C. Wright Mills wrote in the Acknowledgements of his book The Power Elite, the most accurate, honest and useful description of the writing process that I have yet found, speaking as a writer of essays myself and having experienced many of the same realizations over time. This care for honesty and acknowledgement places the topics that he dealt with in his book in a timeless setting and dignifies them with the courage to be examined as we go forward.
He said that the desire for proof does not negate the value of reasoning together with other people in order to arrive at the truth. He admitted to three distinct conversations that occur within any book. The author and his or her imagined readers, the author and thinkers that both he and his readers have been influenced by and the reader confronting what is written and measuring it against their own knowledge and experience. Mills acknowledged that the task of a good writer is to include as much of these other conversations in his writing as possible. The benefit, he states, is that the writer not only sets forth his views but also clarifies and expands them.
If you have been in the past a listener or a reader of the late Alan Watt, the late Bill Cooper, Eustace Mullins, Jordan Maxwell or other researchers like them, you will gain a very observant, learned voice to add to the conversation of your ongoing attempt to make sense of our world and its history thus far, by reading The Power Elite. It is a shame that Mr. Mills passed away at only fort-five years old years old. Before he died, he managed to touch the likes of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and many other political intellectuals.
Mills once spent three eighteen hour days in deep animated conversation with the young Castro, who had read The Power Elite, and after that brief tour of Cuba, Mills wrote another book defending the Cuban Revolution called Listen, Yankee, which sold four hundred thousand copies within a few months. Any dialogue between men like Mills and scholars who trace the antiquity, organization and pedigrees of evil is a place where many useful grains of truth may be sifted from the chaff for the edification of folks on all sides of the conversation.
Just as the observed facts as interpreted years ago led many to believe that the sun revolved around the earth, a re-interpretation of those same facts supplemented by new information led to a radically different and ultimately truer interpretation; that the earth was the wanderer in relation to our revered star. At the time of those discoveries, information and debate were severely controlled by several different mechanisms of the societies then in existence, in particular some of the religious authorities. One wonders how much time would be saved between the recurring Dark Ages and Renaissances of our societies, if open healthy debate and conversation was allowed, encouraged and expected by all members of our species who wished to bear the adjective sapiens in their Latin names.
C. Wright Mills was considered a threat to national security by the CIA even after his untimely death, I have read, and that assessment is a definite feather in his cap to any student of the involvement of the CIA in world affairs. Particularly, their effective meddling in the arts and letters between 1947 and 1967, as deftly outlined in the book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters by Frances Stoner Saunders.
It is abundantly clear where Mills stood on the issue of an over-arching conspiracy. He deduced that men who are already elite will naturally take advantage of any situation available in order to further their own interests. It was pointed out that the difficulty in understanding how changing societal structuring opens and closes opportunities for existing elites obfuscates their machinations. To believe that history is occurring by blind stumbling accident is attributed to a feeling of overall impotence and guilt.
He made a clear distinction between cunning and intellect, between careful planning and quickly seized opportunities and between personal ability and the power to purchase the abilities that one may not possess from others. In short, he demystified the powerful men in society and showed them to us without their robes of wizardry. In this, I fully concur with Mr. Mills’ myth busting of the “self-made man” and the worn out rags to riches, bold entrepreneurial creation myths of the rich and powerful.
Although Mills did not base his model on an assumption of conspiracy, he makes it abundantly clear that once the changing societal structure aligned with people possessing the will to use it for their own furtherance, many deep plans and programs were hatched and put into action. Mills quotes Richard Hofstadter, who said, “There is a great difference between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy...”
Mills touched upon another group that hasn’t received as much scrutiny as the main three he focused upon, namely the politicians, the military and the Wall Street crowd. This fourth group consists of the entertainers and celebrities. In my lifetime, I have watched this group infiltrate into politics and even when not overtly politically engaged, they exert a definite measurable force upon the sea of television watchers, radio listeners and movie goers.
Again, there could be much healthy debate by many learned researchers and historians as to how much of this phenomenon is just coincidental and how much is part of a planned assault upon the hearts and minds of the populations effected. The main point to remember is that regardless of whether the problems we are confronted with are an organized diabolical plot or whether they are organic off-shoots of what Nietzsche called the human “will to power” and others like Andrew Lobaczewski have called psychopathy and “political ponerology,” it remains for us to take note of and attempt to rectify them.
It may be argued, for instance that day-time TV has many talk shows where celebrities actually debate everyday topics as well as discuss political and social topics. This is true and I enjoy watching the shows myself, but there are a few things to bear in mind while enjoying them. Firstly, the fact that they are paid celebrities necessarily puts some barbed-wire around the scope of their conversation. Secondly, the social media tie-ins, as well as the live audience, serve wittingly or unwittingly to exert politically correct peer pressure on the viewers at home.
A useful practice is to imagine the discussions taking place at the local grocery store, at your own kitchen table with one or two others or with a sheet of blank paper where you are free to explore. The differences in these imagined conversations will easily expose the danger of our growing reliance on celebrities to decide what is cool, what is just and what is necessary, all while the unthinking, non-debating population magnify the effect via mass social media.
