The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  The strike deadline coincided with the wedding of Cesar’s third-eldest daughter, Eloise. Helen, running the household in Delano while Cesar spent most of his time in Salinas, had been leaving notes for her husband to remind him of the date. Before the church ceremony began on August 8, Jerry Cohen caught Chavez’s attention and motioned with his eyes that he needed to talk. Chavez went and kneeled by Cohen. Cohen told him the leaders of the Teamsters wanted to talk immediately. Talk or deal? asked Chavez. Cohen made a phone call and returned with word that they wanted to negotiate a truce. National leaders of the union were interested in rejoining the AFL-CIO and not eager to antagonize labor leaders. They pressured the Teamsters organization in California to negotiate with Chavez. Cesar went to the wedding reception8 at Filipino Hall, called Helen aside to explain, and took the second dance with his daughter. Then he left with Cohen, Dolores Huerta, and Manuel Chavez and sped a hundred miles to the Black Oak Inn in Paso Robles, halfway between Delano and Salinas.

  At 2:15 a.m. Chavez called Monsignor Roger Mahony9 to say the two parties had reached a verbal agreement. To give both unions cover, Chavez asked the bishops’ committee to issue a statement calling for negotiations. Mahony headed to Salinas to set up a meeting.

  By the time Monsignor George Higgins arrived from Washington—his thirteenth trip in six months to mediate farmworker disputes—talks had broken down. Higgins and Mahony found Chavez in bed with back pain. He revived sufficiently to hold a press conference at the union office to denounce a temporary restraining order against the strike, issued by a local judge at the request of growers. Chavez announced he had begun to fast and would go to jail rather than obey the order. Mahony and Higgins shuttled between Chavez and the Teamsters, and talks went on till dawn. By 5:00 a.m. they had hammered out an agreement that averted the strike. The Teamsters agreed to relinquish the contracts, and both unions granted the growers six days to acknowledge the UFW and begin negotiations. At Higgins’s discretion,10 the deadline could be extended four days.

  Unlike the early days of the grape strike, Chavez now headed an established union, and his church and labor allies urged him to make peace. Chavez had to balance his instinct to stay at war and hold out for all he wanted with his need to appease his financial and political supporters. Chavez fasted at an undisclosed location (the apartment of a friend), conveniently unavailable to speak with Higgins, Kircher, or anyone else who wanted to exhort him to be more reasonable. When Higgins agreed to extend the peace treaty for the extra four days, Chavez was upset. He sent Cohen and Huerta banging on the priest’s hotel room door late at night to convey his displeasure at a decision he knew the workers would not like.

  Chavez’s secret weapon turned out to be the intransigence of the growers. They held some general discussions with the union but had no intention of letting the Teamsters renege on their deal. The growers were confident about prevailing in a court system heavily weighted in their favor. Their argument was simple: they were victims of a jurisdictional dispute between two unions, and California law forbade strikes in such a situation.

  Only the two companies threatened with boycotts—Interharvest and Freshpict, a subsidiary of Purex—expressed interest in negotiations with the UFW. As the ten-day moratorium expired, Interharvest agreed to allow Monsignor Higgins to conduct a card check election so workers could choose between the Teamsters and the UFW. As Higgins counted almost a thousand cards, an Interharvest official hovered nearby. Finally he beseeched the priest to make sure the UFW won. The company wanted to avoid a boycott, but Interharvest would be ostracized if the company betrayed the industry and signed with the UFW. They needed a UFW victory for cover. Higgins obliged. He never announced the vote11 totals, and only years later acknowledged that the union had fallen short of a majority.

  The ten-day truce expired, with no agreement other than that with Interharvest. Thousands of workers rallied again at Hartnell College and enthusiastically approved a general strike. Chavez was recovering from his fast and declined to attend. He had lost seventeen pounds and gained some time to himself, but failed to achieve the peace of mind he sought. “That fast was not like a spiritual fast,”12 he said later, “it was mostly because I was distressed and because I needed strength. And I had been going very fast, you know, from negotiating the [grape] contracts and all right on thru the other . . . It was really like a rest more than anything else.”

