Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (47 page)

The growers did not answer his letter, and on January 25, at
a general meeting in Delano, plans were set up for an intensified
boycott, as well as an effort to draw public attention to the irresponsible
use of agricultural chemicals.

Four days after this meeting in Delano, court hearings began
in Bakersfield in response to a UFWOC suit demanding
access to public records on the use of pesticides kept by the
Kern County Agricultural Commission. In August 1968, because
of numerous worker injuries in the Coachella and San
Joaquin valleys, Jerry Cohen had gone to the commission and
asked to see the records. “I went there at eleven in the morning.
I was told to come back the next day. At one thirty-three
the same day a temporary restraining order was issued preventing
me from seeing the reports of the spray. That’s one
of the fastest injunctions ever issued in the Valley.”

The county agricultural commissioner testified that “no farm
workers have been injured by the application of economic
poisons in Kern County to my knowledge,” and his counsel
supported this astonishing statement by fighting introduction
of evidence to the contrary from the records of the state Department
of Public Health. The assistant state director of agriculture,
a recognized authority on pesticides, also refuted the
commissioner: he referred repeatedly to poisoning cases in
Kern County, including an episode in Delano in which sixteen
out of twenty-four workers who entered a field more than a
month after it had been sprayed were hospitalized for parathion
poisoning.

For want of a better defense, the growers had called on the
crop-dusting companies to fight public identification of the
“economic poisons” on the grounds that the poisons were
“trade secrets.” But one crop duster testified that four of the
five men who mixed his chemicals had been too sick to work
at one time or another during the past year, and another
acknowledged that his company abandoned the use of TEPP
(tetraethyl pyrophosphate) after he himself had become very
ill from exposure to it. The hearings were recessed after one
week at the request of the crop dusters’ attorney. A few days
later, at hearings of the state Department of Agriculture at
Tulare, a department expert, noting that California used more
pesticides than any other state, admitted that his department
made no tests on these products, preferring to accept the word of
the chemical companies. This policy was vigorously attacked by
a Los Angeles physician, Dr. Bravo, who owns a ranch in the
Imperial Valley and is a member of the state Board of Agriculture:
in his opinion, the word of the chemical companies isn’t
nearly good enough. Accusing them of fraud in labeling their
fertilizer and pesticide products, he declared that their prices
were exorbitant—one common pesticide, he said, sells at a 3,000
percent profit—and that the labels were misleading in regard to
the dangers of the products; research on the immediate and
long-term effects had been totally inadequate. “Seven or eight
hundred persons per year,” he understood, “are injured from
these chemicals. The mortality rate is high.” It was also brought
out that much pesticide use was inspired by unscrupulous advertising
campaigns rather than a real need. Since the chemical
companies had failed to regulate their own ethics, the doctor
called for legislation of the kind that had been imposed on the
drug companies, which like so many other American industries
had failed miserably in its responsibilities to the people who
made it prosperous.

On March 14 (in the
Medical World News
), there appeared a
preliminary report on a five-year study by the National Cancer
Institute which declared that many common pesticides act as
carcinogens; the institute felt obliged to deny that it was under
pressure from the chemical industry when, at the last minute,
the five-year study was withdrawn as inconclusive. Meanwhile,
at the hearings in Bakersfield, a Public Health Department report
was cited to the effect that among ninety-four agricultural
workers reported injured by pesticides in Kern County in 1968,
fifty-four were farm laborers, and Judge George Browne of the
Kern County Superior Court, in a decision handed down on
March 27, acknowledged that “many commonly used
pesticides—particularly the organic phosphate and chlorinated
hydrocarbons—are highly toxic and can constitute a hazard to human
health and welfare, including death, if not properly regulated
and used.” Nevertheless, Judge Browne prohibited disclosure of
the public records on pesticide use, basing his decision on the
pesticide industry’s economic importance to the state and on the
growers’ contention, which he dutifully accepted, that UFWOC’s
“efforts to organize agricultural workers, and the grape
strike and the boycott having been unsuccessful, the intervenor’s
[i.e., Jerry Cohen and UFWOC] motive and purpose are not in
fact as herein above stated, but are to use the information acquired
to keep alive controversy with the growers, to assist in
selling unionization to workers, and to invoke public sympathy
and support and to force unionization not only through publicity
but by using the information to commence and prosecute
groundless lawsuits for alleged pesticide injuries against growers
and owners.”