Because Mills was primarily concerned with describing the power structure of America and its tectonic shifts over one hundred and eighty years time, I feel that we have missed much by not hearing his views on Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Aga Khan, the Royal Institute for International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, the Fabian Society, the writings of Carroll Quigley, the Vatican and the larger secret societies.
I feel that Mills, like Nietzsche, was gifted in staying the course of his original intended inquiries without becoming emotionally sidetracked by what he discovered along the way. He ripped the rug off, blew the smoke away, broke the mirrors and set out to describe the creatures he found on the chessboard underneath. Any emotion that seeps into The Power Elite, is in my opinion, due to the fact that arsenals of nuclear and biological weapons on a scale never before attained by mankind were in the hands of men whom Mills wouldn’t have trusted to water his house plants if he was on vacation.
From David Talbot’s excellent and in my opinion, necessary book, The Devil’s Chessboard we learn that C. Wright Mills was a “ruggedly independent, Texas-born scholar. He lived in a farmhouse forty miles outside of New York City and rode a motorcycle that he had built with his own hands to the classes he taught at Columbia University.”
Talbot points out that Mills rejected Marxist discourse and romantic pluralism as theories of American politics. He goes on to say that according to Mills, power in America was not solely in the hands of owners of the means of production, nor an equilibrium of business, labour, farmers and professionals. We learn that this latter concept was considered a fairy tale by Mills who thought it an inadequate means of explaining the mechanics of American power.
Mr. Talbot exposes much of the story of the Dulles brothers and their huge but secretive influence on American and world history. In doing this massive chore, he refers back to C. Wright Mills several times throughout his excellent chronicle of the Dulles twisted trail of carnage. I most highly recommend Mr. Talbot’s well written, well researched and timely book, The Devil’s Chessboard as well as Mr. Mills’ book, The Power Elite to any person desirous of a tour behind the curtain of oblivion and an examination of the powerful people to be found there. Think of the former as a microscope and the latter as a telescope.
A reading of these two books will illustrate for you how the military, the corporate CEOs and the ranking politicians were all drawn together to mutually benefit from a permanent wartime economy. If you don’t already know, you will see how the revolving door works for these elites to swap jobs with great frequency and to great benefit for all concerned within the clique. You will come to know a world of exclusive self-perpetuating social clubs and exclusive schools.
A world where the distinctions between government and business have been erased. You will learn much about the shadow men that close deals and obtain consensus from the main lobes of power. Again, Mills writes of these spooks in a macro view like a man with binoculars jotting notes in his journal about the appearance and habits of a strange bird that he has discovered, while Talbot ultimately illustrates several such birds with the detail of a Robert Bateman painting. Mr. Talbot shares a wonderfully revealing quote that was one Washington insider’s response to Mills book when it came out.
“Writing in The New York Times Book Review, corporate lawyer and presidential advisor Adolf Berle—a member in good standing of the power elite—found “an uncomfortable degree of truth” in Mill’s book and fought off his discomfort by concluding that it was essentially “an angry cartoon, not a serious picture.”
David Talbot shows us clearly how the militarized government during World War II fed power to the corporate elite and how President Eisenhower accelerated the process and unleashed the Dulles brothers and inflicted them upon the world. He credits C. Wright Mills as being among the first people to see through the sham of national security when used as a cloak for nefarious deeds at home and abroad. It is suggested that to President Eisenhower, the CIA gave the best bang for the buck as to enforcing American corporate interests overseas.
“Only a few maverick voices—like that of the intellectual loner from Texas—grasped the frightening amorality that prevailed at the pinnacle of American power,” says David Talbot in his book.
I must conclude that Mr. Mills was a very brave and forward thinker and that it earned him the label of being overly pessimistic in some circles. Mr. Talbot, I respect as a man who has taken the journalistic trouble to lay out a great piece of the American past and walk us back through it with the lights on, during which painstaking exercise, we learn that we had been in a cave full of snakes, rats, bats and spiders; mostly unafraid at the time because we simply couldn’t see them. These two men’s books go well together, flesh each other out and abundantly prove the accrued dividends of courage and the wisdom of patience.
I met an old man in Vancouver many years ago who in some ways reminds me of C. Wright Mills. My family lived in a triplex apartment building that was cut into the side of a large hill that used to command a rare high spot near Forty-first Avenue and Main Street. The alley behind was reached by a long flight of steep narrow concrete stairs for an elevation gain of about fifteen feet. The houses on the next street to the East, had garages that communicated with this garbage littered strip of crumbling asphalt.
Over time, newer houses were built, usually three properties in the space that had previously been allotted to one. Many of the new houses had large garages and sometimes these were rented out by absentee landlords for storage purposes. I parked my vehicle off the alley and one sunny day on a week-end I chanced upon an elderly gentleman who appeared to be cleaning out one of those rented garages.
