The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  “Out of the ruin of the 1960s, one remarkable institution and one remarkable leader13 survived,” Jack Newfield wrote in the Village Voice on May 10, 1976.

  Martin King, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. SDS, SNCC and the Beatles fell apart. Rennie Davis discovered a teenage guru. Tim Leary became an informer. Huey Newton beat up an old man and jumped bail. Rap Brown is in prison for armed robbery. Ramparts expired. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and now Phil Ochs are dead. But Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers endured, and grew, and faltered, and rallied, and became the one tangible thing we could point to and say yes, this is good, this works, this is an example of the world we want to create.

  By the time he was interviewed by Newfield, Chavez’s stories about his early years had strayed farther from the facts. He said he had attended sixty-seven schools by seventh grade and that he had been trained by Fred Ross as a teenager.

  “We’re here to stay,”14 he said in a newspaper interview. “We don’t have to do now what we’ve been doing for 13 years. But we’ve got to sharpen up our management. I understand this now, and it’s exciting. It’s creative. It’s an experiment we’re doing.” On Tuesdays, he had instituted a communal lunch at La Paz. At five o’clock each day, they had “situation time,” where about thirty people joined him to act out management situations. Milne’s lessons and the idea that there was a science of management theory had piqued Chavez’s natural curiosity. He was self-educated, deeply knowledgeable in certain areas and with enormous gaps in others, and disinclined to analyze information. When he embraced a new idea he swallowed it whole; he was convinced, for example, that the key to computerizing the union’s files was to find the right hardware system. No amount of argument from others that the problem was software and programming could shake him from his conviction.

  In the summer of 1976, Chavez faced a public test of his new management structure. After the state labor board had shut down in February and elections stopped, Jerry Cohen had prepared an initiative for the November ballot that would make the rights and regulations established under the Agricultural Labor Relations Act part of the California constitution. An initiative had been Chavez’s original plan, before the governor threw his support behind legislative efforts. A campaign would capitalize on the union’s support in the cities. By the end of February Chavez had told board members he wanted to proceed15 even if behind-the-scenes efforts to restart the ALRB succeeded.

  The union passed the first hurdle easily. A petition blitz collected far more signatures than needed to place Proposition 14 on the ballot. Chavez celebrated the success of the union’s new structure and increased efficiency at a meeting to debrief staff who had run the petition-gathering campaign. Medina hailed the union’s new maturity. “In the past there was a fire and all of us grabbed hoses16 and buckets and we ran and left everything hanging,” he told the boycotters. “We didn’t do that this time.” With the new structure, Medina predicted, “we’re going to become not only the strongest but perhaps the largest Union in this country during the next four or five years.”

  A month later, the state legislature approved $6.5 million to reopen the ALRB, and the UFW faced a crucial decision: whether to invest money and resources to actively campaign for Proposition 14. Elections in the fields would start again within months, and the union was ill-prepared. Ganz and a dozen of his staff had been on loan to Jerry Brown’s short-lived presidential campaign, which scored several upsets in Democratic primaries. The union had been steadily signing contracts, but still represented only a small fraction of the workers who had voted for the UFW. Ranch committees were just beginning to function effectively. A statewide campaign would sap all resources away from those efforts, at the very time the union had to gear up for more elections.

  Chavez estimated a Prop 14 campaign would cost more than $1 million and have only a 40 percent chance of success. In mid-June 1976 he laid out to the board the arguments against17 proceeding: Only a small percentage of comparable initiatives had ever passed. A no vote was much easier to win than a yes vote. The initiative had started as a tactic to prod the state to refund the ALRB; now there was no necessity to pursue a costly and risky fight. Most board members agreed the union’s limited resources should go toward negotiating and administering contracts. “Workers are getting antsy,” Medina said, pointing to places where elections had been won a year earlier and the union had yet to return. “They see time passing by and they see nothing happening.”

  Fred Ross voiced the strongest dissent. He urged an all-out campaign for Prop 14 and challenged Chavez’s lack of conviction.

