The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (22 page)

On April 3, as the marchers arrived in Stockton, Chavez received a message that a lawyer for Schenley wanted to meet. First he thought the call a hoax. But Sidney Korshak, a well-known lawyer to mobsters, said he was empowered by the chairman of Schenley to negotiate as soon as possible. For Schenley, a multinational company with only a small fraction of its business in Delano, one small vineyard was jeopardizing the sale of dozens of major liquor labels. Schenley officials had proposed selling the vineyard, but Korshak suggested they could reap good publicity by signing a contract instead.

Chavez slept in the car as Hartmire drove him to Los Angeles. They met Korshak at his Beverly Hills home the next day, and after a minor skirmish about the role of the AFL-CIO in the pact, they had a deal. They signed a recognition agreement with contract negotiations to follow within sixty days. “Labor history was written
²²
here today,” said Kircher, who cosigned the agreement.

Chavez reached Cannon on the mobile phone, and he stood on top of a car and announced the news to the cheers of the marchers. Four years after he had moved to Delano with little more than a dream, Cesar Chavez was on the front page of the
New York Times
. Chavez sent a letter to boycott supporters to share the news—and told them to switch focus immediately to the giant DiGiorgio Corporation, the union’s next target.

The union had made sleeping arrangements
²³
for nine hundred people in Sacramento, in a gym, churches, and union halls. On Easter, the marchers crossed the Tower Bridge into Sacramento, the crowd so large it took almost an hour for the last person to cross. More than eight thousand cheering farmworkers and supporters massed in the park in front of the state Capitol. The
originales
, those who had marched the whole way, had a special place of honor. Hartmire led the crowd in prayer. Chavez spotted Fred Ross, who had just joined the march, and called him up to the makeshift stage.

The union leader addressed the crowd only briefly. “It is well to remember that in defeat there must be courage, but also that in victory, there must be humility,” Chavez began. He thanked the many organizations that had lent support, and the farmworkers who had the courage to walk out on strike. Prolonged applause followed his introduction of the only person he thanked by name: “And I want to introduce to you someone, when we started organizing four years ago, in fact one of the very few people that thought that this could be done—my wife, Helen.”
²⁴

Governor Pat Brown had declined Chavez’s request to meet and spent Easter with his family at the Palm Springs home of Frank Sinatra. That only made the rally stronger. Chavez rejected the governor’s offer to meet the next morning. Sunday or not at all, he told Brown. My way or the highway, a hallmark of Chavez’s negotiating style that growers would soon see again and again.

The farmworkers had shown their strength, to the outside world and to themselves. They could walk through the heart of enemy territory in Delano, and they could rebuff the governor’s overtures. The
Delano Record
might report on its front page that the rally on the Capitol steps fanned “the flames of class struggle
²⁵
and suspicion and bitterness and hatred,” but the marchers had carried their message far beyond the parochial barriers of the valley: Farmworkers were no longer willing to be treated as second-class citizens.

“We are still in an age of symbols and heroes and so forth,” Chavez said in an interview, downplaying his own role. “For many years I was a farm worker, a migratory worker, and, well personally, and I’m being very frank, maybe it’s just a matter of trying to even the score,
²⁶
you know.”

Now that he was gaining national attention, Chavez took care to shape his own life story. He began to embellish his evolution as an organizer in small but pointed ways. The history melted into mythology, the better to draw people into
la causa
. In particular, Chavez recast two key junctures in his life—his decision to join the CSO, and his decision to leave.

When Chavez recounted how he became an organizer, he was still a farmworker, picking apricots, not a lumber handler. Where Fred Ross had been too late for the Chavez house meeting the first night and returned the following week night, Chavez massaged the facts to say he dodged Ross several times and made Helen cover for him, assuming Ross was a nosy sociologist studying the habits of Mexicans. Chavez erased his parents and family from the house meeting that night and replaced them with a bunch of rowdy friends he recruited to give Ross a hard time. He had told them he would give them a signal, Chavez said: when he switched his cigarette from one hand to the other, they were to drive Ross out. While in real life Ross brought an interpreter along, in Chavez’s version Ross spoke fluent and impressive Spanish. One detail remained true to the history: Ross was such a great organizer that Chavez was immediately impressed and ready to join the CSO.

