Letter: On Operation Dixie

Veronica Darby’s article on the failure of Operation Dixie is worth a read but as an analysis of Labor history it is fundamentally flawed. I was amazed that a piece examining the failure of the CIO’s Operation Dixie itself fails to make any significant mention, much less examination, of the mammoth Textile Workers Strike of 1934-35. This was easily the most seismic event in Southern Labor’s experience since the Civil War. Its catastrophic failure traumatized the textile workers and demoralized the southern working class as a whole for decades to come. Given that the CIO effort came barely a decade after the disaster, Operation Dixie was attempting to organize the very same workers who had been broken by that defeat. Late in his life my father could still recall having seen the National Guard deployed as strike breakers around the mill in his hometown.

That an analysis attempting to explain the reasons for the CIO’s failure would ignore this material reality calls its credibility into serious question. Particularly when we consider that many textile workers, with good reason, felt betrayed by their Union leadership following the earlier strike. Any effective analysis of the failure of the CIO’s organizing drive would need to take account of this legacy of demoralization and distrust. Darby’s analysis doesn’t.

Rather than situating her examination within the broader historical context of the Southern Labor struggle, Darby chooses to situate it within the context of the post war conflict between Communist and anti-Communist elements within the US Labor movement. While it cannot be denied that this was a major factor, Darby focuses on it to the practical exclusion of all else. She does admit to the role of racism but this is largely superficial, used primarily as a means of drawing a contrast between the strategies of business unionism and Communist led unionism. At no point does she so much as mention that the white supremacist Governments of the southern states rested, both implicitly and explicitly, on an alliance between the political elites and the Ku Klux Klan. Surely the reality that the struggles of Southern Labor were conducted under what amounted to regimes of state terror requires some comment?

In summary, despite its presentations otherwise, Darby’s article isn’t a critical examination of the why’s and wherefore’s of the failure of Operation Dixie. That would require locating her critique in a broad analysis of the historical context and material realities under which southern labor struggled, as well as the political conflicts within the Labor movement nationally. This she does not do. Rather, she presents something akin to an ideological morality tale. Were it not, she seems to suggest, for anti-Communism Operation Dixie could have succeeded. The flaw in this conclusion is that it must ignore the fact that a far more militant and sweeping effort at organizing the textile workers of the South, carried out at the height of radicalization within the US Labor movement, had likewise gone down to defeat barely a decade previous.