Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf ◽  
Ken Fones-Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
American South ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Southern Religion ◽  
Union Activists ◽  
The American South

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. This book explores the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The book's nuanced look at working-class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the book shows, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, the book provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

Dying to Eat

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
American South ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Korean Chinese ◽  
The American South

In Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife, Candi K. Cann examines the role of food in dying, death, bereavement, and the afterlife. The coeditors seek to illuminate on the intersection of food and death in various cultures as well as fill an overlooked scholarly niche. Dying to Eat offers a multi-cultural perspective from contributors examining Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Latin American, European, Middle Eastern and American rituals and customs surrounding death and food. The contributors discuss a wide array of topics, including the role of death in the Islamic Sufi approach to food, the intersection of Buddhism, Catholicism, and Shamanism, as well as the role of casseroles and church cookbooks in the American South. The collection will provide not only food for thought on the subject of death and afterlife, but also theories, methods, recipes, and instructions on how and why food is used in dying, death, mourning, and afterlife rituals and practices in different cultural and religious contexts.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Locke
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bible Belt ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Southern Religion ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The American South ◽  
Major Argument

The introduction presents the book’s major argument that, through the politics of prohibition, ambitious evangelical leaders were able to inject themselves into southern life and create the political conditions that would later identify the American South as the Bible Belt. H. L. Mencken coined that term later, in the 1920s, to capture what he saw as the South’s peculiar alliance of region and religion, but the reality that Mencken described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. To explore that process, the introduction establishes key concepts such as clericalism and anticlericalism, argues for Texas as the proper focus for a targeted study, and previews major characters and milestones in the development of a politicized brand of southern religion.

The Knights of Labor

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Hild
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
Knights Of Labor ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
Railway System

Founded in Philadelphia in 1869, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor became the largest and most powerful labor organization that had ever existed in the United States by the mid-1880s. Recruiting men and women of nearly all occupations and all races (except Chinese), the Knights tried to reform American capitalism and politics in ways that would curb the growing economic and political abuses and excesses of the Gilded Age. Leaders of the organization viewed strikes as harmful to workers and employers alike, especially after the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, but a series of railroad strikes in 1884 and 1885 caused the Knights’ membership rolls to reach a peak of at least 700,000 in 1886. The heyday of the Knights of Labor proved brief though. Two major events in May 1886, the Haymarket riot in Chicago and the failure of a strike against Jay Gould’s Southwestern Railway system, began a series of setbacks that caused the organization to decline about as rapidly as it had arisen. By 1893, membership dropped below 100,000, and the Knights’ leaders aligned the organization with the farmers’ movement and the Populist Party. The Knights increasingly became a rural organization, as urban skilled and semi-skilled workers joined trade unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The AFL, however, proved less inclusive and egalitarian than the Knights of Labor, although some of the latter’s ideals would be carried on by later organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Black, Slave, Woman—The Role of Slave Women in the Ante-bellum South

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-154
Author(s):  
Chin Yu Chen
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Black Women ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Work And Family ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Slave Women ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The American South

There is a famous Chinese proverb which says “a good man never fights with a woman.” From the viewpoint of this Chinese custom, women should always be respected. This maxim certainly was never applied to Black women in the Ante-bellum south of the United States prior to the Civil War. The intent of this paper is to bring to the attention of the reader some of the inhumanity practiced on slave women when they were required to work, without pay, on the plantations in the American South before that country’s Civil War. The women learned quickly to “respect” the “lash” which beat them if they did not do their work properly, or sassed their master. Slavery, at its best, is a terrible institution, and this paper does not address the subject of slavery in other parts of the world. This study is designed to study the plight of Black women, and their struggles, in that time of supposed Southern “gentility.” This study will also attempt to provide an insight into the work and family life of Black women in the era of the Antebellum South.

Labor and the Cold War: A Fifty-Year Perspective

2000 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 110-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Scott Smith
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Labor Studies ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Labor Activists ◽  
The Cold War

Roughly fifty years after the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) purged communist-led unions from its membership, the Southwest Labor Studies Association met in San Francisco from April 29 to May 1, 1999, to reconsider the history and implications of this event and, more broadly, to attempt to untangle the connections between and among McCarthyism, anticommunist liberalism, and the political trajectory of organized labor during the postwar era. Bringing together labor activists, union members, and academics, panels considered these themes from a number of perspectives and methodological approaches. Papers focused on such topics as the dynamics of political repression, the effectiveness of liberal anticommunist politics for organized labor, and the role of the state in shaping the labor movement.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf ◽  
Ken Fones-Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
The People ◽  
Central Elements ◽  
The One ◽  
Public Opposition

This concluding chapter argues that in the end, the Congress of Industrial Organizations' (CIO) Southern Organizing Campaign failed for a number of reasons—employer intransigence, repression by local authorities, public opposition, racism, anti-Communism, CIO strategies, and the improving economic conditions of workers all contributed. Southern evangelical Protestantism also played a part, but not the one typically described in the historical scholarship. The larger lesson is that social movements of any sort and at any time should begin by understanding the culture of the people that they hope will follow their lead. Understanding that only some sort of faith will generally move people to take chances, those social movements should strive to grasp the central elements of that faith.

Christianities in the Now South

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
James Hudnut-Beumler
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
American South ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Past ◽  
Southern Religion ◽  
The American South

This book explores the extent to which there still is a distinctive southern religion, characterized by a predominant evangelical Christianity, composed of white and black representative churches. Recognizing the overdrawn quality of such evaluations even for the southern past, the argument is offered that intra-Christian diversity in the American South has reached the point where the term “Christianities” is more appropriate to capture the range of beliefs and practices visible in the 21st century. Christians in the Now South are so diverse as to sound at times more like a cacophony than the supposed southern harmonies of the past.

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