Ross did his part to fuel the myth building. He invented a diary entry and told interviewers that when he went home that night he wrote: “I think I’ve found the guy I’ve been looking for.”

The end of Chavez’s account of the fateful meeting was equally fictional. The first thing Chavez asked Ross, according to the revised history, was, What will CSO do for farmworkers? If we get strong enough, Ross replied, we will form a union.

In his revisionist account of leaving the CSO, Chavez likewise altered the facts. Frustrated that the CSO helped middle-class Mexican Americans and ignored farmworkers, Chavez said, he decided to go off on his own and do the job. In fact, at the March 16, 1962, convention where he announced his resignation, the CSO adopted a program to help farmworkers. Chavez rejected the plan and believed he needed to organize on his own terms, reporting to no one and free to work in the way he thought best. He submitted his resignation letter on April 16.

As more national reporters began to express interest in where Cesar Chavez came from, he added one more significant detail to the evolving legend. He began to repeat that he quit CSO on his birthday, March 31, 1962. Not too many years later, that date would become an official union holiday.

Chapter 13

The First Big Test

It’s tough enough just fighting a company. Or it’s tough enough just fighting another union. But when the company and the union are working hand in glove, it’s a hard combination to beat.

As soon as Chavez announced the Schenley agreement, some marchers on the
peregrinación
tore up their boycott schenley signs and tossed them in the air. Others crossed out schenley and wrote in digiorgio.

DiGiorgio was not only the largest grower in California but also a symbol of corporate agricultural power. With ties to the Bank of America, offices in the hub of San Francisco’s business district, and a history of violently putting down labor strife in the fields, DiGiorgio offered Chavez an attractive villain.

The DiGiorgio empire
¹
had been built by Joseph DiGiorgio, who arrived in America as a fifteen-year-old Sicilian fruit peddler at the end of the nineteenth century and rose to run a multimillion-dollar food company. By 1966, his four nephews had taken over and expanded from vineyards, a winery, and a shipping and distribution network into canned goods and juices. DiGiorgio was the largest grape, pear, and plum grower in the United States. As with Schenley, only a small percentage of DiGiorgio’s business was directly affected by the strike. The company had been shifting more and more investments out of agriculture; only about 20 percent of DiGiorgio’s $100 million annual revenue came from farming. Most came from sales of well-known brands such as S&W Fine Foods and Treesweet. So the threatened boycott caused concern.

Robert DiGiorgio, one of Joseph’s nephews, had been trying to convince
²
his partners to get out of the fields altogether. Farming was too perilous, dependent on factors outside the grower’s control, and yielded only a modest income at best. If a union contract proved unworkable, he could use the labor problems as an added incentive to sell the DiGiorgio land. Robert DiGiorgio threw down the gauntlet: he called for an election among workers in his grape vineyards.

Chavez had no choice but to accept. He knew the challenge was fraught with problems. Who would be eligible to vote? What were the rules? Who would enforce them? But he had been demanding elections for months, and his supporters would not have understood had he turned down the opportunity.

As Chavez faced the first significant test of his union’s power in the fields, he drew on everything he had learned. Unlike his campaigns in the CSO, he did not have to rely on his relatives, nor did he have to do everything himself. He had a team of savvy, dedicated advisers and dozens of zealous volunteers, including farmworkers, students, nuns, and ministers, eager to carry out any request. And once again, he had the help of “Papa Ross.”

