by Philip Dray
Still, this was also the era of the Dixiecrat rebellion, the walkout led by white supremacist Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina from the 1948 Democratic National Convention, in protest over the party’s civil rights plank, and it was a very real question whether the genial postwar spirit of reconciliation and “freedom trains” would extend to the sleepy textile mill villages of Appalachia. The CIO’s operation was run out of its Southern Organizing Committee office in Atlanta and headed by Van A. Bittner, a UMW organizer, and George Baldanzi, a veteran official of the Textile Workers Union of America. Many of the frontline organizers had been chosen because they were Southerners and were thought to thus have a better chance of promoting trust among workers, given the region’s customary suspicion of outsiders. It was critical to the operation’s success that organizers establish a core of workers in each plant to carry on the actual in-factory organizing around union objectives, the goal being the building of enough interest to warrant NLRB-supervised certification elections. In retrospect, however, the operation was inadequately staffed. While the CIO’s successful 1937 GM autoworkers’ sit-down had strategically targeted a single employer, the CIO in the South—with about twenty organizers per state—was spread thinly across the region from the Carolina Piedmont to the Texas Gulf Coast. Only here and there could the union hope to bring concentrated force to bear against a specific firm.
Logistics aside, much of the South retained the region’s entrenched system of caste as well as its reactionary, think-alike institutions of press, pulpit, business, and police. Here, labor advocates would not merely encounter the resistance of a single manufacturer or town, but animosity on a pervasive regional scale, a uniform reaction to what was perceived quite literally as an “invasion” of labor agitators. To puzzled white Southerners, the likelihood that the CIO effort was driven by some powerful ideology, probably “Communist,” served as the only possible explanation for why outsiders would be as foolish as to defy local custom by attempting to unionize black and white workers. Even the name “Operation Dixie” was unfortunate in its suggestion of a military undertaking, in a region with fabled memories of federal occupation.
It certainly didn’t help that the labor movement itself in the postwar years was not above occasional red-baiting. George Meany of the AFL called the CIO leadership “the devoted followers of Moscow” and characterized it generally as “an organization that has openly followed the communist line and is following that line today.”42 The phobia slowly pervaded the CIO itself. Having welcomed Communists as members in the late 1930s (John L. Lewis had then insisted, “I do not turn my organizers and CIO members upside down and shake them to see what kind of literature falls out of their pockets”), the CIO now bent over backward to reassure the public that Communists would not be active within its ranks.43 The United Electrical Workers and the Farm Equipment Workers had departed the CIO after the dustup over the anti-Communist oath requirement in Taft-Hartley, and at its 1949 convention the CIO went so far as to rule that individual Communists would not be allowed to hold executive union jobs. The following year the CIO expelled nine left-leaning unions, many of which had committed the wayward sin of bucking the CIO endorsement of Harry Truman for reelection in 1948 and had instead supported Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace.44 While such housecleaning may have buffed the CIO’s image, in a practical sense cutting loose the Communists meant chasing away some of the CIO’s most experienced organizers as well as whole unions with solid records of core activism, such as the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers, which had won eighteen recent certification elections with integrated locals and was known for promoting black union leadership.
Of course, Operation Dixie represented more than just an affront to local racial custom—it threatened the South’s ability to offer the low-priced and durable labor status quo vital to attracting commercial and industrial investment. Here there was something of an unhappy precedent as far as labor was concerned: the United Textile Workers strike of 1934, which had ended with Southern mill owners discharging leading union activists from their jobs and even evicting many of them and their families from company towns. In a double blow to Southern organizing, the loss of the 1934 strike had exiled a generation of potential local union leaders while thoroughly inhibiting anyone inclined to follow in their footsteps. Fifteen years after the failure of the big UTW walkout, Southern employers could still feel confident in the extreme economic vulnerability of local workers, the federal government’s reluctance to act on civic disorder in the South, and the remoteness of the campaign from crusading big-city newspapers.
Of course, for Operation Dixie staff there were myriad everyday challenges. Many Southern mill hands were working their first salaried, non-agricultural job. To such workers, who came from dire poverty and the company-store tradition of sharecropping, a job in a textile plant that paid real wages represented a significant step forward. “These people had just come off of … red clay country farms,” observed one CIO organizer. “They figured these were the best jobs they had ever had,” and were understandably hesitant to align with a Northern-based labor organization.45 Race was also a considerable barrier, since any biracial gathering, especially one based around labor organizing by outsiders, was seen as a transgression of local mores, if not the law. Churches were no refuge, as the textile mills routinely sugared local churches with donations as a way of softening ministers on local plant policies. Nor could organizers count on local police or officials for assistance. CIO organizers, forced to stay in whites-only motels, could not use the rooms of those establishments for holding meetings, and were frequently left little choice but to gather interested workers under bridges, by railroad sidings, and in other out-of-the-way places.
