The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  His health worsened, and recurring back problems became acute. In early September 1968, Helen Chavez called Bill Kircher5 in tears, saying she could not get Cesar to stand up. Kircher flew to California, called Chavez’s doctor, and checked him into O’Connor Hospital in San Jose. Dozens sent get-well cards and a parade of visitors stopped by, including Father McDonnell, who made everyone in the room recite the Hail Mary,6 Glory Be, and Apostles’ Creed.

  In the wake of the King and Kennedy assassinations, fears about Chavez’s safety increased. When his physician, Jerome Lackner, was not present to act as gatekeeper, two elderly nuns guarded access to the hospital room. In the early morning hours of September 13, a mysterious caller asked for Chavez’s room number. The operator alerted Lackner, who had Chavez transferred to another room and called the San Jose police. From then on, an officer was stationed7 outside his room from midnight till 6:00 a.m.

  There had been vague threats earlier. Just after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a newspaper reported rumors that growers had offered a $10,000 bounty for Chavez. After Robert Kennedy was shot, union officials received various reports of threats, all unsubstantiated but worrisome in the climate of 1968. Union officials relayed the reports to county law enforcement, the FBI, and the White House. Chatfield wrote twice8 to Bishop Manning, suggesting he keep other bishops informed and implying he should speak to growers.

  Front-page newspaper stories about the potential threats while Chavez was in the San Jose hospital precipitated a debate in Delano about his security. Chavez professed not to want any protection, but he also wanted to see how people responded. The security issue became another test of loyalty. “Cesar is creating a crisis9 for the leadership of the union,” Chatfield wrote in his diary on September 15, 1968. “He is using the threat on his life, which has been blown up by the press, to force the officers to make a decision about whether they are going to see that Cesar is protected or not.”

  Chatfield talked to judo experts and guard-dog trainers. Chavez played down the need for security and resisted entreaties that he travel with guards. With friends, he adopted a fatalistic attitude. After another threat was reported by a Filipino labor contractor in Northern California, Chavez was worried but told Huerta he had decided that “it’s going to happen sooner or later,10 there’s nothing I can do.”

  Others worried more. As she watched the emotional reaction of a crowd when Chavez spoke to a rally in Coachella, Huerta said to Ross: “This kind of feeling for him the people have, this is exactly what’s going to get him killed . . . The guy sounded like a messiah11 or something.”

  Whatever his feelings and fears, Chavez again turned a difficult situation to his advantage. The threats became a convenient way to escape from public view when he felt the need. The threats fueled more comparisons to the two martyred heroes of nonviolence, King and Gandhi, which enhanced Chavez’s prestige and leverage. The comparisons, however, also increased the pressure to succeed. After the fast, Drake said years later, “he was too saintly12 to make mistakes.”

  When he was discharged from O’Connor Hospital, Chavez moved to a small room at St. Anthony’s seminary in Santa Barbara to recuperate. He hung a photo13 of Gandhi and a Mexican straw crucifix on the wall and wore a mezuzah around his neck. Helen and Peggy McGivern, the first nurse who had gone to work for the union, shared a room next door. Matthiessen came to visit, and Chavez greeted the writer propped up in a hospital bed in white pajamas. For therapy, he soaked in a tub with 97-degree water. Matthiessen, his back aching from a touch football injury, joined Chavez in the water. Using his ill health as an excuse, Chavez persuaded Matthiessen to read his draft14 of the New Yorker stories out loud. That way, Chavez could truthfully say he had never read the glowing profiles before they appeared in print.

  Chavez’s health improved dramatically, which he attributed to the hot soaks. Matthiessen offered to pay to install a similar facility in Delano. Arrangements were discreetly made to heat the pool at the home of a nearby union lawyer to exactly the same temperature. Matthiessen quietly wrote a $900 check.15

  Chavez moved back home, where he had a relapse. He was cross and impatient with those closest to him, even as he was tolerant and kind to others. He had so much trouble resting in the small house filled with children that he moved a bed into his office at Forty Acres and asked McGivern to take care of him.

