The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (63 page)

He opened the meeting
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with the farmworker prayer. He announced that two members of his staff, including his son Paul, would wait on the board, fetch drinks, and relay messages. Meals would be served in the room next door. They sat in new comfortable reclining chairs, specially ordered for the refurbished Game room.

Shortly after the meeting began, Chavez played a demonstration Game for the board with the others who had trained at Synanon. He began by announcing he was firing his secretary “for fucking up and making me feel so fucking embarrassed.” (She was only fired in the Game.) For more than half an hour, the group shrieked at each other, yelling at one person for being fat, another for failing to make sure the room was properly cooled, and a third for neglecting to finish a financial report on time. They yelled over one another most of the time, stopping only when Chavez spoke. They acknowledged that even in the Game, they deferred to the player they called “the Chief.”

That evening, Chavez invited the La Paz community to listen as board members reminisced into the tape recorder. He stressed the importance of preserving their history for posterity. Until midnight, they spoke about the good old days. Chavez asked each person to describe how they had come to the union. Richard, the best raconteur in the family, regaled them with stories about vacuuming up cockroaches in the middle of the night at the New York boycott house. Medina recalled how he had no idea where Chicago was when Chavez told him to go there for a few weeks. Four years later, Medina finally came home; no one in the office recognized him. Chavez reminisced about driving out to the first rose strike in May 1965 with Drake in his little red Renault.

With the heady victories of the past and long-standing bonds fresh in mind, Chavez tried to lay down the law the next morning. As he worked through the agenda, he dismissed objections to his decisions and ruled out of order people who complained. He was not going to brook the kind of challenges to policy decisions that had been slowing things down.

“I haven’t really said, ‘Fuck it, this has got to be done,’” Chavez explained. “Jim, in the past, I used to do that,
¹⁰
you remember,” he appealed to Drake. “We’re gonna do this cause I think it’s gotta be done. And I think I was right most of the time . . . I used to just get in my mind, it’s gonna be done. And I just command it be done. And make myself a fucking nuisance. But, the value was, we were really going someplace. And that’s happening less and less.”

What some considered micromanaging, he defined as essential prerogatives of the president. He planned to interview every prospective applicant in California. He demanded letters of reference from employers, dismissing objections that no employer would give a farmworker a recommendation to work for the UFW.

His new buzzword was “concentrate,” which elicited confusion. He had decided that the union could only do one thing at a time successfully. History showed that they succeeded when they focused on only one thing. They must do that again. The choice he offered was to negotiate contracts, organize more workers, or administer the contracts. He left no doubt that negotiations was the correct response. No amount of protest shook him from that position, though most board members objected that the choice itself made no sense. Padilla said they needed to sign contracts, but they also needed to organize new workers and to enforce the existing contracts. “Growers are laughing at us because we’re not organizing,” he said.

“If we’re thinking we can do one and not do the other, we’re kidding ourselves,” Richard Chavez said. “We have to do both.”

Ganz and Medina argued that organizing
was
negotiating contracts; the two could not be separated. Challenged on the definition of organizing, the thing he once knew best, Chavez refused to debate. Ganz suggested they concentrate on one region or crop instead of an activity.

“There’s no other way to define it,” Chavez said flatly. He had been agonizing over the decision for months, he told the board. “The biggest problem in my mind has been: what the fuck’s gone wrong. Really just trying, day and night, thinking about, what the hell’s happening. I’m convinced after looking at it, after sleeping on it, after looking at it, after reading, after reviewing, after analyzing, that it’s very simple. We’re not concentrating,” he said.

Chavez acknowledged he faced a group that no longer accepted what he said without question. In part, they had grown up and had ideas of their own; in part, they could not understand or accept what Chavez was trying to do. Padilla thought he might resign, confused about where Chavez was leading. Richard Chavez felt burned out, torn between his practical beliefs, his older brother, and his partner, and frustrated that he had been unable to build a legacy or train another generation. Even Chris Hartmire, the faithful disciple, was confused. He had recently made a startling confession to Drake. Hartmire said he was afraid to speak his mind for fear he, too, would be branded one of the “asshole” conspirators.

