The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  Chavez did not want a law; he much preferred to operate as a nonviolent guerilla force. But he needed money for a strike fund, and advocating a law when Ronald Reagan was governor of California seemed a safe bet. Reagan would never sign a law unfavorable to his agribusiness allies. Chavez turned to Cohen and told him to start drafting a law that incorporated several key principles on which they would not compromise.

  Cohen became Chavez’s gambling partner all summer—in courtrooms, on picket lines, and at the negotiating table. For Cohen, Chavez’s willingness to take risks made the lawyer’s job immensely appealing. Both men loved the action, and the bond between them had grown as each came to appreciate the other’s talents. Cohen proved masterful at devising strategies to make the law work for the union, turning even defensive situations into offensive advantages. “Cesar has told me I fit the union like a glove,” Cohen wrote in his journal. The young attorney’s mind was always racing ahead, and he often spoke as fast as he thought. He had been drawn to the law by heroic attorneys in To Kill a Mockingbird and Anatomy of a Murder. His favorite movie was McCabe and Mrs. Miller, about a gambler who teams up with a prostitute to run a brothel. Cohen looked the part of the angry young crusader, shirttail hanging out, hair unkempt, toothpicks in his mouth since he had given up smoking. He reveled in defying conventional wisdom and did not feel bound by legal tradition or strictures. He was precisely the type of lawyer Chavez wanted, and one of the very few outside professionals whose expertise Chavez valued.

  “Must gamble daily,”11 Cohen wrote down as he tried to analyze Chavez’s style and success. Chavez could gamble, Cohen noted, because there was always a way to turn a loss into a victory. The strike in Coachella offered a prime example—the Teamster war generated an outpouring of public support. “Cesar has been able to breed amazing confidence in some of us who naturally believe and act on the proposition that there is no ill from which some good will not flow.”

  Cohen’s legal gambits played an increasingly important role in Chavez’s strategy. Shortly before the strike began, the union had won a major victory in the highest court of California. After more than two years of appeals, the Supreme Court threw out the injunctions that had ended the 1970 Salinas lettuce strike. The court concluded the vegetable growers had signed sweetheart contracts with the Teamsters with no input from workers, who clearly preferred the UFW. Therefore, no jurisdictional dispute existed. “The crippling injunction is dissolved,”12 Chavez declared. “Salinas is a prime example of how the politics of a local community interfere with the courts being able to administer this justice. We are very, very disturbed because had the courts been able to administer justice equally . . . we would have won the fight two years ago.”

  As soon as the decision was announced, the union went on the legal offensive. Based on a novel theory promulgated by Bill Carder, the UFW sued under federal antitrust laws, accusing the Teamsters and growers of colluding to artificially depress wages for farmworkers. The suit had the potential to cost growers and the Teamsters millions of dollars and force them to divulge sensitive information during depositions and interrogatories.

  But Chavez had to focus on the crisis in the vineyards before he could return to Salinas. With a $1.6 million strike fund from the AFL-CIO, the union paid pickets $75 a week. By June they had increased pay to $90,13 and still the picket lines were relatively thin. When the filmmakers shot footage of farmworkers shouting “Viva la huelga!” as they were carted off to jail, the arrestees came from Salinas. At ranches where the union still had contracts, such as the Almaden winery, workers were ordered to rotate two-week stints on the picket lines as a condition of employment.

  By July the grape season was over in Coachella. The conflict followed the harvest north into the San Joaquin Valley, where the union faced a more hostile legal system and draconian anti-picketing injunctions. Cohen suggested another legal gamble that Chavez quickly embraced: civil disobedience and mass arrests. In law school, Cohen had studied a recent California Supreme Court decision that established the principle that one could challenge the constitutionality of an injunction by violating the ruling. The tactic carried risk: a loss brought contempt-of-court charges that could carry severe penalties. But a victory would swiftly overturn a bad injunction, much faster than through standard appeals.

