The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (65 page)

They made fun of Founder’s Day, the La Paz committees, and the royal “we” in the president’s newsletters, “a substitute for going out there and really dealing with the problem,” Ganz said. Huerta gamed Chavez for not learning from the 1973 debacle and again failing to make sure the field office staff could handle the contracts. “We’re going to get screwed,” she warned. “Whores in Giumarra’s camps!” Cohen shouted, a reference to Chavez’s tirade that blew up the 1973 negotiations with Delano grape growers.

The new owners of Interharvest, the largest lettuce grower, had come to meet Chavez the prior week and found him fasting. “Here’s these agribusiness guys who want to talk about problems,” Ganz said, and instead “they got all this weird stuff . . . In the car going back to the airport, [Interharvest owner] Howard Marguleas says to me, ‘What was that all about?’”

The Steven Spielberg science fiction movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
had been recently released, and the board members made fun of Chavez by humming the five-tone melodic theme that scientists used to communicate with extraterrestrials who landed in a UFO: “Doo do doo do doo. Doo do doo do doo.”

Chavez had recently taken a six-day mind-control class in Los Angeles and then announced he could cure ailments by laying on hands. The board members ridiculed him as “the Great Healer.” Padilla described a recent scene where Chavez “cured” someone, and they all began humming the
Close Encounters
theme again.

“Why don’t you start eating like a regular person, and why don’t you start sleeping like a regular person!” Mack Lyons yelled.

“He wants to be like Gandhi,” Ganz replied. “Watch this, Gandhi led the independence in India. But then when it got down to the real problems, of starting to build a country, the real problems, he went off in this cloud.”

“He talks about how when you touch someone in the dark, the sparks fly . . . Cesar, do you think you really can heal people?” Lyons asked.

“Yes,” replied Chavez, who made almost no effort to defend himself.

Chavez did not need to fight back; the Game was a way for him to elicit information that would give him greater control. People said things in the Game that they were “too chickenshit” to say in another context. Their comments gave him clearer understanding of who stood in his way. “It is not difficult to get rid of total failures. They liquidate themselves,” Chavez had said in his address to the 1977 union convention. “Yesterday’s successes, however, always linger on beyond their productive life. We must seek out those sacred tasks of the past that drain needed resources and scarce time, and prune them ruthlessly
⁶
so we can focus on the future.”

The legal department was next to play the Game. At Chavez’s urging, Cohen ordered his staff to travel to La Paz for training. On Saturdays, the eighteen lawyers and several paralegals boarded a van in Salinas at 3:00 a.m. for the five-hour ride to La Paz, unhappier each week.

The legal department was in Salinas because in 1974, Cohen had decided he could no longer live at La Paz and wanted to raise his family in Monterey County. Cohen had offered to resign as general counsel, but Chavez rejected the offer. He liked and trusted Cohen, relied on him for advice, and appreciated the law as a weapon. Chavez delighted in Cohen’s legal gambles, his irreverence toward authority, and his winning record. Like Chavez, Cohen turned defensive situations into opportunities that cost growers money and forced them to divulge information.

Once the ALRA passed, however, the role of the legal department changed dramatically. They became more traditional labor lawyers. They filed election objections and unfair labor charges, fought for back wages for fired employees, and litigated to define the parameters of the new law. For the lawyers, the chance to set precedents and shape the best labor law in the country was exhilarating. For Chavez, the work held little appeal. The legal department became less crucial to him, and the location in Salinas more problematic. “They’re not plugged into the union,” Chavez told the board. “They don’t have the same hopes that we have. The department should not be in Salinas. It’s a mistake.”
⁷

Chavez knew the lawyers would make strong Game players. “The guys that have words,
⁸
have an edge,” he said. “If you have a lot of words you don’t have to scream too much; if you don’t have words, you scream.” For four weeks, the legal department played the Game under the watchful eyes of Chavez and his trusted staff. In their naiveté and arrogance, the lawyers thought themselves irreplaceable at this historic moment in time. That as much as anything else galled Chavez and made him determined to prove otherwise.

The lawyers were not subtle. “Legal staff are organizing and pushing their feelings, e.g., waste of time to come to La Paz, Game isn’t working, the real work of the union is ‘out there,’ La Paz staff are brown-nosing ‘moonies,’”
⁹
Hartmire reported to Chavez.

Their Games started shortly after
Time
picked up on recent stories about investigations into violence and child abuse at Synanon, which the magazine termed a “kooky cult”; in addition to mandatory vasectomies, Dederich had decided residents at Home Place should swap spouses. Dederich filed a $76 million libel suit against
Time
. Like Chavez, Dederich relished the idea of a good enemy: “The Holy War
¹⁰
against Time unites people in Synanon as other battles did in the days that built Synanon,” read an internal memo. Dederich announced a boycott against
Time
and asked Chavez for help. Chavez denounced the story as a vicious attack and asked the UFW board to offer Dederich full support, noting Synanon had supplied the union with $100,000 worth of cars and materials, plus, of course, the Game.

“How do we reconcile our belief in nonviolence with the fact that he has an armed camp
¹¹
now?” Cohen asked, referring to comments by Dederich about his specially trained weapons force. Hostility from neighbors and authorities had prompted Synanon to purchase $63,000 worth of guns
¹²
and ammunition, including 235 pistols, rifles, and shotguns, Dederich said. Families told stories about children held in Synanon against their will and beaten up after escape attempts, and a Marin County grand jury was investigating allegations of child abuse.

