Postwar Realities
A curious paradox confronted the American working class at the end of World War II. On the one hand, a great many workers had made significant gains in income since the low point of the Depression. For example, average weekly wages in manufacturing had risen 65 percent from December 1941 to April 1945, while the cost of living had increased only some 30 percent. Because of labor shortages, many workers were also able to move into better paying jobs. Additionally, throughout the nation workers had become accustomed to plenty of overtime at time and a half, so that gross income for millions of Americans had doubled and even tripled over anything they had known before the war. When compared with the frightening insecurity of the Depression, the war years represented a giant step forward.1
Further, if the status of workers in general had improved, the condition of organized workers had improved most of all. The War Labor Board and the Office of Price Administration, augmented by a host of regulations administered by New Dealers in dozens of federal agencies, had produced a fundamental shift in the tri-lateral relationships among business, government and labor. If workers still remained the least of equals in this arrangement, and if businesses still remained first, the domination of the economy by corporations was at least modified by the cultural authority that the government had obtained in exercising its mandate to win the war. To all appearances, “Dr. Win the War,” whom Roosevelt had announced as the replacement for “Dr. New Deal,” had not represented quite the retreat from social progress that many ardent New Dealers feared.
Aside from the very real economic gains made by American workers during the war, the most important change seemed to be structural: organized labor had gained a permanent institutional place in American life. The footholds gained by the CIO in basic industries (and then substantially weakened during the final prewar recession) were almost fully consolidated during the war. Some 80 percent of all workers in basic industries were dues-paying members of organized labor at the end of the war. The dues checkoff itself had become largely institutionalized, providing conclusive evidence for many that American corporations had decided to live with the CIO on a permanent basis. In comparative terms, at least, CIO treasuries were bulging from the monthly contributions of six million members.2
No union’s change in status seemed more pronounced than that of the long-embattled textile workers’ union. Emil Rieve, the president of the consolidated Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA-CIO), had sat on the War Labor Board, a fact that in itself testified to the altered status of the labor movement. But beyond such cosmetic changes, the War Labor Board had real power, and its rulings during three rounds of wartime wage-price adjustments became increasingly prolabor. As a historian of the TWUA has concluded: “During each period, the TWUA’s position in the industry improved significantly, to the point where, in 1945, a government ruling was so pro-union that some firms reacted with open defiance of government controls themselves.”3
At the peak of textile organizing before the war, the TWUA claimed almost a quarter of a million recruits. But the relationship of the union to its members and to the companies with which it had contracts was so fragile that dues collections rarely reflected more than half that figure. This circumstance changed dramatically during the war. The union had operated on deficit financing from the founding of the Textile Workers Organizing Committee in 1937 to the middle of the war, before finally passing into the black. By war’s end, however, the TWUA counted 450,000 members, organized in a comparatively well-developed national, regional, state, and local union structure. War Labor Board rulings had played a significant role in this transformation.4
If the general situation looked better from the standpoint of the textile union, the stronger and historically more progressive internationals in the CIO arrived at war’s end in an even more aggressive frame of mind. The social democrats who had consolidated their position in the United Automobile Workers under Walter Reuther nursed dreams of transforming American society—to be spearheaded by the CIO in the immediate postwar years. The Steelworkers Union, a bit to the right of the UAW, and the Electrical and Rubber Workers, both a bit to the left, all nursed similar expectations. With their organized membership freed from the shackles of the no-strike pledge, the labor movement would lead the way to a new society. After all, they could tell themselves, had they not, in the space of one decade, moved from a beleaguered minority in the AFL to something approaching a position of bargaining parity with the world’s largest corporations? Could they not shut down all the nation’s basic industries, and the docks, and the trucking industry? Had not the climactic moment for industrial unionism arrived, the moment to usher in the “new America” that progressives had been anticipating since the great strikes of the 1880s and 1890s? As the CIO looked across the postwar landscape, its spokesmen were not timid in their appraisals of their prospects.5