The assholes, Chavez and Huerta insisted, had infiltrated the union and now were attempting to undermine friendships and marriages. They recounted again the alleged espionage of Kathleen McCarthy, the nurse, and David McClure, the plumber. Huerta charged that the assholes were now sabotaging her relationship with Richard. “Richard and I have been having fights about this for the last two months,” she said. “They’re going to fuck other people’s relationships up. We’re stupid if we think it’s not happening . . . They’re starting to live with the members. They’re doing it just to fuck us up . . . They’re going to marry people just to fuck this union up.”

Richard ran the Delano office. He just did not see the conspiracy that his brother and partner wove. “For God’s sake, open your eyes and see what’s happening!” Cesar said. “They’ve got you and Dolores fighting like never before. Don’t say no, Richard!”

Hartmire screwed up his courage and challenged Chavez and Huerta. The minister had been disturbed by the firing of Joe Smith, but he had accepted Chavez’s explanations. Now Huerta had targeted a woman named Shelly Spiegel, a teacher for a small school in Delano that the farmworker ministry sponsored. Hartmire knew Spiegel was not an infiltrator. “When somebody gets focused on as being a problem, all sorts of unrelated facts, incidents, relationships, begin to automatically fall into place as an indictment on that person which would never fall into place if someone wasn’t focusing attention on things,” Hartmire said. “And those pieces may or may not add up to something. But they add up to something because someone with power has indicted them. All I’m pleading for is that we also listen to another interpretation of those events. So we don’t screw good people who shouldn’t be screwed. And Cesar, let me tell you, we’re afraid.”

“My God, what are we?” Drake exploded. “What are we? What have we become? If Chris Hartmire is afraid to express things openly because he’s afraid he’s going to be accused of being part of a conspiracy, what more is there to say?”

“I’m afraid of you, too,” Richard Chavez told his brother. “Everybody’s afraid. But we’re too goddamn chickenshit to say. I’m afraid, because I might be one of the conspirators.”

Chavez played masterfully on their fears—the fear that he would reject them, and the fear that he would abandon them. In a poignant, rambling soliloquy, he said calmly that perhaps the time had come for him to work out a transition and leave. He did not want to stay until he was forced out. He talked about Churchill’s defeat after World War II and about the fate of movement founders who were overthrown. He wanted to leave gracefully and go on to his next project. He was committed to his vision, and he would rather leave than compromise.

“We’ve come to a stop, kind of. I see certain things in the union that I think have to be dealt with. But, most people don’t agree with me. They don’t. Let’s face it, they don’t. The Game, they don’t agree with me. This idea that we’re being had. They don’t, you know. That’s just the way things happen. So what I want to do, this union would be a lot better off if we could have an orderly transition.”

He gambled that despite their discontent, no one in the room could envision the union without Chavez. As Hartmire observed, they defined themselves in terms of their relationship to their leader. In the end they were willing to compromise their principles to preserve that central relationship. Once he brought them to that realization, Chavez was halfway there.

“If I stay,” Chavez continued, “I have to stay on my own terms and I have to fuck the organization to the extent that I become a real dictator, if I’m not one right now. That’s just natural.” He would only stay, he repeated, on one condition: “I got to be the fucking king, or I leave.”

“When I came here, I had total, absolute power. That’s how it got done. The whole cake was mine. Well, it was a little cake. But it was mine. And then the cake keeps expanding. I try to keep being a proprietor. After a while, everybody built it. After a little while, if you have absolute total power, can you go to more total power? No. The only way to go is to go down. To go down, to have less power, is tough.”

