The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  A week later, Chavez received even better news. Marion Moses had arranged for Dr. Janet Travell, who had been the White House physician and treated President Kennedy for back problems, to visit Chavez in Delano. She arrived in time to be introduced briefly at the Friday night meeting on March 14, 1969. Travell stood in the back of the hall and drew a series of sketches as Chavez leaned against the platform in front. She watched him walk, in great pain, and Travell lit up with excitement. By the time she arrived at his house the next morning, the doctor had a strong suspicion she knew what was wrong. Chavez lay flat on his back, unable to sit up without help. Despite his pain, he made sure to tape-record the session, preserving for history his consultation with the Kennedy family doctor.

  “You can see that the left foot is considerably larger13 than the right,” Travell explained to Moses. “You can also see that lying straight, the points of his ankle bones don’t meet. The left leg comes way down. The difference in size of the foot is very striking.” The disparity went beyond his legs: His left arm, pelvis, and side of his face were all significantly larger than the right. He had been born with an extreme case of asymmetry, Travell explained. His vertebrae were slightly fused, so his skeleton resembled that of a gorilla. Lastly, Chavez had a condition she called “Venus de Milo foot,” because the gods that Michelangelo sculpted always had a second toe longer than the first. In mere mortals, that configuration caused acute pain on long walks.

  Chavez was elated with the diagnosis as well as with the simplicity of the solutions—a rocking chair to keep muscles moving and prevent spasm, electric blankets to keep his legs at an even temperature, and pads under his shorter foot. Just like putting a shim under one side of a door to even it out, he said repeatedly to his brother Richard, the carpenter. “Isn’t that fantastic!” Cesar said happily. Richard was crooked too, Travell observed, but to a far lesser degree. “You’re a freak too!” Cesar said laughing. “We can be in a carnival.”

  Travell showed Moses how to apply ethyl chloride spray to ease the pain and allow muscles to be stretched out. By afternoon, Chavez could raise his knee to his chin and sit up by himself. He called in top aides to hear Travell’s diagnosis and recommendations. With two-minute breaks to stand, stretch, and apply heating pads, Chavez should be able to resume a full schedule. “He’s got to work,” Travell said, “otherwise he’s not going to be happy.”

  To even out his legs temporarily, Travell put a book under his right foot and flipped a handful of pages at a time until she found the proper height—about three-quarters of an inch. Moses set out to buy an electric blanket before stores closed for the weekend but was stymied by a recent Chavez edict that no check could be signed without a vote by the entire board.

  “For the first time I bring an honest-to-God feeling of hope to the prospect of complete recovery,” Chavez wrote to a friend two weeks after Travell’s visit. “Not only do I feel better, but I know why the pain has been so intense.”

  Chavez began to work in a rocking chair in his new office at Forty Acres. Construction had progressed, though in a far more prosaic fashion than Chavez’s original grand plans. Thanks to a $40,000 contribution from the United Auto Workers, an office building and meeting hall stood on the site, along with a trailer donated by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that housed the medical clinic. The elaborate plans for a walled oasis, fountains, and recreational facilities gathered dust. The gas station had only briefly been open for business. Chavez’s new office was sparsely decorated, with a painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe behind his desk, a straw crucifix on a facing wall, busts of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln on shelves, and large photographs of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

  Although Forty Acres was home to “boycott central,” neither Chavez nor others who helped to coordinate actually exercised much central control. Communication was limited. Chavez discouraged calls. He viewed the phone as expensive and had an aversion to phone conversations. When he did talk, he assumed the lines were bugged. In discussing a campaign against pesticides, he used the code name “fishing expedition.”

  Resourceful boycott leaders didn’t need Chavez to tell them what to do. Those with good instincts emulated Chavez’s fanatical work ethic and plowed ahead, trying different approaches until they found the most vulnerable spot in their market. Chavez felt in control, but the distance and decentralized operation afforded boycott leaders an unusual degree of independence. They made dozens of strategic decisions each week that determined their success or failure. In many cities the effort was weak, but the boycott did not have to succeed everywhere. The union needed sufficient pressure on three major chains—Jewel in Chicago, Stop & Shop in Boston, and Safeway in Los Angeles.

