The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  Like Jones, Smith wanted nothing more than to spend his life working for the movement. Unlike Jones, Smith had neither political ambitions nor a radical past. He grew up in Indiana, came out of the Catholic Worker movement, and found his home in the boycott, first in Chicago and then San Diego. When Chavez decided to restart El Malcriado for the third time, Crosby Milne had suggested Smith as the editor, and Jones endorsed the choice. “I think Joe Smith is a fantastic idea4 for the newspaper,” Chavez said at the February 1976 retreat. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself.” Smith worked closely with Milne and Jacques Levy to assemble a staff, well aware the board had been unhappy with the paper and shut it down twice before. “The best thing about working in La Paz is getting a chance to work directly with Cesar,” Smith told a journalist he recruited as managing editor in the summer of 1976. “Cesar and the union will delegate a lot of responsibility to someone and not be looking over his shoulder and second-guessing him. Because Cesar understands5 that if you delegate responsibility to someone that also means giving them the right to make some mistakes, too, and understanding that’s going to happen, and giving people room to grow.”

  The first issue of the new El Malcriado was about to go to the printer the Friday that Smith intervened with Chavez on McCarthy’s behalf. Over the weekend, Chavez reviewed the pages, expressed some concerns, and asked for changes in two stories he thought made the union look bad. When the executive board reviewed the printed paper on Tuesday, September 14, Chavez explained the problems he had spotted and stressed that board members needed to guide the newspaper staff, who could not be expected to understand the subtleties of union politics. He talked about plans for a Spanish edition and asked the editors to schedule a weekly meeting for board members to give input. “I think it’s a beautiful paper,”6 Chavez said. “It’s the best, well-written paper we’ve ever had . . . Considering the circumstances, I think they’ve done an outstanding job, and I think they should get a hand.” The board gave Smith and his staff a rousing farmworker applause.

  When the board reconvened the next day and Smith asked for input for the next issue of the paper, Chavez abruptly reversed himself. Whether he had received information that caused him to distrust Smith or simply had decided that Smith needed to be discredited to further tarnish Jones, Chavez turned on the astonished editor of El Malcriado.

  “I have some very serious questions about the first fucking edition. And I’m pissed off at you very much,” Chavez said to Smith. “Cause you couldn’t have fucked up. We laid it out, we told you exactly what to do . . . It’s a fucking game7 you’re playing. It’s not a mistake . . . This board tells you what to do in the first edition, and you don’t do it. Don’t tell me you forgot. I’m not going to buy it. You must have had some special reasons for doing it.”

  “I’m not trying to run a game on the board!” Smith protested, baffled by the sudden attack.

  “You’ll have a hell of a time convincing me different,” Chavez said. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  Smith’s voice rose and his tone grew agitated as he realized that both his competence and his integrity were under attack. “I didn’t ask for this job! You called me and you asked me to do it and I came up! I made a lot of mistakes. I was confused. Four years on the boycott doesn’t prepare somebody for this kind of job . . . I have never tried to fuck with the union. Never. In any way! You ask anybody I worked for if I have tried to fuck with the union. Never once. And I’m not trying to fuck with the union now.” A train rumbled by, and Smith yelled to be heard above the racket. “I didn’t understand the dynamics of how we were supposed to put the paper out. Because I would not have deliberately created any problems for the union.” His voice rose even higher, in alarm and indignation. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “I want to know why,” Chavez said calmly. “You tell me why.” Then he turned to Jones. “Nick, you’ll recall it was on the strength of your recommendation that we hired Joe. You recommended him at the meeting at the mission.”

  By the end of the afternoon, the board had killed the paper. When the meeting continued that night at Chavez’s house, he launched into an attack on Jones.

  Two weeks later, with polls showing Prop 14 in trouble and only a few weeks left before the election, Chavez confronted Jones. “I had a very shattering phone conversation8 with Cesar yesterday,” Jones wrote to Chris Hartmire. Chavez suggested Jones was part of a left-wing conspiracy to undermine the union. The UFW president pointed to Smith as an example and also accused Charlie March, the New York boycott director, of sending volunteers with Communist leanings to mess up the Prop 14 campaign. “I recruited them both,” Jones wrote about Smith and March, “and have as much faith in their integrity as I do yours or Helen Chavez. I expect the next accusations to fall on my head . . . Cesar believes there is a conspiracy within the union and now I do. Someone in leadership is doing some vicious and unprincipled witch hunting.”