It was with some shock, then, that in the war’s immediate aftermath, labor found itself thrown completely on the defensive by a surprisingly aggressive business community. As the Truman administration came under steadily mounting pressure from business lobbyists, the labor movement found itself on the defensive inside the Democratic Party as well. When labor economists reported what rank-and-file members had already felt in their pockets—that real wages had declined almost 15 percent in the first three months following the war—dismay extended far beyond those labor progressives who had dreamed of a transformation of American society. Attempts at collective bargaining to gain cost-of-living increases in line with the escalating rate of inflation met stony resistance—in steel, in autos, and, indeed, everywhere. As a result, the great strikes of the autumn and winter of 1945–1946 were defensive strikes, designed to preserve the buying power of wages rather than to advance to a higher wage scale.6
Yet as denounced by business spokesmen—and, ominously, by some in the Truman administration—labor’s actions were viewed by the society as a whole as being impetuous, greedy, or, more simply, radical. Increasingly, business spokesmen called attention to Communists as sources of labor unrest, despite the fact that the most visible and disruptive strikes were in auto and steel, where left-wing elements had been resoundingly defeated in internal battles in the UAW and the USW. But for many Americans, Reuther was not seen as a social democrat who had consolidated his influence over Communists; rather, he was increasingly depicted as the “radical boss” of the world’s largest union, the 1,200,000-member UAW. During more than a year of strife following the victory over Japan in August 1945, labor lost battle after battle in its campaign to retain price controls and preserve the purchasing power of union wages. In retrospect, it is clear that inadequate cost-of-living increases were granted only at the cost of excessive price increases. The latter came initially in the cost of steel, and then inevitably, in the price of basic products made from steel.7
Thus, at war’s end, organized labor was in a peculiar position. Although emerging strengthened in numbers and with a level of cultural credibility it did not possess in the 1930s, it found itself on the defensive in an increasingly conservative society. In addition, its membership base in the North was being seriously threatened by the accelerating flight of companies to the nonunion South. At a time when labor’s defensive strikes were commanding a great deal of its attention and resources, it was forced to make organizing the South a top postwar priority and take immediate measures to block the South as a nonunion haven for Northern business. If textile and furniture manufacturers could “run away” to the South, so could a host of other industries. In accepting this challenge, what labor leaders did not realize was the extent to which their strategies were tailored to a Northern, and pre-World War II, society.
In 1946, the reality of social relations in the South did not mesh well with the Northern model. The South had a distinct heritage, disfigured by a time-honored system of racial segregation, and heightened by generations of poverty and provincialism. Above all, the long history of racial and class hierarchy had produced stringent social controls unlike anything that could be found in the North. In the Southern economy, tight cooperation among the owners of industry, the judicial system, and law enforcement agencies was regarded as the natural order of things. It was “normal practice.” To be sure, the CIO had encountered police harassment and company thugs in a number of Northern states, and labor had its martyrs to show for it. But the bald hypocrisy and ruthlessness of sheriffs in Southern mill villages went quite beyond the patterns of management-police cooperation common in the North. There really were no Northern “models” that could prepare the CIO for the implacable hostility that awaited textile organizers entering a mill village for the first time.