  On Monday morning, August 24, some five thousand workers picketed the fields, shutting down the Salinas lettuce industry in the largest strike of its kind. Production the following week plummeted to a quarter of normal. The price of lettuce doubled.

  The growers were stunned. “It took everybody several days to catch on that it was a totally new ball game,13 that the workers were into it 100 percent,” Tom Driscoll, a large strawberry grower, told Jacques Levy a few weeks later. “The second shock was that the workers stayed out, they didn’t go back in two days like everybody thought they would.”

  The vice president of the Grower-Shipper Association wrote an article called “How to Handle Your UFWOC Problem” in which he recommended that each grower form a “citizens committee,” set up a public relations department and a legal team, obtain a temporary restraining order, prepare to evict workers from company housing, procure a heavy convoy to transport workers in and out of fields, play loud music to drown out pickets, take down license plates of pickets, and decide on “combat pay.”

  During the first week of the strike, judges issued fifteen restraining orders against the pickets, covering thirty-six growers. The union quickly exhausted its appeals, and arrests began. By September, legal sanctions started to mount. “I would have to be in a monastery in Tibet14 not to know that neither Cesar Chavez nor his union intend to obey any court order,” commented San Mateo County judge Melvin Cohn.

  Chavez was running out of money, growers were bringing in scabs, and the injunctions that limited or restrained pickets multiplied daily. “I have to call a boycott,”15 Chavez told his staff. “See, that’s the only card that we have that we haven’t played.”

  Chavez knew that people who had been out in the cities for years on the grape boycott had looked forward to coming home once the contracts were signed. He had called all the boycotters to Salinas, ostensibly to help in the strike. He knew the action would likely be short-lived, and he needed to persuade them to reenlist. Eliseo Medina had driven from Chicago, eager to help with the strike and then return home to Delano and the grape contracts. Jessica Govea had driven from Montreal, equally glad to be back in California, reunited with her boyfriend, Marshall Ganz. Both Govea and Medina noticed the difference in the Salinas workers immediately. “These were young men—rough-and-tumble guys who worked piece rate, who had a work life expectancy of 10 years, who lived in labor camps in the growers’ land, who worked hard, lived hard and partied hard,” Govea wrote in her journal. “They were unafraid.”16

  Chavez broke the news to the boycotters gradually. On September 8, he met with them in a church hall and spoke about the power of the boycott. He told them the union could afford two more weeks of the strike at most. They had spent more than $300,000, paying $15 a week to single strikers and $25 to families. Gas cost another $1,500–$1,800 a week. Hartmire had arranged a $125,000 loan from the Franciscans and was working to come up with more.

  On September 16, State Superior Court judge Anthony Brazil declared that a jurisdictional dispute existed and issued a permanent injunction against the strike. Chavez called the boycotters to a beach picnic that afternoon to celebrate Mexican Independence Day, the fifth anniversary of the historic meeting in the Delano church that launched the grape strike. He used all his charm to persuade the tired boycotters to go out into the cities again. Medina wanted badly to stay in California and help his own people, the grape workers. But he decided that as long as he worked for the union, he had to go where he was most needed. He told Chavez he would return to Chicago.

  Few vegetable workers volunteered to join the
boycott. They did not want to leave their jobs and lose their livelihoods. Many had families living in the Imperial Valley or in Mexicali, just across the border. Disappointed in their lack of interest, Chavez attributed the reluctance to their concerns about money.

  The boycotters dispersed. Violence flared between Teamsters and Chavistas. After a UFW picket was arrested in connection with a shooting in Santa Maria, Jerry Cohen wrote in his diary: “Manuel Chavez is not controlling (I suspect he is encouraging) the violence of the people. My fear is that there will be retaliation17 against members of our union and Cesar.” Dolores Huerta was trying to negotiate contracts with two companies that had agreed to recognize the union, Freshpict and D’Arrigo, but talks broke down. Kircher and Higgins expressed frustration with the UFW’s intransigence. Higgins sent Chavez a telegram to try to goad him into taking charge. “Kircher shares my view that Dolores has mismanaged18 the negotiations—to put it mildly,” Higgins wrote to Monsignor Mahony.