  In July, hundreds of workers and supporters openly defied anti-picketing injunctions in the vineyards of the San Joaquin Valley. They filled the jails, first in Kern County, then Tulare, then Fresno. The protesters refused to post bail, and the jails overflowed. When they were released, many returned to the picket lines to be arrested again. Sheriff’s departments quickly exhausted their overtime budgets and looked frantically for places to house the prisoners. While Teamster leaders signed more contracts and bragged they had 221 growers, Chavez hailed the UFW pickets in jail as true heroes, willing to sacrifice for others. “This is our entire life,”14 Chavez told a rally in a Delano park. “We have nothing else to live for.”

  Eighty-five priests and religious women attending an International Symposium on Ignatian Spirituality in San Francisco decided to go to Fresno and join the picket lines; half of them volunteered to go to jail. They were soon joined by Dorothy Day, the seventy-six-year-old founder of the Catholic Worker movement, one of 443 arrested as they violated an injunction that limited pickets to one every hundred feet. In her olive-green jailhouse dress15 and wide-brimmed hat, Day explained why she had flown across the country to go to jail: “I think Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers union is the most important thing that has happened to the U.S. labor movement. The working poor in the fields have banded together through free choice to work out their own destiny.” She talked about Chavez’s sacrifice, his humble lifestyle, and her visits to his house, which lacked the trappings customarily associated with labor leaders.

  A recalcitrant judge refused to release Day and the other prisoners from out of town. The Fresno jail took on a festive air, with an all-night prayer vigil, a twenty-four-hour fast, and celebrity guests. Chavez climbed on a chair in the barracks-style jail and thanked the prisoners for their sacrifice. The union was at a crossroads, Chavez said, that would determine whether it survived. Joan Baez sang in the prison courtyard, and Daniel Ellsberg offered updates on the bombing in Cambodia. All the women signed Day’s dress in marker, and she asked to keep the prison garb as a souvenir. When the prisoners finally were set free after two weeks, they celebrated mass with singing and huelga chants. With a flourish, Chavez added his signature to Day’s prison dress.

  At the negotiating table, Chavez had undertaken another gamble when the expiration of the Delano contracts neared. The Delano growers had suffered for five years through the first strike and boycott, and they badly wanted to avoid a repeat. But they needed changes in the hiring hall. John Giumarra Jr. had again taken the lead. Cohen met alone with Giumarra and felt they made good progress on structuring a compromise.

  Ten days before the contracts expired, Chavez was suddenly optimistic.16 A boycott leader had called to report that several major chains in Los Angeles had agreed to tell Giumarra they would not carry his grapes without a UFW contract. “It’s all over!” Chavez announced, beaming, to the group working on contract language in a Bakersfield hotel room. He thought they now had the leverage they needed.

  He left a few days later on a four-day whirlwind tour of Midwest cities, making speeches to raise money and support for the boycott. Chavez spoke to packed crowds in Michigan and Ohio. He marveled at how the strike helped educate the workers, which he called the most difficult part of his job. “We’ve learned that there’s a great difference between a member who has never been on the picket line and had a contract handed to him and a member that had to fight for his contract,” Chavez said at a Cleveland rally. The picket line was the greatest educational tool he knew. “They have learned more about concern and solidarity17 than they would have learned if we had put them in a school for three years. I have never seen love develop among human being
s as I do on the picket line.”

  Chavez was buoyed by his reception. Around the country, millions of people felt good about themselves because they refused to buy grapes, walked on a picket line, or donated to the union. “I was talking to a group of supporters, one of them said, ‘Hell, you know it’s our strike, too.18 We’ve got a lot of years invested in it,’” Chavez recounted on his return to Delano. “So it seems to me that the concern comes from the recognition that if we were to lose here this would be the end to a very important and a very unique movement among farmworkers.”

  He had lost thirty-one contracts in Coachella, twenty in Lamont, and fifty small ones in Fresno. His optimism about the twenty-nine Delano contracts dimmed. But the losses did not faze Chavez. “It’s not that serious,19 that they are going to destroy our union,” he said. “All we have to do is go back to the pre-contract days.” The strain on the union, he said, was balanced by the lift from “the tremendous support that we get throughout the country.”