To have been adequately prepared, organizers and union leadership would have needed an intimate understanding of the decades-long history of Southern textile workers and of the actual day-to-day conditions of life in the industrial hamlets across the South. As a textile worker once explained,
The company stores took all your money. I’ve seen plenty of people who didn’t draw a cent on payday. It all went to the store. If you wanted to go to a show uptown, you went to the company store and got a pass. But the company store charged you for this and deducted it from your pay when payday came around. Even doctors’ bills were paid through the company store.8
How could people come to accept such treatment? Actually, for most, such relationships with “the store” had been all they, their parents, and grandparents had ever known. Even before the coming of the mills, as sharecroppers or as rent tenants or as small landowners in the mountains and piedmont of the South, they had gotten their seed and supplies on “furnish” from the “furnishing merchants” who, like the company stores, conducted business wholly on credit. The “rednecks” of sharecropping and the “lint heads” of the mill villages lived so exclusively on credit from furnishing merchants and company stores that they rarely, if ever, saw actual money. The impact of this inheritance was so pervasive that refugees from sharecropping who found employment at mills that actually paid their workers in cash felt they had made a fundamental improvement in their way of life. A mill in a town (i.e., not in its own “mill village”) that did not operate a company store was in the position of giving employment to workers who could, as one of them put it, “buy anywhere I pleased.” It was a real change, one for which many workers felt grateful.9
It would be an error of the first magnitude to pass lightly over this fundamental social circumstance of the postwar American South. Like other people, Southerners had dreams. And like other people, they knew the constraints under which they lived. In this fundamental sense, they were neither “mystified” nor “apathetic.” The breath taking speed with which hundreds of thousands of Southern workers had, as one of them put it, “gone into battle” in the great general textile strike of 1934 testified both to the reality of their hopes and to their capacity for collective action.
Nevertheless, in ways that historians and other social observers cannot conclusively “prove” with concrete evidence, these hopes and this potential persisted in a social environment that steadfastly warred against their expression. It was an environment of poverty—of poverty over many generations. It was a culture of dependence, again for many generations, on “the man” who ran the store and whose shelves contained the needs of life. It was, in the end, a culture that could at one and the same time encourage traditional American hopes while confirming an inheritance of poverty and dependence.
The history of organized labor in the South attested to the presence of these contradictory drives in Southern workers. It was an intricate history, one full of dogged determination and violence that on occasion had involved large numbers of workers. Southern workers had, sequentially, been receptive to Knights of Labor organizers in the sugar parishes of Louisiana in the 1880s, to IWW organizers in the lumber industry in Texas after the turn of the century, to Communist organizers in Gastonia, North Carolina, in the 1920s, and, on many occasions stretching over two generations, to the American Federation of Labor. There had even been an interracial general strike in New Orleans in 1902. Textiles, in particular, had long been the center of intense organizing activity. A roster of textile mill towns involved at one time or another in intense labor struggles sounded like a roll call of the industry itself: Cannon, Cone, Burlington, and Erwin in North Carolina; Dan River in Virginia; Comer in Alabama; and Bibb in Georgia. But the large textile chains were by no means the only targets. Some of the most bitter struggles occurred in relatively small mill towns. Several, such as those in Marion in North Carolina and Elizabethton in Tennessee in 1929, attracted national attention. A correspondent of the Nation described living and working conditions at Marion as “almost indescribably degrading.”10
The immediate organizational forerunner of Operation Dixie came just before World War II. It offered sober instruction for the would-be architects of Operation Dixie. In 1937, the CIO’s John L. Lewis created the “Textile Workers Organizing Committee” (TWOC) and appointed Sydney Hillman to head it. The ensuing organizing campaign in 1937 embodied an essentially Northern emphasis. Hillman divided the nation into eight regions; only two were located in the South. Some 500 organizers were placed on staff, with 350 of them assigned to the six Northern regions. In effect, the TWOC was assigning organizers on the basis of existing regional membership, rather than on the basis of where its potential members were. In dispatching two-thirds of its organizing staff to Northern states, it was trying to fill a leaking can. Between 1925 and 1940, for example, one of the great textile centers in the nation (Fall River, Massachusetts) had lost three-quarters of its production capacity, seventy-three mills totaling $60,000,000 in capital investment, to the South. If the union was to have a future, it lay in the nearly 500,000 textile workers below the Mason-Dixon line. The union did, however, take the precaution of disassociating itself from the 1934 strike by hiring all new organizers, transferring the 1934 veterans “to regions where they are less well known.” A victory was won quickly at the Covington Mills in Virginia in March, the first of many that would come once the full organizing staff was deployed in June. But “again and again, mill hands voted in favor of the TWOC only to be suppressed by mill owners and local governments.”11
