There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The availability of relatively cheap braceros and numerous illegal workers continued after the war, undermining union organizing. Not until 1954 did Washington address the problem, with President Eisenhower’s creation of Operation Wetback, a military effort to locate undocumented Mexicans for deportation. A few years later the AFL-sponsored Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) asked Congress to insist that “the approximation of slave labor conditions which [the growers] have perpetuated will no longer be tolerated by this nation,” and in 1964 the bracero program itself was formally terminated with further agitation from the AFL-CIO and other liberal reform elements.14 That same year another blow was dealt the hegemony of the growers when the U.S. Supreme Court in Reapportionment Cases ruled that state legislative representation would be based on voting population as opposed to acreage, diminishing the power of rural counties in state assemblies. In California this meant that the burgeoning suburbs of Southern California would now gain electoral precedence over the rural agricultural regions, weakening the growers’ traditional political clout.15

  ONE REFORM GROUP AT WORK in the California harvest lands beginning in the early 1950s was the Community Service Organization (CSO), whose focus was on creating people power through voter registration efforts. The group took its inspiration from community organizer Saul Alinsky’s theory that the poor and disenfranchised, if mobilized in significant numbers, could become a potent political force. In his Reveille for Radicals, a primer on grassroots organizing published in 1946 and used by a generation of activists, Alinsky warned that “if [people] continue inarticulate, apathetic, disinterested, forlorn and alone in their abysmal anonymity, then democracy is ended.”16 One young Mexican American drawn to the CSO’s work was César Chávez, a migrant worker who had been born in Arizona in 1927. Chávez and his family had lost their land in the Depression and gone west to join the armies of migrant farmworkers working California’s Imperial and San Joaquin valleys, picking greens, carrots, tomatoes, grapes, prunes, and cotton in a seasonal loop from Delano—about a half hour’s drive north of Bakersfield–to San Jose, Sacramento, Fresno, and back again. The family eventually settled in a section of San Jose known as Sal si Puedes (“get out if you can”). César, the eldest son, helped his mother keep the family intact after his father was hurt in the fields and could no longer work. He joined the navy toward the end of World War II, returning to California to marry and raise a family.

  In 1952 Chávez and his wife, Linda (they eventually had eight children), were living in a Mexican American neighborhood in Delano. A CSO staffer named Fred Ross sought out César, having heard he enjoyed a reputation as an informal community counselor, a man whose judgment was respected by his neighbors. Chávez was initially suspicious of the outsider—Anglo college students and social workers had flitted in and out of the local scene before—but he was impressed to learn that Ross had advocated for Mexican prisoners beaten by Los Angeles police in an infamous 1951 case known as “Bloody Christmas,” in which the cops themselves were ultimately indicted. For his part, Ross was struck by Chávez’s “kind of burning interest” in voter registration as a means of social change. “[César] made the connection very quickly between the civic weakness of [his Mexican American neighbors] and the social neglect of the barrio,” Ross recalled, noting in his diary at the time, “I think I’ve found the guy I’m looking for.”17

  Chávez served CSO for a decade, becoming a paid staff member and eventually the organization’s general director. In 1962, however, when he and a Latina colleague, Dolores “Lola” Huerta, expressed an interest in forming a farmworkers’ union, the CSO informed them that labor organizing was outside the scope of the group’s mission. Venturing off on their own, Chávez and Huerta launched the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA).

  Chávez’s organizing style was appropriately low-key. Favoring farmworkers’ attire, never a business suit, he spoke plainly, without rhetorical flourishes, telling the workers their exploitation at the hands of the growers was their problem, and that only they could end it. He balanced intimate house meetings, where people would be free to talk, with occasional larger gatherings designed to make the attendees feel empowered by their numbers. The fledgling union made it a point to charge dues to inculcate a sense of ownership among members; and in order to demonstrate that the NFWA could deliver something of value, it offered numerous social services. A direct labor action was not planned, for Chávez and Huerta believed several years would be needed to build and fortify their union before confronting the growers. But events intruded on September 7, 1965, when an AWOC local of Filipino farmworkers staged a walkout against Delano grape growers over dismal wages. The local, led by Larry Itliong, turned to the NFWA for support. There was a history of ill will between Filipino and Mexican workers, and Chávez doubted his untested union was ready for a strike, but there was considerable pressure from his supporters to join the AWOC action. At issue were demands for a wage increase from $1.25 to $1.40 an hour and recognition of AWOC and the NFWA. At a meeting on September 20 Chávez submitted the question to the rank and file, who voted unanimously to join the struggle.

