Nelson Lichtenstein in Dissent:
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.
“One of the major clues to the politically disappointing history of American unions,” Mills wrote, “has been the absence of union-made intellectuals: men who combine solid trade union experience . . . with the self-awareness and wider consciousness that are the qualities of the intellectual. The key fact about the UAW is that there is a group of such men.”
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. “The gap between ideas and action is not so wide as to frustrate and turn them inward; their ideas are acted out.” Unlike so many other intellectuals, wrote Mills, “they are not just waiting and talking their lives through.”
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