Though it called the Superior Court decision “appalling,” the
Union had won a propaganda victory. To keep the issue alive,
it appealed the decision, and in April filed a series of suits with
the declared intention of forbidding further use of DDT in California,
where over 1,300,000 pounds of this long-lived poison
are still used annually in the San Joaquin Valley alone. In Washington,
Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin was calling for a
national ban on DDT (“The accumulation of DDT in our
environment  .  .  .  is reaching catastrophic proportions”), citing the
recent confiscation by the FDA of ten tons of contaminated
salmon from Lake Michigan, and the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare announced that the average American
diet contains 10 percent more DDT than the limits set down by
the World Health Organization. California’s leading newspapers,
the conservative Los Angeles
Times
and San Francisco
Chronicle
, were also clamoring for regulation of the pesticides
which had grossly polluted California’s rivers and were threatening
the fisheries. Under the circumstances, the California
Farm Bureau Federation thought it best to join the hue and cry
against DDT, which it did officially on May 25.

The growers’ troubles were just beginning. Under the
Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, all new labor groups must file a
report on their organization with the U.S. Department of Labor,
and on February 22—eight months late—the report of the Agricultural
Workers Freedom to Work Association was finally filed
by its president, Gilbert Rubio, and Shirley Fetalvero, its
secretary-treasurer. The report declared that AWFWA was and had
been from the beginning an organization set up by the growers,
with the support of the John Birch Society, to fight the effect of
Chavez’s union by disrupting UFWOC efforts to organize and
boycott, to seek worker support for AWFWA (propaganda, free
picnics, no dues), to obtain information on UFWOC sympathizers,
activities, and future plans, and so forth. The AWFWA
staff was paid through a front outfit that called itself “Mexican-Americans
for Democratic Action,” and was furnished office
space and typewriters at the Edison Highway headquarters of
the Giumarra corporations in Bakersfield; use of mimeograph
machines, office supplies, and the like, were furnished by the
Di Giorgio ranch at Arvin, despite a clause in Di Giorgio’s contract
with UFWOC that prohibits activities tending to undermine
the Union.

The report also stated that AWFWA was set up originally at
a lunch meeting in Sambo’s Restaurant in Bakersfield, in May
1968. At this meeting it was decided that Gilbert Rubio and
Joe Mendoza would be hired at $120 a week to oppose Chavez,
and that a number of growers not present at the meeting would
be solicited for support. “Several meetings involving many
persons were held but only John Giumarra, Jr., Robert Sabovich
and Jack Pandol gave orders to Mendoza and AWFWA.”

In early March, UFWOC announced that court action would
be filed in Bakersfield against the John Birch Society, the National
Freedom to Work Committee and a group of growers on
grounds of conspiracy to form an illegal employer-dominated
union; a separate suit would be filed against the Di Giorgio
Fruit Corporation for intentional subversion of its Union contract.
Meanwhile Mendoza, claiming that AWFWA no longer
existed, had been sent on an anti-boycott lecture tour of the
Eastern cities by the National Right to Work Committee, and
appeared at a committee banquet in Washington, D.C., where
he was presented with an award by Senator Everett Dirksen
for his efforts on behalf of American farm workers.

On March 7, two weeks after he had filed the AWFWA report,
Gilbert Rubio was haled into the Delano court for his part in
the October disturbance for which his gang had been arrested.
Although his probation report had recommended a maximum
of thirty days, he was given a sentence of three months. (After
a week the Union got him freed on a technicality, but the jail
term is still pending. Since then, the luckless Gilbert had been
hospitalized with head injuries suffered in a fall, and has been
arrested once again, charged with drunken driving.)

If its own report is true, AWFWA was nothing more than an
inept right-wing conspiracy whose founders undertook to
destroy a legitimate organization and smear the reputation of its
leader, Cesar Chavez. The usual cheap Americanism was invoked,
and the law of the land purposely broken, for no worthier
cause than their own wallets. In the list of sponsors of this enterprise,
most of the names are predictable enough: I was sorry
to see “John J. Kovacevich” among them.

