The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  For Chavez, the victory vindicated his strategy and affirmed the depth of his support. The Teamsters might have had reason to be confident about winning among workers in the fields; they never imagined Chavez and Ross could conduct such a methodical search and persuade so many former workers to return to Delano and vote.

  If he had lost the election, Chavez said a few years later, that would have been the end. “We didn’t have the credibility21 with the people yet, we weren’t established, we were just beginning. I think the public wouldn’t have supported us after that.”

  Chapter 14

  Chavez the Leader

  There are about five people in the union that are like that: they just look at me and blink their eyes and do it. I may be wrong, they still do it. But it’s also a reciprocal thing, they have more influence with me than most anybody else.

  His leadership burnished by two big victories, Chavez began to assert his vision more forcefully and assemble a team that shared his values and met his needs.

  As the strike entered its second year, his public persona remained the patient, soft-spoken, collaborative leader. He talked with many people, elicited information, consulted a handful of close advisers, and made decisions. During deliberations, he was so engaged and solicitous that many participants mistook the process for democracy.

  One of his early decisions became a linchpin for all that followed. In Fred Ross’s model, the organizer was the spark, always in the back of the room pushing others forward to be leaders. Ross’s star pupil adopted a different model, one that grew out of his frustrations in the CSO and his difficulty trusting others to do anything as well as he could. Chavez saw himself as both the leader and the organizer-in-chief. He must play both roles, he argued, because he alone had the requisite commitment.

  “The organizer has to work more1 than anyone else,” he said. “Almost no one in a group is totally committed. And in the initial part of the movement, there’s the fear that when the organizer leaves, the movement will collapse. So you have to be able to say, ‘I’m not going to be here a year, or six months, but an awful long time—until when they get rid of me, they’ll have leaders to do it themselves.’”

  The twin roles showcased different facets of Chavez’s personality. As the organizer who wanted to persuade people to act, he was charming, attentive, and humble. As the leader who wanted an order carried out, he was single-minded, demanding, and ruthless. “Nice guys throughout the ages have done very little for humanity,” he told a group of volunteers. “It isn’t the nice guy who gets things done. It’s the hardheaded guy.”2

  He made his values clear: loyalty and hard work topped the list. You earn your place in this union, Chavez said repeatedly, with hard work. He divided people3 into three categories. He reserved the highest accolades for those in the first group, “the guy who can go out there and turn the whole thing upside down, and get production, and get results. To me, this guy is very valuable. I have something in common with him. I like him.”

  In the second group was “the guy who works his head off and can’t get things done. Fine, he can be taught.”

  The third group was the lazy, and laziness was a cardinal sin. Chavez marked those people, and sooner or later, they would be purged. “That guy has no business in the union,” he said. “If we don’t do that, then we destroy ourselves.”

  His closest advisers remained Chavez’s family and the friends he had trusted and relied on for years—Helen, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, Manuel Chavez, and Richard Chavez, who had joined the union full-time. Chris Hartmire and Jim Drake had earned spots in the tier just beneath the inner circle. Fred Ross had a special place, the mentor turned student, always treated with great respect. As needs arose, Chavez drew in new disciples. Almost all were Anglo men.

  Two key players came from nearby Bakersfield. Brother Gilbert, a Christian brother who had met Chavez a year before the strike, resigned as assistant principal at Garces High School and dropped out of graduate school in November 1965. His assignment was to build a service center—the tool that Chavez had developed during his years organizing in the CSO and which he valued so highly as a mechanism for attracting and binding followers to the movement. Brother Gilbert soon reverted to his given name, LeRoy Chatfield. Tall and rail thin, with white-blond hair and piercing blue eyes, Chatfield was an exceedingly capable and equally loyal presence. Chatfield raised funds and oversaw a service center that soon included the newspaper, the credit union, a health clinic, and various properties. Chatfield, then thirty-one, was respected for his access and efficiency, though his authoritarian demeanor often clashed with the more freewheeling spirit of the movement. Chatfield considered Chavez his closest friend.