No one said a word. He told them he had been fasting. He pleaded with them to understand. “What you’re saying, you’ve grown up. You have grown up. And now it’s very hard to face me on an equal basis. As it should be. And all of you are growing up . . . You’re sure, you now own the union, you’ve done enough, you feel like, ‘I have a right now to say.’”

Chavez knew the group functioned best when they faced a common enemy. “When we had a visible opponent, we had unity, a real purpose, it was like a religious war.” He conjured up a new villain, just as he had done at other key junctures. He spun a web of innuendo to strengthen his case about infiltrators and cover his own misdeeds.

Philip Vera Cruz was the eldest member of the board, the quietest, and the least popular. Although he had been on the board since 1966, he remained an outsider, separated by language, culture, and ideology. He was more left-leaning than the others, and known as the “philosopher” because he often gave discourses to students who visited Forty Acres. He had refused to leave Delano for a boycott assignment and clashed with Chavez over the construction of a retirement home for elderly Filipinos. Vera Cruz had privately questioned Chavez’s authoritarian leadership for some time. His distrust pushed him further outside: when the board had discussed Nick Jones, Chavez engineered an emergency call to send Vera Cruz out of town. Recently Vera Cruz had questioned the purges. Word had gotten back to La Paz that the seventy-three-year-old planned to introduce a resolution condemning the firings at the union’s upcoming convention. He needed to be discredited.

Chavez charged that Vera Cruz, who took copious notes at meetings, planned to write a book in which he would criticize the union. Chavez accused Vera Cruz of having turned over his notes to the Communists, more commonly referred to as the “assholes,” or simply “them.” They knew he stayed in San Francisco with left-wing radicals, Chavez told Vera Cruz. He was accused of sabotaging Agbayani Village, the retirement community (in fact, Chavez had insisted on charging rents and imposing conditions that made the accommodations unattractive to the elderly Filipinos). Vera Cruz denied the accusations but said little in his own defense. “Those assholes got Philip. They organized and they fucked him up,” Chavez told the board and two dozen staff members in the room. “You got to watch out ’cause they’re very fucking smart.”

People in the room were angry, eager for someone to blame for the union’s travails. The proud Filipino leader made a good target. They heaped curses and epithets on Vera Cruz. They accused him of turning over internal documents to his girlfriend, an Anglo volunteer, and alleged she had seduced him to gain information. “Philip, we started a movement together,” Chavez said. “You know how those Commies work. They come and they probe everywhere until they find a weakness. They came and they buttered you up. Everyone’s seen it.”

Chavez produced a one-sentence oath,
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written by Cohen and designed to trap Vera Cruz: “We, the undersigned agree that the matters discussed today were confidential and in consideration of the mutual promises made herein covenant with each other and with the UFW AFL-CIO and agree not to disclose the matters discussed at today’s meeting in any manner whether by written publication or orally.” The board members pleaded, shouted, and threatened Vera Cruz, but he refused to sign. Chavez trumpeted his refusal as evidence of the Filipino’s treachery, whipping the crowd into a frenzy like a revivalist preacher. The other thirty-five in the room signed the oath.
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Almost everyone was won over.

Those who harbored doubts about the conspiracy theories eased their consciences with two arguments. There
had
been spies; often the plants were so clumsy they were quickly spotted, but perhaps others had infiltrated more successfully. And Cesar had usually been right. For years, as Drake had pointed out, his vision and instincts had guided the union to success.

“I think if we don’t know where it’s at, there’s something wrong with us,” said Richard Chavez, who had done a 180-degree turn and now enthusiastically supported his brother, marveling at his perspicacity. “I feel that I know exactly where it’s at. No doubt in my mind why he’s where he’s at. What happens is he might be months ahead of us, or years . . . He’s way out there in front, way in front.”

The most important thing, Chavez said after Vera Cruz was escorted out of the room, was to have convinced the board that the threat from infiltrators was real.

The victory also gave Chavez more credibility in painting his own family troubles as part of the conspiracy to bring down the union. “I don’t even know if I’m married right now,” he said. “Helen just took off.”