The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  Gilbert Padilla jumped in angrily. “My mother died during the campaign, I took three days off . . . My sister died, I took two days off. My aunt died, I took one day. Don’t pull that guilt trip.” Then he explained Godfrey’s real offense: she had not accepted his explanation about why Nick Jones was fired, and instead pursued the question with Chavez.

  I said, “Deirdre, you have no concerns. Nobody’s after you. I like your work. Don’t worry about it.” . . . It never went away, Deirdre. It’s still in your mind . . . You didn’t trust me.

  Since 1961, when Cesar has asked me to do something, I never questioned it. You tell me, “Go, do this,” I go do it. Whether I do it well or don’t do it well, but I do it. So it hurts me to see people who’ve been here six months, three months, up in arms, doesn’t like policy. If this union’s going to run under the leadership of this man, the board of directors follow his leadership. When we sit down here in this room, and Cesar says, Eliseo go to Coachella, Eliseo doesn’t question it. He doesn’t question it. He says, “When do I leave?” Marshall, you go to Calexico. Richard, you take your family to Delano. They don’t question it. Why should people here have a hard time following policy? . . . You have some people here questioning the leadership of this man. It’s just crazy.

  Chavez had remained in the background most of the time. Now he spoke up. “Let me tell you what’s happening. You know, we’re not dumb. We’ve been at it for a long time. We built a movement because, I think, we’re pretty fucking smart about what we do and we know people, and we know politics, and I’ve been around even before some of you were born.” When he asked Padilla to do something, he acted without question. From now on, Chavez expected the same of everyone at La Paz. “We’re prepared to lose anyone that wants to leave. We’re prepared for that. We’re also prepared to have people here who when I ask them to jump, they’re going to say, ‘How high?’ That’s how it’s going to run. We’ve got a responsibility to do something for the workers over there and the only way we’re going to do it is if we have some goddamn rules and when I give an order or Gilbert or Dolores or anybody in authority, you just do it . . . Beginning tomorrow, when you get an order, if you don’t carry it out, out.”

  Godfrey and the others thrown out of the union were not allowed to use the pay phone at La Paz after the meeting. “I have never spent such a fearful night,”21 she wrote the board members afterward. Security people loudly patrolled the halls all night and threatened to throw her out on the street after she went to Tehachapi to make a call. “I shall never forget the frenzied, hate-filled faces and voices of people who had been warm and friendly with me right through to the hour of the meeting.”

  When McClure refused to leave La Paz, the union called police and had the plumber arrested for trespassing. Liza Hirsch, the law student Chavez had mentored, was working for the union as a negotiator in Oxnard. She knew McClure through her father, who was active in the plumbers union, and when McClure was thrown out he went to stay with Fred Hirsch in San Jose. When the UFW refused to give McClure back his truck, his portable plumbing shop, Liza called Chavez to intervene. In doing so, she cast a cloud of suspicion on herself. Though he had known her since she was a child and groomed her for a future in the union, Chavez began to monitor her actions for evidence of treachery. A year later, during the wedding of Gilbert Padilla’s daughter at La Paz, Chavez denounced Liza as a Communist and ordered her thrown out.

  The Monday Night Massacre did not make the newspapers. Internally, the purge was discussed in muted tones. Hartmire did more damage control. He compared Chavez’s leadership style to that of Castro, John L. Lewis, Mao, and Gandhi. “What did the Cultural Revolution look like up close?” Hartmire wrote to reassure his staff members. “From one viewpoint it must have been clumsy, ugly, and painful: young militants attacking established leaders, people being demoted, removed from positions, sent to the villages, attacked in wall signs, beaten by the red guard, etc . . . Clearly, Cesar has embarked on a mini-cultural revolution22 within the UFW . . . he is determined to carry it through and he is certain that it will help the movement, while at the same time knowing that it may not always be right or accurate or wise in particular cases.”

  The Great Leap Forward, the structure that Chavez had struggled for a year to build with the help of Crosby Milne, gave way to the Cultural Revolution. For all intents and purposes, Chavez abandoned what he had built with Milne. Chavez took away union-wide responsibilities from the executive board members and reassigned them to geographic areas. He consolidated the organizing and contract administration departments (what he called “the heart and soul23 of the union”) and put himself in charge.

  Milne was gone, too. One of the people thrown out during the Monday Night Massacre was the girlfriend of Milne’s son. Milne bore no ill will about the purges and understood the necessity, he wrote to Chavez. His year was up, and it was time to move on. A short time later, Chavez turned Milne into a co-conspirator, falsely accusing him of having absconded with tapes from the restructuring conferences. Medina had been right24 to question Milne’s trustworthiness, Chavez lamented.

  With Milne’s departure went the last best chance for a workable management structure that would allow the union to function efficiently. As John Moyer perceptively wrote to Hartmire: “The delegation of authority, which Cesar so often talks about and which Crosby’s reorganization demanded, involves the relinquishing of power and responsibility to others with whom the leader still has to relate. This is very, very difficult to achieve. It puts severe stress on the psyche of the leader. Things happen over which he no longer has direct control but for which he is still responsible. Trust relationships become strained, and a certain degree of paranoia25 becomes inevitable.”

