In Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf analyze the religious beliefs of working-class people to offer new explanations for the fate of southern unionism from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Noting that the CIO’s post–World War II Southern Organizing Campaign—otherwise known as Operation Dixie—has not received a book-length treatment for a quarter century, the authors reconsider both its strategies and the ultimate failure that has cast a restrictive national cloud over the labor movement ever since. In so doing, they reevaluate Operation Dixie through the eyes of CIO organizers and white workers. Through this analysis, the authors reveal that religion represented far more than a prop or a fatalistic delusion. Instead, it was a dynamic and central way white workers made sense of their world.
After a first chapter that analyzes southern political economy...