  “But see, Fred, if we lose the damn initiative, that’s goodbye to everything,” Chavez said. “To the board, and to the law. And we’re in trouble.”

  “Cesar, if we don’t do that, and we think we won, we’re kidding ourselves,” Ross responded. “In my opinion, we’re going to be right back to the same spot. Those growers are never going to give up.”

  “Then we do exactly the same thing,” Chavez said.

  “We can’t do the same thing. We’ll have lost credibility in the eyes of the public,” Ross said. If they backed off now, people would not take the union seriously. “Right now that ace is in the hole. We can bluff this year. We are bluffing this year. Next time we try to bluff, I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  Chavez postponed the decision.

  A few weeks later, he flew to New York to attend the Democratic National Convention.18 Eight years earlier, Chavez had watched Hubert Humphrey accept the nomination for president that he had hoped would go to Robert F. Kennedy. Knowing Humphrey would not mention the farmworkers, Chavez got down on his knees in front of the television and begged for a bone, much to Jerry Cohen’s amusement. Now Cohen was in New York to watch Chavez deliver a nominating speech for California governor Jerry Brown, and the UFW was the most popular ticket in town. On the spur of the moment, Marshall Ganz and Jessica Govea put together a $10-a-ticket fund-raiser to precede Chavez’s speech. They began planning Monday; Wednesday afternoon, crowds waited up to thirty minutes for the ancient elevators in the McAlpin Hotel to ascend to the party on the twenty-fourth floor. Chavez and Brown waded through crowds to the front of the room to make brief remarks. New York papers ran photographs of Jane Fonda auctioning off six autographed copies of Jacques Levy’s book. The books sold for $1,100, and the event netted the UFW more than $8,500.

  At 7:00 p.m. the party ended, and an hour later an estimated fifty million viewers watched Chavez nominate Brown, a speech carried in its entirety by the networks. Jimmy Carter won the nomination, but the UFW received credit for Brown’s upset victories in several state primaries. The hottest item on the convention floor was the black eagle flag.

  One week later, the UFW executive board met at La Paz to decide how to proceed on Proposition 14. They were riding high after the convention, confident of their political prowess. Chris Hartmire took notes in the front of the room as Chavez asked the board and staff to list pros and cons. The cons far outweighed the pros. The union’s strongest argument—farmworkers were being denied the right to vote—had been undercut as soon as funding for the state board was restored. Opponents had seized on provisions in the initiative that allowed union organizers access to workers and framed the vote-no campaign as a defense of private property. Everyone agreed that had powerful appeal. Ganz presciently outlined the opposition’s advertisements: “There will be a woman sleeping in bed, and all of a sudden the window will open, and in jumps Roberto Garcia . . . I’d take a picture of a grower’s wife—‘You mean they can come into my home?!’”

  Chavez sidestepped the question of whether a $1 million campaign was the best use of the union’s resources as he steered the board to the conclusion he had already reached. Can we win?19 he asked. Yes or no? At first, no one spoke. “I guess you got your answer!” snorted Richard Chavez, the lone skeptic. “It’s gonna take a big miracle and a big chunk of money.”

  “Yes or no?” his broth
er insisted. “Could it be won?” No, Richard answered.

  The only other naysayer was Nick Jones, the national boycott director. Hartmire voiced some concern, disabusing Chavez of the idea that religious groups and editorial boards would understand the rationale now that elections were resuming. But the minister joined the chorus, confident that the union could once again overcome all odds. Imbued with the si se puede spirit, how could the answer be anything but yes? The vote was 8–1.

  The governor called Chavez to urge that the union reconsider. Brown warned the campaign could backfire and energize opponents. Growers would launch a multimillion-dollar campaign that would be difficult to overcome. “I think it is a real problem,”20 Brown said. He predicted the campaign would polarize communities and cost many of the UFW’s allies a lot of political capital. “I don’t see how the initiative can be justified in view of the fact that the money was appropriated and there is a board.”