  After Proposition 14 lost, Chavez lashed out at those upon whom he could most easily vent his anger. He directed Ganz and Ross to interrogate everyone who worked on the campaign, ostensibly to decide on new assignments but with orders to root out the “assholes,” the term of choice for spies, agitators, or malcontents. During a debriefing session for campaign volunteers at La Paz, Chavez eavesdropped outside the meeting room and suddenly climbed in a window to denounce those who criticized the leadership of the ill-fated campaign. Ganz, who might have been the logical scapegoat for the loss, was far too valuable to Chavez to sacrifice.

  Jones had one final meeting with Chavez, who accused him of bringing spies into La Paz. On November 14, 1976, Nick and Virginia Jones resigned, saying they no longer had the trust of the union leaders. In a two-page letter, they outlined Chavez’s charges against them. “We are deeply concerned9 about what we perceive to be serious internal destruction of the United Farm Workers of America,” the Joneses wrote. They urged the board to take a stand against the “accusations and firings of full time staff based on the flimsy say-so, whims and innuendo which the accuser(s) are not held responsible to substantiate.”

  The day he received the letter, Chavez fired Joe Smith. Similar charges would be leveled against many others in the years to come: problems could not be innocent mistakes but must be a deliberate attempt to sabotage the union. Smith was outraged as only a naive, dedicated believer could be. “I do not question Cesar’s right to fire me.10 His authority is quite clear,” Smith wrote after he was fired, asking the board for a hearing. “However, I also believe that the way in which I was fired presents a clear danger to the safety of the union.” Despite everything, all he wanted was a chance to stay. “The union has become the most important thing in my life.”

  Jerry Cohen said Smith had no rights under the constitution (“We’re fighting the Teamsters, the growers . . . we don’t have to be screwing around with chickenshit hearings of staff people when it’s the prerogative of the president to fire people,” Cohen said impatiently), but Chavez magnanimously insisted that Smith be heard. Chavez wanted a public forum to deny allegations that the firing was politically motivated and to discredit Smith.

  “I’ve been fired,11 that’s one thing,” Smith said. “But the other thing is that I’ve been accused of being an agent, of deliberately sabotaging the paper, and of deliberately attacking the union.”

  “Who accused you of that?” Chavez said with feigned surprise.

  “Well that’s what you told me in your meeting,” Smith replied, taken aback.

  “I didn’t tell you that at the meeting. I didn’t tell you you were an agent.”

  “You said I was in conspiracy with other people.”

  “I didn’t tell you that. You know what I told you. The only thing I told you was that all of the screw-ups in the paper were deliberate as far as I was concerned. I didn’t tell you you were an agent or a spy.”

  Smith held his ground, reiterating that Chavez had said the editor was part of a group of leftists conspiring
against the union. Chavez grew irate and accused Smith of using the red-baiting line to cover his incompetence. “You said that my friends had come to you with information about me that led you to distrust me,” Smith insisted. Sooner or later, he warned the board, they would have to find a way to deal with staff. A union fighting for the rights of workers denied its own workers any recourse.

  Most board members said nothing. They understood that Smith was a pawn in a larger chess game. None of them had objected to Chavez’s decision to force out Jones. Jones had no strong allies on the board and Chavez’s assertion that Jones was “politicking” against Ganz was reason enough for the dismissal.

  If Chavez had thought these firings would pass unnoticed, like his earlier housecleaning in 1967, he misjudged. The union’s profile was much higher, the investment of its supporters greater, the reach of the boycotters and former staff members wider. A Denver weekly did a lengthy story on a volunteer who had been thrown out during the Ganz/Ross inquisitions. The Los Angeles Times ran a story based on the Joneses’ resignation letter. Letters poured in from religious supporters and staff in many boycott offices who had worked with Jones, Smith, and others who had been dismissed. The letter writers were baffled, hurt, and full of questions: either there had been some grave mistake or Chavez needed to reveal information that supported his decisions.

  Chavez offered different explanations to different audiences. With those who appreciated the importance of keeping the political left out of labor unions, he accused Jones of a left-wing agenda. With people who would never believe that Smith and Jones were part of a Communist conspiracy, Chavez dismissed the idea as silly, denied having made such accusations, and said Jones had been fired for politicking. Chavez said Jones had schemed to challenge Ganz at the next convention, an explanation that allowed those eager to exculpate Chavez to blame Ganz for purging Jones out of self-interest.

  As far as Chavez was concerned, people who complained were questioning his judgment, and that alone was enough to warrant their dismissal. As Fred Hirsch had pointed out as early as 1968, Chavez viewed almost everyone as expendable. He prided himself on his unmatched work ethic and the union’s ability to chew people up and spit them out. “I’m a son of a bitch to work with,” he told a group of volunteers. “And most of you could not work with me side by side. You could not keep up my pace. I work every day12 of the year. I just sleep and eat and work. I do nothing else.”

  Before Prop 14, Jones had supervised 329 boycotters in thirty-four cities. A month after he resigned, 57 of them had been reassigned, 92 had been fired, and 23 had taken an extended leave of absence. Almost all boycott leaders had left or been transferred, and eleven offices were closed. “We are still having problems vis-a-vis Nick’s resignation with virtually all boycott [office]s,” the new director, Larry Tramutt, reported to the board. He read them a letter from the New York boycotters who charged that staff were “dealt with in a manner reminiscent of McCarthyism.”13

  In their confusion and anger, many boycotters turned to Chris Hartmire. Chavez turned to the minister, too, first to find out what was being said, and then to send back a message. Hartmire summarized the reactions among those perturbed by the departure of Nick and Virginia Jones: “(1) Somebody fingered Nick14 and falsely accused him of leftist activity—without foundation; (2) it smacks of McCarthyism (3) If Nick can be dealt with that way, it can happen to anyone (4) no one will tell us what really happened.” The minister urged Chavez to meet with the staff to clear the air. “Some very solid, serious people have had their sense of security shaken by the events or by the lack of explanation of the events. They want to stay for a long time (or for life) but they have a hard-to-define worry that maybe there will be more firings in the future.”

  Chavez offered explanations15 that enabled the minister to rationalize the dismissals of people he trusted. First, no one knew as much as Chavez did. Workers called him all the time. No one else sat where he did. Second, he might be wrong about one person. But even if firing Smith had been a mistake, for example, the damage to one person paled in comparison to the risk to the union if Chavez’s conspiracy theory was correct. Everyone knew the union had been under FBI surveillance at various times. Jerry Ducote, a former Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputy, had pled guilty to breaking into union offices and stealing documents, allegedly at the behest of growers. Conspiracies did not seem far-fetched. Hartmire accepted the reasoning and dutifully spread the word.

  Hartmire’s explanations did not convince his close friend John Moyer, the United Church of Christ minister who cared deeply about the cause. Moyer knew Nick and Virginia Jones well, was aware of their unswerving loyalty to the union, and rejected Chavez’s accusations as absurd. Though he cared about the Joneses, Moyer focused on Chavez16 and the union. “The real issues here deal with the future of the UFW and the NFWM and go far beyond Nick and Virginia,” Moyer wrote Hartmire. “They have to do with trust, loyalty, delegation of authority, leadership, the movement from organizing in the fields to an established union, from powerlessness to power, from Fred Ross to Crosby Milne, from youth to maturity, from idealism to disillusionment, from smallness to bigness.”

  Moyer recalled a 1966 talk that Chavez had delivered in New York, where he asked church leaders to stick with the union when it gained power and the inevitable internal struggles emerged. “All of us were amazed at the depth of his perception of human nature and of what we in the church call sin,” Moyer wrote. “There is a basic conflict between Cesar’s academic perception and his emotional ability to deal with it. In that respect he is a very normal human being.”

