Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf

Ken Fones-Wolf

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South

In Waves of Opposition, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf describes and analyzes the battles over the powerful new medium of radio, which helped spark the massive upsurge of organized labor during the Depression. She demonstrates its importance as a weapon in an ideological war between labor and business, where corporations used radio to sing the praises of individualism and consumerism, while unions emphasized equal rights, industrial democracy, and social justice. Organized chronologically, the work explores the advent of local labor radio stations such as WCFL and WEVD, labor's anti-censorship campaigns, and unionist experiments with early FM broadcasting. Through extensive use of business and union archives, as well as broadcasting industry records, Fones-Wolf demonstrates how radio became a key component of organized labor's efforts to contest businesses' domination of political discourse throughout the thirties, forties, and fifties. Waves of Opposition concludes by claiming that labor's virtual disappearance from American media today helps explain in part why unions have become so marginalized and offers important historical lessons to those seeking to revitalize organized labor.

Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf

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