The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization, 1940–1970

Abstract

In the prevailing narrative of twentieth-century American labor, the South has played an established role. The part reads something like this: Despite the sporadic efforts of Southern workers to unionize, the South remained a region of unorganized, low-wage, politically powerless workers, a region whose working people were divided by race, overwhelmed by managerial paternalism, and repressed by state and local government. Even during the heyday of Big Labor (circa 1935–1955), when industrial workers in the North and West built powerful unions, organized labor misfired in Dixie. The trend was not hard to explain. The South's repressive systems of politics and race relations, its chronically low-wage economy, and (some, excluding myself, would argue) its unusually individualistic workers—all of these created an inhospitable climate for labor unions in the New South.