  Kircher was perturbed about Huerta’s involvement for another reason. He had found out she was six months pregnant. An unwed pregnant woman as the lead negotiator and key figure in the union was a major crisis, Kircher told Cohen. Kircher hoped Chavez would remove Huerta from her public role, before news of her pregnancy spread. For Cohen and others in the union, the situation was more complicated: Huerta had become involved with Richard Chavez. Their relationship, kept quiet for some time, became public during her pregnancy. Many women, Helen Chavez chief among them, were livid. Richard’s wife, Sally, had been Helen’s close friend since childhood. The betrayal seemed particularly cruel because Sally had never recovered from the trauma of losing their eldest son in a car accident a few years earlier. Richard, in his grief, had turned to Huerta. “One of the interesting events to contemplate is the confrontation between Dolores and Cesar if that ever took place,” Cohen speculated in his journal about Huerta’s pregnancy. “Perhaps Cesar is waiting for Dolores to tell him. A confession?”19 The new liaison became a subject of widespread gossip, and Helen voiced her anger to many people. Two of Richard and Sally’s daughters showed up in the union office and roughed-up Dolores.20 But Huerta and Chavez’s relationship survived, and she relinquished none of her power within the union.

  With the boycotters settled in cities around the United States, Chavez announced his next target—the Bud Antle company, which shipped $25 million worth of lettuce a year. Union researchers had dug up some tenuous connections to Dow Chemical, which produced the napalm used by the United States in the Vietnam War. Pictures of Vietnamese women and children disfigured by napalm bombs had triggered anti-Dow protests on college campuses. Antle was one of the three big lettuce growers in the valley, and the Dow Chemical connection, however distant, made the company an attractive boycott target.

  Bud Antle, who gave his name to the company, was known as an innovator who often broke with the pack. Rather than hire braceros for certain field work, he had signed a contract in 1961 with the Teamsters. For that treachery he was thrown out of the Grower-Shipper Association. Antle’s contract with the Teamsters had not covered workers who hoed, thinned, irrigated, and drove tractors. But when other growers signed Teamster contracts, Antle hurriedly extended his pact to cover all agricultural workers. He took the lead among the growers fighting Chavez in court,21 charging that a strike would cost his company $100,000 a day.

  When Chavez suspended the strike, Antle went back to court and obtained an injunction on October 8 ordering the union to stop boycotting his produce. When the UFW showed no sign of complying, Antle asked for a bond to protect against the company’s losses. On November 17, Judge Gordon Campbell ordered UFWOC to post a $2 million bond. The union ignored that, too.

  Six days later, Antle’s attorneys met with Chavez to take his deposition. Just before the lunch break, Chavez was asked whether the union was boycotting Antle lettuce. He readily confirmed the boycott and volunteered that the union had every intention of continuing. Antle’s lawyer immediately took that statement to a judge. When the deposition resumed shortly after 1:00 p.m. at the Royal Palms Motel in Bakersfield, Chavez was handed an order to appear in court to answer contempt charges for defying the anti-boycott injunction. He could not have been more pleased.

  At the end of the nine-hour deposition, Cohen gleefully warned Antle’s attorneys that they would be treated to a repeat of the scene at the Bakersfield courthouse in 1968, when Chavez had appeared on the thirteenth day of his fast, accompanied by thousands of farmworkers. Chavez chimed in: “You see, the only way we can get the fact that we are being persecuted22 by Bud Antle and Dow Chemical is to have our people get it on the cameras and let the people throughout the country react to that. That is the only defense we have. We wouldn’t do it, but I don’t see what else we can do. I also want to have them there because if I go to jail I want them to witness. They get pretty upset and they want to go on the boycott, and we want to use the public awareness of the persecution.”

