The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  “I got an answer for you,” Chavez responded. “If you don’t resolve the philosophy, then I say, ‘I want out.’ I might just say that. Then you’ve got a real choice to make.”

  With clarity and prescience, he framed the decision as the watershed it would turn out to be: “When you make a philosophical decision, you either survive, or you fail . . . We’re all somehow, maybe even subconsciously maybe, aware that it’s one of those decisions that will make us or break us.”

  Padilla and Richard Chavez were ready to vote. Padilla defined the options as “pay or don’t pay,” and said the union could not afford to pay salaries. The younger board members pushed for a delay. We need time to think this through, Medina and Govea said. Cohen wanted to get the vote over with. He knew he had been outgambled. The board agreed to reconvene in a week and adjourned after midnight.

  Chavez used the week to organize. Padilla read the lawyers’ requests out loud at a community meeting and easily whipped up antagonism toward the greedy Anglo lawyers who demanded more money, made fun of La Paz, and thought they were better than everyone else. “The word that fits is ‘blackmail,’”16 David Villarino wrote to his father-in-law. Chavez went to Salinas and met with the lawyers, an uncomfortable session that resolved nothing. They told him he should fire incompetent volunteers and pay people who could skillfully negotiate and administer contracts. He told them he wanted his lawyers at La Paz.

  Chavez saw an opportunity to accomplish two goals: disband a legal department that had become at best out of step and at worst a threat, and reaffirm the principle of voluntary servitude.

  When the executive board reconvened on June 25, Chavez again presented the question of whether or not to pay wages across the union. He dismissed pleas to consider only the lawyers’ requests, a vote he might well have lost. He ruled out compromises, such as paying more money to fewer lawyers. They could defer paying wages until the union was on a sounder financial footing, but they had to make a philosophical decision. If they paid the attorneys, they would have to pay everyone, he repeated. “We have to really take a stand,” he said. Huerta and Padilla agreed.

  “I’m a leader,”17 Chavez said. “I’ve been leading all of you guys all these years. And maybe you don’t need me anymore. Really truly. And the way to put it is, my direction is just not satisfying you. Perfectly all right. I have another project I’d like to do.”

  “I think that’s a big cop-out,” Ganz replied. “I thought we were all committed to building a union. I thought that’s why we were all here.”

  “And so far we’ve built a union largely based on my ideas, right?” Chavez said. “And we come now to a place where maybe my ideas maybe aren’t working.”

  “Maybe other people have ideas . . . ways to make it better,” Govea said.

  Ganz faced the implications of all that Chavez had said in recent months, and the conflict with the reality in the fields. After almost a year of focusing on contract negotiations, the UFW still had scarcely more than a hundred contracts, representing a small fraction of the farmworkers in California. Now Chavez was about to jettison a legal department that was one of their key weapons. “We have always sort of prided ourselves on being different from the rest of the unions,” Ganz said. “But there’s one fact that keeps staring at me, which is that they are unions. And we’re still not there. And I think that’s where we want to get. And maybe the past experience of every other labor organization in the country just demonstrates that there comes a time when it has to happen. And I think we better face it, and I think we better deal with it.”

  The split had become public, and irreparable. They aired their different long-term visions. “Organize other poor people,” Huerta said.

  “That’s your pot of gold,” Ganz responded.

  Huerta insisted she spoke for the members. “Organize the unorganized workers throughout the country. Maybe throughout the world. That was our goal. We all voted on that at the convention, and nobody opposed it. If that is really our goal, we can’t talk about paying wages. It’s just simple.”

  Medina looked at the same set of facts and reached the opposite conclusion. He, too, saw the question as one of philosophy. He was a farmworker, one of only two who had come out of the fields onto the board. He had worked toward building a union that would be run by farmworkers. There was no way talented farmworkers would come work for the union without pay. The students being trained in the Fred Ross school should be the best and the brightest from the ranch committees, he said—farmworkers, not the sons and daughters of union leaders. Look at the union staff in the field offices and La Paz, Medina said. “You think that’s where the future of the union is? I disagree entirely. I think we need to realize that we’re not going to be able to turn the union over to the workers on the same basis we started out. I think we should pay wages.” The leaders in the fields were the ones with a personal stake in the union’s success, he said. “We’re kidding ourselves if we think that we’re going to turn this union over to farmworkers on the basis of $10 a week and benefits.”

