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While American society in the fifties was as a whole characterized by conformism, scholars working quietly in academia formulated critical analyses of the consumerist malaise.

In "White Collar: The American Middle Classes" (1951), sociologist C. Wright Mills contended that bureaucracies had overwhelmed the new class of city workers. Mills proposed that bureaucratic control deprived city workers of all independent thought and turned them into cheerful robots, paid a decent salary, but alienated from the world because of their inability to affect or change it.

In "The Power Elite" (1956) Mills called attention to the interlaced interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society. He suggested that the ordinary citizen was a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those entities.

==References==
*C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)
*C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956) 

==Links==
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Wright_Mills
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Elite

[[Category:Historical Roots]]