Quotations

from the book

The Power Elite

by C.Wright Mills

Oxford Press, 1956

The power elite are those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them.

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The top of the American system of power is much more unified and much more powerful, the bottom is much more fragmented, and in truth, impotent, than is generally supposed.

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Today in America there is the development of a permanent war establishment by a privately incorporated economy inside a political vacuum.

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The political aim of the petty right formed among the new upper classes of the small cities is the destruction of the legislative achievements of the New and Fair Deals.

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People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.

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The idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite as a privileged ruling stratum.

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American men of power tend, by convention, to deny that they are powerful. No American runs for office in order to rule or even to govern, but only to serve; he does not become a bureaucrat or even an official, but a public servant... such postures have become standard features of the public-relations programs of all men of power.

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The professional celebrity is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency and skill than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.

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It does not seem to matter what a man is very best at; so long as he has won out in competition over all others, he is celebrated.

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It is better to take one dime from each of ten million people at the point of a corporation than $100,000 from each of ten banks at the point of a gun. It is also safer.

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The test of ability in a society in which money is a sovereign value is widely taken to be money-making. Since the criterion of ability is the making of money, of course ability is graded according to wealth and the very rich have the greatest ability.

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The first really great American fortunes were developed during the economic transformation of the Civil War era, and out of the decisive corruptions that seem to be part of all American wars.

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In understanding the private appropriations of the very rich, we must also bear in mind that the private industrial development of the United States has been much underwritten by outright gifts out of the people's domain. State, local, and federal governments have given land free to railroads, paid for the cost of shipbuilding, for the transportation of important mail. Much more free land has been given to businesses than to small, independent homesteaders. Coal and iron have been legally determined not to be covered by the 'mineral' rights held by the government on the land it leased. The government has subsidized private industry by maintaining high tariff rates, and if the taxpayers of the United States had not paid, out of their own labor, for a paved road system, Henry Ford's astuteness and thrift would not have enabled him to become a billionaire out of the automobile industry.

In capitalistic economies, wars have led to many opportunities for the private appropriation of fortune and power. But the complex facts of World War II make previous appropriations seem puny indeed. Between 1940 and 1944, some $175 billion worth of prime supply contracts-the key to control of the nation's means of production-were given to private corporations. A full two-thirds of this went to the top one hundred corporations-in fact, almost one-third went to ten private corporations. These companies then made money by selling what they had produced to the government. They were granted priorities and allotments for materials and parts; they decided how much of these were to be passed down to sub-contractors, as well as who and how many sub-contractors there should be. They were allowed to expand their own facilities under extremely favorable amortization (20 per cent a year) and tax privileges. Instead of the normal twenty or thirty years, they could write off the cost in five. These were also generally the same corporations which operated most of the government-owned facilities, and obtained the most favorable options to 'buy them after the war.

It had cost some $40 billion to build all the manufacturing facilities existing in the United States in 1939. By 1945, an additional $26 billion worth of high-quality new plant and equipment had been added-two thirds of it paid for directly from government funds. Some 20 of this $26 billion worth was usable for producing peacetime products. If to the $40 billion existing, we add this $20 billion, we have a $60 billion productive plan usable in the postwar period. The top 250 corporations owned in 1939 about 65 per cent of the facilities then existing, operated during the war 79 per cent of all new privately operated facilities built with government money, and held 78 per cent of all active prime war supply contracts as of September 1944.3 No wonder that in World War II, little fortunes became big and many new little ones were created.

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The incorporation of the United States economy occurred on a continent abundantly supplied with natural resources, rapidly peopled by migrants, within a legal and political framework willing and able to permit private men to do the job. They did it. And in fulfilling their historical task of organizing for profit the industrialization and the incorporation, they acquired for their private use the great American fortunes. Within the private corporate system, they became the very rich.

In realizing the power of property and in acquiring instruments for its protection, the very rich have become involved, and now they are deeply entrenched, in the higher corporate world of the twentieth-century American economy. Not great fortunes, but great corporations are the important units of wealth, to which individuals of property are variously attached. The corporation is the source of wealth, and the basis of the continued power and privilege of wealth. All the men and the families of great wealth are now identified with large corporations in which their property is seated.

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The chief executives who sit in the political directorate ... hold the power and the means of defending the privileges of their corporate world. If they do not reign, they do govern at many of the vital points of everyday life in America, and no powers effectively and consistently countervail against them, nor have they as corporate-made men developed any effectively restraining conscience .

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The supremacy of corporate economic power began, in a formal way, with the Congressional elections of 1866, and was consolidated by the Supreme Court decision of 1886 which declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the corporation. That period witnessed the transfer of the center of initiative from government to corporation.

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To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.

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The common sense' of our children is going to be less the result of any firm social tradition than of the stereotypes carried by the mass media to which they are so fully exposed.

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People tend strongly to select those media which carry contents with which they already agree. There is a kind of selection of new opinions on the basis of prior opinions. No one seems to search out such counter-statements as may be found in alternative media offerings.

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The media display an apparent variety and competition, but on closer view they seem to compete more in terms of variations on a few standardized themes than of clashing issues.

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The freedom to raise issues effectively seems more and more to be confined to those few interests that have ready and continual access to these media.

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1- the media tell the man in the mass who he is-they give him identity

2- they tell him what he wants to be- they give him aspirations

3- they tell him how to get that way- they give him technique

4- they tell him how to feel that he is that way even when he is not-they give him escape.

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The mass media, especially television, often encroach upon the small-scale discussion, and destroy the chance for the reasonable and leisurely and human interchange of opinion. They are an important cause of the destruction of privacy in its full human meaning. That is an important reason why they not only fail as an educational force, but are a malign force: they do not articulate for the viewer or listener the broader sources of his private tensions and anxieties, his inarticulate resentments and half-formed hopes. They neither enable the individual to transcend his narrow milieu nor clarify its private meaning.

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Mass education, in many respects, has become another mass medium.

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Democracy implies that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge - not to speak of power - to hold the decision-makers accountable.

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The conservative defends the irrationality of tradition against the powers of human reason; he denies the legitimacy of man's attempt individually to control his own fate and collectively to build his own world. How then can he bring in reason as a means of choosing among traditions and men, as a means of deciding which changes are Providential and which are evil forces? He cannot provide any rational guide in our choice of which leaders grasp Providence and act it out and which are reformers and levelers. There is within this view no guide-line to help us decide which contenders for this natural distinction are genuine.

And yet the answer, although not always clear, is always there: if we do not destroy the natural order of classes and the hierarchy of powers, we shall have superiors and leaders to tell us. If we uphold these natural distinctions, and in fact resuscitate older ones, the leaders will decide. In the end, the classic conservative is left with this single principle: the principle of gratefully accepting the leadership of some set of men whom he considers a sanctified elite. If such men were there for all to recognize, then the conservative could at least be socially clear. Then the yearning for a classic tradition and a conservative hierarchy could be satisfied. For they would be visibly anchored in the authority of an aristocracy, and this aristocracy would be tangible to the senses as the very model of private conduct and public decision

It is just here that American publicists of the conservative mood have become embarrassed and confused. Their embarrassment is in part due to a fear of confronting the all-pervading liberal rhetoric; their confusion is mainly due to two simple facts about the American upper classes in general, and the higher circles of power in particular:

Those who are on high are not suitable as models of conservative excellence. Nor do they themselves uphold any ideology truly suitable for public use.

The very rich in America have been culturally among the very poor; the only kinds of experience for which they have been models are the material ones of money-getting and money-keeping. Material success is their sole basis of authority.

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