The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (47 page)

With some sixty thousand index cards in the files from past members, no one knew for sure how many members the union had, who paid dues, or whether dues corresponded correctly with the hours worked. Similar problems plagued the medical plan, an innovative insurance program set up by LeRoy Chatfield and designed to meet the needs of seasonal workers. Chavez had the foresight to invest in a computer system, and he pinned his hopes on programmers who were laboriously writing language and punching cards to create programs to computerize the union’s files. Dave Smith, the computer whiz, had been close to Quigley. When he was forced out, Smith left as well.

When the first meeting of the national executive board convened on December 17, 1973, Chavez faced a new dynamic—a roomful of strong personalities, experienced organizers, and smart minds unafraid to voice opinions. He set out to structure meetings to ensure that he maintained control.

The board met at least four times a year, each meeting lasting several days, often ten hours a day. Discussions on the most mundane matters could take hours, while significant policy decisions often were made quickly, or ratified after the fact. If Chavez sensed resistance to an idea, he changed the subject and deferred the discussion. He skillfully played one member against another to build coalitions that supported his ideas and break apart allies who might form an independent bloc. If he found himself backed into a corner and all else failed, he lashed out at Huerta. If a discussion veered off course, he suggested they take a walk or tell war stories into the tape recorder, which he kept running throughout the sessions. When emotions ran too high, he defused the situation with a joke or a song. From the beginning, Chavez, the master organizer, organized the board to do his bidding.

Most of the board members were stationed in the field or boycott cities, and an us-versus-them dynamic with La Paz emerged from the start. They wanted to explain their problems and frustrations dealing with the inefficient union headquarters. Chavez wanted them to appreciate his challenges as president of the union. The tension played out in dozens of small, mostly good-natured exchanges: Medina asked that La Paz send out background on candidates seeking endorsements before the board members were asked to vote. Chavez said nobody was available to pull material together. Medina persisted, saying that a simple recommendation would suffice. He didn’t want to vote blind. “What I had forgotten was that there was a new board,” Chavez replied, gracious and patronizing at once. “Because on the old board they all knew these things
¹³
and I could just send them and they would act on them. But that much we can do.”

When he became frustrated, Chavez frequently fell back on his two favorite bugaboos: “The biggest problem is car and telephone.
¹⁴
That’s the single biggest problems we have in the union. You can’t control those.” For two weeks, he told the board, he had negotiated with Jerry Cohen about the legal department’s phone bill. He wanted the board to adopt rules so he would not face these situations. “I’m just making you guys responsible
¹⁵
for what I’ve been responsible for all this time,” Chavez said. “I’ve got to force all of you, including you, Dolores, to make some rules so we can run this goddamn union. If we had rules, there wouldn’t be any problems.”

Board members protested that rules invented in La Paz did not work in the real world. For example, Chavez told them not to accept any more eight-cylinder cars as donations because they used too much gas; they told him the boycotters would have no cars. He presented a formula for car repair budgets that added up hypothetical averages, which were irrelevant when the clunkers broke down. “So I get one-tenth of one brake shoe per month?” Medina asked. Chavez told them the budget assumed twenty-four thousand miles per set of tires; they laughed and said they were lucky if tires lasted fifteen thousand miles.

“When you call me on the phone, I don’t tell you my problems; I try to help you,” Chavez finally said in annoyance. “This week is my week.
¹⁶
You have to know what problems we have in La Paz so you can help me.”

Occasionally, philosophical arguments broke out—and remained unresolved. One of the most persistent revolved around the question of how to compensate union staff. Several times Chavez had tamped down suggestions to pay wages. At one board meeting, Medina and Richard Chavez argued that eventually workers would have to be paid for the time they spent on union business if farmworkers were to truly play important roles in running the union. Other board members dismissed the suggestion as the start of a slippery slope toward paying salaries, which would destroy the movement spirit. “That discussion is the one that’s going to give us the biggest problems. See, that discussion goes to the whole movement,” Chavez said, noting the question was moot until they won back contracts. “We have enough sense,” he said calmly. “We’ll know what to do
¹⁷
when the time comes. We always do.”

