Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf.Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie.

Abstract

In their fine book Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie, Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf provide an outstanding account of the role of religion in the Congress of Industrial Organizations’s (CIO) campaign to organize industrial workers in the South after World War II. Labor historians tend to know little about American religious history, and historians of American religion tend to know little about the history of the American labor movement. Equally at home in both fields, the Fones-Wolfs employ a wide array of secondary and archival sources, including workers’ own oral histories, to illuminate an episode crucial to understanding southern society and American politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Rightly or wrongly, the CIO focused its Southern Organizing Campaign on the textile industry, which had relocated to the South to avoid unionization. Because most textile workers were white, it was thus able to finesse its commitment to racial unity—a commitment not shared by the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL). Although imbued with a leftism often hostile to organized religion, the CIO nevertheless recognized that it needed to engage with the religiosity of white workers in order to succeed. Unfortunately, as the Fones-Wolfs make clear, the organizers grasped that religiosity only imperfectly, relying for outreach on northerners whose credentials lay in mainline modernist denominations.