The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  “If we’re thinking we can do one and not do the other, we’re kidding ourselves,” Richard Chavez said. “We have to do both.”

  Ganz and Medina argued that organizing was negotiating contracts; the two could not be separated. Challenged on the definition of organizing, the thing he once knew best, Chavez refused to debate. Ganz suggested they concentrate on one region or crop instead of an activity.

  “There’s no other way to define it,” Chavez said flatly. He had been agonizing over the decision for months, he told the board. “The biggest problem in my mind has been: what the fuck’s gone wrong. Really just trying, day and night, thinking about, what the hell’s happening. I’m convinced after looking at it, after sleeping on it, after looking at it, after reading, after reviewing, after analyzing, that it’s very simple. We’re not concentrating,” he said.

  Chavez acknowledged he faced a group that no longer accepted what he said without question. In part, they had grown up and had ideas of their own; in part, they could not understand or accept what Chavez was trying to do. Padilla thought he might resign, confused about where Chavez was leading. Richard Chavez felt burned out, torn between his practical beliefs, his older brother, and his partner, and frustrated that he had been unable to build a legacy or train another generation. Even Chris Hartmire, the faithful disciple, was confused. He had recently made a startling confession to Drake. Hartmire said he was afraid to speak his mind for fear he, too, would be branded one of the “asshole” conspirators.

  The assholes, Chavez and Huerta insisted, had infiltrated the union and now were attempting to undermine friendships and marriages. They recounted again the alleged espionage of Kathleen McCarthy, the nurse, and David McClure, the plumber. Huerta charged that the assholes were now sabotaging her relationship with Richard. “Richard and I have been having fights about this for the last two months,” she said. “They’re going to fuck other people’s relationships up. We’re stupid if we think it’s not happening . . . They’re starting to live with the members. They’re doing it just to fuck us up . . . They’re going to marry people just to fuck this union up.”

  Richard ran the Delano office. He just did not see the conspiracy that his brother and partner wove. “For God’s sake, open your eyes and see what’s happening!” Cesar said. “They’ve got you and Dolores fighting like never before. Don’t say no, Richard!”

  Hartmire screwed up his courage and challenged Chavez and Huerta. The minister had been disturbed by the firing of Joe Smith, but he had accepted Chavez’s explanations. Now Huerta had targeted a woman named Shelly Spiegel, a teacher for a small school in Delano that the farmworker ministry sponsored. Hartmire knew Spiegel was not an infiltrator. “When somebody gets focused on as being a problem, all sorts of unrelated facts, incidents, relationships, begin to automatically fall into place as an indictment on that person which would never fall into place if someone wasn’t focusing attention on things,” Hartmire said. “And those pieces may or may not add up to something. But they add up to something because someone with power has indicted them. All I’m pleading for is that we also listen to another interpretation of those events. So we don’t screw good people who shouldn’t be screwed. And Cesar, let me tell you, we’re afraid.”

  “My God, what are we?” Drake exploded. “What are we? What have we become? If Chris Hartmire is afraid to express things openly because he’s afraid he’s going to be accused of being part of a conspiracy, what more is there to say?”

  “I’m afraid of you, too,” Richard Chavez told his brother. “Everybody’s afraid. But we’re too goddamn chickenshit to say. I’m afraid, because I might be one of the conspirators.”

  Chavez played masterfully on their fears—the fear that he would reject them, and the fear that he would abandon them. In a poignant, rambling soliloquy, he said calmly that perhaps the time had come for him to work out a transition and leave. He did not want to stay until he was forced out. He talked about Churchill’s defeat after World War II and about the fate of movement founders who were overthrown. He wanted to leave gracefully and go on to his next project. He was committed to his vision, and he would rather leave than compromise.

  “We’ve come to a stop, kind of. I see certain things in the union that I think have to be dealt with. But, most people don’t agree with me. They don’t. Let’s face it, they don’t. The Game, they don’t agree with me. This idea that we’re being had. They don’t, you know. That’s just the way things happen. So what I want to do, this union would be a lot better off if we could have an orderly transition.”