  Boycotters relied on Chavez and the Delano crew for a steady stream of fresh outrages to generate consumer support. The “fishing expedition” Chavez referred to, for example, was just that: Jerry Cohen requested data from Kern County on pesticide use. Before county officials responded, a judge issued an injunction blocking the release of the information. What were they afraid of? Chavez demanded. The growers handed him a perfect issue for the boycott: if consumers didn’t want to stop eating grapes to help farmworkers, they should stop for their own health. Chavez dispatched Moses on a tour to boycott cities to talk about the dangers of pesticides.

  Enterprising researchers turned up another statistic that gave Chavez a new line of attack. The Nixon administration had almost doubled the amount of grapes purchased by the Defense Department, exporting many to troops in Vietnam. The Defense Department’s purchase of grapes increased from 6.9 million pounds in 1968 to 11 million pounds in 1969. The amount shipped to Vietnam jumped from 555,000 pounds in 1968 to 2,047,695 pounds in the first six months of 1969 alone. “The Grapes of War,”14 the union proclaimed, turning the statistics into a double whammy: Nixon used tax dollars to subsidize growers so desperate to find new markets that they unloaded grapes in an increasingly unpopular war.

  Chavez had finally taken a position on the war, after avoiding the subject in earlier years. For one thing, he believed that the growing opposition to the war extended to the fields of California. An antiwar stance, which aligned him with outside supporters, had become more palatable with the union’s members. For another, the war had become personal. His eldest son, Fernando, had applied to be a conscientious objector.15 The decision surprised Chavez, who had a somewhat rocky relationship with Fernando. Chavez talked about his son with rare bitterness, Peter Matthiessen noted, calling him a “real Mexican American,” a withering epithet he reserved for those with middle-class values. Fernando liked to play golf, his father noted with scorn.

  Cesar refused to give Fernando a letter of support in his application for conscientious objector status and told his son that if he truly believed in the principle of resisting the draft, he should be willing to go to jail. Fernando followed that counsel. On April 22, 1969, Richard Chavez, who had taught his nephew to play golf, accompanied Fernando to the Selective Service office, where he announced he would refuse induction because he did not believe in war. A crowd turned out despite the rain, and Father Mark Day led them in prayer. Helen was there with some of the younger children; Cesar stayed in his sickbed.

  Many responded with plaudits, but others urged Cesar to persuade his son to change his mind. Two weeks later, Chavez attended the Friday night meeting, despite a bad day of pain. In both Spanish and English, he explained why he would support Fernando’s decision to risk prison rather than serve. He framed the issue in terms of a commitment to nonviolence:

  This has nothing to do with the union, only that he is my son16 and I am the director of the union so it has become part of the union . . . I know I’ll be willing to give all my time and all my work and my health and my life, if you think that’s needed, but I never really knew there was something I wouldn’t give the movement. And I found today that I’m not willing to give the union my principles . . . I’m willing to leave the movement, I’m willing to be
asked to leave, but not to sacrifice my principles to anyone, because if you do that, then of course there’s nothing left to give your life meaning.

  A few months later, Chavez participated in a mass at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the death of Robert Kennedy. Ascending the ornate, ten-foot-high pulpit, from which Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his final sermon four days before he was assassinated, Chavez spoke publicly for the first time against the Vietnam War.

  Chavez’s Washington appearance marked the start of a three-month tour, his first major national appearances since the fast and his illness. To push what he hoped would be the final boycott season, Chavez decided to visit all the major cities. He traveled in a Winnebago accompanied by a small entourage that included a nurse, a guard, and Chris Hartmire, who functioned as spokesman, speechwriter, and general campaign manager.

