Because the sociologist Jack M. Bloom places it in “Class, Race and the Civil Rights Motion,”
The obvious defeat of Populism and the following disenfranchisement of blacks led to a extreme setback for these whites, as nicely. Lots of them misplaced the precise to vote. They had been topic to the cruel phrases of their employers, and so they remained with out labor unions to counter the ability the rich retained. Once they did attempt to kind unions, they discovered the area’s custom of violence turned in opposition to them.
White supremacy had triumphed, however not all whites could be supreme.
Jim Crow didn’t eradicate Black political motion or erase class battle amongst whites. Nonetheless, it established a hierarchical order of social and financial dominance by the homeowners of land and capital. It additionally produced a world of poverty and disinvestment, of Robert Penn Warren’s torn-down mills and grass lined tracks and “whitewashed shacks, all simply alike, set in a row by the cotton fields.”
It was in protection of this world that Southern political and financial elites bitterly resisted organized labor because it grew by leaps and bounds within the Thirties, backed by Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Wagner and the Nationwide Labor Relations Act. It was in protection of this world that those self same elites fought, efficiently, to derail the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ postwar effort to prepare the South, Operation Dixie.
It was in protection of this world, because the historian Katherine Rye Jewell factors out in “{Dollars} for Dixie: Enterprise and the Transformation of Conservatism within the Twentieth Century,” that Southern elites original cultural traditionalism, anti-New Dealism and free market ideology into a brand new mantra of “free enterprise,” meant to face athwart a supposed motion “away from particular person accountability, states’ rights, and native and neighborhood self-government,” within the phrases of the Southern States Industrial Council, a enterprise group organized in opposition to Roosevelt’s imaginative and prescient for the nation.
Organized labor was, is and stays an existential risk to the political and financial elites of a area whose foremost dedication is to the upkeep of an employer-dominated economic system of low-wage labor and its attendant social order. The place an earlier era complained of C.I.O. “communism,” this one warns of U.A.W. socialism. “They proudly name themselves democratic socialists,” the assertion issued on Tuesday by the Republican governors says.
