Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie

One of the things we realized as we read the contributions to this symposium is that if you try to shine a bright light on a factor that has been ignored or slighted by previous scholarship in the field, it ends up distorting some of what you are trying to say. In Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie, we hope that we did not give the impression that we blamed Protestant evangelicalism for Operation Dixie’s failure or that we intended to privilege that factor above all others. We believe that a powerful mix of racism, anticommunism, employer intransigence, and repressive state and local governments was the major impediment to the CIO’s campaign. What we discovered, however, was that aspects of the region’s dominant religious culture at that particular moment made the CIO’s overtures less appealing to white workers than labor activists and liberal reformers had hoped. The sacred sphere of southern white evangelicals was not static but rather the product of fears as well as hopes, of nightmares as well as dreams, and influenced by the notion that the world was a contest between good and evil in which God and Satan intervened directly into their lives and battled for their souls. This colored the way they saw employers, unions, and communists. Their religious views were also shaped by a rising level of material comfort and the prospect for even greater economic security for their siblings and their children. It is little wonder, then, that a worker like Lucille Hall would look askance at unions’ sending “outsiders in here to tell you how bad you were treated. You’d know better” (quoted on 81). The symposium’s participants have given us a tall order in terms of responding to things we might have done better. We are grateful for their attention to the