The Congress of Industrial Organizations leads a campaign known as "Operation Dixie" to unionize the textile industries in the South, with the intent of increasing wages and building large-scale support for unionization.

The campaign is part of a larger political strategy to shift the conservative political stronghold held in the South via organized labor. It largely fails due to Jim Crow laws and white people living in poverty resisting organizing alongside Black workers. This failure also marks the labor movement's shift away from radical socialist organizing to a more conservative approach.