  Marshall Ganz was a recent graduate of Bakersfield High, where he had starred on the school debate team and knew Brother Gilbert as coach of a rival squad. Ganz was the son of a Bakersfield rabbi who had tried to help Chavez procure deputy registrars a decade earlier. Ganz had dropped out of Harvard after going to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, worked for SNCC, and returned home to discover a civil rights battle in his backyard. A generation younger than the others, the twenty-three-year-old was the only Anglo in the inner circle who made a concerted effort to learn Spanish. He soon spoke flawlessly, enabling him to organize in the fields. He loved to brainstorm and had played a key role in organizing the peregrinación, plotting out the route, handling logistics, and drafting Chavez’s explanations of the march.

  As growers became more skilled at using the courts to restrain picketing and cripple the strike, Chavez wanted a lawyer who would fight back. He could not have found a better match than twenty-six-year-old Jerry Cohen, who made up for his lack of experience with a fighting spirit that rivaled that of his new boss. Brash, fast-talking, and brilliant, Cohen saw the law as a tool and loved to find creative ways to turn it against the ruling class. Chavez always said you don’t win by playing defense, and Cohen, an avid sports fan, shared that conviction. Only one year out of law school, he immediately saw ways to wage an offensive battle even in a legal system rigged against the union. Bill Kircher arranged for the AFL-CIO to pay Cohen $750 a month.

  As Chavez brought more players into his emerging kitchen cabinet, others were gradually pushed aside. Larry Itliong, technically the number two person in the union, felt cut out and grew angry. Many of the earlier generation of CSO leaders had faded in importance; some were turned off by the religious pageantry or frustrated by the lack of militancy, while others found themselves marginalized. Antonio Orendain, the union’s secretary-treasurer, remained the only Mexican immigrant in the leadership ranks. He treated Chavez with a certain formality, an outsider’s reserved respect. Unlike most people, who called him “Cesar” (Chavez used the English pronunciation, CEE-zer), Orendain always addressed the union leader as “Chavez,” or “Sr. Chavez” in writing. Orendain referred to Chatfield and the others as “the twelve apostles.” (Chavez also used the term on occasion; when Cesar prevailed upon his brother to join the union full-time, Richard Chavez recalled,4 “He said, ‘I want you to be one of my apostles.’”)

  But Orendain appreciated the value of Chavez’s leadership. Sent to Texas to straighten out disorganized factions after a rogue melon strike broke out, Orendain explained, “In California, just one man makes all the decisions—Cesar Chavez. You never hear anything about an executive board calling the shots. You hear only one name.5 People like to have one flag; people like to have one leader, one name.”

  With the exception of Huerta, women remained in the background and played traditional roles. They typed, answered the phone, took notes at the Friday night meetings, ran mimeograph machines, took care of the children, and worked as secretaries and nurses. Chavez had absorbed his mother’s lessons about gender roles, and the nascent women’s liberation movement had not affected his ingrained views. “Of course, I never change our kids.6 I never even learned how to put a diaper on,” Chavez boasted. He believed that women needed to be involved in the strike
to make sure they supported their husbands. He wanted women transcribing notes and doing other secretarial work because they were “made for this kind . . . [of] tedious work.”7

  Chavez also found women useful for public protests. On one occasion, he asked Helen to lead a group of women staging a sit-in at the office of the new Fresno bishop, Timothy Manning. Manning had made overtures to the union and assigned a young radical priest to minister full-time to the Delano farmworkers. Father Mark Day began his ministry8 by celebrating mass in a bright red robe emblazoned with the black eagle and led worshippers in “Solidaridad Pa’ Siempre” (Solidarity Forever) and “Nosotros Venceremos” (We Shall Overcome). Growers expressed outrage. Manning acquiesced to pressure and reassigned Day.

  When Chavez found out, he dispatched his wife and a group of women to the chancery. Informed that Manning was out, the women politely brushed past the receptionists and made themselves comfortable in his office. One mother changed her baby’s diaper. Helen Chavez installed herself in the bishop’s chair, and when they got hungry, she carefully cut a candy bar into small pieces on the bishop’s desk. Meanwhile, supporters sent dozens of telegrams9 to Manning, beseeching him to reconsider and allow Day to remain in Delano. At the same time, sympathetic reporters were asked to make calls—but not write stories—inquiring about the rumored transfer. By the end of the day, Manning had relented.

