This is an eminently readable and richly detailed account of the failed attempt by the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO), beginning in 1946, to unionize industrial workers in the South. Its most original contribution to the literature is to examine the religious commitments of those involved in this struggle, and to explore how these religious views and actions affected the campaign as a whole. They bring important new primary sources to light, including oral histories, to compile their account. Much of the story is conveyed through illuminating biographical vignettes of little-known persons who took part in this movement.

Earlier chronicles of these events have emphasized the role of well-heeled employers in spreading anti-union propaganda. The authors concede the importance of such interventions in defeating the CIO campaign, but, insisting on the agency of the Southern workers themselves, work to understand the motivations of those who were targeted by the unionizing efforts. Some were attracted by the Social Gospel, while others were fundamentalists to whom the Social Gospel was foreign. Yet union advocates evidenced theological diversity. Many Southern evangelical workers “defied the warnings of apocalyptic preachers and remained dedicated to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal” (83). Even within families, conservative protestant theology was applied to social issues in different ways. George Dyer, raised a Hardshell Baptist, was a strong supporter of unions, while his wife Tessie, a Methodist, was willing to be a strikebreaker, when necessity arose: “I was supposed to work, and I was going” (85).

Pentecostal churches were often more amenable to their members joining unions than were mainline churches, although Pentecostal preachers tended to warn against strikes, and their ministers even asserted sometimes that “labor strife . . . was a sign of the end times” (111). A revealing digression situates late 1940s Southern religion in a national context, when the authors note that the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) promoted the concept of industrial chaplains who would be neutral between labor and management, whereas the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) favored industrial chaplains who would simultaneously serve the interests of the church and business. The more pro-business vision of the NAE won out, and it seems to have been more influential generally in the South than the FCC.

Southern labor organizers, including the organizers of the CIO's “Operation Dixie,” were a fascinating and fractious lot. The authors expose the real costs to the organizers and their allies of this work: Some were viciously beaten, some lost their jobs, and some had to leave the South altogether. The authors exert much effort in examining the fault lines of anti-Communism and race. Several unions would be expelled from the CIO in 1949, for alleged Communist domination. Some of the expelled unions, including the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union featured on the front cover of the book, had active organizing efforts in the South. Both the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and employers had blasted the CIO for its incorporation of Communists in its ranks. (The AFL was conducting a rival organizing campaign in the South at the same time.)

By distancing itself from Communists in this way, the authors demonstrate that the movement was weakened. The Highlander Folk School, featured in later white supremacist attacks against Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the institutions from which the CIO distanced itself on these grounds; the authors determine that Highlander's ability to fulfill its mission was weakened by this distancing. Some of the union organizers most gifted in appealing to workers' religious motivations (Claude Williams, for example) were alleged to be Communists, and thus not welcome in the CIO's organizing campaign. Yet the authors also argue that the CIO ultimately had no choice, because Communism was too toxic in Southern culture for any union or union organizer affiliated with Communism to play a useful part: “If the principal CIO goal was to organize the South's workers, it had to reject left-led unions and downplay its commitment to racial radicalism” (204). They also point out that some labor organizers who were definitely not Communist were still stigmatized as such. The line between hard-nosed political opposition and character assassination was not always clearly drawn.

“Operation Dixie” was also targeted foremost to unionizing the South's textile workers, who were predominantly white. After careful and thoughtful analysis of the CIO organizers' commitments to racial equality, the authors conclude that their record in this respect was generally a positive one. Most of the organizers seem to have been racial progressives. The CIO organizing drive sparked opposition from the Ku Klux Klan, and “the ensuing turmoil . . . caused some CIO leaders to shrink back from their commitment to a civil-rights-oriented biracial unionism” (182). The authors examine the mostly positive responses to the CIO organizing campaign from the black press, from whose viewpoint it was evident that the CIO had made the right enemies. In 1947, one black journalist wrote that “labor unions had ‘done more in the past twenty years to advance the cause of the common man and of the minorities than any other single group’” (183). The authors intriguingly present evidence that CIO organizers played a role in helping to persuade Billy Graham to desegregate his revivals as early as 1953.

Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf do a real service by causing us to think more deeply about this uncomfortable and complicated period of American religious history, and provoking us to think expansively about its possible ripple effects. This book deserves a wide reading.