  Chapter 30

  Slough Off the Old

  All the elements are there to fulfill the dream of a strong and democratic national union except one: We have not yet learned how to work as one towards a common goal. We are convinced that the game will help, and we are grateful to you for the opportunity to learn and use it.

  The UFW board members looked distinctly out of place as they walked around the immaculate grounds of a well-appointed residential compound in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, greeted warmly by bald men and women in orange overalls. The leaders of the farm worker movement had been summoned by Chavez to a planning meeting, and the eerily similar appearance of their hosts was just the first surprise.

  Chavez had intended to call a special board meeting at Sweet’s Mill, an old logging camp in the Sierra Nevada where the union had retreats. He wanted somewhere without phones or distractions1 so he could keep the board focused on his agenda. Then in mid-February 1977 he visited Synanon founder Charles Dederich at the headquarters of his drug-treatment empire, a showplace community high in the mountains east of Fresno. Dederich invited Chavez to bring his board to the Synanon compound for his planning session, and the UFW president accepted.

  Dederich was called Chuck, or “the Founder,” or “the Old Man.” He was a charismatic con man with a rags-to-riches story, a large man with an outsized personality, a big ego, and a booming voice. The reformed alcoholic had developed a drug-treatment program that earned national praise for its seemingly remarkable—but vastly overstated—results. On the strength of Dederich’s salesmanship and testimonials from experts, journalists, and celebrities, Synanon had grown2 during its first decade from a small storefront in 1958 to an oceanfront complex in Santa Monica. In the 1960s era of drug experimentation, families gratefully sent their teenagers to Dederich’s facility, lauded on the floor of Congress as the “miracle on the beach.” By the 1970s, Dederich had parlayed Synanon’s reputation into vast wealth and a devoted following, upon which he experimented at several highly regimented communities around California. He no longer believed addicts could “graduate” and successfully reenter society. The only way to ensure their continued health was for them to remain at Synanon. He moved the headquarters to a complex in Marin Cou
nty. At its height in 1972, about seventeen hundred people lived in Synanon communities, which included separate children’s dorms, communal dining, and private schools.

  The Santa Monica facility had been familiar to UFW staff members for many years because Synanon offered free medical and dental care for union volunteers. Only Chavez, however, had been in close touch with Dederich recently and understood how Synanon had changed. In a deliberate manner, Dederich had transformed the drug treatment program into a cultish movement, open to anyone willing to pay for the privilege of living in one of his structured communities. In 1975, Dederich declared that Synanon was a religion, in part an effort to shield his finances from public view, in part to enhance his status as the Founder. He abandoned an earlier commitment to nonviolence and trained a weapons corps to discourage interference from public officials or private individuals.

  The manicured complex where Chavez brought the UFW leadership was Dederich’s latest community. The most privileged residents lived in an isolated group of buildings with its own airstrip. By 1977, most long-term Synanon residents were what Dederich called “squares”—people with no history of addiction. They paid rent and donated large sums of money to the religion, often turning over real estate and savings. Dederich continued to experiment with new rules, such as the requirement for shaved heads. One month before the UFW board met at the compound he called “Home Place,” Dederich declared there were too many children in the world and ordered mandatory vasectomies for all men in Synanon.

  Dederich, just a few weeks shy of sixty-four, had a salesman’s talent for hooking people into his vision. He spoke with the cadences of a revivalist preacher, and his followers included comedian Steve Allen, jazz musician Art Pepper, and Connecticut senator Thomas Dodd. “I say this with as much humility as I am capable, which isn’t very much, but when I sit down3 and start to talk, people start gathering,” Dederich said in a deposition. “It is inevitable. No matter where I do that, it just happens. I can’t stop it.”

  Chavez found much to admire in Dederich and his iron-clad grip on the planned community. Both men considered themselves experimenters and rebels and shared a disdain—and often disregard—for established authority. Dederich believed in communal living, where people worked without salaries for the common good (although he himself collected a six-figure income). Dederich ostensibly dedicated himself to rehabilitating the poor, the addicts, and the outcasts of society, a group that Chavez daydreamed about recruiting into the Poor Peoples Union. Although Synanon increasingly courted “squares” with ample wealth, Dederich kept enough ex-addicts around to maintain the fiction of operating a treatment program. He was an authoritarian who had built an efficient operation, with luxury cars, an electronic intercom system that replaced telephones, and access to so much money that he claimed Synanon had not needed to bother with a budget.

  Dederich also had successfully navigated a transition similar to the one Chavez now struggled to achieve. The Old Man had taken his first creation, the drug-treatment facility, and radically reshaped the organization4 into a social community. He offered to share the secret of how to manage such change, build a communal society, and maintain firm control. Slough off the old and groom the new, Dederich told Chavez. Root out those who resist change.

  The essential tool Dederich used was the Game, an encounter-group-type therapy at the center of Synanon’s daily life. In the Game, players accused one another of real or exaggerated misdeeds, in order to correct faults and improve communication. One person was “indicted” for either professional or personal misbehavior and others joined in the attack, screaming and using as many obscenities as possible. The target escaped only by shifting the indictment to someone else. Other drug treatment programs adapted variations of the Game as a therapeutic practice, but Dederich had moved in a different direction, using the Game as his daily management tool. The Game, Dederich told Chavez, was the key he needed to reshape the UFW.