  Just as Luis Valdez had observed on the march to Sacramento, Chavez leaned into the suffering. The pain was real, and he exhibited courageous willingness to endure physical hardship. But the suffering image also proved an effective tactic. Now Chavez experimented with a variation—the crippled leader, conducting business from his hospital bed at Forty Acres. Chavez’s bad back gave him another way to control situations. He could beg off from meetings and engagements or terminate conversations quickly, pleading pain. He gave interviews from bed, in his pajamas.

  Some in his inner circle harbored doubts, not about the genuineness of his pain but about the strategic timing. He seemed to take to his bed at convenient times, and they wondered whether some of the suffering was psychosomatic. Chatfield thought Chavez was experimenting with the image of a great man working through pain to establish his authority. A decade earlier, Chavez had grown a mustache and worn suits to look older as a CSO organizer; now he talked to Chatfield about the idea of wearing pajama-like clothing as a symbol of sacrifice until workers had a union. Chatfield thought the idea a “bold stab of genius.”16

  Chavez also talked to Chatfield about the importance of symbolism at union meetings. He wanted to restore liveliness to the Friday night meetings. Chavez proposed they schedule in the midst of each meeting the abrazo de solidaridad—essentially the traditional kiss of peace used in the Catholic mass—to help “get everybody involved17 in the act of strengthening the community.” Chatfield enthusiastically agreed. “Easier to get it now than it will be a couple years from now,” Chatfield observed. “Oh yes, it’ll be too late,” Chavez agreed. “Even now there will be some that are going to be reluctant to get into it. It’s pretty hard for some people to love people. They can’t let go. Why should it be that hard? . . . There’s going to be a lot of complaints because we won’t have enough time for business.”

  “And therefore we’re not running the union democratically and all that stuff,” Chatfield added.

  Chavez’s celebrity coupled with his medically enforced semiseclusion had already inflamed unhappiness among those shut out of the inner circle. Larry Itliong, Antonio Orendain, and others renewed complaints that the president was more interested in playing God than running a labor union. They clashed more openly with the apostles.

  Itliong had to go through aides just to talk with Chavez, and when Bill Kircher chastised the Filipino leader for not taking more responsibility in Chavez’s absences, Itliong responded angrily: “How in hell18 can you expect me to give an order to those volunteers? . . . Every time I ask them to do a little something, they look at me like I’m crazy. They look at me like, ‘Who the hell are you? . . . we work for Cesar Chavez.’”

  The clashes grew more open. Chavez condemned Itliong and others as lazy, materialistic, and jealous. The problem, Chavez told Itliong, is that “you won’t obey my orders.”

  Meeting at his house19 with Richard, Manuel, Hartmire, Drake, and a few other close advisers, Chavez warned he was headed for a confrontation. Chavez had begun to tape meetings and conversations. He liked technology and felt the need to preserve his own history. He told his advisers he wanted to “put this on the tape.” Then he recounted a recent, heated conversation with Itliong and other unhappy union officials: “They said that it was a one man union. I said, ‘Yes, that’s true. If I leave, I bet you that most of the volunteers who work with me would leave.’ I said, ‘They’re here mostly because of me.’”

  This was not the first time he had found himself in this situation, Chavez continued, speaking softly and sadly. “This is my problem. I’ve lived with this everywhere I go . . . In CSO,
I was just an organizer. If I said something, they did it. There was just this kind of loyalty. When I came to the valley, man, I had to build loyalty because we needed loyalty. That’s the way I do it.”

  Loyalty had always been a clearly stated prerequisite for union staff. But in earlier years, the issue had been undivided loyalty to the cause. Nothing should interfere with dedication to work—not family, outside interests, or competing causes. Now there had been a profound shift: the union was synonymous with Cesar, and loyalty was to Cesar. Subtle changes ensued. Supporters were called “Chavistas.” Some mythologies Chavez encouraged, like the story that he started the union on his birthday. Some he professed to view with dismay: “Every time they say ‘Cesar Chavez’s union,’20 it cuts you inside.”

