by Miriam Pawel
In February 1978, without notifying Ganz, Chavez announced that Ganz would be shifted to organizing—a department all but abolished after the decision to concentrate on negotiating more contracts. The switch was motivated, Chavez said, by concern from state officials that if the UFW did not pick up the pace on elections, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board’s budget would be cut.
Ganz responded2 to the abrupt about-face with a thirteen-page, single-spaced letter that detailed everything he found troubling in recent months: Chavez’s lack of interest in substantive issues facing the union. His response to the loss of Prop 14, “the first time the public really rejected us.” The focus on purging “assholes” as “a substitute for dealing with our own problems of administrative incompetence.” Chavez’s annoyance when problems arose. His desperation to sign contracts at any cost, and the message of weakness that sent to employers. His veiled comments at recent meetings about board members having “political interests” that conflicted with Chavez’s plans.
“It was like you locked yourself up in La Paz with your people over there and that the trust which should be shared with the rest of us who worked all these years to help you build this movement is transferred to your ‘co-game players’ and your La Paz folks,” Ganz wrote. “What the fuck political interests are you talking about? Does someone on the board have ambitions to replace you? If so, I don’t know about it. Are those of us on the board some kind of threat to you? If so, I don’t know what it is.”
Ganz felt he had lost Chavez’s trust by questioning his decisions. “If my thinking for myself and arguing for my position is a threat to you and to the union, then I’m ready to leave rather than create an internal division. But I think it’s a bigger threat to the union if you can’t tolerate independence and self-direction among top staff and officers. You cannot build a national union out of ‘yes men.’”
In his anger and hurt, Ganz wrote with more accuracy than he realized; though Ganz found the idea almost inconceivable, yes-men were what Chavez wanted. Rather than respond privately, Chavez brought up the letter at the March 1978 executive board meeting—a further breach of the intimate relationship Ganz had enjoyed. Ganz asked for a private conversation. “He’s the president of the fucking union, Marshall,” Cohen said in annoyance. “He’s not your father.”3 Ganz was coaxed into repeating the points of his letter in a long monologue. Chavez took notes. He scrawled four words on the bottom of his pad: “Let me run union.”4
To run the union, he repeated, he needed the Game. Ganz’s unhappiness became another opening to convince the board to play. The Game, Chavez promised, offered the perfect forum to voice grievances and clear the air. The first Game would be painful, he warned. But “a two, three hour rip-roaring game” would free them to make better decisions. “It’s like hunting two tigers with one bullet,” he said. “You want to take a chance.” Almost everyone who played at La Paz enjoyed the Game, Chavez insisted. Gilbert Padilla immediately disagreed. Plenty of people had confided in Padilla that they found the Game upsetting and destructive. “They come because it’s part of the community; if you don’t come, you’re an asshole,” he told Chavez, who vehemently disagreed. “Let’s go play,”5 Chavez urged the board. “We’ll record it for posterity.”
And so they did. The players knew each other well, knew their vulnerabilities, and knew which attacks would appeal to Chavez. The ten players (Cohen played with the nine board members) included two brothers and two couples—Huerta and Richard Chavez, and Ganz and Govea, who had replaced Philip Vera Cruz on the board.
Chavez had mentioned off and on for two years that he wanted the legal department at La Paz, not Salinas. Ganz gamed Cohen: “The real problem is he’s got his own union going in Salinas. How many unions have you ever heard of that the general counsel, the legal department of the union is 300 miles away from the union? How many of you ever hear of that? But see, he’s got his own thing going.”
Huerta gamed Ganz on developing an independent power base: “I think you’re trying to start your own union.” Then she turned on Govea and accused her of being Ganz’s sidekick: “At the convention we should have just passed a resolution to give Marshall two votes.”
Padilla and Ganz gamed Medina about his ambition and accused him of campaigning to be the union president. “He doesn’t believe in God . . . and he wants to be president of the union!” Huerta said. If he assumed power, she warned, he would bring all the assholes in with him.
