The battlefield was shifting: Instead of criticizing capitalism for its failures, a new kind of left, far more idiosyncratic and less predictable, was essentially criticizing America for its successes, or at least for the downside of its successes.

This new threat to the human spirit came not from poverty but from affluence, bigness, and corporate indifference from bland jobs
through which the corporation subtly and often unconsciously subdued and corrupted the human spirit. As they moved into white-collar jobs, more and more people felt as Sloan Wilson had when he portrayed Tom Rath—that they had less control over their lives. Here was a world where individuality seemed to be threatened and the price of success might well be ever greater conformity.

Much of the old left’s agenda had been imported from Europe and had been shaped by historical and social circumstances, which did not necessarily fit the postwar American condition, where workers had become consumers and beneficiaries of the economic system and thought of themselves as capitalists. As that happened, not only did more working people enter the middle class, but there was a vast new reevaluation of what being on the left meant. By the mid-fifties one of the great new growth industries in Wall Street was investing the pension funds of labor unions. Those who had been a critical part of the left in the past were now being incorporated into the system, not merely politically but economically; as that happened, a new left was beginning to form around very different issues. Mills was the perfect radical iconoclast to examine the new American condition. He was unmistakably American, a rough, untamed son of the Southwest, where the clash of economic forces was still raw. Alienation came naturally to him: He was raised as a Catholic in a small town in Texas, whose culture was, he liked to say, “one man, one rifle.” His parents forced him to sing in a Catholic choir in Waco and that had produced, as Irving Horowitz noted, “a lifelong resentment of Christianity.” It also helped guarantee, given the prejudices of the region against Catholics, that he felt a “painful sense of isolation from his peers.” Certainly, he had always felt like an outsider. There was no taint of Marxism to his work. He once wrote the sociologist Kurt Wolff that people always had come to him and told him that he wrote “as if I were a European about this country.... I am an outlander, not only regionally but down bone deep and for good. In Orwell’s phrase: I am just outside the whale and always have been. I did not really earn it; I just was it without intending to be and without doing anything about it except what I had to do from day to day.”

Eventually, the family moved from West Texas to Dallas, where Mills graduated from Dallas Technical High in 1934. After an unhappy start at Texas A & M (years later he told his friend Harvey Swados, the writer, that the hazing he had received as an Aggie had turned him into a rebel), he transferred to the University of Texas at Austin. The university and the city had been an oasis of intellectual
and political ferment in Texas, and that was true more than ever during the Depression. Among his professors and fellow students there was a sense from the start that Mills was different from the start, a young man whose physical and intellectual force and passion were remarkable. His energy was always ferocious: Every topic, as far as he was concerned, was to be argued, and every argument was to be won. Clarence Ayres, a professor at the University of Texas, wrote of him at the time: “He isn’t a pale, precocious bookworm. He is a big strapping fellow with an athlete’s energy. He looks much older than he is. For several years he has been reading everything within his reach, and he really is prodigiously learned for his years and situation. He also has acumen and the result of this combination of qualities has not been altogether to his advantage.” In this letter written about Mills when he was twenty-three, Ayres continued prophetically: “The prevailing legend about him is to the effect that he takes people up and pursues them furiously until they get so tired of it they rebuff him (or until he has milked them dry and drops them). There is something in it both ways. Mills is tremendously eager and incredibly energetic. If he gets the idea that somebody has something, he goes after it like the three furies. I think he may have worn his welcome to shreds in some quarters.... The picture which emerges ... is of an unusually strong student who may become a headliner. I think any department would be lucky to have him among its advanced students.”

Mills acknowledged his own rough edges. Indeed, he felt as if they gave him a psychological advantage. He was often tactless in dealing with colleagues and surprised when his words wounded them; he was also thin-skinned, and when others ventured even mild criticism of his work, a new feud was often born. He did graduate work at Texas in sociology but no Ph.D. program was offered there, so in the fall of 1939 he entered the graduate program in sociology at the University of Wisconsin. There he made important intellectual connections and broadened his studies. In Madison, he seemed to make much the same impression he had in Austin: Hans Gerth, an immigrant intellectual, remembered him “with Thorstein Veblen in one hand and John Dewey in the other. He was a tall burly young man of Herculean build. He was no man with a pale cast of the intellect given to self mortification ...” (Later when they had a squabble over whether Mills had taken too much credit for some of Gerth’s work, Gerth was not so enthusiastic. Mills, he said, was “an excellent operator, whippersnapper, promising young man on the make, and Texas cowboy à la ride and shoot.”)

While he was at Madison, Mills failed his Army physical because of hypertension (he suffered from chronic heart and circulatory problems). If anything, this heightened his alienation from the American political mainstream, for it put him on the sidelines at what was the defining moment for most members of his generation. He was big, powerful, and robust, yet he could not join what most of his contemporaries judged to be the nation’s finest hour. Inevitably, as he had not participated in that great democratic cause, he rebelled and did not accept the propaganda and rationales that were used to justify it. He saw parallels, observed by few other contemporary intellectuals, between the corporate capitalism of Germany, which had allowed Nazism to rise, and the corporate capitalism of America. In Madison he married his first wife, Freya (the first of three, each of whom had one child with him). It was becoming clear that the pull of contemporary events was at least as powerful on him as that of academia, and some of his friends worried that he would become a pamphleteer rather than a scholar. “Hold your chin up, young man,” wrote one of his few friends, Eliseo Vivas, a philosopher at Wisconsin who worried over the pull of journalism on Mills. He told Mills to “stick to the major guns with the ‘long range’ and don’t allow your ambition to do something right now with you in the field of the freelancer and journalist. Write for decades, not for the week. Concentrate on the thesis and don’t look right or left until it is done.”