  Chavez had long played Medina and Ganz against each other, ensuring that his two strongest organizers never recognized their natural alliance. By the time they found themselves on the same side, Medina was on the verge of resigning. He had just finished managing a string of victories at eight citrus orchards that added more than twenty-four hundred new members and thousands of dollars in dues. He had figured out a way to forestall the lengthy delays growers often imposed: Medina kept workers on strike until the grower agreed to waive objections, certify the election, and bargain. Fresh from this success, he had presented Chavez with a modest budget to add a half dozen organizers to the staff. Chavez turned on Medina and denounced the proposal as ridiculous. Chavez attacked the young organizer in a manner he had often used on others, but never before on the respectful Medina.

  Now, at what would be his final board meeting, Medina said he faulted himself. He had been derelict in his duties. Until now, he had gone along with whatever Chavez wanted, suppressing questions and doubts about the Game, the purges, mind control, community building. “Maybe, you know, we’re all on different wavelengths,” he said to Chavez. “Maybe part of it is that we don’t understand where you’re going. I sure as hell don’t.”

  The vote split along generational lines. With some reluctance, Pete Velasco and Richard Chavez supported Cesar’s proposal and voted to reaffirm the commitment to the volunteer system. Richard had been the strongest advocate of paying wages and becoming a business union, but in the end he could not vote against his brother.

  Forcing a vote that amounted to a referendum on his leadership, Chavez had prevailed by the narrowest possible margin, a remarkably public schism. “Paying salaries, how stupid18 can they be,” Chavez vented to Hartmire a few days later. “I am not going to risk my neck for that kind of organization . . . I can’t keep risking my life when there is no idealism.” He felt exactly the way he had felt in CSO, Chavez said. He was tired of forcing his will on everyone else and would step down as president in 1981. He added a major caveat: “Obviously if they all leave, then I will have to stay to develop the next group of leaders . . . Obviously I won’t leave if there is a crisis or if I think the union can’t survive. I don’t want to give my life to a dead Dr. King movement.”

  Medina asked Chavez for a leave of absence a few days after the June board meeting, with the understanding he would not return. His departure removed the only credible alternative to Chavez, to the dismay of Ganz and Richard Chavez. They urged Cesar to reach out, but he made no effort to keep the young leader. Soon word emanated from La Paz: “Story already is that he [Medina] wasn’t a good negotiator or organizer and all he wanted was money,” Kirsten Zerger, one of the last lawyers left in Salinas, wrote in her diary. “How far from the truth. How sad we are at this state of revising history so soon.”19

  Ganz and Govea went on loan to help Jerry Brown’s reelection campaign, postponing a decision about their future with the un
ion. Jim Drake had wrestled for more than a year before he could leave, feeling like he was resigning from his own family. In June, he finished negotiating a contract, walked into a meeting to announce the good news, received the traditional farmworker applause, walked out, and drove away. He went to work organizing woodcutters in Mississippi.

  Even Hartmire thought about leaving, but he knew that his departure would send a terrible signal. “Somehow, the union has to make this transition20 from la causa to a bread and butter union and some old time people have to make it happen,” he wrote his wife. “If it doesn’t happen, there isn’t going to be a farmworker union.” Like many, he had worked himself to exhaustion. He ignored symptoms until he felt so ill he drove himself from La Paz to a Los Angeles hospital, where he collapsed with a bleeding ulcer.

