The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (56 page)

The UFW followed a consultant’s advice and withheld its limited media buy until the last few weeks. Although Brown stood by the union and filmed commercials, Speaker McCarthy sent his constituents a letter urging them to vote no on Prop 14. Chavez made dozens of appearances the last six weeks, but house meetings, rallies, bumper stickers, and Chavez’s personal appeal were no match for the growers’ aggressive media blitz. Chavez found himself in violation of one of his cardinal rules: never be on the defensive.

Proposition 14 lost by more than a two-to-one margin. Carter failed to carry California, and Democrat John Tunney narrowly lost his U.S. Senate seat to S. I. Hayakawa, an outcome some blamed on the UFW’s losing crusade. “Our experience in this movement is that we never lose,” Chavez told the disappointed crowd that gathered on election night at Mount Carmel High School in Los Angeles. “There may be temporary setbacks, but we never lose . . . Don’t be bitter.”
²³

Since the ALRB was set to reopen anyway, the immediate setback for the union was not particularly significant. The damage to Chavez was more severe. He had not had to take responsibility for a strategy gone awry in many years, not since he had become a national celebrity. Earlier setbacks caused by judgment errors, like the loss of the contracts in 1973, had been apparent only to a small circle. To the world at large, the UFW leader had been a heroic victim who brilliantly turned every loss into a victory. He had not made a losing gamble—until now. Prop 14 was a very public rejection and an avoidable loss. He would have to face people who would tell him one of the things he most hated to hear: I told you so. On top of that, he would have to be nice to them and make amends, because he was now even more dependent on them for the future of the law.

Chavez had been fasting
²⁴
before the election, as had his driver and chief of security, longtime union volunteer Ben Maddock. On the drive back to La Paz on the night of the defeat, they had to stop the car on a cold mountain road because both men were sick to their stomachs.

Chapter 29

The Cultural Revolution

We’re prepared to lose anyone that wants to leave. We’re prepared for that. We’re also prepared to have people here who when I ask them to jump, they’re going to say, “How high?” That’s how it’s going to run.

The failure of Proposition 14 stripped away one of Chavez’s surefire fallbacks: go to the people in the cities for support. Struggling to reconcile his faith in the union’s popularity with the dramatic loss, he looked for explanations—and then for scapegoats. Chavez began to lay the groundwork before the votes were cast.

Nick Jones had grown up in North Dakota, dropped out of college, and joined the Students for a Democratic Society. He registered as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and discovered the boycott in Chicago soon after the grape strike began. At twenty-four, he moved to Delano in the summer of 1966 and went on the payroll of the Migrant Ministry. A few months later he met Virginia Rodriguez, a farmworker kid who had been working as a secretary when she saw an advertisement for a training program to help
la causa
. She ended up at the nonprofit Center for Change and Community Development, where Manuel Chavez was working when he was out on parole. Manuel convinced Rodriguez to join the union full-time, and she went to work as Cesar’s secretary in early 1967. She and Jones were married that summer. When the fast started in February 1968, they pitched the first tent at Forty Acres. A few months later, they headed to Portland with their six-week-old daughter to work on the boycott.

Chavez trusted Jones with a variety of assignments over the years, including undercover missions and one of the first security details to protect the union leader, a job that required familiarity with weapons, devotion, and discretion. Jones’s success as boycott director in Boston and then Chicago propelled him to his position as national boycott director in early 1976. Jones had recruited a lot of the boycotters and developed a loyal following around the country.

“My whole life is the union,” Jones said in a July 1976 interview at La Paz, the day the executive board voted to move ahead with the Prop 14 campaign. “I can’t imagine what I would have done had I left the movement . . . Virginia and I have never had a day that we’ve looked back on that we’ve felt we shouldn’t have been here. So I mean, we made our life out of it and will live and die in the movement,
¹
I think.”