Operation Dixie had some initial success in tobacco, pulp and paper, lumber and woodworking factories; its first major test in textiles came in August 1946. Three CIO-induced union elections were to be held in North Carolina—at the Sidney Blumenthal Company in Caramount and at two factories in Rockingham, the Pee Dee Manufacturing Company and Hannah Pickett Mills. The CIO lost narrowly in Caramount, but was defeated by substantial margins at both plants in Rockingham. A subsequent election at the Avondale Mills in Alabama also went to the nonunion forces.
Meanwhile, police and employer harassment of Operation Dixie organizers was being stepped up across the region. Textile employers and local authorities tapped CIO organizers’ telephones, jotted down license plate numbers of vehicles at union gatherings, and started bonfires near to where CIO literature was handed out as a not-so-subtle hint that there existed a handy place to discard it. One South Carolina police chief crafted his own solution by grabbing a CIO organizer off the street and driving the man around town in a squad car; the organizer was innocent of any wrongdoing and was soon set free, but not before everyone in town knew he’d been in police custody. Elsewhere police found they could intimidate workers by simply standing nearby when organizers set up outside a plant. Such conditions made it almost impossible to convince a mill worker he or she would be safe if they joined a union.
Operation Dixie, which sputtered to an end in 1953, was a demoralizing loss for labor, and one that augured badly for the future. The UAW in particular paid a price for the campaign’s failure, as foreign carmakers such as Nissan, Honda, BMW, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz ultimately took advantage of the region’s persistent low wages and antiunion resiliency to open plants that were more cost-effective than the Big Three manufacturing centers in Michigan. Automakers in Tennessee, Alabama, and other Southern states could operate at considerably lower expense by using nonunionized labor and avoiding the ample wage and benefit obligations that burdened Detroit. In one sense the grand effort to transform the textile mills of the South wound up having a far greater impact on the organization behind the plan, for the experience soured the CIO on further civil rights activism and even on its own internal efforts to attain wage equality among members.
Some historians have pond
ered whether, with more national support, Operation Dixie might have served as the opening salvo of the modern civil rights movement. It seems unlikely. There was not yet a movement of black Southerners in towns like Montgomery or Atlanta, or on college campuses in North Carolina, willing to march, protest, and be arrested to secure a good job at a textile mill, as there would be a decade later over segregation on buses, at lunch counters, and in reaction to voting injustices. Nor was there yet adequate commitment from the Justice Department, the courts, or the federal government. Not until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education would the Supreme Court remove the legal underpinning for Jim Crow segregation; and it would take the subsequent desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to move a U.S. president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to send troops to quell racial difficulties in the South, the first time this had occurred in more than eight decades. From a labor perspective, success by Operation Dixie would have likely transformed not only the country’s union movement but possibly the political history of the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century, for as labor attorney Thomas Geoghegan writes, the CIO’s ability to organize the South would have made labor “a truly national force, and not a regional one, [that remained] trapped in the Northeast and Midwest.”46 On either score, if Operation Dixie was convincing of anything, it was that any future commitment to change in the South would need to be overwhelming, and draw upon support from a wider proportion of American society.
AFTER THE PASSING of a generation, the differences over trade unionization that had caused the rupture of the AFL and the breakaway of the CIO in the 1930s had begun to ebb. Industrial unionism’s appropriateness was now apparent; large-membership locals of unskilled industrial workers could not be kept subordinate to old-time craft unions. With the CIO at 6 million members and the AFL at 9 million (the railway brotherhoods had about 2.5 million members), it was not difficult to perceive the potential in reuniting the country’s two major workers’ organizations, especially in an era so inimical to labor’s gains. Personal antagonisms on the part of some of the unions’ elders had long impeded any movement toward reconciliation, but in November 1952, by coincidence, both William Green of the AFL and Philip Murray of the CIO died, creating a power vacuum that could be filled by men far less tainted by the groups’ contentious history. The case for maximum labor unity was urged by another factor that same month—the election of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower to the White House over liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson.
Replacing Murray as CIO president was Walter Reuther, who in 1935 had been one of the founders of the UAW. Originally a Ford tool-and-die craftsman, he had earned his union stripes in the Flint struggle of early 1937 along with his two brothers, Roy and Victor, who were also UAW officers, and later that year at the Battle of the Overpass, where he had been among those assaulted by the Ford “Service Department” men. By 1946 he had won out over his fellow Overpass sufferer Richard Frankensteen to assume the UAW presidency.