  By the time Hartmire had recovered, La Paz had stopped playing the Game, though there had been no formal announcement. Two high-profile tragedies contributed to the decision. In October, Paul Morantz, a Los Angeles lawyer who had successfully represented former Synanon residents seeking to recoup their life savings, was bitten by a rattlesnake that had been left in his mailbox. On November 18, 1978, Los Angeles police raided Synanon and seized incriminating evidence, including tape recordings of Dederich saying, “Don’t mess with us. You can get killed dead, literally dead.” The Old Man was found soon after in an alcoholic stupor in Arizona and arrested on charges of being an accessory to attempted murder; two of his followers were charged with placing the snake in Morantz’s mailbox.

  Four days after the police raid on Home Place, the charismatic cult leader Jim Jones coerced more than nine hundred of his followers to commit mass suicide by cyanide poisoning at the Peoples Temple in Guyana. The Peoples Temple had until recently been based in Northern California, where Jones was a well-known figure, active in Democratic politics and praised by prominent officials.

  Both events had a sobering effect on La Paz. A Democratic assemblyman put out a press release comparing the cult of Chavez to Jonestown. Who wants to stay around only to find out in a year that there are five hundred suicides21 up at La Paz? Jerry Cohen said, half joking.

  In Salinas, the legal department was phasing out. Cohen quietly resigned as general counsel and prepared to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court and help in contract negotiations. Half the lawyers left shortly after the vote by the executive board. The others stayed to wind up cases and hand off work to their successors. The transition to a volunteer legal department did not proceed as smoothly as Chavez had envisioned. He had difficulty recruiting talent. The new lawyers at La Paz were so inexperienced that the union paid more for outside counsel than they had paid the Salinas lawyers. The overwhelmed lawyers in La Paz pleaded for help.

  Chavez went to visit Sandy Nathan, who had been Cohen’s deputy overseeing all of the work before the ALRB. Nathan was packing up to leave. In a rare move, Chavez acknowledged he had erred. He had known the lawyers were good, he said, but he hadn’t realized how good or how indispensable. He apologized for not having truly understood their work or its importance. The union needed help to rebuild, he said. He spoke in the persuasive, sincere manner that made people trust him and want to help. He asked Nathan to stay.

  “He didn’t need to come22 and lay himself open to me, and I wasn’t going to extract anything from him,” Nathan wrote that night. “I know it must have been hard for him, it must have been somewhat humiliating for him. I felt bad enough as it was. I felt this pervasive sense of sadness in there with him, that it was too late, where has he been, why didn’t he come sooner . . . At one point I got this feeling of a person being offered something and you know you really can’t accept it, you can’t even talk about it in good faith anymore.” He finished packing and headed east.

  At La Paz, Chavez embraced the future that he had chosen. He orchestrated an elaborate graduation23 for the negotiators from the Fred Ross School—his son, son-in-law, Huerta’s son, and eight other Mexican Americans, mostly children of movement volunteers. The ceremony began two hours late while seamstresses pressed into service only three days earlier finished sewing special shirts Chavez had requested. He wanted the graduates to wear matching manta shirts patterned after the one he had worn when he broke his Phoenix fast. He told them that manta, simple cotton, was the shirt of poor people.

  In his homily, Chris Hartmire compared the graduates to the disciples of Jesus: “You are being sent out on this day by Fred, by Richard, by Cesar, by the board, by the whole union, that cares about what you do. At a deeper level, you’re also being sent out by God, to serve the people and to announce the day of more justice.”

  Sensitivity about recent departures was near the surface. “When some of those of little faith and lots of mouth remark to you, ‘Yeah, I guess the union is ok, but what about that second level of leadership?’ I hope you just shove those words right down their mouth,” Ross said in his remarks to the crowd. “Because that second level of leadership is sitting right in front of you right now.”

  In his commencement address, Chavez lauded the union’s executive board for training a group that might challenge their leadership—secure in the knowledge that would never occur. “Very few unions would dare develop leadership without any restrictions,” Chavez said. “We’re not afraid of that . . . This decision was made by the leaders of the union knowing full well they were developing an awful lot of competition.” More than a decade earlier, Chavez said, he had shared with Ross the dream of a school such as this one. “Some day, mark my words,” he concluded, “we will see hundreds of farmworkers going through this school.”