  His distance and his wisdom gave Moyer greater clarity than most observers. Chavez was increasingly annoyed that even simple orders turned into debates. “Following orders is a gift,”17 Chavez said. “It’s very hard to find a group of people who will follow orders.” His decisions were challenged, rather than obeyed. When Chavez ordered the Delano day care center closed, staff members helped the parents organize a petition to keep the program open. Union clinics continued to dispense birth control pills, despite a union policy prohibiting the practice. After finding contributions in envelopes unopened for months, Chavez ordered that all mail to anyone at La Paz be opened by a central office unless marked “personal.” His brother returned the memo18 to the mail administrator with a note that read: “B.S. Any mail that says Richard E. Chavez on it must not be touched or opened by anyone.”

  Cesar did not confront his brother about the mail policy, nor was he ready to take on other members of the board, who had once accepted his edicts and now grew more confident as they gained experience and expertise. But he could continue to clean house in the area where he had control.

  “We have never really been that clear about democracy in the union, and I think we mislead people,” Chavez told the executive board in March 1977. “We don’t make it clear to the staff that they don’t have the same rights. They don’t. Face it . . . we bullshit about democracy,19 but they don’t have it.”

  Chavez divided the staff into two categories: those for whom the movement way of life represented a step up, and those from more privileged backgrounds who had taken a step down to join the union. Complaints about the lack of democracy, Chavez said, came from those who had taken a step down. If they didn’t like it, they should leave. The objections did not come from the farmworkers, he maintained: “They could care less.” In a few years, he would find out differently.

  When the criticism did not abate, Chavez escalated his attacks. For the first time, he purged people in public, humiliating ways. Drawing inspiration from Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Chavez used “the community” to do the dirty work. He carefully scripted roles for the community meeting he called at La Paz on April 4, 1977. The meeting, which became known as the Monday Night Massacre,20 was chaired by Gilbert Padilla and his wife, Esther, a major figure in La Paz.

  “We know who you are,” Esther Padilla began ominously. “And we’re sick and tired of it. We want s
ome action. We want you to get the hell out of La Paz. We want you to get the hell out of the union. Cesar has been busting his ass off for so many years to build this union. So many people have been sacrificing. The whole Chavez family. You have the audacity, the audacity to try to destroy our union. What we have built. What we have sacrificed for. It is sickening. We want some action. We want it now.”

  The roles had been rehearsed. Most of the half dozen targets were too shaken to say much in their defense and simply agreed to leave. Several were women who shared one of the dilapidated kitchens in the old hospital building. They had not been happy, they admitted, but they had never acted to sabotage the union. Denials only brought more screaming. Some of the loudest attacks came from Cesar Chavez’s son and Dolores Huerta’s daughter. “This movement is based on trust,” Paul Chavez yelled at one of the malcontents. “Who are you not to trust this man? Who are you?”

  The only one to fight back was David McClure, a plumber who had recently arrived to help with badly needed construction projects. Accused of being a spy, he denied the allegations with screams as loud as those of his attackers. And he refused to leave. Chavez intervened, triumphantly offering as evidence McClure’s daily calls to the office of the conservative senator S. I. Hayakawa: “We got the goods on that, David. We got the goods. We got the witnesses. Documented. We got the hours.”

  “They’re engineers, Cesar!” McClure said in disgust. “It’s not that Hayakawa.” The Tehachapi consultant working with him on the heating project was named Hayakawa.

  Cornered, Chavez lashed out in his nastiest voice. “We know what you’re up to. You’re a fucking agent.”

  “I am not!” McClure shouted

  “You’re goddamn right you are. You’re a fucking agent and we want you out of here right now.”

  Mary Ann Coffey saved them the trouble of throwing her out. She came to the defense of her friend Deirdre Godfrey. Godfrey had already submitted her resignation because she felt burned out. Coffey broke down in tears as she objected to the attacks on Godfrey’s loyalty. “I just don’t believe what’s going on here. I’ve known Deirdre and her family since we joined within a day of each other, three years ago.” Godfrey came from a large family, who all supported the union. “Her mother didn’t eat lettuce, which is no big deal, millions of people don’t eat lettuce. Except Deirdre’s mother was dying at the time. It was on her diet. She constantly argued with the dieticians at the hospital and told them to take it back.”