The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (32 page)

Chavez did not attend talks with the Coachella growers. He did not think they were serious, and he was holding out for the more important Delano growers. “We are the ones who should be negotiating from power
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and they are the ones acting as if they have all the power,” Chavez said as he broke off negotiations.

The 1969 harvest was unusually large. Grapes ripened late in Coachella, so the early season overlapped with the harvest further north, forcing Delano growers to keep more grapes in cold storage. Prices for the fruit dropped sharply. After the Coachella talks fell apart, the boycott regained strength. Some growers began to soften their opposition to legislation, feeling unionization was inevitable and a law might at least give them ground rules to better fight off Chavez, a man they feared more than the union itself.

“Chavez has created an image
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for himself,” John Kovacevich, one of the key Delano growers, reported to the Commonwealth Club. “In a recent trip east, New York and Boston people said that if the attitudes of the churches and the Kennedys could be neutralized, the growers’ position would have a chance.” Other unions were also interested, Kovacevich said, a reference to the Teamsters. “So unionization may come about whether we like it or not. Legislation fair to both sides is needed.”

Once he decided the boycott was key to winning contracts, Chavez directed all his strategic moves toward that end. If the boycott needed more strike action, he threw up picket lines in the fields. If the boycotters needed a new hot issue, he found one. If supporters needed an explanation of why grapes were still being harvested despite the strike, he created a justification. If an organizer needed a prominent endorsement or help from major labor leaders, Chavez made a phone call.

The boycott also built leadership on college campuses, where the first generation of Chicano activists was beginning to emulate black student groups and demand attention to their issues. At the University of Washington in Seattle, a record thirty-five Chicanos enrolled in the fall of 1968, doubling the number on campus. The black eagle flag became their trademark and the grape boycott their focus; after months of protest, helped by boycott leaders sent from Delano, the university residence halls voted overwhelmingly to ban grapes from dining halls.
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In cities around the United States and Canada, supermarkets and in some cases whole chains succumbed to the boycott pressure and declined to stock grapes, though some put them back on the shelves once the pickets moved on. Supermarkets were worn down by the bad publicity and the relentless pressure the boycotters generated, the outcry from mayors and city councils, the telegrams from local and national labor federations, and the denunciations by congressmen and religious leaders. Supermarket managers lost time and money because they needed emergency squads to handle picket lines and protests. Executives tired of candlelight marches outside their homes that demonized them as people who kept farmworkers impoverished. Grapes were a luxury item that accounted for a very small percentage of total produce sales for supermarkets. Executives began to tell growers they needed to resolve their labor problems.

Grape growers hired a public relations firm to fight the negative publicity. Teams of growers crisscrossed the country, urging supermarkets not to honor the boycott. In May 1969, ten growers made sixty-nine appearances in the United States and Canada. If stores gave in to pressure and stopped carrying grapes, growers warned, supermarkets would face no end to the demands to boycott different products. John Giumarra Jr. told members of the New York State Food Merchants Association that Chavez was a “New Left guerrilla” who hoped to topple “the established structure of American democracy.” Supermarket executives cautioned growers to tone down their language. “You can’t do business with Cesar Chavez,” Giumarra said, “any more than you could do business with Hitler.”
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Chavez read the growers’ response as evidence they were hurting. He was optimistic that an all-out push when the 1969 harvest hit stores, from May until the end of the year, would finally break the deadlock. Writing to Marshall Ganz in Toronto, where he ran the boycott, Chavez was upbeat and blunt. “I guess by now you know that the growers are bleeding
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re: the sharpness of the boycott. The bastards are really screaming and my hope is that if we do a boycott as good as we did last year and some action in Delano the bastards will be coming to UFWOC for a blood transfusion (signing a contract). At this point it’s either them or us. We miss you very much and the ranch committees are a mess but don’t worry the boycott is more important.”

A week later, Chavez received even better news. Marion Moses had arranged for Dr. Janet Travell, who had been the White House physician and treated President Kennedy for back problems, to visit Chavez in Delano. She arrived in time to be introduced briefly at the Friday night meeting on March 14, 1969. Travell stood in the back of the hall and drew a series of sketches as Chavez leaned against the platform in front. She watched him walk, in great pain, and Travell lit up with excitement. By the time she arrived at his house the next morning, the doctor had a strong suspicion she knew what was wrong. Chavez lay flat on his back, unable to sit up without help. Despite his pain, he made sure to tape-record the session, preserving for history his consultation with the Kennedy family doctor.

“You can see that the left foot is considerably larger
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than the right,” Travell explained to Moses. “You can also see that lying straight, the points of his ankle bones don’t meet. The left leg comes way down. The difference in size of the foot is very striking.” The disparity went beyond his legs: His left arm, pelvis, and side of his face were all significantly larger than the right. He had been born with an extreme case of asymmetry, Travell explained. His vertebrae were slightly fused, so his skeleton resembled that of a gorilla. Lastly, Chavez had a condition she called “Venus de Milo foot,” because the gods that Michelangelo sculpted always had a second toe longer than the first. In mere mortals, that configuration caused acute pain on long walks.

Chavez was elated with the diagnosis as well as with the simplicity of the solutions—a rocking chair to keep muscles moving and prevent spasm, electric blankets to keep his legs at an even temperature, and pads under his shorter foot. Just like putting a shim under one side of a door to even it out, he said repeatedly to his brother Richard, the carpenter. “Isn’t that fantastic!” Cesar said happily. Richard was crooked too, Travell observed, but to a far lesser degree. “You’re a freak too!” Cesar said laughing. “We can be in a carnival.”