  Chavez flew to New York, where he appealed for support to two thousand Sunday morning worshippers at Riverside Church. Addressing the nondenominational service in the Gothic cathedral in his customary attire—plaid shirt, olive pants, and work boots—he asked them not to buy lettuce without the black eagle on the label and called nonviolence “truly the essence of Christ’s teaching.”23 The next day, he delivered the St. Thomas Aquinas lecture to a packed auditorium at Manhattan College, then debated the vice president of the growers association on the Today show. On Thursday, December 3, Chavez arrived back in Salinas, so tired he could barely keep his eyes open. Due in court the next morning on the contempt charge, he huddled with his lawyers at the sparsely furnished apartment of Bill Carder, a recent addition to the legal team. Carder had read Peter Matthiessen’s profile in the New Yorker, gone to see Chavez speak, and run into his old law school classmate Jerry Cohen. Within weeks, Carder was in Salinas, his living room dominated by the big red IBM typewriter he used to prepare dozens of court filings.

  Just as Cohen had promised, hundreds of farmworkers stretched out the next morning in a mile-long march from the union office at 14 South Wood Street to the massive concrete courthouse. For three and a half hours, men, women, and children stood and knelt silently in the courtyard and hallways on all three courthouse floors.

  Inside Judge Campbell’s chambers,24 attorneys for both sides asked that the hearing be postponed. AFL-CIO president George Meany had set up a meeting the next day with the Teamsters and they thought the dispute might be resolved. Belatedly, Antle’s attorney had recognized Chavez’s ploy. He did not want to see Chavez in jail, “possibly causing national repercussions,” Richard Maltzman told the judge.

  Judge Campbell listened impatiently. No agreement reached between the parties outside of court would affect the question of whether Chavez had flagrantly violated the judge’s order: “The question still remains as to whether or not there has been a contempt of court,” he told the lawyers. He ordered the case to proceed.

  Chavez sat in the courtroom and listened as his lawyers argued that the judge’s order was confusing and impossible to obey. Ultimately they rested their case on the same legal argument they had presented in fighting the injunction. The order “was in excess of the court’s jurisdiction and unconstitutional,” Carder told the packed courtroom. Chavez had the right to discuss the labor dispute and to tell people Antle’s workers were not represented by the union of their choice. “That is pure speech,” Carder said, “and if that is not protected by the First Amendment, I don’t know what is!”

  When Maltzman gave a convoluted response, Cohen and Carder laughed, and Campbell admonished them for unbecoming conduct. The union put on no witnesses; no evidence would change the fundamental question of constitutionality, Carder argued.

  Maltzman swore himself in as a witness and testified that Chavez had told him the union would continue to boycott Antle lettuce and had tied the company to Dow Chemical for the sole purpose of harming Antle. “We know that Mr. Chavez has th
e power and the ability to call these people off,” Maltzman said in his closing statement. Rather than see Chavez in jail, getting the publicity once accorded Martin Luther King Jr., Maltzman asked the judge to set Chavez free and order him to return to court the following week with a notice calling off the boycott.

  Campbell recessed only briefly before he delivered a ruling he had drafted in advance. “No man or organization is above or below the law,” the judge began. He briefly reviewed the facts and concluded Chavez was clearly in contempt. Campbell ordered the labor leader jailed for ten days on three counts of violating the order and held indefinitely until Chavez ordered an end to the Antle boycott. “Mr. Chavez shall remain in the county jail until that notification has been proven to have been done,” Campbell told the audience.

  “If an objective is a noble objective,” the judge concluded, “and many people can say there is a noble objective here, improper and evil methods cannot be justified to achieve those noble ends and objectives.” With that he remanded Chavez to the custody of the Monterey County sheriff.

  Deputies took Chavez one block north on Alisal Street and booked him25 into the Monterey County jail. His black pants, blue shirt, and work boots were deposited in Locker #216. He declined an offer for special treatment and donned the regulation prison denim. His cell was in the rear of the second floor, so he could not see the round-the-clock vigils that began immediately in the parking lot across from the entrance to the Gothic Revival–style jail. A truck decked out with flowers and a brown-and-gold Our Lady of Guadalupe became a shrine. When darkness fell, votive candles lit the night.

  Helen Chavez arrived for a brief visit the next morning, bringing her husband a book on Gandhi. They spoke on a telephone, sitting on opposite sides of a glass wall. Afterward she read a short statement from Cesar to the crowd across the street: “I am fine and in good spirits. They are being very kind to me. I was spiritually prepared for this confinement.” The workers must have their choice of union, he said. “Jail is a small price26 to pay to help right that injustice.”