Chavez complained that his long absences from La Paz had wreaked havoc with the administration. Board members told him he needed competent help. “I doubt anyone else but me can do it,” Chavez said defensively. “You can’t take your eye from it. Not one minute.”

“We’re playing hardball now,” Richard said. “We’re not Little League anymore. We’re so good at kicking ass.”

“Richard, just give me some time to be in La Paz,”
¹⁸
Cesar replied. “I can do my job. I don’t need any help. When the strike’s over, when the boycott’s over, then I want you to come to La Paz.”

“The day the boycott’s over, we’re going to have a nightmare,” Huerta warned. “Getting contracts negotiated, setting up enforcement . . . We’re going to not only have this little problem, we’re going to have a statewide problem.”

“The problems are going to multiply,” Richard added.

“They’ll be different problems,” Cesar said.

“It’s the same problems over and over,” Huerta responded.

Just as the inept management of the hiring halls had alienated workers, the chaotic administration at La Paz—dubbed by its detractors “Magic Mountain”—frustrated everyone who dealt with the union office. Financial practices remained murky. The state threatened to shut the credit union because half its loans were delinquent, the bank lacked sufficient reserves, and it commingled investments with UFW funds. Board members heard complaints from supporters, staff, and funders about poor management. The disorganization of the union was an open secret, they told Chavez. He rejected the idea of problems in his own office as firmly as he had dismissed complaints about the hiring hall.

Fred Ross, who often sat in on executive board meetings, always treated Chavez with great respect, proud of the student who had outstripped his teacher. The older man almost never challenged Chavez. But Ross had been watching the union drift and the boycott flounder, and in the fall of 1974 he finally spoke up in his typical no-nonsense manner. La Paz gave no direction, boycotters were confused, half the cities had ineffective operations, and no one on the board knew why. “I think it’s absolutely insane the way we’re organized,” Ross said. The boycott needed a director who could ride herd on cities, spot problems, offer advice, and move people around when necessary. Someone needed to ride the circuit, the way he and Chavez had done back in the CSO.

Chavez blamed the board for not wanting centralized direction and insisted the boycott was working well. Ross chastised Chavez
¹⁹
for overconfidence. Then Ross compounded the challenge, suggesting they put Medina in charge. He had written a lengthy pamphlet on how to run a boycott that Ross used as his training template. “I think Eliseo has a very nice way with people, I think that he’s not going to rub people the wrong way, and I think that’s half the battle right there, besides all the rest of his smarts,” Ross said.

Medina, the only Mexican farmworker on the board, was the last person Chavez wanted to elevate to a position of greater power. Chavez reacted instinctively: Medina was irreplaceable in Ohio. “We’re not going to have a director if the board doesn’t want one,” Chavez said. “Over my dead body we’re going to have a director!” Ross told Chavez he was acting like the manager of a supermarket chain who had not felt enough pressure from the boycott to take grapes off the shelves. “You’re not hurting enough,” Ross told Chavez.

Ganz tried to ask Medina whether he would take the job, but Chavez cut him off. “We’re not going to force a decision down no one’s throat and then make that goddamn decision the source of some conflict on this board. You understand? Not while I’m here. You take that into consideration. It’s a new ball game in this movement. It used to be when I gave orders, it was done and no one asked questions. It’s not like that anymore. Sure, people will do something if I say something. Next meeting I don’t want to come and be accosted. When you do things democratically, it takes a lot more time.”

Medina finally spoke, quietly. He would rather stay in the Midwest, he said, but he was willing to do whatever the union needed. Chavez assured him he need not move, then changed the subject. They sang some union songs, and laughed as Padilla, a great mimic, performed imitations of their negotiator. They watched the first cut of the documentary about the summer of 1973 and adjourned for the night, the question of the boycott left unresolved.