  Despite that, he told the group at his house, he feared there was no way to live with the split that had developed among the union’s top officials. Chavez’s preferred tactic for getting rid of people was to be passive-aggressive. As Orendain said, Chavez didn’t tell anyone to leave; he just opened all the windows and doors and waited. Chavez feared a confrontation not because he doubted the outcome but because he preferred to avoid the fallout.

  “In a confrontation,21 I can beat them,” he said. “I can beat them because they haven’t been around organizations, they don’t know how to stab each other, and I know how to do every fucking stab. But once you do that, so you do it to save the union, then every time there’s opposition developing, boom, you get them because, well, you want to save the union. And I’ve done it twice now, and I don’t want to do it again. Even if it means the union goes to hell.”

  Chavez, the ultimate pragmatist, was not about to let the union go to hell, nor could he afford to have the showdown yet. Itliong had strong allegiance among Filipino workers, and Chavez needed their support. So he arranged a rapprochement after his outburst. He made overtures to Itliong and publicly condemned the lack of attention to the Filipino leader.

  From time to time Chavez raised his biggest threat,22 sometimes in anger, sometimes in weary resignation, sometimes in good humor. He would leave soon, he said, because he disliked the politics of running an organization. Chavez told Kircher that once the political infighting started, he would resign. He would like to head a team that went from place to place, organizing workers and then moving on, he told Chatfield a dozen times, and might leave as soon as the strike was settled. Chatfield wondered about his own fate; would he stay with the union or go on with Chavez to his next venture? He was inclined to go. They discussed organizing in East Los Angeles, Texas, and Florida.

  Chavez voiced similar sentiments to Matthiessen as they drove around the San Joaquin Valley. “He sees himself23 not as a union leader but as an organizer,” Matthiessen wrote, “and he told me once with cheerful fatalism that when his union is established and his own people, aspiring to consumer status, find him too thorny for their liking and kick him out, he may go and organize somewhere else, perhaps in the Chicano slums of East Los Angeles.” A decade before similar issues would surface in a defining moment for the union, Chavez foresaw an eventual split.

  Chavez was anything but cheerful when he raised the threat of leaving with the small group of advisers in his living room in January 1969. Chavez saw no good alternative: “In order to put it together, I’ve got to become a real bastard, more than I am now. Just go around and crack the whip and get people out of the union. In other words, I got to pull a Joseph Stalin,24 to really get it. And I don’t think I want to do that. By the time I do that, then I’ll be a different man. Then I’ll do it again for some other reason. More and more and more, you know. What I’d like to do is, just leave the organization. I’ve had so many damn disappointments . . . It’s been one after the other. Organize great things in my life, and they all come down to the same thing. Obviously I do a horrible job going in, you know. If I did a better job, we wouldn’t have these things. But boy, the moment that leadership develops and that struggle starts, it’s time to leave.”

  The more the union became synonymous with Chavez, the hollower the threat. The only way to leave would be to destroy the very thing he had built, and even those who disliked or resented him did not want to see that happen.

  “I’ve never taken the kind of shit that I’ve been taking in this organization in my lifetime,” Itliong told Jacques Levy, quotes that stayed buried in Levy’s notebook. “But I do it because I think it’s bigger than me for the farm workers to have an organization.” Itliong called Chavez a brilliant, magnetic leader who distrusted his own friends and advisers. “Cesar is afraid that if he shares the authority with the people, he’s afraid that they might run away from him . . . If you have a one man organization,25 once the man is gone, the organization is gone.”

  Increasingly, Chavez surrounded himself with people who simply could not imagine the union without him. His lament to the advisers about pulling a Stalin was met by great concern, and Hartmire responded that the only solution was to recruit “more people of heart26 into the struggle” so that they would overwhelm any volunteers who lacked the proper attitude.

