by Miriam Pawel
Chavez ended the strike. The civil disobedience gambit had produced more than thirty-five hundred arrests and generated widespread sympathy for the union. “You have no idea how far we have brought the workers,” he explained. “That is why when people ask if I am discouraged, how can I be discouraged?29 In 1962 people were afraid to even look at you, you know. Now they are not only not afraid of the flag, they accept the strike as an important part of their lives, then they are willing to go to jail . . . that kind of commitment you cannot destroy.”
The union had just a handful of contracts. Interharvest was the only vegetable contract left; Steinberg and Larson in table grapes; one strawberry grower; eight wine grape growers. But as he lost members to the Teamsters, Chavez gained public esteem—and contributions. In February 1973 the union had collected slightly more than $30,000 in donations and ended the month $84,000 in the red. In July, donations exceeded $300,000, a record for a single month. In December, a direct mail appeal that included stories about Juan de la Cruz’s funeral netted thousands more. The UAW, which had suspended contributions in 1971 because the UFW had large assets relative to its membership, resumed its help, sending $10,000 a week. By the end of 1973, the union had raised more than $4.3 million since January and spent more than $5 million30—an enormous sum for a tiny union with almost no members.
Chavez had bought recognition, empathy and support. From top labor leaders to nuns to housewives, thousands felt personally invested, emotionally and financially, in his success. He had also raised expectations. As he had long ago discovered, when people give money, they expect things in return.
Despite his commitment to Meany to press for legislation, Chavez was determined to operate on his own timetable. Asked when he thought the union might regain the contracts, Chavez answered: “We don’t know. We don’t have a time limit. We don’t set time limits. This is our work.31 We’re committed to do it the rest of our lives. It takes whatever it takes, we’ll do it. It will be done.”
Chapter 24
The Seeds Are Sown
We have demonstrated to the whole world our capacity for sacrifice. We have demonstrated for many years our willingness, our commitment, and our discipline for nonviolence, and even more important than that we have demonstrated to the whole world that nothing is going to stop us from getting our own union.
At the end of a marathon day presiding over the first constitutional convention of the United Farm Workers of America, Cesar Chavez paused to reflect on the historic occasion. After a celebratory evening of music and dancing, Chavez chatted in the early morning hours of September 22, 1973, with Jacques Levy. The union leader was pensive, expressing pleasure tinged with regret. On one hand, Chavez told Levy, the convention was a dream come true. Hundreds of farmworker delegates, debating resolutions, learning Robert’s Rules of Order, building their own union. The next day, delegates would elect the first executive board, and that milestone would usher in what Chavez called a “so-called democracy.” From now on, he said with resignation, his strongest colleagues would inevitably become his enemies.
Your best people always turn out to be the opposition, Chavez explained, because the strongest leaders have the most ambition. In this “so-called democracy,” he would be forced to get rid of potential challengers, otherwise they would get rid of him. He would have to eliminate those who showed the greatest promise, and inevitably be left with the second-rate. “I don’t like it,” Chavez said. “It makes me puke.” But he had no doubts: “It has to be done.” The convention, he said, had sown the seeds.1
Levy tried to reassure Chavez. Next week, the writer pointed out, the top union leaders would disperse to cities around the country to organize the boycott, a diaspora that would stymie potential opposition. Chavez shook his head. “No,” he said, “the seed is there. It will not be stopped.”
In public, Chavez displayed none of this concern. In a blue guayabera, an embroidered Mexican shirt, he reveled in the music and art commissioned for this special occasion. Religious and labor leaders came to speak and pay respect. Congratulatory telegrams poured in from around the world. Each speaker was escorted to the podium by a farmworker honor guard marching in a double line, while the rhythmic stomping of feet reinforced the applause. In substance and style, the event symbolized the triumph of the UFW’s spirit. They had but ten contracts, had just buried two martyrs, faced war with the Teamsters, yet remained ebullient.
