• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

More Successful Operation Dixie

Thanks for putting us all on the spot with this during the zoom call ;) (it took me a second to respond because I definitely thought you were saying CIA at first)

As I said I mostly know about Operation Dixie through my reading on the lumber industry so I might be generalizing a little - but I'd argue that organizing the South is the lost opportunity for the American labor movement. Which, given how herculean a task it would have been, just goes to show how difficult a road labor has had.

Taft-Hartley was passed partially in response to Operation Dixie (as well as the postwar strike wave) and gave state governments the tools with which to crush it, but if the drive had been more successful, labor might have had enough power in the South to survive the act and even prevent the Southern states from enacting right-to-work laws. No right-to-work in the Sun Belt would mean less of a dramatic internal outsourcing in the 60s onwards - no "New South" and a longer lease on life for Northern industry. (Specifically in lumber, this means mills won't move as quickly to the Southern yellow pine belt and small mill towns in the Northwest will remain viable for a few more years - the old-growth crisis will not look like OTL's, and that means one fewer wedge for conservatives to drive between organized environmentalism and the working class. But this is just me digressing on my favorite topic.) The lack of unorganized labor markets in the US might mean that manufacturing starts heading overseas earlier than OTL, but labor would be in a stronger position to fight the trend.

Naturally, a strong and integrated labor movement in the South would be a massive boost for the civil rights movement, too - but that's exactly why a successful Operation Dixie is hard to achieve. It flew in the face of both the authoritarian politics of the South and of the everyday racism of most white workers. The few locals that survived from Operation Dixie IOTL - which were nominally integrated but often not in practice - had a strained relationship with the officially anti-racist AFL-CIO leadership. During the 1967 Masonite strike in Laurel, Mississippi, the national IWA actually tried to distance itself from the millworkers because they suspected the strike was really motivated by fears of Black advancement in the workplace. (Here is an issue of the SNCC's newspaper with an article about the very complex politics going on in that strike.) The organizing drive was also undermined in its later phases by the CIO's internal purge of Communists.

You'd need a very different political climate for Operation Dixie to succeed - one where the federal government was interested in helping unionization rather than empowering states to hinder it, and where white workers were more willing to overlook their biases in favor of class solidarity. If you can find a way to avert the Red Scare, that's a start.

Edit: added some JSTOR links for those with access
 
Last edited:
Thanks for putting us all on the spot with this during the zoom call ;) (it took me a second to respond because I definitely thought you were saying CIA at first)
Oh wow, whoops.
Thanks for your thoughts, will think more about them tomorrow.
 
Back
Top