  Rapidly gaining strength, the walkout soon involved five thousand workers on agricultural lands covering more than four hundred square miles; as it was increasingly a Mexican American strike, the NFWA and Itliong’s AWOC chapter merged the following year into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), with Chávez as its leader.

  Picketing agricultural concerns presented a unique challenge to strikers because the targeted farms were spread over so wide an area. One advantage they held, however, was that grapes required harvesting at a particular moment, so a strategically timed strike could inflict maximum damage; and because a grape crop required the attention of semiskilled workers ten months out of the year, the field hands tended to be more experienced, less migratory, and hence less replaceable. Nonetheless, the growers gave no sign of interest in working things out peacefully. They used tractors to kick up dust that would gag the picketers, fired guns over the strikers’ heads, and, on one occasion, crop-dusted them from a low-flying airplane. They also utilized the local courts, obtaining an injunction so explicitly worded it forbade the picketers from shouting the word “Huelga!”—Spanish for “strike.”

  “The growers were giving us the knee and elbow,” recalled Chávez, who was himself attacked by growers’ thugs, “knocking us down and throwing us down. But we remained nonviolent. We weren’t afraid of them. We just got up and continued picketing.”18 He had worried that his fellow strikers might turn and run before the growers’ violent tactics, but the workers only seemed emboldened by the challenge, driven in their purpose by deeply felt grievances held too long in check. “The picket line is a beautiful thing,” Chávez concluded, “because it does something to a human being.”19

  Another of Chávez’s insights was to take a page from the Southern civil rights movement and counter the unified local opposition by appealing to forces outside the harvesting regions. He turned to the nation’s most experienced protestors, the youthful members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who had recently emerged from the cauldron of civil rights activism in the Deep South, as well as the Berkeley Free Speech movement. He traveled personally to the campuses of nearby Berkeley and Stanford to enlist the student activists, some of whom came to the picking regions to conduct workshops in nonviolent civil disobedience for the farmworkers.

  Chávez, a devout Catholic, also benefited from the consistent interest of the Church, specifically its philosophy of liberation theology, the belief (only recently sanctioned by the Vatican) that priests and other church members had a duty to assist the poor in their struggle for economic and social justice. A migrant worker all his life, Chávez had something of an uneven education, but with the guidance of a local priest, Father Donald McDonnell, he devoured books about and by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. From his reading he
took away the idea of framing the farmworkers’ cause not as a mere labor dispute, but as a broad-based civil rights crusade, one that would include all the elements of a Gandhian campaign, such as marches, consumer boycotts, even fasting. McDonnell also shared with Chávez portions of the transcripts of the La Follette Committee Hearings held in Los Angeles in the 1930s, which revealed the underhanded techniques regional growers had used to ravage earlier farmworkers’ movements. The consumer boycott would become a favored advocacy technique of the farmworkers, as the logistical difficulties of protesting in the fields and the too-ready availability of replacement workers made a traditional strike difficult.

  In adopting satyagraha, or Gandhian nonviolence, Chávez was staking out new terrain for organized labor in the United States. Picketing, strike rallies, and sit-downs were in essence nonviolent means of protest, but American workers had at times instigated violence or, more often, reacted to it in kind. What was revolutionary about Chávez’s approach—as it had been for Gandhi, King, and others—was that it was absolute. There was to be no violence, even in reaction to that fomented by others. While some practitioners of the method embraced nonviolence as a spiritual philosophy, others simply valued it as a useful tactic; what had been proven in the civil rights movement was that it could be a very effective strategy, compelling public interest, sympathy, and support. Another advantage was that it was not easily linked to Communism. Conservatives certainly didn’t give up trying—Chávez was red-baited much as King had been—but the accusation of Communist influence simply proved impossible to make stick given the plainly indigenous character of the farmworkers and their cause.