Chavez often marked people he wanted to purge and then waited for an opportunity to move against them. As Ross observed,
²
Chavez preferred passive resistance to confrontation, subjecting people to “a certain type of ostracism, embarrassment, to the point where they just can’t stand it anymore.” As part of his technique, Chavez became skilled at weaving complicated Machiavellian webs, tying together unrelated events to form patterns. His distrust often prompted comments or actions that verified his suspicions, and the prophecies became self-fulfilling. What distinguished Chavez’s attack on Jones was the prominence of the target and the ensuing outcry.

Jones had been the only union staff member to publicly voice doubts about the wisdom of pursuing the Proposition 14 campaign; that alone became grounds for suspicion. He did not get along well with Ganz, and the two had clashed during the signature-gathering phase. What Ganz wanted from Jones was his staff. Some boycotters were reluctant to move across the country for another grueling campaign, and Ganz was known as a tough taskmaster. Jones turned over his staff, but not as quickly as Ganz wanted. Their disagreements fueled speculation that Jones wanted to challenge Ganz for his seat on the board. In mid-September, Chavez told the executive board at a private meeting at his house that he believed Jones was out to sabotage Prop 14 and the union. To strengthen his case, Chavez dragged in two people Jones had recruited in Chicago.

Kathleen McCarthy was a nurse who had worked on the Chicago boycott, where she accused a farmworker of attempting to rape her during a driving lesson. In 1976 she joined the staff of the Delano clinic, where she had run-ins with her supervisor. At a September 9 meeting of the board that ran the health group, Chavez said people at the clinic were undermining the union and singled out McCarthy as a probable spy. The next day, Chavez met with McCarthy and accused her of being an agent. When she burst into tears, he viewed her response as confirmation. As she wandered around La Paz dazed by the encounter, she ran into Joe Smith,
³
who had worked on the boycott with her in Chicago. He gave her a ride to Bakersfield and then spoke to Chavez on her behalf.

Like Jones, Smith wanted nothing more than to spend his life working for the movement. Unlike Jones, Smith had neither political ambitions nor a radical past. He grew up in Indiana, came out of the Catholic Worker movement, and found his home in the boycott, first in Chicago and then San Diego. When Chavez decided to restart
El Malcriado
for the third time, Crosby Milne had suggested Smith as the editor, and Jones endorsed the choice. “I think Joe Smith is a fantastic idea
⁴
for the newspaper,” Chavez said at the February 1976 retreat. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself.” Smith worked closely with Milne and Jacques Levy to assemble a staff, well aware the board had been unhappy with the paper and shut it down twice before. “The best thing about working in La Paz is getting a chance to work directly with Cesar,” Smith told a journalist he recruited as managing editor in the summer of 1976. “Cesar and the union will delegate a lot of responsibility to someone and not be looking over his shoulder and second-guessing him. Because Cesar understands
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that if you delegate responsibility to someone that also means giving them the right to make some mistakes, too, and understanding that’s going to happen, and giving people room to grow.”

The first issue of the new
El Malcriado
was about to go to the printer the Friday that Smith intervened with Chavez on McCarthy’s behalf. Over the weekend, Chavez reviewed the pages, expressed some concerns, and asked for changes in two stories he thought made the union look bad. When the executive board reviewed the printed paper on Tuesday, September 14, Chavez explained the problems he had spotted and stressed that board members needed to guide the newspaper staff, who could not be expected to understand the subtleties of union politics. He talked about plans for a Spanish edition and asked the editors to schedule a weekly meeting for board members to give input. “I think it’s a beautiful paper,”
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Chavez said. “It’s the best, well-written paper we’ve ever had . . . Considering the circumstances, I think they’ve done an outstanding job, and I think they should get a hand.” The board gave Smith and his staff a rousing farmworker applause.

When the board reconvened the next day and Smith asked for input for the next issue of the paper, Chavez abruptly reversed himself. Whether he had received information that caused him to distrust Smith or simply had decided that Smith needed to be discredited to further tarnish Jones, Chavez turned on the astonished editor of
El Malcriado
.