  The eleven negotiators were the last class to graduate from the Fred W. Ross School.

  Part V

  November 1978–April 1993

  Chapter 34

  From Dream to Nightmare

  I feel the way I never felt before. We have thirty years of struggle behind us, but I am spirited and encouraged. I feel I can fight for another hundred years.

  Since his first forays into the Salinas Valley, Chavez had regarded the vegetable workers with a mixture of admiration and wariness. He respected their courage and willingness to engage in militant action. He boasted about “liberated ranches” where the tortuga forced recalcitrant supervisors to honor the contracts. He marveled at meetings where workers whipped copies of the UFW constitution out of their back pocket and quoted passages verbatim.1 But he also recognized that independence made the vegetable workers harder to control, and he understood the danger.

  The lettuce workers, Chavez counseled the negotiation students at La Paz, were sharper and more likely than the grape workers to challenge authority. Most lechugueros were Mexican citizens with green cards. “Anybody with a green card—that’s just an indication how on the ball they are. If you see a green card, rest assured they had to really hustle,” Chavez advised. “Keep your eyes open, because they’ll try to hustle you.2 If you don’t know when to stand up, they’ll get you. If you stand up too quickly, they’ll get you.”

  In the fall of 1978, the UFW had thirty-one contracts covering roughly ten thousand vegetable workers. They were about one-third of the union’s membership, and among the most highly paid. As the contracts neared expiration at the end of the year, the vegetable workers were not happy with their union.

  The flash point for frustration was the UFW’s Robert F. Kennedy health insurance plan, managed out of La Paz by volunteers with little training and minimal computer skills. They struggled to administer a complex medical plan for tens of thousands of workers. The union’s eligibility lists were full of errors. Reimbursement checks arrived months late or never at all. Workers who took pride in managing their affairs found they had become credit risks. A report to Chavez by one of his chief negotiators in advance of contract talks called the RFK plan a “ticking time bomb.”3

  Chavez dispatched Dolores Huerta and Richard Chavez to Salinas to scout out the situation in preparation for negotiations. They returned in alarm. Reimbursement checks f
or hundreds of dollars, issued more than a year earlier, gathered dust in an inch-thick pile of unopened envelopes. Two staff people struggled to service twenty contracts. Grievances piled up, unaddressed. The mood was ugly. “We are in serious trouble,”4 Huerta reported. The only workers who showed up at union meetings were the most loyal Chavistas—and they came to yell at union leaders and plead for support. “We have very, very, big problems,” Richard Chavez told his brother. At several ranches, they heard rumblings about moves to vote the union out.

  Just as he had been impatient with grape workers’ complaints about the hiring hall and back dues six years earlier, Chavez did not want to hear the vegetable workers’ gripes. He first blamed the “assholes,” left-wingers who he argued had infiltrated the union intent on sabotage. Even Huerta rejected that explanation. “You’re very mistaken,” Richard chimed in angrily. “We created the fucking problem. It’s our problem . . . We had the same problem in Delano in ’72. The same fucking problem.” The militancy of the vegetable workers, Huerta added, made the situation in Salinas even worse.

  Chavez tried to reassure them. The problem could never be as bad as in 1973, when the Teamsters took away all the UFW contracts. “If we lose contracts by decertification elections, that’s going to be a bigger problem,” Huerta responded. Under the ALRA, workers could decertify the union during the last year of a contract. Growers had already been capitalizing on the discontent by bringing unhappy workers from UFW companies to talk to workers during election campaigns. Of twenty-two elections held between June and September 1978, the UFW had lost two-thirds.5

  Chavez agreed to send a team to Salinas to iron out problems and soothe the ranch committees. What was the goal? asked Chavez. “The goal is to save those contracts,”6 his brother answered. Cesar wanted to name the project. They decided on “Plan de Flote.” The goal was to stay afloat.