Chavez said the
Time
magazine story represented an attack on religious freedom, and the UFW needed to help its friends. The board adopted the
Time
boycott. The next Saturday, the lawyers arrived at La Paz for their Game dressed in matching white shirts and black ties and marched in a serpentine line from the bus to the conference room carrying copies of
Time
and singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

A few weeks later, Cohen approached Chavez with a request from several lawyers. Most earned $600 a month and depended on relatives or savings to get by. Forced to play the Game as they struggled to keep up with the mounting legal work, they had asked Cohen for an increase. When he told Chavez, the union president saw an opportunity. Tell them to put it in writing, he said. Cohen did. He directed all the lawyers to submit requests and presented the letters to Chavez in one bundle. They asked for additional amounts that averaged just over $400 a month.

Doctors and lawyers had always been exempt from the $5-a-week system, a practical concession justified on the basis of their professional status. Plenty of other exceptions were made. When Chavez needed particular expertise—whether from a lawyer, a mechanic, or Fred Ross—he paid. But anytime a proposal to pay wages arose, he batted down the suggestion with vigor. As early as 1971 he had voiced concern that others would push to change the system. In 1973, he had warned that the volunteer policy would not outlast him. Since then, pressure had steadily increased. Longtime volunteers aged, had families, and outgrew the stage of life where they happily lived on food stamps and subsistence pay, dependent on La Paz for their children’s shoes and clothing allowances.

The volunteer system had become central to Chavez’s vision of community, as well as a test of his leadership. He had brought up the crucial question at each meeting since the first time he brought the board to Synanon. “I gather from all the discussion here, or do I, that we don’t want to pay wages,
¹³
we can’t afford to pay wages, that it shouldn’t be done now, maybe later?” he asked at one meeting. “I need to have a very clear-cut decision so that I know what to do.” He had waited for an opportunity to force the issue, and the lawyers handed him that opening.

Chavez arrived at the June 16, 1978, executive board meeting fresh from a one-night stay in the Yuma County jail. Over Memorial Day weekend, Manuel Chavez had started a melon strike in Arizona. On June 7, a judge issued an injunction that barred all picketing, after hearing evidence that pickets threw rocks, blocked traffic, and threatened workers in the fields. Chavez was outraged by the no-picketing rule in his native county. He and Helen went to Yuma to disobey the injunction and face arrest. When they were released the next day and en route to a rally, Chavez had the driver detour and stop alongside a field in the North Gila Valley. For several minutes, he stared in silence
¹⁴
across the field at the tree that marked the site of the old family homestead.

Two days later, Chavez opened the June board meeting
¹⁵
with a poem by Mao Tse Tung. The tension showed in even minor discussions. A proposal to formalize a time-off policy degenerated into a debate about burned-out, frustrated staff. What was the point of giving people time off if they had no money to go anywhere on vacation? asked Gilbert Padilla. When the budget was presented for the next quarter, Chavez raised the requests by the lawyers for higher salaries.

“From where I stand, this represents to me two significant things. One is the money of course. But the other one is the philosophy.” He equated philosophy with the commitment to subsistence wages and to a community like La Paz. “Is it really too late, or is it possible to try and get the legal department to live the kind of lifestyle that we do? And if we try to do that, what happens?”

Chavez insisted the question the board must decide was not how much to pay the lawyers but whether to pay staff at all. He spoke calmly, as he usually did once he had made a decision. “Every board meeting, it comes up. I think we should really make a decision.”

For those who might not be swayed by philosophy, Chavez added a practical argument: if the lawyers received higher wages, other staff would renew requests for salaries. The union’s perennially dire budget situation made that an impossibility, he said.

To leave no doubt, he coolly issued another ultimatum. “I also have my needs. Frankly, if we pay wages in this outfit, I’m leaving. I’m not going to be pissed off. But I don’t want it. I have other things I want to do . . . I want to live in a community. I’ll do anything to do that. Including leaving the union if I have to. I want to do that. It’s not a good thing, because I’m probably overbearing on everybody else.” Then he fell back on the pragmatic argument: “But really, you have no choice, moneywise, because it’s there in black and white.” Ganz laughed, recognizing the Hobson’s choice.

“But if we had a choice,” Chavez continued, “I can just see what the decision would be, philosophically, if we had a choice. If we had the money, this decision probably wouldn’t stand too long . . . See, we really don’t have a choice, right? We don’t. And I don’t know how long it will be before we have a choice.”

Cohen gambled, in his cockiest style. He said most if not all the lawyers would leave rather than move to La Paz, especially the best ones. Knowing he could not win on philosophy, he appealed to the ever-pragmatic Chavez. You get what you pay for, Cohen said, and good lawyers won’t work for free. “You may want to have some hired guns around,” he said several times. He would help with a transition, but the pressures of his family, the need to pay college tuitions, and the desire to live in Monterey made a move to La Paz impossible. He would not raise his children like Dolores Huerta did, he said in a swipe at her notorious neglect.

Everyone in the room realized that Chavez could have easily and quietly reached an accommodation on the requests. His decision to frame the issue as a debate about philosophy signaled not only his willingness but his desire to sacrifice the legal department in the interest of establishing a principle.

“How do we resolve it?” Ganz asked, growing alarmed. “Because the price we pay then is losing a lot of immediate effectiveness, right?” If Cohen said he needed $20,000 a year, “are we really going to say, ‘Well, that’s too bad man’?” Ganz asked incredulously.

“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.