> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 4:38 PM, mep <maximumep at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Guess it's not really Carrol's disconnect from reality that's at issue
> here.
>
> If Operation Dixie was "half-assed," why in the passage you yourself
> cite does Moody term it the CIO's "first serious incursion into the
> South?" The organizing drive covered 12 states, lasted 7 years and
> consumed a considerable amount of the CIO's resources. That it failed
> for specific reasons is beside the point.
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It didn't merely "fail" because of objective conditions... The CIO bureaucracy specifically refused to carry out the grass-roots mobilization that would have been required to unionize Southern workers, particularly by challenging Jim Crow racism, -- and this was largely because the leadership's priorities were a) the Democratic party b) purging reds. That a bureaucratic leadership, labour union or otherwise, sets up a project (or in this case tolerates a project set up by radicals that they would later purge) and allows resources to whittled away on it for a few years doesn't necessarily signify a commitment to win or follow through. The CIO's key commitments meant that would rather sabotage, even pander to the racism of white workers, than carry out a serious unionization campaign:
"The turning point for the radical labor movement that had arisen in the 1930s came with the failure of Operation Dixie, the campaign to organize workers in the South. The CIO's right wing led the campaign, excluded left wing organizers, declined to reach out to black workers, and hesitated to tackle the racist character of the Democratic Party in the South. The CIO leadership even attempted to appeal to the race prejudice of white workers in order to get them to sign up with the new unions. But, organized on that basis, Operation Dixie proved an utter failure, with fewer unionized workers in the South at the end of the 1940s than there had been at the beginning. The failure of Operation Dixie not only retarded social progress in the South and stopped the forward motion of the labor movement, it also established the basis for a white power reaction first in the form of the Dixiecrats (1948), later in the George Wallace Campaign (1968), and finally in Nixon's strategy of winning Southern white voters to the Republican Party."[11]
http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/fromthearchives?nid=179
-mep