  Hartmire was prophetic. Where the first generation of volunteers had been political activists who saw Chavez as the best vehicle to help farmworkers, newer recruits were drawn by the man. They came because they had heard about the mystical leader, and they stayed because they found him charming, humble, sweet, and caring. He seemed in some ways just like them—physically unprepossessing, almost shy, not above doing the most menial jobs—and yet in other ways almost saintly. When he talked one-on-one, he focused intently on his listener, and he pulled them into la causa just as he had organized recruits for the CSO at house meetings. The new generation was more in awe and less likely to question decisions. When new volunteers asked Jim Drake what they could do, he sometimes told them to sweep the floor and clean up. That weeded them out quickly.

  “One thing which characterizes Cesar’s leadership is that he takes full responsibility for as much of the operation as he is physically capable of. All decisions are made by him,” Fred Hirsch, the leftist plumber, wrote in a twenty-five-page, single-spaced resignation letter in June 1968. Decisions were rubber-stamped by the board, workers had little input, dissent was discouraged, and volunteers were treated with contempt, as interchangeable parts, he wrote. People whispered that Chavez surrounded himself with Anglos because he feared encouraging young farmworker leaders who might prove less malleable. “More than anyone else, I love and admire Cesar for what he has done in the past and for what he can do in the future in organizing. He is a man who will not easily be matched anywhere,” Hirsch wrote. “But he is a man.”27

  Philip Mason was both a student and a collector of history. As a young archivist, he had pioneered a labor history library at Wayne State University in Detroit, with the support of Walter Reuther. In 1966, the UAW gave Wayne State money to build a home for the library, which was later named after Walter P. Reuther. One day Reuther told Mason he had arranged for him to go to Delano. History was being made there, Reuther said, and Mason needed to meet with Cesar Chavez and arrange for the Reuther Library to collect the archives of the farm worker union.

  His first night in Delano, Mason went to a Mexican restaurant that Chavez recommended. They were expecting him, and Mason dug into a green sauce he thought was guacamole. His mouth caught fire. The next morning, Chavez was eager to know how Mason liked the meal. The archivist learned the union leader had a sense of humor. That began what Mason considered a real friendship. They met at least once a year, usually around Chavez’s birthday, when Mason was sure to find him at home. The two were one month apart in age and talked about everything from their astrological signs to poetry. Mason sent Chavez law books and a tape recorder. Chavez agreed to preserve all the materials from the movement and send them to the Reuther Library. From then on, he saved notes, letters, minutes, and tapes.

  Mason knew he was not only collecting history but watching it unfold. He thought the movement was particularly important
for young people. Disillusioned by the tragedies of Vietnam, assassinations, and riots, they found hope in Delano. Not only did Chavez have a great sense of history, Mason said, but “he comes awfully close to feeling he has a mission. Almost a fatalistic view.” Mason saw how people idolized Chavez after the fast, and he accepted the hero worship as necessary, though he worried about the consequences. “I have some serious doubts,”28 Mason confided in Levy, “whether if anything happened to Cesar, whether that union would survive.”

  Chavez had never had close friends outside his family. Some in the inner circle, like Chatfield, Moses, and Cohen, considered him a close friend. Others, including Hartmire, did not mistake the bond they shared for friendship, despite the many trials they endured and the tributes Chavez lavished on the minister. If you had friends, Chavez said, your decisions were influenced by your feelings and your desire to protect your friends. Personal relationships became a distraction. “I don’t have any friends,” he said. “I’m single-minded,29 one-track minded. I came here with the idea of building a union for workers. That’s what I intend to do.”

  By the time Peter Matthiessen’s profile appeared in the New Yorker in late June 1969, Chavez had acquired a guard dog named Boycott. Security guards were stationed outside his house on Kensington Street. On July 4, Chavez’s portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which hailed him as “a one-time grape picker who combines a mystical mien with peasant earthiness.” The magazine included an “Anglo-Chicano Lexicon” that defined more than a dozen terms associated with the movement, including la causa, anglo, bracero, and barrio.

  Matthiessen donated his $1,500 fee from the New Yorker to the Service Center. His stories provided an enormous boost to Chavez’s credibility and status on the East Coast. As he returned to Delano that summer to do further reporting for his book, Matthiessen presciently captured Chavez’s predicament: