by Philip Dray
For many who had been present it was the exchange of shouts and heckling that stood out, evidence of the widening gap between organized labor and student activists over Vietnam. It didn’t help that most of the big trade unions’ senior labor executive councils were truly senior—white men in their seventies or eighties, many of whom had retired or been relieved of their day-to-day union duties yet hung on as esteemed elders. Meany was a particular embarrassment, his cold war paranoia and dismissal of those who challenged him as “jitterbugs,” “kookies,” or “woo-woos” appearing outdated and even childish. Liberals and intellectuals who felt a sincere connection to the labor movement and labor history could not help but feel alienated. Of course the dynamic also functioned the other way: older union members, even those who disapproved of the war, could not countenance the more outlandish forms of activism the young people favored, which went so far as to disrespect the president and the country.
ON MARCH 7, 1966, 150 MEN AND WOMEN, mostly Mexican Americans but also some black and Anglo volunteers, along with a handful of nuns and priests, embarked with César Chávez on a three-hundred-mile march from Delano to the state capital in Sacramento. The marchers carried their own sleeping bags and held aloft an embroidered silk tapestry of Our Lady of Guadalupe, traditional defender of the poor, as well as American and Mexican flags and a wooden sign painted with the word the growers had forbidden, “Huelga.” They also hoisted banners emblazoned with the thunderbird, “the NFWA’s splendidly barbaric coat of arms,” which was known among those hostile to the movement as “Chávez’s Trotsky flag.”32 Despite a march of striking farmworkers across California being unprecedented, the event had a relaxed feel, less protest than religious pilgrimage—a peregrinación, Chávez termed it—with some participants strumming guitars or playing accordions as they walked. The ultimate destination was the capital steps, where a rally would be held in hope of gaining the attention of California governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who had thus far largely kept his distance from the workers’ plight.
As the growers’ arguments—that migrant workers were by nature carefree, did not want to be unionized, or were led by Communists—each failed in turn, their barbs had become increasingly hostile. “Chavez and his cohorts have imported the long-haired kooks, professional loafers, winos and dregs of society to carry their Huelga banners,” one conservative leaflet asserted, suggesting the march was being stage-managed by outsiders.33 A local newspaper accused the pickers of following blindly the teachings of big-city radicals. “Most of these people don’t know who [Saul] Alinsky is,” the article complained. “All they know is he’s got a name like a bomb thrower.”34 At times the vehement resistance appeared motivated less by the NFWA’s specific demands than by the sense among growers that their honor was at stake. “What Chavez was challenging was a way of life,” Dunne notes. “A heady history of casually breaking farm strikes had given the owners an emotional investment in not yielding to this one.”35
Meanwhile, Chávez’s peregrinación snaked north through the fertile San Joaquin Valley, through vineyards and cotton fields, losing but also gaining people along the way. After many miles Chávez could walk no longer, and was obliged to ride along in a car. At every stop a NFWA member named Luis Valdez read the official resolution the marchers had written: “Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich…. We are poor, we are humble, and our only choice is to strike…. We want to be equal with all the working men in the nation…. We Shall Overcome.”36
Upon the group’s arrival in Sacramento on Easter Sunday, the fifty-seven originales, those who had walked the entire distance, were swept up in triumph onto a stage festooned with Mexican and American flags. The celebration was particularly appropriate, for during the final days of the march the first grower had capitulated. On April 7, 1966, the Schenley Corporation, which owned the Dubonnet Wine Corporation and regularly employed about 450 farmworkers, had signed a contract with the NFWA. The company’s surrender may have had to do with a rumor its own attorney had heard, and passed along to Schenley’s management, that a Los Angeles bartenders’ union was considering a boycott of Schenley products in sympathy with Chávez. Such a boycott would be devastating, as the Schenley brand was well known. Whatever the company’s reasons, the moment was historic, the first instance of a California grower agreeing to formally recognize a union of fieldworkers.37 “Farm workers … are excluded from virtually all the laws Congress has passed to protect industrial workers, including the statutes governing collective bargaining and minimum wages,” the New York Times applauded. “The ability of the California grape strikers to make themselves heard despite this absence of legal safeguards is attributable to the fervor with which they have fought for emancipation.”38
Chávez followed up on the breakthrough at Schenley by targeting DiGiorgio, a larger corporation that controlled several hundred thousand acres in California and employed as many as fifteen hundred pickers. Founded in the early twentieth century by Joseph DiGiorgio, a Sicilian immigrant, the firm had broken farmworker strikes in 1939, 1947, and 1960. The current president, Robert DiGiorgio, the founder’s nephew, was a prominent businessman who sat on the board of the Bank of America. To defeat DiGiorgio, with its family tradition of strikebreaking and its connections to California’s financial powers, Chávez used a controversial strategy, insisting that the company’s available workforce be reduced by sending undocumented Mexican workers home. This came at a time when the idea of Chicano rights was dawning, especially among the farmworkers and their supporters, and many were displeased with the notion of urging the expulsion of migrants. There had in fact been talk of the NFWA unionizing workers on both sides of the border. But Chávez defended it as necessary to break DiGiorgio.
