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43 The Godfather, C. Wright Mills: The Intellectual as Agent The image which unites the Hemingway man and the wobbley . . . and both of them with my “real” occupational role as a professor of social science . . . is the image of the political writer. This is the idea of the man who stands up to nonsense and injustice and says no. Says no, not out of mere defiance or for the sake of the impudent no, but out of love of truth and joy in exercising intellectual skills. —C. Wright Mills, “For Ought?” The Age of Complacency is ending. Let the old women complain wisely about “the end of ideology.” We are beginning to move again. —C. Wright Mills, “The New Left,” 1960 When C. Wright Mills met Dwight Macdonald in 1942, the two men hit it off well, both enjoying the art of argument. In fact, as Macdonald’s biographer put it, “Dwight claimed that [Mills] could argue longer and louder about any subject than even he could.” While Mills lived outside of New York City (in Wisconsin and then in Maryland), he sent Macdonald numerous pieces published in politics and other articles published elsewhere— purely for the sake of discussion. Mills was Macdonald’s junior and learned quite a bit from his elder; he also confronted their differences in a fairly substantive correspondence. In setting out what drew the two of them together and then explaining why they drew apart, we get a better sense of not only their intellectual friendship but also the origins of New Left thinking . For when Macdonald reviewed Mills’s White Collar harshly and Mills followed suit by “breaking ranks” from Macdonald, the origins of the New Left could be glimpsed, even if just in embryonic form. C. Wright Mills would essentially take a great deal from Macdonald’s explorations at politics, but would resist his final choice of the West.1 A generation gap always informed their relationship. Although Mills 1. Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 134. 44 Intellectuals in Action graduated from high school in 1934 and began attending college the same year, he did not come of political age during the 1930s. Texas, after all, was not exactly a hotbed of radical sectarianism like New York City. Mills explained , “I did not personally experience ‘the thirties.’ At the time, I just didn’t get its mood.” Nor did he get Marxism. He was too busy rebelling against the military regiment of Texas A&M (where he spent, in his own words, “one unhappy year”), reading Nietzsche, and writing fiction and poetry. Marxism was foreign to this “native American radical who could speak with indigenous accents,” as Irving Howe described him. For this reason, Mills could write confidently later in his life, “I’ve never been emotionally involved with Marxism or communism, never belonged in any sense to it.” This absence of Marxism and radical sectarianism explained a core difference between Mills and Macdonald (and other New York Intellectuals ). Mills started with something of a blank slate when he began his search for a New Left.2 Mills’s first experience of anything at all “radical” was his discovery—via his professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Clarence Ayres—of the liberal philosophy of pragmatism (which made him more willing than Macdonald to entertain “liberal” ideas in general). Mills explained in 1938, “My intellectual godfathers were pragmatists. When I first awoke I discovered myself among them.” This debt became clearer when Mills attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in 1939. Here he decided to write his dissertation on pragmatism, the indigenous American philosophy that argued for no absolute fixed principles other than experimentation. One of the things that drew him nearer to Macdonald was that he was increasingly wary about pragmatism’s political consequences. He wrote to Macdonald in 1942, in a clumsy style not yet overcome, “I am growing a little fearful that the only positive value, with the aid of which you sustain radical society 2. Mills quoted in Richard Gillam, “Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, and ‘the Critical Ideal,’” American Scholar (Winter 1977–78): 72; Mills, autobiographical fragment in the C. Wright Mills Papers, 1934–1965, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, box 4B389; Irving Howe, “On the Career and Example of C. Wright Mills,” in Steady Work: Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism, 1953–1966 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), 247; C. Wright Mills to Hallock Hoffman...

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