The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (44 page)

A core group of grape workers supported the strike and left the vineyards, but the picket lines were primarily staffed by workers and volunteers from outside Coachella, including a large contingent from Salinas. The union staged dramatic confrontations that took full advantage of the Teamster thugs. Scene after scene was captured on tape by a film crew that Chavez had dispatched to Coachella before the strike began. Anticipating a summer of unrest, Chavez had instructed a young filmmaker working for the union to spend the next six months shooting a documentary in the California vineyards. Until they were unmasked, the crew masqueraded as news reporters and gained damning footage of Teamsters and growers.

The opinions of rank-and-file workers rarely surfaced amid the vivid demonstrations of the Teamsters’ brute force. To the public, the workers’ support for Chavez became a given. In private, Chavez said complaints about the hiring hall were an excuse for growers to ditch the union. “They had to pick on something,”
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he explained to Levy. “The hiring hall becomes an issue when the employer doesn’t want to cooperate. If the employer wants to cooperate, it works beautifully . . . the issue is, just among us chickens, you know, who’s going to control the workforce.” He also saw racism in the collusion between the growers and the Teamsters. “A lot has to do with this great fear that we’re a movement, not a union. But really, deep roots lie in the racism of both groups. We are a non-white union
⁸
. . . They have been the superior race, not only race-wise but economic-wise. They have had total say over the work force.”

The UFW’s religious supporters offered the ideal contrast to the Teamster goons. Hartmire brought religious leaders from around the country to Coachella to bear witness, and the Teamsters obligingly staged displays of violence that rendered the question of the workers’ choice moot. A UFW supporter’s trailer was burnt to the ground. A Teamster leader broke the nose of a priest while he was being interviewed in a diner by a
Wall Street Journal
reporter.

A group of United Church of Christ delegates discussed the strike during their annual assembly in St. Louis, Missouri. They offered to take up a collection and send money. Send people instead, Hartmire told John Moyer, who was spearheading the UCC effort. The ministers chartered a plane, left St. Louis late at night, and arrived in Coachella before dawn, in time to observe Teamster goons gathering up their weapons. When the visitors arrived at the park where the strikers assembled every morning, the bleary-eyed clergy were welcomed with cheers, tears, and hugs. They split up to visit picket lines, and one group witnessed Teamsters run a UFW car off the road, pull the picketers out, and beat them. “I can say truthfully that you couldn’t have been here at a better time,” Chavez somberly told the ninety-five delegates after they reassembled that afternoon. “Things have really escalated.
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The tensions as you can see are very high and the violence is rampant at this point.”

Chavez ran down the incidents of the past three days—six men hospitalized, thirteen injured, one house burned down, fifteen cars stopped and people dragged out and beaten. “A month and a half ago, a month ago, a week ago, people on the picket line hadn’t been in a strike before. And they’re now striking and they’re being asked to change their life radically and to make this very difficult commitment to non-violence . . . Our main concern right now is not in winning the strike, although we’d like to. The most important thing today, and it’s going to be for the next few days, is to be able to remain on those picket lines, to remain non-violent, but not to become frightened.”

Sterling Cary, president of the National Council of Churches, responded on behalf of the clergy who had journeyed to Coachella to reassure the farmworkers they were not alone: “Your struggle is our struggle. It is the struggle of America itself as America tries to finds ways to be on the side of those who are locked out of the system.”

Cheers greeted the United Church of Christ delegates when they marched into the St. Louis assembly forty-eight hours after they had departed, sleepless but exhilarated. They delivered emotional accounts of the valiant struggle of the Chavistas. Then the “Coachella 95” returned home to twenty-five different states, and each formed a UFWOC support group.

The more important Delano contracts could still be salvaged, but Chavez was determined to negotiate on his terms. He foresaw victory no matter the outcome: if they lost the contracts, another boycott would force the growers to come crawling back.

