Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf (review)

When thinking about the contemporary South, especially from the perspective of politics, one thinks conservative, evangelical, and Republican—a geographical base for the American right. Yet anyone interested in understanding the history of the South is confronted immediately with its various social, economic, political, and cultural shades. Expanding the chronology of the historical South beyond the last seventy-five years reveals a region that defies facile generalizations. Labor historians Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf have revealed new realities of Southern society in their latest book, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie. The idea that Southerners would have interacted with those on the radical left is at best inconceivable, but the notion that evangelicalism, central to contemporary conservatism, could be used to justify left-leaning labor activism is ostensibly much worse than inconceivable: it's heretical.

Religion has remained a constant in the formation of Southern identity from the colonial period to the contemporary era. Regardless of where one stands along the political spectrum, there is no denying that faith has left an indelible mark on Southern life. In Struggle for the Soul, Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf, both professors of history at the University of West Virginia, have combined their scholarly efforts to consider the "power of the sacred" in providing a "framework for working class concerns" in the postwar industrial South, focusing on the major players, friends and foes of organized labor, who battled for the souls of the southern industrial working class.

Southern radicalism can be traced back to the Great Depression. But the efforts of those who sought to unionize industrial workers intensified when the federal government sought to coordinate American industry during World War II, a global conflict that led to the greatest economic boom in the nation's history. The Southern economy, ensconced within an economic cul-de-sac from post-bellum years through to the Great Depression, leaving the South as a financially dependent region, was converted around the time of the war. Almost immediately, plans were put in place to organize Southern industrial labor. The industrial conversion, however, led to negative consequences for the workers. Southerners, including Protestant leaders such as Alva Wilmot Taylor, David Burgess, and the intrepid Lucy Randolph Mason, to name a few, addressed the social problems created by industrial capitalism by turning to their Protestant faith.

Workers knew that capitalization exacerbated class and racial tensions in an industrial economy. They also realized that a fundamental component of capitalism—namely, the creation of systems of dependency or unfreedom by the managerial classes—clashed with the core tenets of Christianity. "Jesus," Alva Taylor proclaimed, "was the 'real' progenitor of a democracy that would seep away class and racial distinctions and pursue social justice." "Taylor believed," Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf write, "that if Jesus were alive . . . he would be 'at the head of these vast, marching columns of labor'" (44). Lucy Randolph Mason forged a similar message. Those who were "fit to inherit the Kingdom of God," Mason believed, "served God as they cared for his children" (128). The message of these social gospelers appealed to those denominations with a significantly larger working class: Assemblies of God, Pentecostal Holiness, Churches of God, and Pillar of Fire. Challenging the narrow view that "individual salvation was the only sacred concern," these pious proletarians along with supporters among the bourgeois would be part of a "prophetic front," the authors argue, "firmly rooted in a postmillennial evangelical Protestantism" (45).

The Fones-Wolfs do not want readers to view the religious faithful among the supporters of unionization as "escapist, fatalistic, and other worldly." In one sense, Karl Marx was correct when he described religion as an opiate of the oppressed. Indeed, religion is itself a kind of solace, which, at times...