  He gambled that despite their discontent, no one in the room could envision the union without Chavez. As Hartmire observed, they defined themselves in terms of their relationship to their leader. In the end they were willing to compromise their principles to preserve that central relationship. Once he brought them to that realization, Chavez was halfway there.

  “If I stay,” Chavez continued, “I have to stay on my own terms and I have to fuck the organization to the extent that I become a real dictator, if I’m not one right now. That’s just natural.” He would only stay, he repeated, on one condition: “I got to be the fucking king, or I leave.”

  “When I came here, I had total, absolute power. That’s how it got done. The whole cake was mine. Well, it was a little cake. But it was mine. And then the cake keeps expanding. I try to keep being a proprietor. After a while, everybody built it. After a little while, if you have absolute total power, can you go to more total power? No. The only way to go is to go down. To go down, to have less power, is tough.”

  No one said a word. He told them he had been fasting. He pleaded with them to understand. “What you’re saying, you’ve grown up. You have grown up. And now it’s very hard to face me on an equal basis. As it should be. And all of you are growing up . . . You’re sure, you now own the union, you’ve done enough, you feel like, ‘I have a right now to say.’”

  Chavez knew the group functioned best when they faced a common enemy. “When we had a visible opponent, we had unity, a real purpose, it was like a religious war.” He conjured up a new villain, just as he had done at other key junctures. He spun a web of innuendo to strengthen his case about infiltrators and cover his own misdeeds.

  Philip Vera Cruz was the eldest member of the board, the quietest, and the least popular. Although he had been on the board since 1966, he remained an outsider, separated by language, culture, and ideology. He was more left-leaning than the others, and known as the “philosopher” because he often gave discourses to students who visited Forty Acres. He had refused to leave Delano for a boycott assignment and clashed with Chavez over the construction of a retirement home for elderly Filipinos. Vera Cruz had privately questioned Chavez’s authoritarian leadership for some time. His distrust pushed him further outside: when the board had discussed Nick Jones, Chavez engineered an emergency call to send Vera Cruz out of town. Recently Vera Cruz had questioned the purges. Word had gotten back to La Paz that the seventy-three-year-old planned to introduce a resolution condemning the firings at the union’s upcoming convention. He needed to be discredited.

  Chavez charged that Vera Cruz, who took copious notes at meetings, planned to write a book in which he would criticize the union. Chavez accused Vera Cruz of having turned over his notes to the Communists, more commonly referred to as the “assholes,” or simply “them.” They knew he stayed in San Francisco with left-wing radicals, Chavez told Vera Cruz. He was accused of sabotaging Agbayani Village, the retirement community (in fact, Chavez had insisted on charging rents and imposing conditions that made the accommodations unattractive to the elderly Filipinos). Vera Cruz denied the accusations but said little in his own defense. “Those assholes got Philip. They organized and they fucked him up,” Chavez told the board and two dozen staff members in the room. “You got to watch out ’cause they’re very fucking smart.”

  People in the room were angry, eager for someone to blame for the union’s travails. The proud Fi
lipino leader made a good target. They heaped curses and epithets on Vera Cruz. They accused him of turning over internal documents to his girlfriend, an Anglo volunteer, and alleged she had seduced him to gain information. “Philip, we started a movement together,” Chavez said. “You know how those Commies work. They come and they probe everywhere until they find a weakness. They came and they buttered you up. Everyone’s seen it.”

  Chavez produced a one-sentence oath,11 written by Cohen and designed to trap Vera Cruz: “We, the undersigned agree that the matters discussed today were confidential and in consideration of the mutual promises made herein covenant with each other and with the UFW AFL-CIO and agree not to disclose the matters discussed at today’s meeting in any manner whether by written publication or orally.” The board members pleaded, shouted, and threatened Vera Cruz, but he refused to sign. Chavez trumpeted his refusal as evidence of the Filipino’s treachery, whipping the crowd into a frenzy like a revivalist preacher. The other thirty-five in the room signed the oath.12 Almost everyone was won over.