Cohen and Huerta gamed Padilla, who had gone around to all the others in recent months in a futile attempt to get them to agree that Chavez had gone crazy. “‘Nutsy,’ is the word, Dolores,” Cohen said.
But they saved their strongest indictments for Chavez. The anger and unhappiness and confusion of the past months spilled out in attack after attack on the union leader. They gamed Chavez hardest on being out of touch with the workers. “He doesn’t know the goddamn members,” Ganz said. “He doesn’t know shit about contract administrations,” Huerta added, recalling the early days of the union when Chavez drove from town to town and spoke with farmworkers all the time.
“He hates the fucking workers,” Richard Chavez said. “He doesn’t know a fucking thing about the field office. He’s trying to make policy for the workers and doesn’t know a goddamn thing about them.” He chastised his brother for shunning the workers whose dues supported the union. (“Think of them as dues-units,” Cohen chimed in sarcastically.) “The workers don’t know who he is anymore. They just know his name.”
They made fun of Founder’s Day, the La Paz committees, and the royal “we” in the president’s newsletters, “a substitute for going out there and really dealing with the problem,” Ganz said. Huerta gamed Chavez for not learning from the 1973 debacle and again failing to make sure the field office staff could handle the contracts. “We’re going to get screwed,” she warned. “Whores in Giumarra’s camps!” Cohen shouted, a reference to Chavez’s tirade that blew up the 1973 negotiations with Delano grape growers.
The new owners of Interharvest, the largest lettuce grower, had come to meet Chavez the prior week and found him fasting. “Here’s these agribusiness guys who want to talk about problems,” Ganz said, and instead “they got all this weird stuff . . . In the car going back to the airport, [Interharvest owner] Howard Marguleas says to me, ‘What was that all about?’”
The Steven Spielberg science fiction movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind had been recently released, and the board members made fun of Chavez by humming the five-tone melodic theme that scientists used to communicate with extraterrestrials who landed in a UFO: “Doo do doo do doo. Doo do doo do doo.”
Chavez had recently taken a six-day mind-control class in Los Angeles and then announced he could cure ailments by laying on hands. The board members ridiculed him as “the Great Healer.” Padilla described a recent scene where Chavez “cured” someone, and they all began humming the Close Encounters theme again.
“Why don’t you start eating like a regular person, and why don’t you start sleeping like a regular person!” Mack Lyons yelled.
“He wants to be like Gandhi,” Ganz replied. “Watch this, Gandhi led the independence in India. But then when it got down to the real problems, of starting to build a country, the real problems, he went off in this cloud.”
“He talks about how when you touch someone in the dark, the sparks fly . . . Cesar, do you think you really can heal people?” Lyons asked.
“Yes,” replied Chavez, who made almost no effort to defend himself.
Chavez did not need to fight back; the Game was a way for him to elicit information that would give him greater control. People said things in the Game that they were “too chickenshit” to say in another context. Their comments gave him clearer understanding of who stood in his way. “It is not difficult to get rid of total failures. They liquidate themselves,” Chavez had said in his address to the 1977 union convention. “Yesterday’s successes, however, always linger on beyond their p
roductive life. We must seek out those sacred tasks of the past that drain needed resources and scarce time, and prune them ruthlessly6 so we can focus on the future.”
The legal department was next to play the Game. At Chavez’s urging, Cohen ordered his staff to travel to La Paz for training. On Saturdays, the eighteen lawyers and several paralegals boarded a van in Salinas at 3:00 a.m. for the five-hour ride to La Paz, unhappier each week.
The legal department was in Salinas because in 1974, Cohen had decided he could no longer live at La Paz and wanted to raise his family in Monterey County. Cohen had offered to resign as general counsel, but Chavez rejected the offer. He liked and trusted Cohen, relied on him for advice, and appreciated the law as a weapon. Chavez delighted in Cohen’s legal gambles, his irreverence toward authority, and his winning record. Like Chavez, Cohen turned defensive situations into opportunities that cost growers money and forced them to divulge information.
