Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 (History of Communication)

Politics & Social Sciences

Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth A.

Sociology

University of Illinois Press

A riveting look at the rise and fall of labor radio in the U.S.    In Waves of Opposition, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf describes and analyzes the battles over the powerful new medium of radio, which helped spark  the massive upsurge of organized labor during the Depression. She demonstrates its importance as a weapon in an ideological war between labor and business, where corporations used radio to sing the praises of individualism and consumerism, while unions emphasized equal rights, industrial democracy, and social justice.    Organized chronologically, the work explores the advent of local labor radio stations such as WCFL and WEVD, labor's anti-censorship campaigns, and unionist experiments with early FM broadcasting. Through extensive use of business and union archives, as well as broadcasting industry records, Fones-Wolf demonstrates how radio became a key component of organized labor's efforts to contest businesses’ domination of political discourse throughout the thirties, forties, and fifties. Waves of Opposition concludes by claiming that labor’s virtual disappearance from American media today helps explain in part why unions have become so marginalized and offers important historical lessons to those seeking to revitalize organized labor.

Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio (History of Communication)

Business & Money

Industries

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (Working Class in American History)

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The authors' 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 authors show, 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, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

FONES-WOLF, KEN

Economics

The post-World War II years in the United States were marked by the business community's efforts to discredit New Deal liberalism and undermine the power and legitimacy of organized labor. In Selling Free Enterprise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf describes how conservative business leaders strove to reorient workers away from their loyalties to organized labor and government, teaching that prosperity could be achieved through reliance on individual initiative, increased productivity, and the protection of personal liberty. Based on research in a wide variety of business and labor sources, this detailed account shows how business permeated every aspect of American life, including factories, schools, churches, and community institutions.

Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 (The History of Media and Communication)

History

'Waves of Opposition' describes and analyses the battles over the powerful medium of radio, which helped spark the massive upsurge of organised labour during the Depression. The text demonstrates its importance as a weapon in an ideological war between labour and business.

Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio (The History of Communication (HCO))

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