  Those who harbored doubts about the conspiracy theories eased their consciences with two arguments. There had been spies; often the plants were so clumsy they were quickly spotted, but perhaps others had infiltrated more successfully. And Cesar had usually been right. For years, as Drake had pointed out, his vision and instincts had guided the union to success.

  “I think if we don’t know where it’s at, there’s something wrong with us,” said Richard Chavez, who had done a 180-degree turn and now enthusiastically supported his brother, marveling at his perspicacity. “I feel that I know exactly where it’s at. No doubt in my mind why he’s where he’s at. What happens is he might be months ahead of us, or years . . . He’s way out there in front, way in front.”

  The most important thing, Chavez said after Vera Cruz was escorted out of the room, was to have convinced the board that the threat from infiltrators was real.

  The victory also gave Chavez more credibility in painting his own family troubles as part of the conspiracy to bring down the union. “I don’t even know if I’m married right now,” he said. “Helen just took off.”

  Helen Chavez had filled in for her husband’s secretary one day and opened the mail. She found a love letter13 to Cesar, sent by an eighteen-year-old who lived in Mendota, a small agricultural community west of Fresno. The teenager came from a farmworker family. She had gotten involved in the union through her mother, helped on the picket line during a Mendota melon strike, and then spent a summer in La Paz along with three classmates. Helen’s first instinct when she read the love letter was to seek out a friend and ask her to drive to Mendota to confront the teen. Talked out of that plan, Helen left La Paz and moved in with her daughter in Delano. When Helen asked the secretary who normally opened the mail if she had seen similar letters in the past, the secretary lied to protect Cesar and said no. The woman later confessed to Hartmire.

  Chavez’s infidelities14 had become common knowledge in certain circles, particularly among those who spent time around him at La Paz. The threats against him, his ability to disappear for unspecified reasons, and his need to travel with trusted guards all facilitated his liaisons. His affairs were not discussed, in part out of deference to Helen, in part because extramarital affairs were common, and in large part because such behavior would not have squared well with the image of the saintly founder and devoted Catholic family man. Just as people did not talk about internal conflicts or purges out of fear the revelations might hurt the movement, they kept quiet about his flirtations and sexual indiscretions.

  On a few occasions, Chavez made a point of talking about how women approached him, painting himself as a hapless victim in stories that may have been intended to counter any rumors that surfaced. In the CSO days, he told a story about an angry husband who interrupted a house meeting with a knife and threatened Chavez. “The moment you’re sort of different from other men, there’s a natural attraction,”15 he told a group of union volunteers in the early years. “It has nothing to do with your looks . . . Some women, they get attracted.”

  Helen’s anger over the love letter and her absence from La Paz forced the issue into public view. The letters, Chavez claimed, were intended to frame him. He had warned his wife that something like this would happen. “My marriage is on the rocks16 right now, on the fucking ice. I told Helen, ‘I bet you, whatever you want, you’re going to be approached, you better watch out.’ Sure enough, two fucking weeks later, there’s a fucking love letter. In perfect Spanish. It just sort of appeared. When I came back, she’s just going out of her mind.”

  Chavez hoped to resolve the situation at a meeting to be moderated by Manuel Chavez. Manuel, whose own affairs were legion, would support Cesar’s testimony about the ways that infiltrators seduced or framed union leaders to gain information. “I have to meet tomorrow at nine to find out if I’m still married or not,” Cesar told the executive board meeting. “It’s really fucking ridiculous. I can’t believe it. But it’s there.”

  Chavez extended the cover story to protect his son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez. A volunteer in Coachella had recently been publicly purged after she held meetings among women staff members to discuss security and other issues. Among the accusations Chavez now leveled against her was that she suggested Rodriguez was cheating on his wife, Linda. “I’m feeling some pressure,” Chavez said. “They’re fucking over with my daughter, her marriage. They fucked with Helen, you know. I told Helen this was going to happen. She believed, but didn’t believe it . . . That’s what they do. They’re experts. They’re doing it now. They’re doing it to my wife. They’re doing it to my daughter.”