  Boycott leaders eagerly lined up events and jostled to secure more time. They counted on Chavez to fire up supporters and to raise money. (In addition to shutting down grape sales, boycott leaders were expected to raise enough money to support their own campaigns and send some back to Delano.) Between September 25 and December 21, Chavez spoke at dozens of rallies and fund-raisers, visited supermarket picket lines, addressed students and labor leaders, and gave interviews in thirty-three cities.

  He disliked public speaking and recognized he was a poor speaker, though he had a knack for sensing what audiences wanted to hear. “It makes you feel like you’re a little monkey in a cage,” he said to Jacques Levy before departing on the tour. “They take you out and put you out front. You do your trick17 and then they put you back. It’s really mean. I leave half of my soul every time I speak.”

  Dressed most days in gray work pants and a plaid wool shirt, Chavez gave the same speech over and over, and always told the same joke: a woman was shopping in a store with her little boy, and as they passed the grapes he tugged on her arm and said, “Mommy, when are we going to be able to eat some of those boycotts?” At one stop Chavez was so tired he left out half the joke and then wondered why no one laughed.

  What he said made no difference. He was greeted like a rock star and applauded for what he had done, not what he said. At a Chicago rally,18 speakers compared him to Gandhi and King. “There were cries of ‘Cesar’ in the Coliseum Wednesday night for a small, brown-skinned man with a bad back,” the newspaper account began. Chavez spoke briefly to the crowd of more than a thousand people, to deafening cheers. “We are going to win the strike soon,” he said. Helen, who had joined the tour for a few days, stood behind her husband.

  Chavez found time19 while on the cross-country tour to see the National Zoo and take pictures of fall foliage in New England. The highlight, he told Levy, was attending a performance of Hello, Dolly! on Broadway. “For the opening scene all of these girls come out, mostly black girls and your eyes leave their sockets they grow about that big. Wow, beautiful color and then Pearl Bailey is just fantastic, just fantastic.”

  He still paid attention to the smallest details of the operation. On a drive between cities, Chavez wrote to his brother Richard and told him to enforce rules at Forty Acres, keep the bathrooms clean, and make sure the phone was answered. He wrote to Helen the same day: “Todos bien20 g.a.d.” (Everyone is OK, gracias a dios.) “Mi encanto, it’s important to think about modernizing the c.u.[credit union]. You need to have more help. Also you need to direct people better. You have to become a manager to operate in the future.”

  Chavez called the boycotters the vanguard, and the best ones embodied two qualities Chavez talked about more and more—relentless determination, and a willingness to sacrifice. In Montreal, Jessica Govea sometimes cried herself to sleep from loneliness and lived on candy bars when her money ran out. She kept on organizing picket lines to persuade supermarkets to stop selling grapes. Jessica’s father was a leader in the Bakersfield chapter of the CSO, and she had known Chavez and Ross since she was a small girl. She had formed a Junior CSO and helped on voter registration drives. In her first year of college, she had gone to hear Chavez speak and was so drawn to the cause that she dropped out of school, promising her parents she would only stay with the union for a year. She had been on the boycott in Canada for several years, first with Ganz in Toronto and then on her own in French-speaking Montreal.

  “One of the most important things that I have learned is that you never give enough of yourself,” she wrote. “I feel that I have grown21 and become a better person because our movement has grown and become a stronger and more determined movement. I no longer belong to myself but to the thousands of people who are struggling to be free.”

  As the possibility of ending the strike began to seem within reach, Chavez talked less about contracts and more about the sort of lofty and less tangible goals that Govea embodied. He had shifted his thinking from earlier years. He no longer believed political power would bring economic justice for farmworkers. Even a successful labor union would achieve that goal for only a small percentage of the poor. Political power for minorities, he said repeatedly, was a myth. He had seen little change in the balance of power since he began organizing almost two decades earlier. The solution he began to try to articulate was a broader poor people’s movement.