During the opening phases, 64,000 textile workers signed up, 50,000 of them in cotton mills. In North Carolina alone, workers outside Asheville turned in 20,000 pledge cards. Nevertheless, by October 1937, the specifics were quite ominous: the North Carolina staff possessed only a single contract covering 450 workers at the Edna Mills in Reidsville. The total for the entire South was seventeen contracts, totaling 21,000 workers. At its peak in April 1937, the TWOC deployed 650 organizers nationwide; eleven months later, the union could afford to have only 249 on the job.12
Undaunted, the TWOC won enough elections in the North to increase its duespaying membership in the region to 135,000 by 1940. Together with the 21,000 in the South, the union had doubled its 1937 strength and stood on the threshold of reorganizing itself as a permanent institution. The Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA), CIO, formally came into being in 1939, with Emil Rieve elected president and George Baldanzi vice president. The TWUA then stood in official opposition to the rump UTW (AFL), which counted a grand total of 1,500 members nationwide.13
Meanwhile, the leading textile firms in the South stepped up their aggressive personnel policies and defeated repeated organizing efforts through what can perhaps best be described as legalized armed repression. In Greensboro, North Carolina, 6,000 workers walked out at Cone Mills to protest a 12.5 percent wage reduction in July 1938. They won an NLRB election in August and a second election in March 1939. But through what one historian described as “continued harassment and discrimination,” Cone not only avoided signing these contracts, but also beat back organizing attempts at every other mill in the chain’s empire. Similarly, the TWUA won six elections at Burlington in Greensboro; but even when these were augmented by favorable NLRB rulings forbidding company harassment, the union failed to achieve “even a foothold.” The same pattern prevailed in the Erwin Mills in Durham, where management prevailed throughout three years of sustained TWUA effort.14
Recalcitrant management was not the CIO’s only problem in the final prewar textile drive. The AFL joined management in criticizing the CIO’s efforts. The federation’s Southern representative, George Googe, a classic race-baiting craft union conservative, issued frequent statements regarding the Communist menace represented by the CIO. All received wide press coverage in the South. It was a hint of things to come in Operation Dixie.
The importance of organizing the textile industry in the South increased during World War II. The long decline of the industry in the North accelerated during the war. By 1945, there were 250,000 fewer textile workers in Northern mills, and 100,000 more Southern textile workers, than at the start of the war. Simultaneously, the steady increase in Southern spindles continued. The balance was tilting decisively—a majority of the nation’s million-odd textile workers would soon be found in the South, and the figure could be expected to increase in the postwar years.15
In sizing up this challenge, on the eve of its Southern campaign in 1946 the CIO could look to substantial wartime gains, made not so much on the picket line as through government resolutions of labor-management disputes that threatened the war effort. These government decisions enabled the CIO to consolidate its membership and achieve a dues checkoff in the nation’s basic industries. One of the reasons the TWUA was able to contribute $125,000 to the cost of Operation Dixie was traceable to its wartime membership gains—to 400,000.
As it prepared for its Southern drive, its gains since 1936 indicated the CIO had achieved an historic breakthrough in the nation’s mass production industries. If the CIO was not the nation’s “one big union,” it was, undeniably, a big union. Industrial unionism had come to America. Whether it would attain permanent status, or how healthy it would be, would depend in no small measure on how well Operation Dixie progressed.
The CIO’s organizational model, derived from its Northern experiences, now confronted the unique challenges of the South. Whatever the odds, however, the CIO leadership had high hopes. They were not alone. Some had had their sights set on the South long before 1946. Among them was a delegate to the TWUA’s first convention in 1939, who would become the South Carolina director during Operation Dixie.
We, too, are going to have some of the good things of this life. We are going to get rid of the mill villages and company stores. We are not going to send our children to the company schools in order that the boss might teach them what he wants them to know. We are going to live like free, decent people.16