“Power Elite”

Mills posits that the institutions that they head are a triumvirate of groups that have inherited or succeeded weaker predecessors:

1. “Two or three hundred giant corporations” which have replaced the traditional agrarian and craft economy,
2. A strong federal political order that has inherited power from “a decentralized set of several dozen states” and “now enters into each and every cranny of the social structure,” and
3. The military establishment, formerly an object of “distrust fed by state militia,” but now an entity with “all the grim and clumsy efficiency of a sprawling bureaucratic domain.”

Mills sees them as a quasi-hereditary caste. The members of the power elite, according to Mills, often enter into positions of societal prominence through educations obtained at eastern establishment universities like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. But, Mills notes, “Harvard or Yale or Princeton is not enough… the point is not Harvard, but which Harvard?”

Mills identifies two classes of Ivy League alumni: those were initiated into an upper echelon fraternity such as the Harvard College social clubs of Porcellian or Fly Club, or Yale‘s Skull & Bones, and those who were not. Those so initiated, Mills continues, receive their invitations based on social links first established in elite private preparatory academies, where they were enrolled as part of family traditions and family connections. In that manner, the mantle of the elite is generally passed down along familial lines over the generations.

The resulting elites, who control the three dominant institutions (military, economy and political system) can be generally grouped into one of six types, according to Mills:

• “Metropolitan 400”: members of historically-notable local families in the principal American cities who are generally represented on the Social Register.
• “Celebrities:” prominent entertainers and media personalities.
• “Chief Executives”: presidents and CEOs of the most important companies within each industrial sector.
• “Corporate Rich”: major landowners and corporate shareholders.
• “Warlords:” senior military officers, most importantly the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• “Political Directorate”: “fifty-odd men of the executive branch” of the U.S. federal government, including the senior leadership in the Executive Office of the President, who are sometimes variously drawn from elected officials of the Democratic  and Republican  parties but are usually professional government bureaucrats.