Elizabeth Fones-Wolf

Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf is a professor of history at West Virginia University. She is the author of Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio, 1933-58, and the co-author of Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie.

Dr. Fones-Wolf's scholarship has focused on different aspects of twentieth-century political, economic, and social history. A major theme of much of this work has been the struggle between organized labor and business to shape the ideas and images that constituted America’s political culture. 

Her first book Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism (1994), examined the ways business’s political and economic ideology permeated American society from the shop floor to the classroom, to the church, and the political arena during the late forties and fifties. It offers an answer to one of the most important questions in recent American history: how did a majority of Americans come to give uncritical support for big business and the market while growing increasingly suspicious of organized labor and government? 

This project led to a second book, Waves of Opposition (2006), in which she explored in greater depth organized labor’s efforts to challenge the corporate domination of the mass media, particularly radio. Through the Depression and World War II, unionists vigorously fought efforts to ensure that labor had access to broadcasting. They joined a loose coalition of reformers who fought unchecked commercialism, promoted public service, and sought to make radio more representative and democratic.

She recently published a book co-authored with Ken Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (University of Illinois Press, 2015), exploring religion, class relations, and politics in modern America. This work began in the early eighties with an article on the Progressive Era in a path-breaking labor history collection, Working Class America (1983). 

She and Ken have come back to the topic in the ensuing years. Indeed, Selling Free Enterprise explored the interaction of the business community and Protestant churches following World War II. In 1998 and 1999, she published two articles with Ken Fones-Wolf on the relationship between Protestantism and organized labor’s struggle for social justice. 

The latter article won the 1999 Woodrow Wilson Award for the best scholarly article in American Presbyterian/Reformed history. Struggled for the Soul of the Postwar South won the 2015 Organization of American Historians David Montgomery Book Prize.