A more serious complication was that the Teamsters, who had aided the NFWA in defeating Schenley by refusing to cross NFWA picket lines, now maneuvered so as to be able to participate in any possible contract resolution with DiGiorgio. Chávez was furious. “Those bastards,” he said of the Teamsters. “We shook the tree and now they’re trying to pick up the fruit. That’s how they operate. And if they get away with it this time, we’ll never get them off our back. Just when we get a grower softened up, they’ll come in and try to make a deal with him. That’s the way they do it, through the bosses.”39
It was a strange power struggle. The Teamsters were a business union, the farmworkers more akin to a social movement, and Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa was said to vehemently oppose getting involved with fruit pickers. But Hoffa was mired in legal problems, and it was believed that Einar Mohn, director of the Western Conference of Teamsters and a competitor for Hoffa’s office, perceived the Teamsters’ entry into the vineyards as a means of raising his own status within the union, especially were Hoffa to go to jail. (He would soon begin serving a thirteen-year sentence for jury tampering and pension fund fraud.) Mohn and his supporters dismissed that allegation, insisting that the actual motivation was that the Teamsters already had one hundred thousand members in various farm-related jobs in California, working in transport and canneries, and could not allow the farmworkers to gain control over so substantial a part of the industry, since theoretically any NFWA strike would impact the numerous Teamsters locals reliant on agribusiness. DiGiorgio by now also seemed to acknowledge that some unionization of pickers was inevitable, and preferred the prospect of dealing with the Teamsters, not least because it would irritate Chávez and the NFWA. Robert DiGiorgio demanded a union representation election that the Teamsters easily won, further angering Chávez, who believed the balloting had been sham, and who in desperation turned again for help to Governor Brown.
The governor had been noticeably absent from the capital on Easter Sunday when the farmworkers had arrived at his doorstep, but since then he had begun feeling more vulnerable about his chances of winning reelection in the fall. At Chávez’s suggestion, and recognizing he could not afford to look unconcerned about the state’s labor unrest, Brown order
ed a state inquiry into the recent DiGiorgio representation voting; when the inquiry substantiated Chávez’s suspicion of improprieties, Brown arranged for a new election to be held under state authority. Chávez and his forces received additional new support when the AFL-CIO agreed to charter the NFWA, on condition it merge with AWOC. In August 1966, as a result of the merger, Chávez’s movement became known as the United Farm Workers of California (UFW). That same year Congress amended the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to include farmworkers in minimum wage protection.
The fight leading up to the DiGiorgio election was intensely ideological. The UFW cited the Teamsters’ alleged links with organized crime, distributing excerpts in English and Spanish of Robert Kennedy’s book The Enemy Within, which recounted sordid details about the Teamsters from the McClellan Committee inquiry. Tainting the Teamsters, or any old-line union, as more organized crime than organized labor, had become easy sport of late. Hoffa’s legal battles had by now dominated headlines for so long that the Teamsters’ reputation for shadiness was more or less fixed in the public mind.
The Teamsters fought back by red-baiting the UFW, at one point referring to the farmworkers as “the Vietcong.” But the UFW handily won the election—Chávez by now simply had superior control of the ground forces—and in April 1967 the union signed a contract with DiGiorgio providing for a union shop, a $1.65 per hour minimum wage, paid vacations, and an agreement that pickers would receive four hours’ pay for showing up for work even if none was available. In July peace was made between the Teamsters and the UFW. In negotiations with the Perelli-Minetti vineyards, it was agreed that the UFW would have control of the fields and the Teamsters would represent workers in canneries, processing facilities, and warehouses.
With the Teamsters dispute settled, the UFW shifted some of its focus to promoting a national boycott on table grapes in order to bring other growers in line. Taking to the road, UFW members staged demonstrations and fasts in league with college and church groups, and appeared before labor, civil liberties, and civil rights organizations, urging American consumers not to buy grapes. Supermarket chains like A&P and Safeway were ubiquitous targets in what proved a highly effective secondary boycott, and grapes proved the ideal item for an enduring boycott since they were hardly an essential grocery item. Eighty-five percent of the nation’s grape growers, including Gallo and several in the Napa Valley, eventually capitulated, agreeing in 1970 to recognize the UFW and sign durable contracts that governed wages, benefits, working conditions, and the use of pesticides, and allowed the union to play a larger role in hiring. The victory was the largest labor-related consumer boycott in history and further confirmation of the Chávez movement’s skill at identifying likely forms of contemporary grassroots activism, then using them to mobilize and nationalize a cause. Because of the large profile it attained, the farmworkers’ movement became a beacon for not only workers’ rights but a more general recognition of Mexican American culture, the movement for Chicano rights that would soon emerge on college campuses across the country. Although it was not immediately evident, Chávez and the farmworkers had also set an inspiring example for what would become a dominant labor movement trend in the final decades of the twentieth century—the successful unionization of long-neglected, traditionally unorganized workers such as nurses, home attendants, janitors, sanitation workers, and domestic workers.