  Chavez wanted the growers to come as supplicants, the way they had in 1970. If it took another boycott to beat them into submission, he saw advantages to that strategy. In the final negotiation session with the Delano growers, Chavez made a gamble that caught even Cohen by surprise.

  Cohen had made good progress. He was so confident they were about to sign a deal that he had called for a typewriter at the hotel to finalize contract language. A half dozen growers, twenty-one farmworkers, and union leaders began to negotiate the evening before the deadline, prepared to work through the night. They went clause by clause, and Cohen checked off each one on his list as they reached agreement. After a break, they resumed negotiations just after midnight, and came to the section on housing. Chavez took over.

  He attacked the growers for the conditions in their labor camps, in particular for allowing gambling on cockfights and prostitutes to visit. “We have a responsibility to the membership to change the quality of life,” Chavez said in a speech that became known to his baffled aides as the “whores in the camps”20 attack. “There’s a hell of a lot of gambling that results in fights and deaths. The foremen make money from controlling gambling, chicken fights, prostitutes . . . We feel we have to change the quality of the life in the camps.”

  After his tirade, talks fell apart. Chavez declared they would not budge on the hiring hall. “In 1969, we waited one more year just for our hiring hall,” he told the growers. “You have no choice, the die is cast. We have certain things we need in this contract. You did OK for three years, and you’re throwing it away. This industry has no way to go but with us.” When the growers came back, Chavez vowed, “we’ll screw them to the ground and they can go to hell.” This time, though, the growers did have an alternative. Giumarra and Zaninovich were not enamored of the Teamsters or the prospect of another boycott. They would have preferred to avoid further strife and stay with the UFW, but not at any cost.

  The talks that had been expected to go through the night recessed. The next morning, Chavez predicted the boycott would force growers to sign in early 1974. He did a Zorro imitation, jumping on a table and brandishing an imaginary sword. Marshall Ganz began to list the boycott cities where they would need to send more people. “They’re going after our balls,” Chavez said as they waited for the last formal session. “I don’t know about you guys but for the few years I have left, I don’t want to go around without them.”

  Shouts of “huelga” and “boycott” filled the room as the talks officially ended. “Brothers and sisters, if you’re ready for the strike, let’s go,” Chavez said to the farmworkers. “They won’t be able to sell their grapes,” he said confidently.

  Chavez’s performance was typical of the way he treated the grape growers, who had come to expect he would dress them down at every opportunity. “He knows how to make them feel small,”21 observed the union’s business manager, Jack Quigley, one of many who believed the contracts could have been saved. The “whores in the camp” speech left Cohen baffled and angry. Not only had Chavez’s actions cost the UFW most of its members, but he had also signaled that he did not necessarily share the same priorities and agenda as key members of his team.

  Those differences, however, were quickly submerged in the strike and escalating violence in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, where Chavez found his new villain. The Teamsters had not reprised their thug tactics as the harvest moved north, but they did not need to. Growers had their own security, and guns were common. Unlike the sheriffs in Coachella, law enforcement officials in Kern and Tulare counties were openly hostile to the farmworkers union. They taunted, harassed, tear-gassed, and occasionally beat the UFW pickets.

  “We charge that the arming of the strikebreakers22 and the growers is with the consent and with the knowledge and with the encouragement of [Tulare County] Sheriff Wiley,” Chavez said angrily at a Delano press conference after a picketer was shot in the shoulder. “They have known that the men are armed inside the fields and they’ve done absolutely nothing to try to correct the situation and take the guns and the rifles away from them.”

  Union supporters sent dozens of telegrams demanding that the U.S. Justice Department investigate alleged civil rights violations. Cohen brought witnesses to the FBI and the Justice Department’s civil rights division, charging local authorities stood by and did nothing to keep order or stop attacks.