  Impressed by the exemplary nature of the campaign, both Walter Reuther of the UAW and Robert Kennedy, now a U.S. senator from New York, were drawn to California. Local growers watched this development with curiosity bordering on outrage. It was incomprehensible to them that a local movement of scruffy migrants had managed to enlist national political figures in their crusade. The growers knew Chávez as a perennial troublemaker; some still derided him as “that dumb Mex.” Never had they expected he would be transformed into a Pied Piper to thousands of local farmworkers and attract powerful friends from Washington, as well as growing legions of volunteers and well-wishers from across the country. “You are making history here,” Reuther assured a boisterous rally in Delano, announcing that the farm strike had the formal support of the AFL-CIO. “We will march here together, we will fight here together, and we will win here together.”20 Kennedy, who impaneled a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor while in town in order to hear local testimony, vowed that if America could dream of putting a man on the moon, it could manage to improve the lives of California farmworkers.

  THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN ORGANIZED LABOR and the Democratic Party, forged in the decades since the Wilson administration and solidified by the New Deal and the Great Society, was about to face a critical test. It would arrive in the form of a tragedy in the sphere of foreign policy—Washington’s decision to commit vast resources and the U.S. military to prop up the unstable government of South Vietnam, and to defend it as a bastion against the spread of Communism. President John F. Kennedy dispatched as many as fifteen thousand military advisers to guide and train the country’s fledgling army; his successor, Lyndon Johnson, ultimately sent a half million American combat troops and ordered the aerial bombing of North Vietnam.

  Supremely loyal to President Johnson was George Meany, leader of the AFL-CIO and for all intents and purposes the U.S. labor movement. He had been personally devastated by the death of President Kennedy, and had been deeply touched when President Johnson made it a point to reach out to him for help in guiding the reforms of the Great Society. Like other labor representatives, Meany welcomed those reforms as a “reincarnation of the verve and excitement of the New Deal,”21 and was also pleased with Johnson’s 1964 vice presidential choice, Hubert Humphrey, who possessed one of the most stellar pro-labor voting records in Congress. He concurred as well with Johnson’s Vietnam policy, having been hawkish on the subject long before most Americans had heard of the distant country.

  Johnson’s escalation of the war, however, contained an inherent conflict for organized labor. Even as the war drained resources from Johnson’s domestic programs, military-related spending boosted domestic manufacturing and created jobs. No one had forgotten that it had been the production buildup of the Second World War that had really ended the Great Depression, and a similar positive impact had been seen during the Korean War. Business spawned by the growing war in Vietnam was most visible on the West Coast, where numerous defense contractors were located and where shipping concerns and warehouses serviced what was known as the Vietnam Run, the busy trade lanes to U.S. military depots in Hawaii, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia. “Billions poured into war industries meant millions of jobs,” notes historian Philip Foner. For organized labor, “the war was far away and jobs were a reality.”22

  Meany, who quickly emerged as Johnson’s leading defender among U.S. union heads, wanted to believe that the nation could afford both the war and the Great Society, a view that was tested when the White House cited escalating war costs in opposing a hike in the minimum wage from $1.25 to $1.60 per hour. Walter Reuther also backed the president’s war, although he rejected the idea that job security at home in any way validated armed conflict. “What good is the General Motors pension plan,” he asked, “if the whole world is engulfed in nuclear or catastrophic war?”23 To see young men sacrificed in the rice paddies and mountains of remote Vietnam no doubt also grated on Reuther’s fundamental optimism about the potential of America’s youth. As early as 1956 he had suggested the organization that would, under President Kennedy, become the Peace Corps, saying, “The more young Americans are sent to the places in the world where people are hungry, and sent with slide rules and textbooks and medical kits … the fewer of our sons we will have to send with guns to fight Communism on the battlefields of the world.”24

  The initial anxiety that the North Vietnamese insurgency represented a bid to spread Communist rule throughout the region was soon compounded by the equally specious concern that the United States could not walk away from the conflict once it had become a proxy war for clashing East-West ideologies, a test of American will. Meanwhile, the choice of Vietnamese partners seemed characterized by the same arrogance and lack of scrutiny that had haunted previous foreign entanglements such as the 1954 American-engineered coup in Guatemala. The quagmire that Vietnam soon became was, in a sense, the bill that had come due for decades of reckless tinkering with the world in the name of anti-Communism. Perhaps Jay Lovestone and the CIA had always made it look too easy.