Chavez was unwilling to relinquish control over even the smallest details of the operation, much less the boycott. No one understood that better than Richard Chavez. He had not joined in the boycott discussion. But he led the charge on the administrative disarray. He saw the problem as twofold—Cesar’s unwillingness to delegate or trust anyone else, and his attachment to an ideological movement at the expense of running a union.

“Let’s start looking at it as a labor union,” Richard urged. “Let’s divide the authority, divide the responsibilities . . . if somebody wants to buy a battery for a goddamn car, you don’t have to know about it.” His brother, Richard said in frustration, insisted on knowing about every spark plug that was purchased. “You can’t do that, not unless you don’t trust people. If you don’t trust me, I’m your brother and you know that I would go to hell for you . . . I’m sure nobody is going to work against you,
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if that’s what you’re afraid of or whatever. Nobody is going to politic against you.”

But his brother was not taking any chances. Chavez met privately with Ross, and by the next board meeting, announced happily that the veteran organizer had agreed to direct the boycott. In a reference to the earlier dispute, Chavez spoke about the evolution of the union since the days he and Jim Drake could decide one afternoon to launch a boycott.

“You have to understand,” he said pleadingly. “I’m watching here, and I know what the difference is between now and then. You want to know? You want to be reminded? You’ve erased it, but it’s there. It’s a truth . . . The difference is that now we have an executive board.” Decisions might be approved by majority vote, he said, but even unanimous tallies masked underlying disagreements. “You’ve got to understand this,” he said again. “I must discipline myself to think constantly that unity is more important
²¹
than winning tomorrow. And we didn’t have that before. From where I sit here, it’s an entirely different ball game. I see it. And I play it that way. See, when you get all eight, nine minds working together, if you don’t watch what you’re doing, you get in trouble. So whatever we do, always constantly think about that unity.”

Chapter 25

The Saint and the Sinner

It was recognition for us, and a tremendous joy. Something I never thought would happen.

The headline
¹
in the Sunday
New York Times
Magazine
in the fall of 1974 posed in large capital letters the unspoken question hovering in the minds of even faithful supporters of
la causa
: “Is Chavez Beaten?”

Cesar Chavez was portrayed as a sympathetic, charismatic figure, but the story concluded that his prospects for building a successful union looked bleak and the high point might well have been behind him—the 1970 contracts. Farmworkers still worshipped Chavez, but they increasingly worked under Teamster contracts.

“La Causa is good and its time will come again,” a worker named Hernandez told the
New York Times
reporter at the end of a fifteen-hour day thinning lettuce with his wife and six children. “When I hear the cry of ‘Huelga’ I want to, you know, walk out of the fields, to screw the grower right at harvest time, to help Cesar in this hard time he has. But look around you, at all these open mouths to feed.” The Hernandez family had four yellowed magazine pictures tacked on the wall of their small house: Abraham Lincoln, Emiliano Zapata, John F. Kennedy, and Cesar Chavez. The Hernandezes had gone on strike for the UFW in 1973; this year, they signed Teamster cards. “I like the Chavez union most, but they made some mistakes,” Hernandez said. “The Teamsters are not as bad as he says.” The Teamsters now printed literature in Spanish and staffed service centers to help workers obtain food stamps and other benefits. “Maybe in our hearts,” Hernandez’s wife added, “we still are with Chavez.”

One year after the emotional strikes and mass protests of 1973, after burning through millions of dollars in strike benefits and related expenses, Chavez’s union was broke again, and no closer to regaining hundreds of lost contracts. The Teamsters had pulled out their goons and become increasingly savvy. The boycott was floundering. National labor leaders wondered about the UFW leader, who seemed more successful as a candidate for sainthood than as a union president. AFL-CIO president George Meany said the 1973 strike “was almost a disaster,” and by inference a waste of money. “It was Chavez’s own people who went to work behind picket lines in Coachella last year, and that didn’t indicate much support,”
²
Meany said. His comments provoked questions among union supporters, and problems for boycott leaders. “We bought a goddamn strike,
³
you know,” Richard Chavez told his brother. “I had a hell of a time explaining that $90 a week [payment to strikers]. A really, really bad time explaining that.”