The delegates met in the Fresno convention center, which dwarfed the small social hall a few miles away where Chavez had held his first convention eleven years earlier. A giant 16-by-24-foot mural2 by a rising young talent, Carlos Almaraz, hung behind a podium draped with flags. The painting was in the style of the great Mexican muralists: Teamsters attacked farmworkers, who used picket signs as their shields, while the Virgen de Guadalupe protected workers, a small boy sold El Malcriado, Anglo supporters stood ready to help, and the word huelga was carried on the wind to the four corners of the earth.
More than a year had passed since the AFL-CIO approved a charter for the farmworkers, and the 1973 convention was the final step in the transition to become a full-fledged union. The UFW needed to elect an executive board and adopt a constitution. Delegates worked for seventeen hours on Friday, September 21, 1973, ten hours the next day, and then twenty-three hours on Sunday straight into Monday morning.
“We are the only ones that can determine whether we are going to win or lose,”3 Chavez declared. “We have demonstrated to the whole world our capacity for sacrifice. We have demonstrated for many years our willingness, our commitment, and our discipline for nonviolence, and even more important than that we have demonstrated to the whole world that nothing is going to stop us from getting our own union.” The applause went on for more than a minute, until Chavez motioned for the cheers to stop.
The strike and the violence of the summer of 1973 had forced the UFW to turn once more to “our court of last resort—to go to the American public and put the case before them,” Chavez told the audience, reading a speech Jacques Levy had helped craft.
The constitution that delegates approved, section by section, had been printed at La Paz the night before the convention and rushed to Fresno—a timetable that ensured few would have time to analyze or question the document. Several who did, including Antonio Orendain, now effectively exiled in Texas and cut out of the leadership, saw that the constitution vested enormous power in the president and almost none in the rank-and-file workers or their elected representatives.
Chavez had drawn once again on his experience in the CSO, taking that group’s constitution as a model of how not to do business. “It was so democratic that nothing could be done,” Chavez explained a few years later. “One of the hang-ups of the formers or founders or drafters of that constitution was that they believed that power corrupts;4 they were misquoting Lord Acton who said not power corrupts but power tends to corrupt. They were a group of liberals mostly and in their wisdom they did not give the president or any officer any power to really do things. All the power was vested in the membership so that it became almost impossible to act.”
When Chavez had drafted his first constitution in 1962 for the Farm Workers Association, he had been determined not to accept any outside funds and to make the union self-supporting. He used a preamble drawn from a papal encyclical and wrote the constitution for the farmworker members. When Chavez composed the new constitution in 1973, the union depended almost entirely on outside financial support. So he aimed much of the new document not at the farmworkers but at his wider public audience. He took particular care with the preamble, judging that the most likely section outsiders would read. “It doesn’t speak to the members, it speaks to the public,” he explained at a meeting with union staff, where he analyzed line by line how he had crafted the brief preamble:5
We, the Farm Workers of America, have tilled the soil, sown the seeds and harvested the crops. We have provided food in abundance for the people in the cities the nation and
the world but have not had sufficient food for our own children.
“We’re making a statement on justice in that paragraph,” Chavez said.
But despite our isolation, our sufferings, jailings, beatings and killings, we remain undaunted in our determination to build our Union as a bulwark against future exploitation.
“That comes from one of my favorite speeches in the beginning of the movement when I talked to the public. That was hope. Nothing but an expression of hope.”
We devoutly believe in the dignity of tilling the soil and tending the crops and reject the notion that farm labor is but a way station to a job in the factory and life in the city.
“Every time people say, ‘Let’s train farmworkers to get them out of that awful work in farm labor,’ it always gripes me. I just can’t stand it.”
And just as work on the land is arduous, so is the task of building a Union. We pledge to struggle as long as it takes to reach our goals.
“That came from a little speech that I prepared for the members, this is in 1966 . . . we were losing strikers, losing hope . . . I ended the speech by saying, ‘If all of you leave, you can go, I don’t give a shit. We’ll win the strike if I have to be the only guy out there, if it takes me 30 years, I’ll be out there with a fucking picket sign by myself. You guys can take off. Who needs frightened people. Take off, I don’t need you. I’ll do it by myself.’ It rallied them.”
