the union in the postwar period. 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." 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. At the time of the launch of Operation Dixie, CIO membership in the Southern United States stood at about 225,000 — a figure excluding the 100,000 Southern members of the United Mine Workers of America, a union which had disaffiliated from the CIO federation in 1942. About 42,000 of these were represented by the CIO-affiliated Textile Workers Union of America. Other important CIO unions in the region included the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), as well as the Oil Workers' Union, Shipbuilding Workers, and Rubber Workers' Union. A permanent Southern Organizing Committee (SOC) was appointed, a group which included top officials of the United Auto Workers (UAW), the United Electrical Workers (UE), the Textile Workers' Union of America, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, among other member unions. Veteran Steelworkers' Union organizer Van Bittner was named as director of the SOC, with 39-year-old Textile Workers' Union Vice President George Baldanzi tapped as Bittner's right-hand man. A total of $1 million was to be raised for the effort by the CIO, with its member unions assessed percentage shares of the cost based on membership size. A total of 200 organizers were to be put into the field as part of Operation Dixie, which was seen by union officials as a return to the methods successfully employed to organize the steel industry in 1936 and 1937. This campaign was touted by CIO President Murray as "the most important drive of its kind ever undertaken in the history of this country" and was the spur to a parallel organizing effort in the South by the rival American Federation of Labor, beginning with an AFL Southern Labor Conference that same May. Organizing tactics The CIO's strategy was to target specific geographic locations within the Southern region and to send in teams of organizers into each of these locations to "proceed to organize