Fred Ross had returned from Syracuse and moved to the Bay Area, where he worked as a consultant for several community organizations. One group had asked him to research Chavez’s death benefit plan, so Ross took the opportunity to visit his old student in Delano a few weeks after the march to Sacramento. Chavez was heading into a meeting with DiGiorgio officials to discuss election protocols, and Ross tagged along. The April 20, 1966, meeting was interrupted by a phone call about a violent confrontation
³
on a picket line outside DiGiorgio’s Delano ranch. Chavez and Ross rushed out to investigate.

At the center of the disturbance, crestfallen, stood Ida Cousino. Ross realized they had met a week earlier in Sacramento. Cousino had sought out Ross when he arrived on the final day of the
peregrinación
and introduced herself. “She wants to be an organizer,”
⁴
Ross had written in his journal. Now he and Chavez found the young woman looking desolate as two farmworkers nursed injuries, one with bad wounds to his head. Cousino had been picketing when Hershel Nuñez, a DiGiorgio security guard, drew his gun and pointed at the picket line. Cousino announced she was making a citizen’s arrest. That brought DiGiorgio managers to the scene. One shoved her roughly out of the way, she fell to the ground, and pickets scrambled to her defense. They tussled with the DiGiorgio supervisors, who struck two workers in the head. Chavez publicly denounced the company and broke off negotiations, then called a meeting for that evening. At the standing-room-only session in the Negro Pentecostal Church, he chastised his members and lectured for almost two hours on the importance of nonviolence: “If we return the growers’ violence
⁵
with our violence, we will lose.” They were only defending the honor of a woman, protested the men, one with a bandage covering ten stitches in his head.

“Through it all, Ida had sat slumped
⁶
down, head bowed and desolate. She looked so pitiful sitting there as the battle roared around her,” Ross wrote. “Sad, I’m sure, that the men who sprang to her aid were being punished, hurt that the brave thing she had done out there in the field had gone unrecognized. I thought I would see her after the meeting and give her a word of cheer. But the moment the meeting was over, she was gone.” Ross found his introduction to the strike dramatic and exhilarating. He decided to stick around for a while, much to Chavez’s delight. He gave instructions to put Ross on the payroll at whatever terms he wanted, a rare order. Ross and Cousino began to spend time together. Soon they were romantically involved, one of many couples who formed in the charged ambiance of the shared fight.

As talks over the terms of the election continued, union organizers worked to get DiGiorgio employees to sign cards pledging support to the National Farm Workers Association. Suddenly they heard a disturbing report: Teamsters were circulating cards in the fields as well. The DiGiorgios had recruited the Teamsters, a scandal-scarred union that had been expelled from the AFL-CIO and had a record of signing contracts that allowed management to retain most of its prerogatives. DiGiorgio supervisors began urging workers to sign Teamster cards.

With no agreed-upon rules for the election, Chavez faced long odds and a well-financed campaign by twin antagonists, DiGiorgio and the Teamsters. DiGiorgio fired workers at will, targeting Chavez supporters. Even if fired workers were ultimately ruled eligible to vote in an election, most would be long gone and far away by the time of the vote. The NFWA had no official lists of employees and no access to workers in the fields of the Delano ranch, which was crisscrossed by eleven miles of roads that divided the vineyard into one-mile squares. Neither Chavez nor Ross had ever run a union election campaign. Their budget was so precarious that when the phone bill was too high one month, Chavez put a lock on the phone.
⁷

“It’s tough enough
⁸
just fighting a company. Or it’s tough enough just fighting another union,” Chavez said after DiGiorgio had abruptly laid off 190 workers in crews where the NFWA had strong support. “But when the company and the union are working hand in glove, it’s a hard combination to beat.”

Ross and Chavez teamed up again to do what they did so well—win over one person at a time. The campaign combined Ross’s meticulous attention to detail and discipline with Chavez’s creative genius and instinct. Through the ups and downs of the next four months, they used all the tactics they had employed in the CSO, and many new ones. The union dispatched “submarines” who worked on DiGiorgio crews and quietly talked up the union’s cause. DiGiorgio workers who voiced support but were afraid to walk out were schooled in ways to help from inside. Women who packed grapes pricked them with pins so they would rot.