The delegates adopted several substantive changes. They scrapped the $3.50 monthly dues in favor of a more traditional structure, 2 percent of income, which would provide more money to the union and eliminate fights about back dues. A second provision was far less traditional: volunteers who worked for the union more than six months would become members with certain voting privileges. Anyone who sacrificed for the movement should have the right to set policy, Chavez said. “Some of the best people6 we have working in the movement are not farmworkers. They’re volunteers. And a lot of them are not brown or black, they’re white . . . We have seen too many movements where they’re used, and after a while they’re taken for granted.”
Chavez extended the same reasoning to his choices for the executive board: the majority did not come from the fields. In addition to Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla, who had obtained waivers when first elected in 1963, Cesar invited his brother Richard to join the board. Chavez rounded out the slate with two of the Filipino leaders, Philip Vera Cruz and Peter Velasco, and a young black farmworker, Mack Lyons, who had been working for the union full-time since the DiGiorgio strike. For the “Anglo spot” on the board, Chavez tapped Marshall Ganz, who excelled as an organizer on the boycott and in the fields. Chavez had approached LeRoy Chatfield and Jim Drake, who both declined, believing that only farmworkers should serve on the board.
The slate had been carefully composed (“All colors, all shapes, all sizes,”7 Chavez told the convention, “Mexicanos, Filipinos, a black brother, a Jew, a woman”) with no input from workers. At the convention, a rump group of young Mexican workers formed an opposition slate to challenge Ganz and the two Filipinos, arguing there should be more Mexican farmworkers on the board.
Only one person was briefly on both slates, a reflection of his popularity, as well as his naiveté. Eliseo Medina, now twenty-seven, had grown from the scared kid who arrived in Chicago with a bag of buttons to an accomplished organizer who stood out wherever he landed. His indefatigable work ethic, warm smile, and ingenious strategies had produced impressive results and won him followers. When Medina ran the Chicago boycott with seven full-time staff, sales of grapes had dropped 42 percent and one of the major chains in the country pulled the fruit off its shelves. During his tenure as director of the Calexico field office, he had streamlined a chaotic operation and found ways to deal with problems at the hiring hall and back dues. Sent by Chavez to establish the union in Florida, Medina had publicized a slave trade operation in the vegetable industry and organized opposition that killed an anti-farmworker bill. After the 1973 strike, Chavez sent Medina to run the boycott in Cleveland.
Medina was flattered at the invitation to join the Chavez slate. When he arrived at the Fresno convention, some of his old friends asked him to join the opposition slate and run against Ganz. Medina agreed, oblivious to the political implications. As soon as Chavez heard, Medina was bumped off the official slate, and new lists were typed up with his replacement. Medina was stunned. Finally Manuel Chavez intervened and held a hallway meeting on Saturday afternoon to explain the political realities. Medina quickly withdrew from the opposition slate and went back on the Chavez team.
Elected by acclaim, Medina took the oath of office and joined the victory lap as the new board members walked around the convention hall to cheers. His reverence for Chavez bordered on hero worship. The immigrant farmworker from Zacatecas would never have imagined that Chavez could find anyone in that assemblage a threat, least of all him.
After the convention, Chavez returned to La Paz and tackled the job of running the operation he had conceived. Even with only a handful of contracts and members, the bureaucracy had grown. He reviewed more than eighty budgets8 each month for thirty-three boycott offices, twenty-six field offices, a dozen departments at La Paz, the Service Center, and the health group. Each day, the president’s office received an average of eighty letters, four to five speaking requests, and one call every three minutes. Each time Chavez left La Paz for trips, he fell further behind. Letters went unanswered, phone requests were mislaid, budgets did not add up. As he prepared for the first meeting of the new executive board, Chavez vowed to make drastic changes, confront people about their sloppy habits, and impose order. Rather than delegate more, Chavez concluded the problem stemmed from delegating too much. Much as he had done years ago in the CSO, Chavez decided the solution was to perform each task himself, at least until he understood exactly what had to be done.
