Operation Dixie

Operation Dixie failed largely due to Jim Crow laws and the deep-seated racial strife in the South which made it difficult for black workers and poor whites to engage cooperatively for successful union organization.

The passage of the Taft-Hartley Act additionally undercut the campaign, making it easier for employers to obstruct union organizing drives by inhibiting the right to strike and allowing prohibition of closed shops.

The American trade union movement was largely a Northern phenomenon at the time of its inception, with the first continuous organization for the advancement of wages emerging among the shoemakers of Philadelphia in 1792.

[3] The stage seemed set for further union growth across the region as the wars in Europe and the Pacific drew to a close and industry began to gear up to slate long pent-up consumer demand.

Mass organization of low wage Southern workers by the CIO would thus achieve the dual purpose of protecting contract gains elsewhere and making the regional and national political climate into one favorable to labor, union leaders believed.

[6] Citing the conservative political climate and low wage economic conditions of the region, the committee returned with a report declaring that "the best place for the CIO to undertake organizing...would be in the South.

"[7] Internal discussions proceeded throughout the fall and winter of 1945–46, with the governing Executive Board of the CIO signing on to a plan massive campaign to unionize the whole of manufacturing industry in the Southern United States in March 1946.

Former steel union chief Philip Murray (1886–1952) was the President of the Congress of Industrial Organizations at the time Operation Dixie was launched.
The number of American workers in trade unions more than quadrupled during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945).
Veteran steel union organizer Van Bittner was the director of the CIO's Southern Organizing Committee, the entity which coordinated Operation Dixie.