  Helen Chavez preferred to stay out of sight as much as possible and avoid the limelight even during events like the march to Sacramento. “Her sense of privacy is what I like about her,” Cesar said to an interviewer. “I mean, I like everything about her, but I really like that a lot.”10 Helen spent much of her time taking care of their large family in a house that was always spotless and smelled of Hexol. She cleaned, cooked, and battled cockroaches. She also continued to manage the credit union, having learned basic accounting techniques. Reserved and closed in public, in private she was outspoken and funny. Ida Cousino especially loved spending time with Helen and her small circle of women friends—her sister Petra and a few others. In private, they let down their hair, drank beer, and cracked jokes. They were boisterous and salty, gossiping about staff members and friends. They shared stories about their husbands, who were gone more than they were home, and often that was just as well. “He wants to make the babies,”11 Helen would say about Cesar, “but he doesn’t want to take care of them.”

  The adjective used most often to describe Helen was “fierce.” The facial feature people remarked on were her fierce eyebrows. She was fiercely loyal to Cesar and would not tolerate any griping about her husband. And she could be fierce in her condemnation of others: women she viewed as poor mothers, or young volunteers she considered floozies out to seduce married men. She was equally strong as a champion for the women she liked, for whom she served as an important role model. Despite her crowded house, she welcomed volunteers who lived in the Chavez house at various times. When Kathy Lynch moved in, she wanted to teach Helen to drive so she would feel less isolated, but Cesar did not approve. Others thought Helen enjoyed the dependence, knowing there were always people happy to give her rides.

  Chavez exhibited a fondness for smart, aggressive women who demonstrated impeccable loyalty. The first to win admittance into the inner circle was Marion Moses, a nurse who had been taking pre-med courses in Berkeley when she first visited Delano. “Can you type?” Drake asked the first time Moses walked into the office. She could, and she did. But as a nurse, she brought professional expertise of greater value and soon was working in a makeshift clinic. Like Chatfield, she had strong opinions but knew when to keep them to herself. She proved herself by her willingness to unquestioningly take on any assignment and deliver. When Chavez suspected someone was stealing money from the union, he handed the problem to Moses. When he grew frustrated that the strike kitchen refused to save scraps of meat to feed his worm farm, Chavez turned to Moses, knowing she would both understand his passion for organic fertilizer and solve the problem.

  Decades before organic vegetables commanded premiums in supermarkets, Chavez was a committed home gardener. He cultivated his own compost and grew worms to produce nitrogen that would fertilize the barren soil. The writhing box (“this little hole12 where you have some worms”) bothered people, Richard told his brother. But Cesar persisted in his efforts to get scraps thrown out by the strike kitchen each night. When he put Moses on the case, he reported triumphantly, the worms ate well. “Marion has never said no13 to an assignment,” Chavez said. “No matter how shitty it is, she gets it done.”

  Moses exemplified many of the qualities Chavez valued most highly: intelligence, initiative, efficiency, and loyalty. “There are about five people in the union that are like that: they just look at me and blink their eyes and do it,” Chavez explained. “I may be wrong,14 they still do it. But it’s also a reciprocal thing, they have more influence with me than most anybody else.”

  Almost all of the inner circle were paid basic wages from the Migrant Ministry, the nonprofit Service Center, or foundations. Supporters seeking to make tax-exempt donations were directed to foundations that funneled the money to help the strike. Hartmire chaired a nonprofit called the Center for Change and Community Development (CCCD), one of several ways government and foundation grants were quietly directed to the union cause. A grant from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity supported a program run by the CCCD called the Self-Help Service Corps Project, chaired by Richard Chavez. The project trained volunteers to organize and essentially provided staff for the strike, until Governor Ronald Reagan vetoed the funding. At one point, Fred Ross was on the payroll15 at $1,250 a month and Manuel Chavez at $500 a month.

