This Day in Labor History: June 28, 1946

On June 28, 1946, the CIO’s Operation Dixie campaign to organize the textile mills of Kannapolis, North Carolina began. It was a complete failure. We need to look at why.

In the aftermath of the World War II, the Congress of Industrial Organizations wanted to expand American unionism to southern factory work. It faced a huge problem in doing this–a problem it had experienced in northern unionized factories too–racial animosity at the workplace. Could class solidarity overcome the combined enemies of racial prejudice and employer race-baiting? The CIO bet that it could. Moreover, the CIO knew it had better work because it could see the writing on the wall. It knew that companies were already looking for cheap, nonunion labor in the South. If it couldn’t organize the South, then what was already happening in the textile industry would decimate American unions throughout the North.

There were several industries in the South that needed organization. One big one was the tobacco industry, with a largely African-American workforce. That became an early target and we have talked about that a bit earlier in this series. Another, and even more important, were textiles. That industry was deeply invested in capital mobility. By the 1940s, there wasn’t much left of the northeastern textile industry that had led to so many of the iconic moments in early 20th century labor history–the Uprising of the 20,000, the Triangle Fire and its aftermath, Lawrence, Paterson, etc, not to mention a critically important history in the 19th century too, from Lowell to Fall River.

The 1934 textile strike was in many ways a last ditch effort by northern based textile unions to save the remnant of the industry there by leading a major strike in the South. It was an extremely important moment in creating the move of the federal government to recognize labor unions as a key part of the nation, but the strike was a failure and the aftermath didn’t lead to unionization of the South. There was a reason for this–the people spearheading the move South looked for specific demographics for their new plants–mostly white towns with strong traditions of evangelical religion and patronage politics. In short, the upcountry and piedmont of the Carolinas, east Tennessee, north Alabama, etc. These were people taught to listen to their community leaders, people with long traditions of racism and anti-Semitism, and people with strong suspicions of the cities and their immigrants and socialism and everything else their pastors them was evil.

In other words, unions.

So the CIO talked a big confident game with their organization of the textile mills around Kannapolis, North Carolina that began in June 1946. They made it a national campaign, they spent a lot of money, and….they failed miserably. If you read local organizers, they were totally covering their butts with CIO officials about what was happening there. Operation Dixie’s North Carolina director William Smith wrote to CIO offices, “the Drive is progressing splendidly. All of our carefully thought out plans are being carried out to the letter and the organizers assigned to Cannon are working in perfect harmony and teamwork . . . There is a spirit of victory over there and our drive, without question, is cracking.”

Well……

Out of 41,000 workers at Cannon, only 839 ever became members of the union, barely 2%, compared with the 50 or 60% that unions required before elections. Most mills had no members; Cannon No. 1 had only 485 out of 19,000. North Carolina was hard country for organizing though. To say the least, these factories did not even go to election. Alabama had a stronger union tradition, largely thanks to the steel mills, so more people knew unionists. But things went no better there in the textile mills. People just flat out didn’t want to sign up. The CIO, mostly through the Textile Workers Union of America, did legitimately try. But to quote the state director of the TWUA in Alabama about a factory in Pell City, “we have discontinued our activities . . . because after a long campaign we were only successful in getting 83 people signed out of 700 in the mill.” I mean, what are you going to do? Stories like this went throughout the textile industry. The CIO did have success in some industries, but not textiles, which was the key to the whole thing.

Now, some historians have argued that part of the problem was that the CIO chose their more right-leaning staffers to run this campaign and marginalized the communists still in the union. I think there’s a good point here, but it’s not about the politics so much as it is about the quality of the unionist. Certainly the communists were not going to attract the white textile workers better than anyone else. The strongest evidence for claims like this come from the fact that regardless of politics, the left-leaning CIO people were simply better organizers. The choice of Van Bittner to run Operation Dixie was a demonstration of the poor record of right-wing CIOers; Bittner primarily preferred to not do very much and was often more concerned through his long history before this with purging the left than organizing workers. Bittner had come up as John L. Lewis’ hatchetman in the United Mine Workers and undermining and blackballing enemies was more his thing than mass organizing.

I think it is pretty safe to say that a guy like Bittner heading Operation Dixie was CIO leadership overthinking the problem of the politics of the South. What Operation Dixie was primarily a great organizer. Bittner was very much not that. But as for the broader claims that a more left-leaning unionism would have done more to attract the white workers of North Carolina and Alabama, well, that feels more like projection of a person’s own politics than anything rooted in any analysis of those communities. However, again, it is worth noting that more left-leaning unions such as the United Packinghouse Workers and the United Steel Workers did have more success than the Textile Workers Union of America, though it is also worth noting that these were not the exact same workers with the same traditions. The specific geographical location of the textile mills did contribute here. But yeah, Van Bittner sucked and Operation Dixie as a whole completely failed.

McCarthyism and Taft-Hartley combined to destroy Operation Dixie and undermine CIO radicalism. The northern communists the CIO relied upon for organizers and publicists were expelled from the labor movement. The right to work rules in the Taft-Hartley Act gave southern states a major tool to beat back the incipient unionization they faced during Operation Dixie. Without the radical edge, there really wasn’t much of a reason for the CIO to exist independently of the American Federation of Labor, leading to their reunion in 1955.

I borrowed from Michael Goldfield’s The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s to write this post. Goldfield goes into the strategy issue in tremendous detail and while I don’t agree with all of it, it is a fantastic deep dive into these issues that makes many strong points.

This is the 526th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.