Reuther’s was possibly the friendliest face ever to emerge from the leadership ranks of the U.S. labor movement. Likable and gregarious, he possessed a quality of genuineness and an irrepressible energy that endeared him to his followers and the American public. These very attributes, and his popularity, often grated on the sensibilities of tougher, more no-nonsense union men—George Meany considered him soft and John L. Lewis once called him “a pseudo-intellectual nitwit”47—but to most Americans Walter Reuther was the labor leader one might want as a next-door neighbor. Throughout his long career he was also perhaps the union movement’s most prominent exponent of the idea that organized labor should serve as a vehicle for promoting expanded human rights and democracy, if for nothing else than as a means of safeguarding the future of a free working people. “The smart, dancing-eyed Reuther,” wrote Harper’s during the war, “is something special among labor leaders, a person who moves in a world of ideas that includes a concept of the general welfare as distinct from short-term labor welfare.”48
One of Reuther’s cherished recollections was of the time he and his younger brother Victor had been taken by their father, Valentine Reuther, the Socialist leader of a brewers’ union, to visit Eugene Debs when he was incarcerated at the Moundsville Penitentiary in West Virginia.49 “Tell my comrades that I entered the prison doors a flaming revolutionist, my head erect, my spirit untamed and my soul unconquerable,” Debs had declared upon his arrival at Moundsville. Reuther, then eleven years old, never forgot the convict’s calm, saintly presence, or how, when leaving the cellblock, his father had begun to cry, asking, “How can they imprison so kind and gentle a man?”50
Walter was by 1922 a skilled tool-and-die worker at the Ford Motor plant at River Rouge. Laid off in the early days of the Depression, in 1933 he and Victor, having saved $450 each, embarked together on a three-year working trip in Europe. They bicycled across the Continent and toured the ruins of the recently burned Reichstag in Berlin before going on to Russia. There they joined other foreign technicians hired in an arrangement between the Ford Motor Company and the Soviet state to help adapt Ford manufacturing methods to Soviet automobile production. The two-year work experience at the Gorki plant would come to haunt both Reuthers once the dread fear of Stalinist Russia became a deep-seated anxiety in America. In 1938 Walter was one of three hundred CIO members called before Congress’s Dies Committee (a forerunner of the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC]), led by Congressman Martin Dies of Texas. Reuther fended off allegations that he was a Communist, explaining that he and Victor, while initially enthusiastic about working at the Russian factory, had become disillusioned by the Communist Party hierarchy and the ways it mistreated workers and interfered with shop operations. The Reuthers’ final split with Moscow came the following year when Russia and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. Walter Reuther, disgusted with the Soviets’ cynical appeasement of Hitler, also turned against leftist influence in the UAW.
Reuther was famously known as an ideas man, a scribbler of thoughts on notepads and scraps of paper, and in 1940 he came forward with an interesting proposal. The war in Europe had begun and Reuther, having been in Germany as Hitler came to power as well as in Japan on his way home from Russia, was, unlike many Americans, under no illusion that the United States could remain on the sidelines. He suggested that some of the nation’s automobile manufacturing facilities be refitted to produce airplanes, using the mass production techniques of auto-making as opposed to the time-consuming craft methods then used for building airplanes one at a time. Five hundred planes could be built in a day, Reuther predicted, writing, “England’s battles, it used to be said, were won on the playing fields of Eton. This plan is put forward in the belief that America’s can be won on the assembly lines of Detroit.”51 The CIO’s Philip Murray and R. J. Thomas, then chief of the UAW, passed Reuther’s idea on to President Roosevelt, who thanked labor for its efforts and shared the concept with his war production team. William Knudson and Charles Kettering of GM were among those who raised technical questions as to whether Reuther’s proposal was realistic. The airplane-making business itself, through its Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce, also balked at the notion.
Knudson’s concerns were the most critical, as he sat on the board of the Office of Production Management (OPM). He and Reuther had crossed swords a few years earlier during the Flint sit-down strike, when the GM boss had been sufficiently impressed with Walter’s negotiating skills to confide, “Young man, I wish you were selling used cars for me.”
“Used cars?” asked Reuther.
“Yes, used cars. Anyone can sell new cars.”52
It was decidedly a “new car” that Reuther was selling this time, with his talk of five hundred airplanes a day, but Knudson wasn’t buying. Reuther nonetheless took the GM executive’s brush-off as a challenge. In Detroit, he gathered a task force of UAW men and others who served the various carmakers and conducted a lengthy technical inquiry to test his own hypothes
is. The consensus opinion after a thorough review was that the scheme was feasible. But there were larger nontechnical issues inhibiting industry enthusiasm. Reuther’s conversion plan would require the nation’s automobile companies to pool their equipment, manpower, and brain trust into one collective enterprise—a vision that was off-putting to car company executives. Equally troubling was Reuther’s assumption that, due to the urgency of the conversion, labor would be involved as a partner in management and production decisions. He had proposed a joint oversight board with three committees—technical, labor supply, and subcontracting—all of which would be coordinated by representatives of industry, government, and labor.
“This was not labor standing by the edge of the desk, hat in hand, gratefully accepting the opportunity to make a suggestion here and there,” historian Bruce Catton recalled. “This was labor declaring that it had just as much responsibility for winning the war as management had and asserting that, on the whole, it possibly had just about as much to contribute. It was a revolutionary proposal—not Fascism, not Communism, nothing that could be put in any of the familiar pigeonholes, but something breathtakingly new.”53