Walter Reuther (right), then UAW president, and his brother, Victor Reuther, then UAW educational director, in 1949
"After visiting the United Auto Workers convention in Atlantic City in 1947, C. Wright Mills wrote that the most impressive thing about the union was “the spectacle it affords of ideas in live contact with power.” While he considered union president Walter Reuther a dynamic leader, Mills was more impressed with the team of young men around him, the labor intellectuals who translated the radicalism and democratic enthusiasms of a boisterous rank and file into a set of concrete programs. ... Comparing them to the New York intellectuals—here he was undoubtedly thinking of Dwight Macdonald and writers for his magazine,
politics—Mills called these UAW partisans 'intellectuals without fakery and without neuroticism.' They were not academic strivers or little magazine impresarios. ..."
Sociologist C. Wright Mills (left), author of the The Power Elite and other books, was a leading labor intellectual in the 1950s. He died in 1962.
No comments:
Post a Comment