We got into a conversation in which he told me many stories about himself. He had originally come to North Vancouver from Southern California in the 1950s. He had worked a variety of jobs in a variety of industries, mostly in the bush. Gold prospecting, fur farming, logging and such like. Currently, he said, he was living off the proceeds of the slow sale of all his accumulated treasures since coming to Canada.
He produced a rusty old bicycle that he wanted to dismantle and dragged it out into the sunshine. I got my old Stillson wrenches and heaved for half an hour to no avail. I tried WD-40, oil and heating the stubborn joint with a torch. As I toiled, he asked if I got along well with my wife. Due to his seniority, I chose to take no offence at the strangely personal question but my conscious effort not to do so showed on my face.
“The reason I ask, Mike, is that I have a gorgeous mink coat that used to belong to my own wife. Here, I’ll show you. I’ll sell it to you, if you want it.”
The old fellow went into the dark garage and rummaged around some boxes and returned with a beautiful, soft, top-quality coat of fur, lined with chocolate-coloured silk. It was easily twice my wife’s height. When I told him this, he laughed and gave me a quick education on mink farming, furs in general and the special care necessary for preserving that class of garments. After he carefully packed it away, we began to talk about fishing.
I learned that on his second day in Canada, as a young man full of Jack London stories, he had been drinking at a pub in North Vancouver with a man from the Squamish tribe. The native had told him of a good place for catching salmon called “The Cable Pool”. It is on the Capilano River not far North of Marine Drive and is still a great fishing spot today.
The young man set off that very day in his truck and began to fish the spot. The water there is crystal clear, deep and contained in a relatively small space. The fishermen stand high above looking straight down at dozens of large fish milling about at various depths like a flotilla of miniature submarines in a barrel.
The Californian used his own experience and knowledge as per his fishing tackle and methods of employing it. In a short time, he had put several nice specimens on a stringer. That’s about when a young Fisheries Officer showed up on the idyllic scene. California greeted him kindly and proudly showed off his catch, speaking in a mild accent that to a Texan like me would have sounded not unlike than the Canadian he was talking to.
He was asked to reel in and to show his tackle. He was using a barbed hook, as any boy would have been taught by any man that wished that boy to actually catch a food fish, rather than to play with it. The fish on the stringer were alive and fresh in the ice cold water, as is the usual practice in warmer climes. They are usually killed and iced upon leaving the fishing spot to maximize their freshness.
All the while, California was under the impression that he was being sounded out to reveal his knowledge of fishing and that the young officer was likely picking up a few pointers to use himself next time he went fishing. Halfway through a cigarette and a story from the Sierra Nevada mountains, the officer’s heretofore polite tone, changed abruptly.
Citing a plethora local statutes, not least of which was his lack of a valid British Columbia Fishing License with a special salmon tag, the Fisheries man informed the immigrant that he was going to have to forfeit his fish, his tackle and his rod and reel. California quickly switched his social skills out of the dream-like state he had been experiencing on this his first foray in the True North to the set he used when facing hostile strangers in remote areas of the Southwest.
They argued awhile as two young men of approximately the same age. Within a short span, the Fisheries Officer decided to end his debate with the troublesome Yank. He announced that under yet another sub-section of Canadian law, that he was now going to take possession of the man’s beloved Ford truck. He put his hand on his holster flap to show his earnestness and demanded the keys to the vehicle.
California landed a no-nonsense hay-maker on the Officer’s chin, jumped into his truck and fled the scene. As he was nearing the Second Narrows Bridge and heading into Vancouver, a North Vancouver RCMP cruiser was in hot pursuit. The high-speed chase came to an ignominious end about ten minutes later.
When he went before the judge, California chose to represent himself. After answering all the questions put to him by way of establishing his guilt on all charges laid, California asked if he might ask a few questions and voice a few observations of his own. Due to the novelty of the situation and his amusing dry juniper accent, the judge humoured his request after giving him a patronizing lecture on the differences between Canadian and American law. It was the judge’s insistence on referring to Canada as a distinct country that stuck in the Californian’s craw.
In a nutshell, he told the judge and all those present in the courtroom, that in his understanding of politics, a country by definition, has the ability to make law. He pointed to a portrait of the Queen and asked the judge if Canada could make its own law without her Royal Assent. The judge began to explain that this function of the Canadian Constitutional Monarchy had been entrusted to the Canadian Governor General by letters patent.
“The way I see it”, said California, “Underneath all that make believe, you don’t quite yet have your own country up here, whatever name you call it by. And I call it robbery when a man with a gun tries to take my truck and fishing gear. Ain’t nothing else to call it.”
He was punished with a hefty fine and several days in jail, but was eventually returned his truck and fishing tackle. He never forgot that lesson. To paraphrase Adolf Berle, I would imagine that at least one other person, perhaps a member of the audience, the court clerk, or maybe even the janitor found an uncomfortable degree of truth in California’s statement and fought off his discomfort by concluding that it was essentially an angry cartoon, not a serious picture.
fin
Sources: C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite © 1956 Oxford University Press
David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard © 2015 The Talbot Players, LLC.