Once the ALRA passed, however, the role of the legal department changed dramatically. They became more traditional labor lawyers. They filed election objections and unfair labor charges, fought for back wages for fired employees, and litigated to define the parameters of the new law. For the lawyers, the chance to set precedents and shape the best labor law in the country was exhilarating. For Chavez, the work held little appeal. The legal department became less crucial to him, and the location in Salinas more problematic. “They’re not plugged into the union,” Chavez told the board. “They don’t have the same hopes that we have. The department should not be in Salinas. It’s a mistake.”7
Chavez knew the lawyers would make strong Game players. “The guys that have words,8 have an edge,” he said. “If you have a lot of words you don’t have to scream too much; if you don’t have words, you scream.” For four weeks, the legal department played the Game under the watchful eyes of Chavez and his trusted staff. In their naiveté and arrogance, the lawyers thought themselves irreplaceable at this historic moment in time. That as much as anything else galled Chavez and made him determined to prove otherwise.
The lawyers were not subtle. “Legal staff are organizing and pushing their feelings, e.g., waste of time to come to La Paz, Game isn’t working, the real work of the union is ‘out there,’ La Paz staff are brown-nosing ‘moonies,’”9 Hartmire reported to Chavez.
Their Games started shortly after Time picked up on recent stories about investigations into violence and child abuse at Synanon, which the magazine termed a “kooky cult”; in addition to mandatory vasectomies, Dederich had decided residents at Home Place should swap spouses. Dederich filed a $76 million libel suit against Time. Like Chavez, Dederich relished the idea of a good enemy: “The Holy War10 against Time unites people in Synanon as other battles did in the days that built Synanon,” read an internal memo. Dederich announced a boycott against Time and asked Chavez for help. Chavez denounced the story as a vicious attack and asked the UFW board to offer Dederich full support, noting Synanon had supplied the union with $100,000 worth of cars and materials, plus, of course, the Game.
“How do we reconcile our belief in nonviolence with the fact that he has an armed camp11 now?” Cohen asked, referring to comments by Dederich about his specially trained weapons force. Hostility from neighbors and authorities had prompted Synanon to purchase $63,000 worth of guns12 and ammunition, including 235 pistols, rifles, and shotguns, Dederich said. Families told stories about children held in Synanon against their will and beaten up after escape attempts, and a Marin County grand jury was investigating allegations of child abuse.
Chavez said the Time magazine story represented an attack on religious freedom, and the UFW needed to help its friends. The board adopted the Time boycott. The next Saturday, the lawyers arrived at La Paz for their Game dressed in matching white shirts and black ties and marched in a serpentine line from the bus to the conference room carrying copies of Time and singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
A few weeks later, Cohen approached Chavez with a request from several lawyers. Most earned $600 a month and depended on relatives or savings to get by. Forced to play the Game as they struggled to keep up with the mounting legal work, they had asked Cohen for an increase. When he told Chavez, the union president saw an opportunity. Tell them to put it in writing, he said. Cohen did. He directed all the lawyers to submit requests and presented the letters to Chavez in one bundle. They asked for additional amounts that averaged just over $400 a month.
Doctors and lawyers had always been exempt from the $5-a-week system, a practical concession justified on the basis of their professional status. Plenty of other exceptions were made. When Chavez needed particular expertise—whether from a lawyer, a mechanic, or Fred Ross—he paid. But anytime a proposal to pay wages arose, he batted down the suggestion with vigor. As early as 1971 he had voiced concern that others would push to change the system. In 1973, he had warned that the volunteer policy would not outlast him. Since then, pressure had steadily increased. Longtime volunteers aged, had families, and outgrew the stage of life where they happily lived on food stamps and subsistence pay, dependent on La Paz for their children’s shoes and clothing allowances.