Travell showed Moses how to apply ethyl chloride spray to ease the pain and allow muscles to be stretched out. By afternoon, Chavez could raise his knee to his chin and sit up by himself. He called in top aides to hear Travell’s diagnosis and recommendations. With two-minute breaks to stand, stretch, and apply heating pads, Chavez should be able to resume a full schedule. “He’s got to work,” Travell said, “otherwise he’s not going to be happy.”

To even out his legs temporarily, Travell put a book under his right foot and flipped a handful of pages at a time until she found the proper height—about three-quarters of an inch. Moses set out to buy an electric blanket before stores closed for the weekend but was stymied by a recent Chavez edict that no check could be signed without a vote by the entire board.

“For the first time I bring an honest-to-God feeling of hope to the prospect of complete recovery,” Chavez wrote to a friend two weeks after Travell’s visit. “Not only do I feel better, but I know why the pain has been so intense.”

Chavez began to work in a rocking chair in his new office at Forty Acres. Construction had progressed, though in a far more prosaic fashion than Chavez’s original grand plans. Thanks to a $40,000 contribution from the United Auto Workers, an office building and meeting hall stood on the site, along with a trailer donated by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that housed the medical clinic. The elaborate plans for a walled oasis, fountains, and recreational facilities gathered dust. The gas station had only briefly been open for business. Chavez’s new office was sparsely decorated, with a painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe behind his desk, a straw crucifix on a facing wall, busts of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln on shelves, and large photographs of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Although Forty Acres was home to “boycott central,” neither Chavez nor others who helped to coordinate actually exercised much central control. Communication was limited. Chavez discouraged calls. He viewed the phone as expensive and had an aversion to phone conversations. When he did talk, he assumed the lines were bugged. In discussing a campaign against pesticides, he used the code name “fishing expedition.”

Resourceful boycott leaders didn’t need Chavez to tell them what to do. Those with good instincts emulated Chavez’s fanatical work ethic and plowed ahead, trying different approaches until they found the most vulnerable spot in their market. Chavez felt in control, but the distance and decentralized operation afforded boycott leaders an unusual degree of independence. They made dozens of strategic decisions each week that determined their success or failure. In many cities the effort was weak, but the boycott did not have to succeed everywhere. The union needed sufficient pressure on three major chains—Jewel in Chicago, Stop & Shop in Boston, and Safeway in Los Angeles.

Boycotters relied on Chavez and the Delano crew for a steady stream of fresh outrages to generate consumer support. The “fishing expedition” Chavez referred to, for example, was just that: Jerry Cohen requested data from Kern County on pesticide use. Before county officials responded, a judge issued an injunction blocking the release of the information. What were they afraid of? Chavez demanded. The growers handed him a perfect issue for the boycott: if consumers didn’t want to stop eating grapes to help farmworkers, they should stop for their own health. Chavez dispatched Moses on a tour to boycott cities to talk about the dangers of pesticides.

Enterprising researchers turned up another statistic that gave Chavez a new line of attack. The Nixon administration had almost doubled the amount of grapes purchased by the Defense Department, exporting many to troops in Vietnam. The Defense Department’s purchase of grapes increased from 6.9 million pounds in 1968 to 11 million pounds in 1969. The amount shipped to Vietnam jumped from 555,000 pounds in 1968 to 2,047,695 pounds in the first six months of 1969 alone. “The Grapes of War,”
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the union proclaimed, turning the statistics into a double whammy: Nixon used tax dollars to subsidize growers so desperate to find new markets that they unloaded grapes in an increasingly unpopular war.

Chavez had finally taken a position on the war, after avoiding the subject in earlier years. For one thing, he believed that the growing opposition to the war extended to the fields of California. An antiwar stance, which aligned him with outside supporters, had become more palatable with the union’s members. For another, the war had become personal. His eldest son, Fernando, had applied to be a conscientious objector.
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The decision surprised Chavez, who had a somewhat rocky relationship with Fernando. Chavez talked about his son with rare bitterness, Peter Matthiessen noted, calling him a “real Mexican American,” a withering epithet he reserved for those with middle-class values. Fernando liked to play golf, his father noted with scorn.

Cesar refused to give Fernando a letter of support in his application for conscientious objector status and told his son that if he truly believed in the principle of resisting the draft, he should be willing to go to jail. Fernando followed that counsel. On April 22, 1969, Richard Chavez, who had taught his nephew to play golf, accompanied Fernando to the Selective Service office, where he announced he would refuse induction because he did not believe in war. A crowd turned out despite the rain, and Father Mark Day led them in prayer. Helen was there with some of the younger children; Cesar stayed in his sickbed.

Many responded with plaudits, but others urged Cesar to persuade his son to change his mind. Two weeks later, Chavez attended the Friday night meeting, despite a bad day of pain. In both Spanish and English, he explained why he would support Fernando’s decision to risk prison rather than serve. He framed the issue in terms of a commitment to nonviolence:

This has nothing to do with the union, only that he is my son
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and I am the director of the union so it has become part of the union . . . I know I’ll be willing to give all my time and all my work and my health and my life, if you think that’s needed, but I never really knew there was something I wouldn’t give the movement. And I found today that I’m not willing to give the union my principles . . . I’m willing to leave the movement, I’m willing to be asked to leave, but not to sacrifice my principles to anyone, because if you do that, then of course there’s nothing left to give your life meaning.

A few months later, Chavez participated in a mass at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the death of Robert Kennedy. Ascending the ornate, ten-foot-high pulpit, from which Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his final sermon four days before he was assassinated, Chavez spoke publicly for the first time against the Vietnam War.

Chavez’s Washington appearance marked the start of a three-month tour, his first major national appearances since the fast and his illness. To push what he hoped would be the final boycott season, Chavez decided to visit all the major cities. He traveled in a Winnebago accompanied by a small entourage that included a nurse, a guard, and Chris Hartmire, who functioned as spokesman, speechwriter, and general campaign manager.