  “In Kern County, we’ve had now a series of beatings23 by the police,” Chavez said. “They have very consistently used profanity against men and women on the picket line . . . that they’re going to kill them and that they’re no good son of a bitches and that they’re Mexican greasers. It is, I think, to the everlasting glory of the farmworkers that they’ve been able to hold back and to continue to espouse the whole idea of nonviolence.”

  In the early hours of August 15, a group of drunken men entered the Smoke House in Lamont, and a barroom brawl ensued. The bartender called police, and three sheriff’s deputies responded. A beer bottle thrown by Nagi Moshin Daifullah hit Deputy Gilbert Cooper in the face, and he chased Daifullah into the street and struck him with his flashlight. Daifullah, twenty-four, fell from the curb headfirst, and never regained consciousness. He died at 1:00 a.m.24 from a massive concussion.

  Daifullah turned out to be a UFW striker; overnight he became a martyr. The police reported that the deputy hit Daifullah on the shoulder and he fell on his head, but Cohen announced he had witnesses who saw the officer hit Daifullah on the head. He would only identify the witnesses to federal Justice Department officials, Cohen said, because he did not trust the local police. Cohen worked the phones, talking to witnesses, arranging to have the body released to the custody of the union, and calling Sen. Edward Kennedy’s office to initiate a federal probe. In the end, there was scant evidence to challenge the official report, but that mattered little.

  Daifullah had come to the United States hoping to study medicine but ended up working in the fields. He had written his father in Yemen, describing the brutal conditions for immigrant farmworkers: ten men sleeping in a room, small portions of poor food, pesticides in the fields, labor contractors treating workers like virtual slaves. Then Daifullah wrote home25 about helping organize workers to join a revolution led by a man who did nothing but work for his cause, had no outside life, wore simple clothes, ate no meat, and earned but $5 a week. “In comparison to other leaders, he most resembles the great Indian leader Gandhi,” Daifullah wrote. “Finally, father, we are participants in a revolution. The revolution is strong and moving along the path to victory.”

  Chavez announced he would fast for three days to honor the martyred Daifullah and asked all UFW members, strikers, staff and friends of the movement to join him. More than five thousand people marched through Delano behind the casket of the young farmworker, carrying black-and-white union flags. The traditional three-color banner wrapped the casket.

  On August 16, sixty-year-old Juan de la Cruz was walking a UFW picket line with his wife when shots were fired from a
passing pickup truck. De la Cruz died in surgery the same day. The sheriff arrested two men and charged them with homicide. Charges were later dismissed.

  Once again, thousands of mourners took to the streets. “He was a humble farmworker,” Chavez said in his eulogy. “And yet in his dying, thousands of people have come to pay honor to his life.”

  During a candlelight procession the night before, Chavez said he thought back to the very early days, when people like de la Cruz believed in the union long before contracts had seemed a realistic possibility. “We live in the midst of people who hate and fear us. They have worked hard to keep us in our place. They will spend millions more to destroy our union. But we do not have to make ourselves small by hating and fearing them in return . . . We are going to win.26 It is just a matter of time.”

  The week of the funerals, the U.S. Attorney General’s office received about three thousand letters, many from religious organizations, demanding the Justice Department intervene to protect the striking farmworkers. Chavez announced he would have to call off the strike until the federal government guaranteed the safety of the picketers. Justice Department memos recorded no request for protection from Chavez. Officials noted that Chavez was out of money,27 and they concluded he was using the safety issue as an excuse to end a losing strike

  Chavez blamed police for colluding with growers, making allegations he felt no compunction to substantiate. “There have been over 200 cases of shootings. And we know the cops are behind it,” Chavez said. His own son Fernando had ducked behind a parked car to escape bullets during a rock fight on a picket line. “So when the two people got killed, we knew the cops were behind it.28 They weren’t pulling the triggers, but it was a plan. They were losing the strike. The only way they could do it was to shoot at us. And they had to have the agreement of the police. If the police had acted halfway reasonably, that strike would have been won.”