The volunteer system had become central to Chavez’s vision of community, as well as a test of his leadership. He had brought up the crucial question at each meeting since the first time he brought the board to Synanon. “I gather from all the discussion here, or do I, that we don’t want to pay wages,13 we can’t afford to pay wages, that it shouldn’t be done now, maybe later?” he asked at one meeting. “I need to have a very clear-cut decision so that I know what to do.” He had waited for an opportunity to force the issue, and the lawyers handed him that opening.
Chavez arrived at the June 16, 1978, executive board meeting fresh from a one-night stay in the Yuma County jail. Over Memorial Day weekend, Manuel Chavez had started a melon strike in Arizona. On June 7, a judge issued an injunction that barred all picketing, after hearing evidence that pickets threw rocks, blocked traffic, and threatened workers in the fields. Chavez was outraged by the no-picketing rule in his native county. He and Helen went to Yuma to disobey the injunction and face arrest. When they were released the next day and en route to a rally, Chavez had the driver detour and stop alongside a field in the North Gila Valley. For several minutes, he stared in silence14 across the field at the tree that marked the site of the old family homestead.
Two days later, Chavez opened the June board meeting15 with a poem by Mao Tse Tung. The tension showed in even minor discussions. A proposal to formalize a time-off policy degenerated into a debate about burned-out, frustrated staff. What was the point of giving people time off if they had no money to go anywhere on vacation? asked Gilbert Padilla. When the budget was presented for the next quarter, Chavez raised the requests by the lawyers for higher salaries.
“From where I stand, this represents to me two significant things. One is the money of course. But the other one is the philosophy.” He equated philosophy with the commitment to subsistence wages and to a community like La Paz. “Is it really too late, or is it possible to try and get the legal department to live the kind of lifestyle that we do? And if we try to do that, what happens?”
Chavez insisted the question the board must decide was not how much to pay the lawyers but whether to pay staff at all. He spoke calmly, as he usually did once he had made a decision. “Every board meeting, it comes up. I think we should really make a decision.”
For those who might not be swayed by philosophy, Chavez added a practical argument: if the lawyers received higher wages, other staff would renew requests for salaries. The union’s perennially dire budget situation made that an impossibility, he said.
To leave no doubt, he coolly issued another ultimatum. “I also have my needs. Frankly, if we pay wages in this outfit, I’m leaving. I’m not going to be pissed off. But I don’t want it. I have other things I want to do . . . I want to live in a community. I’ll do anything to do that. Including leaving the union if I hav
e to. I want to do that. It’s not a good thing, because I’m probably overbearing on everybody else.” Then he fell back on the pragmatic argument: “But really, you have no choice, moneywise, because it’s there in black and white.” Ganz laughed, recognizing the Hobson’s choice.
“But if we had a choice,” Chavez continued, “I can just see what the decision would be, philosophically, if we had a choice. If we had the money, this decision probably wouldn’t stand too long . . . See, we really don’t have a choice, right? We don’t. And I don’t know how long it will be before we have a choice.”
Cohen gambled, in his cockiest style. He said most if not all the lawyers would leave rather than move to La Paz, especially the best ones. Knowing he could not win on philosophy, he appealed to the ever-pragmatic Chavez. You get what you pay for, Cohen said, and good lawyers won’t work for free. “You may want to have some hired guns around,” he said several times. He would help with a transition, but the pressures of his family, the need to pay college tuitions, and the desire to live in Monterey made a move to La Paz impossible. He would not raise his children like Dolores Huerta did, he said in a swipe at her notorious neglect.
Everyone in the room realized that Chavez could have easily and quietly reached an accommodation on the requests. His decision to frame the issue as a debate about philosophy signaled not only his willingness but his desire to sacrifice the legal department in the interest of establishing a principle.
“How do we resolve it?” Ganz asked, growing alarmed. “Because the price we pay then is losing a lot of immediate effectiveness, right?” If Cohen said he needed $20,000 a year, “are we really going to say, ‘Well, that’s too bad man’?” Ganz asked incredulously.