During the winter the Union had maintained the boycott
pressure. Except for the Gristede chain, New York City was
reported “clean” of grapes by January, and in Chicago the
wholesalers acknowledged that the warehouses held fifty thousand
boxes, still unsold. In California, storage grapes were sold
off for wine at the disastrous price of $26 a ton. The boycott had
even taken hold in the big cities of the South; in Atlanta the
campaign was led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., in recognition
of the esteem in which Chavez had been held by his late son.
In London, on February 12, British stevedores refused to unload
a grape shipment of seventy thousand pounds, and their protest
spread to other ports in England, Sweden, Norway and Finland.
The following day, February 13, Jack Pandol and Martin
Zaninovich declared at a public meeting of the state Board of
Agriculture in Tulare that no strike existed and that the boycott
had had no effect.

This was too much for Lionel Steinberg, the Coachella grower
who is thought of as the “liberal” on the Board; most of
Steinberg’s workers had gone out on strike in June 1968, after his
refusal to hold elections or negotiate with the Union, and another
Coachella grower, Harry Carrian, had declared bankruptcy.
Steinberg said it was “short-sighted” of the Board to
pretend that no strike existed. He was also annoyed that the rice
farmers, dairymen and others on the Board, in the hope of
deferring their own confrontation with the Union, were crying
fiercely for a “fight to the death” against Chavez; it was the
grape growers, after all, who were doing all the fighting, and it
was the grape growers who were faced with death in 1969. The
harvest season in Coachella was only a few months away, and
markets all over the country were pleading with the growers to
resolve the boycott crisis before the start of the new season.

Of all the supermarkets, the most intransigent was Safeway,
which has well over two thousand stores and is the largest buyer
of table grapes in the West. The interlocking business interests
of Safeway’s board of directors give a vivid idea of what is
meant by “agribusiness.” One director, J. G. Boswell, is also
president of J. G. Boswell, Inc., one of the largest cotton growers
in California—it owns 135,000 acres in California alone—and the
largest grape grower in Arizona: in 1968, for
not
growing cotton,
Boswell received over four million of the taxpayers’ dollars
in subsidies from the U.S. government. Another director is
Ernest Arbuckle, who is also a director of the Kern County Land
Company; KCL received $838,000 in cotton subsidies. Other
board members own, direct or have large financial holdings in
sugar plantations, the Southern Pacific Railroad, Del Monte
canned foods, the 168,000-acre Tejon Ranch, and other huge
components of California agribusiness. (Compared with agri-businessmen
like these, the Giumarras are small farmers, having
received but $278,000 in cotton subsidies in 1968.)

Nevertheless, Safeway styled itself “neutral” in the grape
dispute, stating its intention to protect the consumer by offering
grapes as it has always done. Robert Magowan, the company’s
chairman of the board, declared that “there has been flagrant
injustice for the Mexican migrant worker  .  .  .  but we are not a
party to the dispute. That is between the growers and the
Union.” The chairman is a director of the J. G. Boswell farm
empire as well as of such huge agribusiness corporations as Del
Monte, Southern Pacific and Caterpillar Tractor: his recognition
of “flagrant injustice” and his simultaneous refusal to act on it
call to mind the signs that appeared this winter in East Los
Angeles, after one of the street kids was killed by a policeman:
G
RINGO
J
USTICE
I
S
S
PELLED
M-O-N-E-Y.

In early March, Chavez was visited by Dr. Janet Travell,
whose treatment had worked so well for President Kennedy.
Dr. Travell discovered that Chavez’s “disc trouble” was actually
a painful muscle spasm: his right leg is shorter than his left,
one side of his pelvis is smaller, and he has what is known as a
“transitional vertebra”; in consequence, the muscles on his right
side were doing all the work. As he grew older and less resilient,
these muscles could no longer compensate, and spasms developed
which gradually became constant. “She is really
phenomenal,” Marion Moses wrote me on March 20. “By a few
simple mechanical adjustments, using books, scissors, paste
and felt, she got him where he was comfortable. Then she uses
a spray technique with a surface anesthesia which relaxes the
muscle so it can be stretched to relieve the spasm. Today for
the first time in years Cesar said that he woke up without pain.
He looks much better, most of the pain lines are gone from his
face most of the time—and most importantly of all, he is following
the treatment very faithfully. He really is very anxious to get
well and start organizing again.” In fact, he was anxious to go
to the Coachella Valley, but Manuel Chavez and many others
were dead set against it: the strong possibility of victory should
not be endangered by the increased tension that Cesar’s
presence there would bring.