Cutting through the Fog: Harvey Swados, C. Wright Mills, and Mid-Twentieth Century America

Abstract

The sociologist C. Wright Mills is no stranger to students of treatments of both the mid-twentieth century American Left and U.S. intellectual history. Mills’s confidante, neighbor, and intellectual ally, the novelist and essayist Harvey Swados, remains an understudied figure in the history of the twentieth century intellectual and literary left. A deeper examination of the Mills-Swados relationship provides not only with a more complete portrait of Mills, but another unique and independent voice in mid-twentieth century intellectual radicalism more clearly emerges. A one-time Trotskyist and a former member of the Max Shachtman-led Workers Party, Swados not only wrote acclaimed literary fiction, but also addressed issues that were distinctly unfashionable among the intellectual left in the 1950s and 1960s: the less ideological and more business-unionist labor leadership; the realities, including the humiliations, of the lives of blue-collar workers in the “Fat Fifties”; and the problems of how to interact with a generation of restless young people were coming of age in an era of material comfort, but who also increasingly wanted a larger voice in American society. Examining the relationship also allows us to better able understand the increasing tension between the different tendencies among leftist intellectuals in the years when Cold War concerns dominated American society, and accommodation with Soviet communism or new forms of socialism was seen as unacceptable by a once-radical generation of intellectuals disillusioned by the atrocities of Stalinism.