“I have some very serious questions about the first fucking edition. And I’m pissed off at you very much,” Chavez said to Smith. “Cause you couldn’t have fucked up. We laid it out, we told you exactly what to do . . . It’s a fucking game
⁷
you’re playing. It’s not a mistake . . . This board tells you what to do in the first edition, and you don’t do it. Don’t tell me you forgot. I’m not going to buy it. You must have had some special reasons for doing it.”

“I’m not trying to run a game on the board!” Smith protested, baffled by the sudden attack.

“You’ll have a hell of a time convincing me different,” Chavez said. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”

Smith’s voice rose and his tone grew agitated as he realized that both his competence and his integrity were under attack. “I didn’t ask for this job! You called me and you asked me to do it and I came up! I made a lot of mistakes. I was confused. Four years on the boycott doesn’t prepare somebody for this kind of job . . . I have never tried to fuck with the union. Never. In any way! You ask anybody I worked for if I have tried to fuck with the union. Never once. And I’m not trying to fuck with the union now.” A train rumbled by, and Smith yelled to be heard above the racket. “I didn’t understand the dynamics of how we were supposed to put the paper out. Because I would not have deliberately created any problems for the union.” His voice rose even higher, in alarm and indignation. “Why would I want to do that?”

“I want to know why,” Chavez said calmly. “You tell me why.” Then he turned to Jones. “Nick, you’ll recall it was on the strength of your recommendation that we hired Joe. You recommended him at the meeting at the mission.”

By the end of the afternoon, the board had killed the paper. When the meeting continued that night at Chavez’s house, he launched into an attack on Jones.

Two weeks later, with polls showing Prop 14 in trouble and only a few weeks left before the election, Chavez confronted Jones. “I had a very shattering phone conversation
⁸
with Cesar yesterday,” Jones wrote to Chris Hartmire. Chavez suggested Jones was part of a left-wing conspiracy to undermine the union. The UFW president pointed to Smith as an example and also accused Charlie March, the New York boycott director, of sending volunteers with Communist leanings to mess up the Prop 14 campaign. “I recruited them both,” Jones wrote about Smith and March, “and have as much faith in their integrity as I do yours or Helen Chavez. I expect the next accusations to fall on my head . . . Cesar believes there is a conspiracy within the union and now I do. Someone in leadership is doing some vicious and unprincipled witch hunting.”

After Proposition 14 lost, Chavez lashed out at those upon whom he could most easily vent his anger. He directed Ganz and Ross to interrogate everyone who worked on the campaign, ostensibly to decide on new assignments but with orders to root out the “assholes,” the term of choice for spies, agitators, or malcontents. During a debriefing session for campaign volunteers at La Paz, Chavez eavesdropped outside the meeting room and suddenly climbed in a window to denounce those who criticized the leadership of the ill-fated campaign. Ganz, who might have been the logical scapegoat for the loss, was far too valuable to Chavez to sacrifice.

Jones had one final meeting with Chavez, who accused him of bringing spies into La Paz. On November 14, 1976, Nick and Virginia Jones resigned, saying they no longer had the trust of the union leaders. In a two-page letter, they outlined Chavez’s charges against them. “We are deeply concerned
⁹
about what we perceive to be serious internal destruction of the United Farm Workers of America,” the Joneses wrote. They urged the board to take a stand against the “accusations and firings of full time staff based on the flimsy say-so, whims and innuendo which the accuser(s) are not held responsible to substantiate.”

The day he received the letter, Chavez fired Joe Smith. Similar charges would be leveled against many others in the years to come: problems could not be innocent mistakes but must be a deliberate attempt to sabotage the union. Smith was outraged as only a naive, dedicated believer could be. “I do not question Cesar’s right to fire me.
¹⁰
His authority is quite clear,” Smith wrote after he was fired, asking the board for a hearing. “However, I also believe that the way in which I was fired presents a clear danger to the safety of the union.” Despite everything, all he wanted was a chance to stay. “The union has become the most important thing in my life.”