  For some time after the strike began, Chavez continued to say the union needed a paid staff,16 supported by members, to ensure the organization didn’t collapse. He pointed frequently to his experience in the CSO as a lesson in the perils of relying on volunteers and outside funds. “If you don’t have a paid staff, and that staff isn’t in any one place long enough to make the thing strong, you’re not going to get anywhere,” he told an audience in November 1965.

  But soon thereafter, Chavez jettisoned that conviction. The sleeping bags perpetually covering every available inch of floor space were testament to his power to attract people willing to work for free. So he turned his tenuous financial situation into a strength and began to spin the romantic tale of an all-volunteer movement: “None of our staff is salaried, but we can provide a floor to sleep on17 and three meals a day,” he wrote in a form letter. He instituted a tradition that became a hallmark of the movement: the $5-a-week volunteer. Chavez proudly explained that his staff worked for room and board and five bucks a week because it was a movement. Each Friday, Kathy Lynch went to the bank and withdrew a stack of $5 bills, which were handed out ceremoniously at the end of the Friday night meeting in Filipino Hall.

  The young people who flocked to la causa and burnished the legend of the $5-a-week volunteer continued to come primarily through political circles, though more began to be recruited through religious groups and social services internships. The newer arrivals expressed a desire to serve and voiced fewer ideological convictions. They were overwhelmingly Anglo and drawn by Chavez’s unconventional magnetism. “The pay is five dollars18 a week and no one seems to mind—all are too busy doing what they feel they must do,” wrote four students from the University of Oregon, who spent a month-long spring break in Delano. They found Chavez “such an exciting person” and described his address to a packed crowd in Filipino Hall: “Cesar spoke as only a man who is truly the leader of his people can speak. His demands were simple, so reasonable, yet they spelled human dignity and success to his brothers—higher wages, double time for Sunday work, no more labor contractors (loud cheers), better working conditions for women, a fifteen minute paid break in the morning and one in the afternoon, job security in the event of illness.”

  A handful of people knew that not everyone lived on $5 a week, but that knowledge was c
losely guarded. There was no formal discussion about policy. Practices evolved. Chavez was pragmatic. People’s needs were met. The union made arrangements to pick up car payments and student loans for valued volunteers. The few farmworkers who went to work for the union full-time as volunteers worked out supplements for their families.

  In the summer of 1967, the frantic pace that had characterized the first two years slowed just a bit. Finances stabilized; a handful of wine grape growers had followed Schenley’s lead, and the union secured half a dozen contracts and several thousand members. Over the course of the year, dues would total19 more than $82,000—still a small fraction of the overall budget, but steady income. Contributions, mainly from labor organizations, totaled more than $439,000. The Service Center was bringing in additional revenue through grants and tax-deductible contributions.

  Chavez also achieved a truce that gained him breathing room. After the DiGiorgio election, UFWOC had continued to spar with the Teamsters, who were recruited by several growers anxious to avoid Chavez. The growers could claim a union contract; the Teamsters, who already represented shed workers and truck drivers, could pick up members without expending any effort. But organized labor frowned on such raids, and the Teamsters came under pressure to negotiate a peace treaty that left farmworkers to Chavez’s union. After UFWOC barely finessed an election victory over the Teamsters at the Perelli-Minetti vineyard, Jerry Cohen negotiated a pact that got the Teamsters out of the fields. Chavez was ready to turn his attention back to table grapes and take on the Giumarra company, the largest grape grower in the valley. First, though, he cleaned house.

  He had welcomed all the help that came to Delano in the early months and employed volunteers without asking about politics or ideology. It was understood the union came first, just as the demand for undivided loyalty had been clear to the Migrant Ministry interns who followed Chavez and Ross around a decade earlier in the CSO. Most people who learned about the strike and offered help in the early years were involved in leftist politics, and their convictions were no secret. The first wave of volunteers tended to be smart, strong-willed, passionate, and independent-minded. That, more than their politics, proved a problem. After almost two years, Chavez could afford to be more selective. As he had observed to Ross years earlier, too much democracy in an organization was not a good thing.