  “It is incumbent upon us to lead the movement into bigger and better things,22 to the end that all of us develop more as human beings and that we become more and more aware and concerned with broader issues,” he wrote to Ganz in Toronto.

  I think that without real economic power on our side . . . we will develop a small, elite group of workers with a lot of benefits, surrounded by mass unemployment, welfare, war on poverty, old people, etc., which will not be able to participate simply because they are not members. The only way to correct this is by organizing in the rural areas on a broader scale.

  Please understand that the Union is still the first concern. I see it as the tip of a drilling bit, making its way through a solid wall of granite. But behind that bit, there are other things that must be done . . . You know I have always been interested in the cooperative movement . . . I’m convinced that cooperativism, when free association is the order of the day, and the democratic process is established, could have many beneficial results for all of us.

  Chavez struggled to reconcile conflicting beliefs. He abhorred the kind of involuntary poverty he knew so well. He was committed to a movement that brought dignity and a decent standard of living. At the same time, he viewed the middle class with contempt. He feared a repetition of his experience in the CSO, where people moved out of poverty, became focused on material wealth, and adopted middle-class values. He sought a way that poor people could gain economic independence without becoming materialistic.

  He glorified boycotters like Govea, who found happiness through sacrifice. Giving up a paycheck, he argued, was a liberating experience. He looked to some form of cooperatives for a longer-term answer and talked about his ideas with Hartmire, Chatfield, Matthiessen, and Mason. He avoided the subject with those who would raise their eyebrows in dismay or lack of understanding—Bill Kircher or Jerry Cohen. Chavez asked Chatfield to look for a large, remote tract that might be suitable for an educational center. Although Chavez had envisioned Forty Acres in that role, he now believed its location in the heart of the farmworkers territory compromised its value as a retreat.

  Chavez studied why the civil rights movement faltered and thought about how he would motivate people in Delano to come to meetings in future years. Like his commitment to find some cross between a movement and a union, he believed collectives offered the possibility of middle ground between the failed systems of capitalism and communism. He thought they held the promise of preserving a spirit of community.

  “We go up and down,23 you know,” he mused to Jacques Levy. “My illness brought the community closer together. The fast really pulled it together, the strike, the first one, the march, all those things pulled it together. But it’s like the kind of glue that wears off. You’ve got
to come back with more glue.”

  He was just starting to research cooperatives. “I’m at the point where I was in 1965 about organizing farm workers unions,” he said. “I was just talking about ideas and what could be done and a lot of people thought I was nuts.”

  First, though, he needed to end the strike.

  Chapter 18

  Contracts

  I think that we set an example for those who wanted to help us, that we said that we’re not going to abandon the fight, that we were going to stay with the struggle if it took a life time. And we meant it.

  The denouement of the grape strike began where the battle had started, in the vineyards of the hot, dry Coachella Valley.

  The Coachella growers had been an afterthought for Chavez. They were not involved in the labor dispute for the first two and a half years. But when Chavez called on consumers to stop eating California grapes in May 1968, the season was still months away in the San Joaquin Valley. The only grapes in supermarkets came from Coachella, the desert area around Palm Springs, where the union had almost no presence. There had been no strike there since the short-lived Filipino action three years earlier.

  Eager to start the boycott, Chavez called a strike against the startled Coachella grape growers at the height of their 1968 season. He hastily threw up picket lines and called them off just as fast, blaming anti-picketing injunctions. The union must focus on the boycott, he declared. “We’re talking about going 80 miles1 an hour and throwing the machine in reverse gear and not even a squeak, it just starts paddling back,” he boasted about his ability to switch tactics without missing a beat.

  The boycott hurt badly in Coachella. The season was short, profit margins slim, and options limited. Unlike in Delano, growers in Coachella could not turn their surplus grapes into wine or raisins if the market turned bad. They counted on a relatively high rate of return because the early, sweet Thompson grapes were highly prized.