  He cast the net wider. “They almost fucked over Fred Ross in San Francisco,” Chavez said, an apparent reference to Ross’s early affair with Ida Cousino. “Your dad,” Chavez said, turning to Fred Ross Jr. “Remember?”

  The only board member who really understood was Huerta, Chavez said. She jumped in to back him up. She talked about men who had approached her over the years with the intention of spying on her and the union.

  By the end, everyone went along, some out of conviction, others accepting the inevitable. They wanted to put it behind them and get back to the place where they had once been. Almost as an afterthought, they agreed on the need to “concentrate” on negotiating contracts, at the expense of almost everything else. Only Ganz voted against the resolution.

  At the end of the meeting, Drake announced his resignation. Everyone ganged up on him, begging and challenging him to stay. He said it was like being at his own funeral. He agreed to stay.

  Two days after the meeting, Cesar and Helen talked at their daughter Eloise’s house. Cesar prepared notes17 for what he called “My Marriage Meeting.” His opening statement indicated that he did not expect to be believed. He wanted to know at the end of the discussion whether he was still married. Number two on the agenda, “My Affair,” included a discussion of the young woman and the letters. Number three was evidence in his defense, which included Manuel and the guards. He ended with some “observations,” including thoughts about the assassination threats, the lack of security, and Helen’s changing role.

  Helen moved back to La Paz, ending their most public separation. Some months later, Hartmire presided as the community gathered to pay tribute to the first lady of La Paz on her fiftieth birthday. “Through all of it,” Hartmire said, “she and Cesar, through all the ups and down, they seem to still like each other! It always amazes me. I think the thing that kind of draws us to her most quickly is, she is just so damn real.18 There isn’t an ounce of phoniness in her being.”

  The roller-coaster summer meeting of the executive board was prominently featured in the president’s newsletter, with a front-page picture of the board and Cohen. The caption read: “The meeting progressed almost without pause and proved to be the most productive in the movement’s history.”19

  Chapter 33

  The End Game

  It is not difficult to get rid
of total failures. They liquidate themselves. Yesterday’s successes, however, always linger on beyond their productive life. We must seek out those sacred tasks of the past that drain needed resources and scarce time, and prune them ruthlessly so we can focus on the future.

  When Chavez had lamented the “so-called democracy” that would require him to sacrifice his best people before they turned on him, he singled out Marshall Ganz as a special ally. When they come after me, they will take Ganz out as well, Chavez told Jacques Levy1 in their late-night conversation at the union’s 1973 founding convention.

  For more than a decade, Ganz had enjoyed a special closeness to Chavez, a father-son dynamic resented by some and envied by others. Ganz’s father had been a rabbi, and his religious upbringing helped form an early bond with Chavez. Ganz’s relationship with Jessica Govea linked him to a CSO family that had been among Chavez’s earliest supporters. A high school debate champion, Ganz spoke his mind more freely than most. He and Chavez quarreled from time to time but always made up. After Huerta, Ganz had been Chavez’s strongest ideological supporter, committed to the importance of the movement philosophy and strongly opposed to paying wages.

  Since the ALRA had passed, however, Ganz had felt increasingly estranged. He was unable to get Chavez’s attention and confused by his preoccupation with the La Paz community. Thrust into the unknown world of elections with little guidance, Ganz learned fast. His fluency in Spanish and comfort in the Mexican culture helped him form relationships with workers in Salinas and figure out the complicated vegetable industry. He immersed himself in strategies to win elections, negotiate, and administer contracts. He was excited by the strength of the ranch committees and his success in building leadership. Ganz was eager to share his new knowledge, but Chavez rebuffed discussions, resenting the intrusion of “real world” issues on his work at La Paz.