  Aside from Chris Hartmire, in whom Chavez had confided some thoughts about Synanon, UFW leaders knew none of this when they drove up the winding roads to the tiny town of Badger on February 25, 1977. They shared Chavez’s sense that the union had been drifting and looked forward to the meeting as an opportunity to develop new strategies. Marshall Ganz wanted to make a pitch for the union to focus its energy on consolidating victories among vegetable workers in the Salinas and the Imperial Valleys. Eliseo Medina, now in charge of the Coachella office, hoped for resources to wage a strong campaign in the vineyards and citrus orchards when the season reached its peak in another month. Jerry Cohen had just finished negotiating an agreement with the Teamsters to leave the fields, a huge step that eliminated the rival union and established the UFW as the sole dominant union for farmworkers.

  The pact grew out of the antitrust suit that the UFW had filed in federal court in early 1973, accusing the Teamsters of colluding with Salinas vegetable growers to depress farmworkers’ wages. The defendants had grown weary of responding to dozens of pages of interrogatories that required hundreds of hours of high-priced legal talent. As the trial neared, they faced the prospect of divulging sensitive information and the possibility of millions of dollars in damages. Farmworkers were a marginal group for the Teamsters, and their relatively low incomes did not generate enough dues to warrant a continued fight. Cohen negotiated a settlement that would give the UFW sole jurisdiction in the fields in exchange for an end to all litigation.

  Chavez made clear as soon as the board assembled at Home Place5 that he had no interest in discussing the Teamster pact, problems with the ALRB, contract negotiations, or election strategy. He wanted to talk about his problems, he said, which revolved around the union’s philosophy. Questions about everything else could wait until the next regular board meeting.

  As they gathered Friday evening, Chavez explained the weekend would include a discussion with Chuck, communal meals with “the Synanon family,” and a demonstration of the Game, Dederich’s great innovation. “In all of this there’s a tremendous amount of discipline,” Chavez said. “But also an awful lot of really tough, good management. No nonsense. Which we need.”

  Chavez opened the meeting with a statement that drew no disagreement: “We’re at a crossroads about our philosophy . . . The crossroads right now is whether it’s a movement or it’s a union. We’re at that stage where we have to make a decision. Because it’s neither right now. With the new law coming in California, it’s changed us completely.”

  He reminisced about the early years and appealed to those who had been with him from the start, recalling the good times when they had struggled together, united against a common enemy. Now they battled an anonymous state agency, instead of evil growers. The adrenaline that fueled the early fights had evaporated, leaving the movement deflated. They had achieved a great labor law, won elections, and driven the Teamsters out of the fields. “The road is open, and we ran out of gas,” Chavez said. Again, no one disagreed. “Here’s this tremendously great opening to just charge through and get the job done. Look, there’s nothing between us and getting the workers organized right now . . . All the obstacles are removed. And we finally climbed the hill and we’re at flatland, and we can’t go.”

  The crisis was deeply personal for Chavez, and he believed the only path involved radical change. Using a favorite tactic, he insisted the executive board choose between two options: the UFW must either pay wages like a regular union or build a community like Synanon. He refused to allow discussion of any middle ground. He was confident the majority would support his commitment to the volunteer system. He also knew the UFW’s shaky finances would make salaries unrealistic. So he really offered no choice. “I’m just convinced that the way for me, at least, for me personally, the way to go is to have a community like Synanon, or close to that, and start truly cooperative ventures,” Chavez explained.

  Framing the choice so starkly drew out those who would pose the greatest obstacle. “I want to take a clear position,” Cohen said. “An
d my clear position is that we’re going to have to pay people.” Cohen argued the volunteer system created a revolving door that crippled the union’s ability to negotiate and administer contracts, conduct research, and operate efficiently. Only departments where people earned small wages, such as the legal department and the Migrant Ministry, did not suffer from debilitating turnover. Paying wages would not cost more in the long run, Cohen contended.

  Richard Chavez, an early advocate of paying wages, raised his concern about long-term security. He had young children. He understood the union could not afford to pay salaries now, but he needed some guarantee about his future.

  “I came to this outfit when there was nothing,” Cesar responded scornfully. “I literally went goddam starving. I had eight kids. Don’t you goddamn ever forget that. None of you . . . I’m not afraid of security. That’s the difference between me and most of you. I think that God will provide.”

  “Then tell him,” Richard snapped back. “Cause I’m kind of worried. I’m a practical man. I am asking a question because other people feel the same way but they’re afraid to say it. I’m saying it because other people are thinking it but they’re afraid to say it.”

  Encountering resistance, Chavez upped the ante with another familiar move: “I’m going to tell you something. It’s not threatening, it’s just plain fucking fact. If this union doesn’t turn around and become a movement, I want no part of it. I’ll help and everything, but I don’t want to be in charge. I want to do something else. I tell you because that’s the way I feel.”