“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Perhaps no one better embodied this motto than the radical social critic C. Wright Mills. Mills was born a hundred years ago today in Waco, Texas, an unlikely birthplace for one of the most significant American left-wing intellectuals of the past century.

The burly Texan made his way from the Lone Star State to New York City where he became a professor of sociology at Columbia University in 1945. In the decade that followed Mills established himself as a leading voice on the Left with his books White Collar and The Power Elite.

As a lonely dissenter in the McCarthy era, Mills offered a bleak portrait of Americans: alienated individuals in a mass society firmly controlled by a small, undemocratic elite.