THE POWER ELITE by C. Wright Mills (1956)
C. Wright Mills was a sociologist who wrote like a novelist. Both these traits are shown in his great work, The Power Elite, which was about the structure of American power.
Mills did a detailed study of the men (all of them were white men) who occupied the top position in the great American corporations, in the military and in governmental administrations. He also compiled lists of the 90 richest Americans of 1900, 1925 and 1950.
These were the individuals who made the fundamental decisions that determined whether there would be peace or war, full employment or widespread unemployment and the priorities of the nation as a whole.
He concluded that members of these elites were not representative of the American people in their social origins, they had goals and incentives that didn't coincide with the interests of the American people, and they were not accountable to the American people.
The corporate elite emerged in the years following the Civil War and was in full bloom by 1900. Back then, Mills' research showed, a typical corporate CEO was a company founder, an heir of a company founder or a lawyer or some other expert hired by the board of directors for his expertise.
By 1950, the typical corporate CEO was someone who had come up through the ranks of a corporation, Mills found. He was someone whose goals and viewpoint on life were formed by the corporation itself, which were a desire to preserve the corporation and increase its profitability.
Most of them had college educations, which the majority of the public did not. Most of them came from well-off backgrounds, but even the ones born into poor backgrounds were shaped by the views of their peers.
Even the public had come to regard business success as the supreme value. Corporate structures have not proved to be as durable as they seemed to Mills, but the cult of success remains
The military elite emerged during World War Two. Before then, Mills said, the Army and Navy were separate from the rest of society and proud of being non-political. But in the 1940s, they emerged as key decision-makers, a strong shaping force in the economy and a political force.
Even more than the corporate elite, members of the military elite had a special identity, which was shaped by education at West Point or Annapolis and by rising through the ranks.
Mills noted that the top military leaders exercised their power and influence in secret, which meant that there was little or no check on it. Decisions of peace and war were made without public knowledge or public accountability.
There also was what President Eisenhower was to call the military-industrial complex. Generals, corporate executives and top politicians were part of the same social circles.
The military remains a strong power, but it has, to an extent, been superseded by the power of the secret intelligence and power agencies. As Mills noted, the power to act without accountability is a strong power.
The third important power structure is the power of governmental administration, but it is different from the other two.
Governmental administration became powerful as a result of the New Deal and World War Two, but it never was an independent power. Civil servants had no voice in policy. That was set by appointed officials who usually were chosen as representatives of particular economic interests.
There was nothing in the USA like the British Foreign Office or the Exchequer, which had their own views on policy and provided continuity during different administrations.
In the USA, for example, experts on China were driven out of the Foreign Service by political demagogues, Mills wrote. Ambassadors were almost all political appointees, rewarded for their service to political parties.
Other governmental departments also were subject to politics, which was dominated by business interests.
American power elites have evolved and mutated, but there is a clear from the elites of the early USA to the elites of Mills' day, and from Mills' elites to those of present-day America.
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