  Chavez defended the decision with a standard line: “It is a mandate of the membership. I am not going to go against their wishes.” Brown asked for an opportunity to speak with the board. Chavez said he was welcome but that it would be a waste of time. Brown and Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy met with the UFW board the following weekend. McCarthy warned that Democrats from rural areas could not afford to support the controversial measure. He offered the UFW a deal: drop the campaign, and the Speaker would promise to fund the ALRB in time for elections to begin in late summer, and to protect the law for the next two years. As Chavez had predicted, the politicians’ arguments fell on deaf ears.

  Ganz took charge of the campaign, with Hartmire as second in command. Jones was told to bring boycotters to California to help. By the middle of September, Hartmire was worried. “We’re getting burned21 already in the press,” he said. Cohen and Drake agreed. The union had allowed the opposition to define the measure. Prop 14 was being portrayed not as the farmworkers’ right to vote but as the union’s right to trespass on private property. The California Supreme Court had upheld an ALRB rule that allowed union organizers access to workers in the fields three times a day, but that mattered little. Hartmire warned that the union needed to move fast to launch its own media campaign.

  The era of door-to-door campaigns had given way to television advertising, and the UFW was caught unprepared. As Brown had predicted, the growers unleashed a well-funded television, radio, and print campaign. Harry Kubo, a Japanese American farmer interned during World War II, had formed the Nisei Farmers League in 1971, frustrated by the UFW’s pickets and penchant for destructive acts. Within a year, he had four hundred members, who formed night patrols to protect against damage to irrigation pumps and fields. By 1976, Kubo was widowed with two teenage daughters. He hired a guard to watch his house while he spearheaded the opposition22 to Prop 14. He traveled thirty thousand miles between June and November and raised $1.8 million for a sophisticated multimedia campaign. Kubo talked about how he had lost his land during the Japanese internment and had no intention of giving up property rights again. Other commercials featured white farmers making thinly veiled appeals to racist fears: “I don’t scare easily, but Prop 14 is an invasion of my property rights. I’ve raised my family and daughters on this farm and we feel threatened.”

  The UFW followed a consultant’s advice and withheld its limited media buy until the last few weeks. Although Brown stood by the union and filmed commercials, Speaker McCarthy sent his constituents a letter urging them to vote no on Prop 14. Chavez made dozens of appearances the last six weeks, but house meetings, rallies, bumper stickers, and Chavez’s personal appeal were no match for the growers’ aggressive media blitz. Chavez found himself in violation of one of his cardinal rules: never be on the defensive.

  Proposition 14 lost by more than a two-to-one margin. Carter failed to carry California, and Democrat John Tunney narrowly lost his U.S. Senate seat to S. I. Hayakawa, an outcome some blamed on the UFW’s losing crusade. “Our experience in this movement is that we never lose,” Chavez told the disappointed crowd that gathered on election night at Mount Carmel High School in Los Angeles. “There may be temporary setbacks, but we never lose . . . Don’t be bitter.”23

  Since the ALRB was set to reopen anyway, the immediate setback for the union was not particularly significant. The damage to Chavez was more severe. He had not had to take responsibility for a strategy gone awry in many years, not since he had become a national celebrity. Earlier setbacks caused by judgment errors, like the loss of the contracts in 1973, had been apparent only to a small circle. To the world at large, the UFW leader had been a heroic victim who brilliantly turned every loss into a victory. He had not made a losing gamble—until now. Prop 14 was a very public rejection and an avoidable loss. He would have to face people who would tell him one of the things he most hated to hear: I told you so. On top of that, he would have to be nice to them and make amends, because he was now even more dependent on them for the future of the law.

  Chavez had been fasting24 before the election, as had his driver and chief of security, longtime union volunteer Ben Maddock. On the drive back to La Paz on the night of the defeat, they had to stop the car on a cold mountain road because both men were sick to their stomachs.