  At home, slowly at first, there came a loosening of tongues. Elements within the labor movement were among the first to voice concern that the war in Vietnam had been hastily entered into and was a mistake. On February 24, 1965, Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital Employees Union, which had a long history of challenging racial discrimination and other injustices, sent telegrams to President Johnson and New York senators Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits, urging a peaceful settlement of “a war no one can win.” Other unions came on board in the coming months—the Negro American Labor Council, the Missouri Teamsters, District 65 of the AFL-CIO, and members of the UAW. “Tell the president we don’t like to be lied to,” Emil Mazey, secretary-treasurer of the UAW, urged a student antiwar rally. “We were lied to by Ike on the U-2 over the Soviet Union, lied to by the Kennedy administration on the Bay of Pigs, and now LBJ says we are in Vietnam to defend democracy.”25

  Students also began to speak out. On March 24, 1965, the first antiwar teach-in, sponsored by SDS, was held at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, involving three thousand students and faculty; it lasted all night and culminated in an antiwar demonstration in the morning. Forty other colleges copied the format, and on May 15 a national teach-in was held over television and radio, with 110 colleges in thirty-five states participating. Of g
reater concern to the Johnson administration were the large public antiwar rallies, such as the SDS-led March on Washington to End the War on April 17 that brought fifteen thousand students, faculty, veteran civil rights protestors, and clergy to protest outside the White House. “I feel that the president responds to public opinion—look what he did on civil rights,” observed a nineteen-year-old marcher, “and I want him to know that public opinion is behind him if he sees the possibility for negotiations.”26 On August 6, in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, one thousand protestors, including folksinger Joan Baez and A. J. Muste, the eighty-year-old pacifist and labor militant, arrived in Washington. Calling themselves the Assembly of Unrepresented People, the group carried a petition calling on Americans of draft age to conscientiously refuse service in the military and to request a discharge if they were already in uniform.

  Local 1199’s opposition remained steadfast. In November 1965 it purchased an ad in the New York Times demanding a cease-fire in Vietnam, an end to the bombings of North Vietnam, and an effort to negotiate a settlement. By early 1966 it was joined by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in condemning a war that, due to college draft deferments, was being fought largely by soldiers drawn from the working class, with blacks a proportionately high percentage. The jungles of Vietnam, it was said, had become “a poor man’s graveyard.”27

  This latter issue was one that might have galvanized broad labor resistance to the war, but despite the activism of selected unions like 1199, the movement at large chose to step delicately. Anyone within labor’s leadership ranks who criticized the war risked excommunication at the hands of Meany, who defended the conflict as necessary “for freedom to survive” and dismissed protestors as “academic do-gooders” and “apostles of appeasement.” He cautioned AFL-CIO members that the White House foreign policy varied not an iota from that of the federation’s executive council.28 The debate came fully into the open at a December 1965 AFL-CIO gathering in San Francisco. Speeches in support of the war were heard from Meany, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk (who was loudly booed by college students in the balcony), as well as an official from the American Legion. The students, who were attending as observers from Berkeley and San Francisco State College, grew restless when it became apparent the convention leadership was intentionally avoiding an actual discussion of the war. They began to yell at the delegates below, calling them “Labor fakers” and admonishing them to “Get out of Vietnam.” Some on the floor heckled back, shouting “Get a haircut!” or “Go to Russia and debate!” while Meany slammed the gavel, demanding, “Will the sergeant of arms clear these kookies out of the gallery.”29 Mazey, the UAW’s outspoken secretary-treasurer who had emerged as his union’s leading dissident voice on the war, used his turn at the podium to challenge the convention to rethink labor’s position. Offering a quick summary of U.S. policy toward Vietnam since the Second World War, he pointed out that America, like earlier French occupiers, was exhibiting a reckless imperialism, and insisted that the rampart against Communism it had chosen to back in Vietnam was a flawed and corrupt puppet dictatorship. He demanded the AFL-CIO reverse course at once and come out for peace negotiations “so that we can bring this unhappy conflict to an end.”30 Meany immediately countered Mazey, insisting that while the French had been a colonial presence in Vietnam, the United States was there as a force of liberation, and that the “unhappy conflict” would end when the Communists stopped trying to take over Southeast Asia.31