John Summers, University of Rochester
"The 'Indispensable Civilian': C. Wright Mills and World War II"

n 1940, C. Wright Mills was a precocious graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, with no serious record of political activity. Mills instead devoted his energies to advancing the sociology of knowledge, a new field of inquiry whose promise, he argued, was best redeemed when its practitioners kept aloof from political power. Four years later Mills emerged as a leading antiwar intellectual and a vigorous advocate for a "politics of truth." This paper examines the origins, development, and consequences of Mills's radicalization in the early 1940s. It gives attention to his life in Washington, DC, his career at the University of Maryland, his political commitments, and his social thought as each evolved in response to World War II.

Like all Americans, Mills's biography was dramatically altered by the domestic mobilization. If his refusal to support "the European bloodbath" set him apart from his contemporaries, it also afforded him a window of insight that he kept open throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Then, his warnings against the functional integration of military, business, and political spheres--"militarized capitalism"--found broad popular support. It was this continual attention to war, as metaphor, as sociological subject, and as prophesy, that illuminates the source of Mills's popularity. In this respect, his career gives support to Morris Dickstein's recent suggestion that American culture from 1945 through 1970 is best viewed through its changing views of war.

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