  Chapter 29

  The Cultural Revolution

  We’re prepared to lose anyone that wants to leave. We’re prepared for that. We’re also prepared to have people here who when I ask them to jump, they’re going to say, “How high?” That’s how it’s going to run.

  The failure of Proposition 14 stripped away one of Chavez’s surefire fallbacks: go to the people in the cities for support. Struggling to reconcile his faith in the union’s popularity with the dramatic loss, he looked for explanations—and then for scapegoats. Chavez began to lay the groundwork before the votes were cast.

  Nick Jones had grown up in North Dakota, dropped out of college, and joined the Students for a Democratic Society. He registered as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and discovered the boycott in Chicago soon after the grape strike began. At twenty-four, he moved to Delano in the summer of 1966 and went on the payroll of the Migrant Ministry. A few months later he met Virginia Rodriguez, a farmworker kid who had been working as a secretary when she saw an advertisement for a training program to help la causa. She ended up at the nonprofit Center for Change and Community Development, where Manuel Chavez was working when he was out on parole. Manuel convinced Rodriguez to join the union full-time, and she went to work as Cesar’s secretary in early 1967. She and Jones were married that summer. When the fast started in February 1968, they pitched the first tent at Forty Acres. A few months later, they headed to Portland with their six-week-old daughter to work on the boycott.

  Chavez trusted Jones with a variety of assignments over the years, including undercover missions and one of the first security details to protect the union leader, a job that required familiarity with weapons, devotion, and discretion. Jones’s success as boycott director in Boston and then Chicago propelled him to his position as national boycott director in early 1976. Jones had recruited a lot of the boycotters and developed a loyal following around the country.

  “My whole life is the union,” Jones said in a July 1976 interview at La Paz, the day the executive board voted to move ahead with the Prop 14 campaign. “I can’t imagine what I would have done had I left the movement . . . Virginia and I have never had a day that we’ve looked back on that we’ve felt we shouldn’t have been here. So I mean, we made our life out of it and will live and die in the movement,1 I think.”

  Chavez often marked people he wanted to purge and then waited for an opportunity to move against them. As Ross observed,2 Chavez preferred passive resistance to confrontation, subjecting people to “a certain type of ostracism, embarrassment, to the point where they just can’t stand it anymore.” As part of his technique, Chavez became skilled at weaving complicated Machiavellian webs, tying together unrelated events to form patterns. His distrust often prompted comments
or actions that verified his suspicions, and the prophecies became self-fulfilling. What distinguished Chavez’s attack on Jones was the prominence of the target and the ensuing outcry.

  Jones had been the only union staff member to publicly voice doubts about the wisdom of pursuing the Proposition 14 campaign; that alone became grounds for suspicion. He did not get along well with Ganz, and the two had clashed during the signature-gathering phase. What Ganz wanted from Jones was his staff. Some boycotters were reluctant to move across the country for another grueling campaign, and Ganz was known as a tough taskmaster. Jones turned over his staff, but not as quickly as Ganz wanted. Their disagreements fueled speculation that Jones wanted to challenge Ganz for his seat on the board. In mid-September, Chavez told the executive board at a private meeting at his house that he believed Jones was out to sabotage Prop 14 and the union. To strengthen his case, Chavez dragged in two people Jones had recruited in Chicago.

  Kathleen McCarthy was a nurse who had worked on the Chicago boycott, where she accused a farmworker of attempting to rape her during a driving lesson. In 1976 she joined the staff of the Delano clinic, where she had run-ins with her supervisor. At a September 9 meeting of the board that ran the health group, Chavez said people at the clinic were undermining the union and singled out McCarthy as a probable spy. The next day, Chavez met with McCarthy and accused her of being an agent. When she burst into tears, he viewed her response as confirmation. As she wandered around La Paz dazed by the encounter, she ran into Joe Smith,3 who had worked on the boycott with her in Chicago. He gave her a ride to Bakersfield and then spoke to Chavez on her behalf.