“Organizing is a gamble,”
¹⁰
Chavez told Moyer, who interviewed the union president during a car ride, sitting in the backseat with Boycott and Huelga as they slurped up ice cream cones. “I bet there are more failures in organizing than in any other endeavor you can think of. It’s a very risky business.”

Chavez made several gambles during the 1973 strike that would shape the future of his union. The first was a deal with AFL-CIO president George Meany. Meany had denounced the Teamsters’ raid on the grape contracts as “tantamount to strike breaking,” and Chavez asked for financial help. Meany agreed, on one condition: Chavez would push for state legislation to govern the rights of farmworkers to organize. Meany wanted to put an end to the unrest and free-for-all in the fields.

Chavez did not want a law; he much preferred to operate as a nonviolent guerilla force. But he needed money for a strike fund, and advocating a law when Ronald Reagan was governor of California seemed a safe bet. Reagan would never sign a law unfavorable to his agribusiness allies. Chavez turned to Cohen and told him to start drafting a law that incorporated several key principles on which they would not compromise.

Cohen became Chavez’s gambling partner all summer—in courtrooms, on picket lines, and at the negotiating table. For Cohen, Chavez’s willingness to take risks made the lawyer’s job immensely appealing. Both men loved the action, and the bond between them had grown as each came to appreciate the other’s talents. Cohen proved masterful at devising strategies to make the law work for the union, turning even defensive situations into offensive advantages. “Cesar has told me I fit the union like a glove,” Cohen wrote in his journal. The young attorney’s mind was always racing ahead, and he often spoke as fast as he thought. He had been drawn to the law by heroic attorneys in
To Kill a Mockingbird
and
Anatomy of a Murder
. His favorite movie was
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
, about a gambler who teams up with a prostitute to run a brothel. Cohen looked the part of the angry young crusader, shirttail hanging out, hair unkempt, toothpicks in his mouth since he had given up smoking. He reveled in defying conventional wisdom and did not feel bound by legal tradition or strictures. He was precisely the type of lawyer Chavez wanted, and one of the very few outside professionals whose expertise Chavez valued.

“Must gamble daily,”
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Cohen wrote down as he tried to analyze Chavez’s style and success. Chavez could gamble, Cohen noted, because there was always a way to turn a loss into a victory. The strike in Coachella offered a prime example—the Teamster war generated an outpouring of public support. “Cesar has been able to breed amazing confidence in some of us who naturally believe and act on the proposition that there is no ill from which some good will not flow.”

Cohen’s legal gambits played an increasingly important role in Chavez’s strategy. Shortly before the strike began, the union had won a major victory in the highest court of California. After more than two years of appeals, the Supreme Court threw out the injunctions that had ended the 1970 Salinas lettuce strike. The court concluded the vegetable growers had signed sweetheart contracts with the Teamsters with no input from workers, who clearly preferred the UFW. Therefore, no jurisdictional dispute existed. “The crippling injunction is dissolved,”
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Chavez declared. “Salinas is a prime example of how the politics of a local community interfere with the courts being able to administer this justice. We are very, very disturbed because had the courts been able to administer justice equally . . . we would have won the fight two years ago.”

As soon as the decision was announced, the union went on the legal offensive. Based on a novel theory promulgated by Bill Carder, the UFW sued under federal antitrust laws, accusing the Teamsters and growers of colluding to artificially depress wages for farmworkers. The suit had the potential to cost growers and the Teamsters millions of dollars and force them to divulge sensitive information during depositions and interrogatories.

But Chavez had to focus on the crisis in the vineyards before he could return to Salinas. With a $1.6 million strike fund from the AFL-CIO, the union paid pickets $75 a week. By June they had increased pay to $90,
¹³
and still the picket lines were relatively thin. When the filmmakers shot footage of farmworkers shouting “Viva la huelga!” as they were carted off to jail, the arrestees came from Salinas. At ranches where the union still had contracts, such as the Almaden winery, workers were ordered to rotate two-week stints on the picket lines as a condition of employment.