WALTER REUTHER, head of the historically activist UAW and a man of humane, socialistic views suggestive of his hero Eugene Debs, was often considered the conscience of the labor movement; it was appropriate then that his personal struggle came to embody labor’s difficult response to President Johnson’s unpopular war. Reuther remained devoted to the president and the agenda of the Great Society even as he quietly began to share the disillusionment with Vietnam. In 1965 he recommended that peace negotiations be initiated under the auspices of the United Nations, and two years later he supported a halt in the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. But his views were consistently less strident than those of his UAW cohorts such as Emil Mazey, whom he disappointed in 1967 by endorsing another term for the man in the White House. At the same time Reuther tried, with little success, to get Mazey and others of the louder critics of the war to tone down their rhetoric and, at Johnson’s personal request, appealed for patience to Martin Luther King Jr., who in spring 1967 issued an eloquent demand for an end to the conflict.40
Victor Reuther, also of the UAW, was far less constrained by the loyalties that seemed to bind his brother. In 1964 he characterized “the Cold War view of the world” as “distorted” and “over-simplified,” and at a 1966 UAW gathering openly accused Meany and Jay Lovestone of using the AFL-CIO as a cover for CIA covert operations in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and elsewhere, thus contributing to the foreign relations boondoggle that Vietnam had become.41 He was said to have piqued Meany’s resentment in particular by alleging that the federation had committed an egregious foul by allowing a rogue element like Lovestone to roam free.42 Ironically, even as Victor Reuther spoke, the old Meany-Lovestone axis was at work in Vietnam, propping up the Confederation of Vietnamese Labor (CVT) in order to keep U.S. supplies flowing into the port of Saigon without hassle from longshoremen or other harbor workers. The AFL-CIO also used money from the U.S. Agency for International Development to create the Asian American Free Labor Institute in Vietnam, with the aim of guiding and training CVT officials and other moderate labor leaders. It gave in-kind support to CVT offices across Vietnam, supplying buses, mimeograph machines, public address systems, and office equipment.
The differences between the two Reuther brothers highlighted questions of tremendous relevance to the labor movement overall. Could labor criticize the war even as it maintained its support of the administration’s domestic reforms? To what extent would antiwar opinions endanger its alliance with the Democratic Party? Had the movement’s hesitation on the subject already rendered it toothless as a credible force for social change?
The argument made increasingly by SDS and others on the left was that organized labor, “because it is closely tied to established political and corporate interests and committed to working with them,” was no longer a viable source of meaningful social advocacy.43 While this might have been true of the major unions’ faithfulness to the president’s Vietnam policy, one could point to the farmworkers’ crusade in California as an example of supportive engagement by the AFL-CIO, the UAW, and other union entities; the big labor groups had also siphoned money and support to the civil rights struggle in the South; indeed the origins of SDS itself lay in an industrial democracy league founded in the 1930s, while its own mission statement had been drafted at a UAW summer camp in Michigan in 1962. Still, the left’s frustration with labor was understandable, as expressed in Alinsky’s witticism that “the fault with the American radical is not that he chose to make his bed in the labor movement, but that he fell asleep in it.”44
Through it all Walter Reuther agonized. After the 1966 midterm elections a kind of turning point was reached in the nation’s political discourse: the Great Society, so dear to Reuther, would henceforth be little spoken of, while maximum attention seemed to shift more or less permanently to the crisis of Vietnam.45 As the war consumed more of the nation’s energy and antiwar fervor intensified, he began to question whether his words on the subject even mattered, for from atop the AFL-CIO Meany continued resolutely to tamp down critical dissent. It was the protesting students who owned the moment and held center stage, increasingly with emerging allies such as movements of black liberation, Chicano activists, and returning war veterans. While student antiwar signs and literature often alluded to a labor-student alliance, such unity largely remained chimerical; it was far more likely that a protesting student would find herself marching alongside a disaffected GI from Vietnam, still in his fatigues, or the concerned mother of a soldier, than a contingent of workers. It was the students who had gotten this one right, and the unkind fate of time and history that Reuther and tho
se of his generation had let slip their place of prominence as the nation’s moral and ethical guardians. No doubt this was always how it was; even the most righteous causes settled ultimately with reality. For participants there lingered memories of days aflame with purpose, but also regret—for compromises made, or all that had been left undone.