He started his day around 3:30 a.m., opening each piece of mail and sorting letters. He took his pile and dictated answers on tape for his secretaries to type. Starting around 8:00 a.m., he met with people and returned phone calls for the rest of the day, often working until 10:00 p.m. He did not believe in appointments and enjoyed what he called “the exchange, the human part,” of conversations, unconstrained by any clock. “People should come, you deal with the problem9 till it’s done,” he said. “There’s no way to know how long it will take.”
When Jacques Levy arrived at La Paz in mid-November 1973 to continue his interviews, he found Chavez sprawled barefoot across his bed, complaining bitterly to Jerry Cohen and Anna Puharich, a well-connected New York socialite who had raised money for the union and then moved to La Paz to run the Service Center. Chavez ranted about inefficiency and overspending. “Cesar says he must get control,”10 Levy wrote. “This is now a Union. Before he was king, but now there are forces and factions keeping track of what he is doing, and he will be held accountable. So he must straighten out La Paz. Can’t allow sloppiness and independence that exists. I’ll fire everyone, if necessary, he says. I’ll start from scratch. But it must be done.”
In some instances, Chavez forced out the most competent staff members, much as he had foreseen. Quigley, a former seminarian with an accounting background, had been recruited to the union by Hartmire. When Quigley arrived at La Paz as the business manager in April 1972, no one had kept financial books for the union or the Service Center since the last accountant left six months earlier. Quigley set up systems and instituted quarterly budgets. Chavez was pleased, and the two men enjoyed a good rapport. Chavez helped Quigley, paralyzed in a surfing accident, raise money for a motorized wheelchair. When Chavez was absent running the strike during much of 1973, Quigley made decisions,11 kept tight control on the budget, and administered the $1.6 million strike fund. When Chavez returned to La Paz, he felt Quigley had usurped too much power. Chavez turned the budget functions over to a trusted aide who had no financial background. Puharich took over the Service Center, throwing her weight around with demands
that reduced some of Quigley’s coworkers to tears. Quigley understood that Chavez didn’t fire people; he just made situations uncomfortable and waited. Quigley resigned in early December 1973.
Chavez’s basic mistrust of almost anyone with outside expertise complicated his efforts to structure an efficient operation. “We haven’t yet mastered the whole idea of administration,”12 Chavez acknowledged to a group of boycotters. “Administrating things is very difficult for us. Either because we don’t like to do it or because we don’t see the necessity of doing it or because we’re just too pressed doing other things.”
With some sixty thousand index cards in the files from past members, no one knew for sure how many members the union had, who paid dues, or whether dues corresponded correctly with the hours worked. Similar problems plagued the medical plan, an innovative insurance program set up by LeRoy Chatfield and designed to meet the needs of seasonal workers. Chavez had the foresight to invest in a computer system, and he pinned his hopes on programmers who were laboriously writing language and punching cards to create programs to computerize the union’s files. Dave Smith, the computer whiz, had been close to Quigley. When he was forced out, Smith left as well.
When the first meeting of the national executive board convened on December 17, 1973, Chavez faced a new dynamic—a roomful of strong personalities, experienced organizers, and smart minds unafraid to voice opinions. He set out to structure meetings to ensure that he maintained control.
The board met at least four times a year, each meeting lasting several days, often ten hours a day. Discussions on the most mundane matters could take hours, while significant policy decisions often were made quickly, or ratified after the fact. If Chavez sensed resistance to an idea, he changed the subject and deferred the discussion. He skillfully played one member against another to build coalitions that supported his ideas and break apart allies who might form an independent bloc. If he found himself backed into a corner and all else failed, he lashed out at Huerta. If a discussion veered off course, he suggested they take a walk or tell war stories into the tape recorder, which he kept running throughout the sessions. When emotions ran too high, he defused the situation with a joke or a song. From the beginning, Chavez, the master organizer, organized the board to do his bidding.