By July the grape season was over in Coachella. The conflict followed the harvest north into the San Joaquin Valley, where the union faced a more hostile legal system and draconian anti-picketing injunctions. Cohen suggested another legal gamble that Chavez quickly embraced: civil disobedience and mass arrests. In law school, Cohen had studied a recent California Supreme Court decision that established the principle that one could challenge the constitutionality of an injunction by violating the ruling. The tactic carried risk: a loss brought contempt-of-court charges that could carry severe penalties. But a victory would swiftly overturn a bad injunction, much faster than through standard appeals.

In July, hundreds of workers and supporters openly defied anti-picketing injunctions in the vineyards of the San Joaquin Valley. They filled the jails, first in Kern County, then Tulare, then Fresno. The protesters refused to post bail, and the jails overflowed. When they were released, many returned to the picket lines to be arrested again. Sheriff’s departments quickly exhausted their overtime budgets and looked frantically for places to house the prisoners. While Teamster leaders signed more contracts and bragged they had 221 growers, Chavez hailed the UFW pickets in jail as true heroes, willing to sacrifice for others. “This is our entire life,”
¹⁴
Chavez told a rally in a Delano park. “We have nothing else to live for.”

Eighty-five priests and religious women attending an International Symposium on Ignatian Spirituality in San Francisco decided to go to Fresno and join the picket lines; half of them volunteered to go to jail. They were soon joined by Dorothy Day, the seventy-six-year-old founder of the Catholic Worker movement, one of 443 arrested as they violated an injunction that limited pickets to one every hundred feet. In her olive-green jailhouse dress
¹⁵
and wide-brimmed hat, Day explained why she had flown across the country to go to jail: “I think Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers union is the most important thing that has happened to the U.S. labor movement. The working poor in the fields have banded together through free choice to work out their own destiny.” She talked about Chavez’s sacrifice, his humble lifestyle, and her visits to his house, which lacked the trappings customarily associated with labor leaders.

A recalcitrant judge refused to release Day and the other prisoners from out of town. The Fresno jail took on a festive air, with an all-night prayer vigil, a twenty-four-hour fast, and celebrity guests. Chavez climbed on a chair in the barracks-style jail and thanked the prisoners for their sacrifice. The union was at a crossroads, Chavez said, that would determine whether it survived. Joan Baez sang in the prison courtyard, and Daniel Ellsberg offered updates on the bombing in Cambodia. All the women signed Day’s dress in marker, and she asked to keep the prison garb as a souvenir. When the prisoners finally were set free after two weeks, they celebrated mass with singing and huelga chants. With a flourish, Chavez added his signature to Day’s prison dress.

At the negotiating table, Chavez had undertaken another gamble when the expiration of the Delano contracts neared. The Delano growers had suffered for five years through the first strike and boycott, and they badly wanted to avoid a repeat. But they needed changes in the hiring hall. John Giumarra Jr. had again taken the lead. Cohen met alone with Giumarra and felt they made good progress on structuring a compromise.

Ten days before the contracts expired, Chavez was suddenly optimistic.
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A boycott leader had called to report that several major chains in Los Angeles had agreed to tell Giumarra they would not carry his grapes without a UFW contract. “It’s all over!” Chavez announced, beaming, to the group working on contract language in a Bakersfield hotel room. He thought they now had the leverage they needed.

He left a few days later on a four-day whirlwind tour of Midwest cities, making speeches to raise money and support for the boycott. Chavez spoke to packed crowds in Michigan and Ohio. He marveled at how the strike helped educate the workers, which he called the most difficult part of his job. “We’ve learned that there’s a great difference between a member who has never been on the picket line and had a contract handed to him and a member that had to fight for his contract,” Chavez said at a Cleveland rally. The picket line was the greatest educational tool he knew. “They have learned more about concern and solidarity
¹⁷
than they would have learned if we had put them in a school for three years. I have never seen love develop among human beings as I do on the picket line.”