The Big Bad Americans

THE POWER ELITE (423 pp.) -- C. Wright Mills--Oxford ($6).

As any undergraduate knows, a sociologist is a man who is daily astonished by the commonplace. Usually, this professional sense of wonder finds its outlet in recording masses of data and using them to suggest trends, shifts in manners and mores, and the like. Occasionally one comes along who, like Tho stein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class), gives society a therapeutic, though not necessarily accurate, boot in the pants. But a few of them suffer from a rare though virulent occupational disease. They become hectoring critics of their fellow men. They scold. They even grit their teeth.

In The Power Elite Sociologist C. (for Charles) Wright Mills of Columbia University warns, in effect, that the U.S. is well on its way to hell in a hand basket. Its leaders are morally bankrupt ("America is indeed without leaders"); its people are whipped around by TV and public-relations types and have almost nothing to do with deciding their political fate. Its rich are vulgar and mindless, its poor too gutless to do anything about their condition; its labor leaders impotent fellows and "government-made men." U.S. generals and admirals are "warlords" who pursue their dreadful projects in the mazes of the Pentagon with a total disregard for what the citizenry thinks or wants.

Taken by themselves, these evils might perhaps be survived. But what sends Mills's fever up is his conviction that he smells something--perhaps not a plot, but surely a tacit and cynical understanding among the big-corporation heads, the "warlords" and the "very rich" to take the country away from the common man. This is big; this is cold, naked power wielded by mindless giants who make life-and-death decisions without moral or intellectual regard for the consequences. Success no longer matters, because to achieve success today is to admit one's moral bankruptcy. And men no longer really make the grade: they are hand-picked by corporations who tell them what they want--and get it, or else.

Texas-born Professor Mills uncovers some pretty startling social phenomena. The reader will hear that the rich have more money than other people and so can afford better schools, longer vacations and more luxury all around. Old money, what the sociologist in John Marquand's Point of No Return called "mellow wampum," isn't good because it's too snobbish and irresponsible. New money isn't good because it has to be acquired by means that would horrify a hard-working sociologist. Mills does not say how much money a man may accumulate and still stay morally decent.

The Power Elite is written in a kind of sociological mumbo jumbo that should discourage all but other sociologists. It is dull, repetitious, and gives equal weight to both sound and spurious evidence. Its underlying tone is one of resentment, and because it offers no suggestion as to how the bogeymen in Mills's belfry may be exorcised, it is intellectually irresponsible. Still it ought to be read, if only for its half truths. It will surely be read with great glee by anti-Americans everywhere. But the average U.S. reader is apt to emerge from this nightmare-shored-by-platitudes wondering how, with such irresponsible interlocking monsters running the country, things manage to go so well, and so many people stay happy, decent and prosperous.

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