Common explanations for the failure of the great postwar drive of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) to build industrial unions in the US South, “Operation Dixie,” focus on anticommunism, resistance to interracial unionism, or both. In their new book on Operation Dixie, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South, Ken and Elizabeth Fones-Wolf take a different tack. Instead of pointing to CIO organizers’ inability to overcome deeply entrenched racial divisions or to combat red-baiting, as Michael Honey, Barbara Griffiths, Robert Korstad, Michelle Brattain, and other scholars of the southern organizing drive have, the Fones-Wolfs “focus on the religious culture of the white working class” and “give equal weight to their religious beliefs and … how those beliefs shaped their understanding of the threats and opportunities they faced” (viii) in the early years of the Cold War.

Given that historians of the twentieth-century South recognize religiosity in general, and evangelical Protestantism in particular, as one of the region's most enduring and distinctive components, it is remarkable that none have yet approached one of the most significant moments in the South's labor history from this angle. By refusing to reduce the faith of southern workers to a generic “southern religion,” Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South offers a subtle and complex account of the intersections of belief, class, and culture that made the region different. As a result, the book genuinely has something new to say about the difficulties unions faced in organizing the South, and thus illuminates one of the central long-term obstacles to the consolidation of the New Deal state.

Recognizing that southern evangelicalism itself had entered a period of ferment, division, and renewal at the very moment CIO organizers fanned out across the region's textile towns, coal mines, and tobacco factories allows the authors to correlate the “contested terrain” (31) of southern faith communities with receptivity to the union gospel. Unlike most labor historians steeped in more materialist conceptions of social action, the Fones-Wolfs make the “sacred a major element in the story of the CIO's crusade for unionism and economic justice” (5) in the South. To be sure, organized southern religion and the conservative National Association of Evangelicals preached working-class quiescence and “Christian free enterprise” (94). Drawing widely on oral histories, however, the Fones-Wolfs find just beneath that deceptive surface a rich vein of “fiercely democratic and individualistic … popular religiosity” (2) with very different possibilities to “meet real needs in the minds of working people” (69).

Such a “personalistic religious culture” (78), however, could cut both ways, making southern worshippers wary of unionism and of northern interference, especially in the materially more secure postwar years. Ultimately, this book treats diverse southern white working-class faith as an ambiguous force. On the one hand, the authors cannot help but admit that faith in free enterprise and opposition to collectivism preached from the pulpit and by “industrial chaplains” (103) working for paternalistic managers could be “a powerful barrier against the CIO's message of class [and racial] unity and a modernist, New Deal liberalism.” On the other, they demonstrate that some CIO religious allies drew – with mixed success – on a postmillenialist faith that in an era of enormous social disruption Christ was “a savior deeply interested in helping overcome the problems that kept people from fulfilled lives.” Still, as the Fones-Wolfs note, the CIO appointed too few organizers familiar with popular southern religious mores. Despite the best efforts of local “religion and labor fellowships,” labor's religious wing emphasized a northern-based mainline Protestantism (or even Catholicism) that provoked more resentment than conversions to unionism amongst southern white evangelicals. Even sympathetic local ministers, the Fones-Wolfs note, “worried about the disruptions in their communities that often accompanied union campaigns” (158). The few exceptions, southern “prophetic radicals” like Claude Williams or Don West, were marginalized by the labor movement because of their ties to the organized left.

Yet, in the end, even with the injection of the “sacred,” the basic narrative of the failure of the “doomed” Southern Organizing Campaign remains much the same. If the Depression and the New Deal pressed forward, then some white evangelicals’ faith in social transformation prior to Christ's second coming (i.e. postmillenialism), World War II and the Cold War ultimately “diminished their belief that mankind might rise above its basically evil nature” (6), placing a premium on immediate personal salvation rather than social reform (i.e. premillenialism). Coupled with racism, anticommunism (often abetted by labor rivals in the AFL), and bitter memories of the historic defeats of textile unionism during the 1930s, such premillennial beliefs did much to block the path of postwar southern unionism, the Fones-Wolfs conclude. Finally, confirming more secular explanations, even if they see anticommunism as a necessary hedge, the Fones-Wolfs fault the CIO for not doing enough to reach out to southern black workers, whose own evangelical faith “placed far more emphasis on community solidarity and collective action” than did that of their white coreligionists. This, as we know, was a faith that would infuse the southern civil rights movement in the subsequent decades, even while the labor movement in the region proved unable to overcome employer resistance.

Filled with arresting personalities and sharp insights, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South is a timely and original book that deeply enriches the history of postwar southern working-class history. Nevertheless, while adding a major new dimension to the basic narrative, it enhances rather than displaces historians’ understanding of Operation Dixie as an “opportunity lost” for a left–liberal coalition that might have reconfigured the postwar South, and thus extended the durability of the New Deal order.