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12 “Boycott, Baby, Boycott! ”: The Civil Rights Coalition Regroups

August ’64 to January ’66

Large numbers of Americans, especially liberal Democrats, needed the grape boycott as much as the boycott needed them. The failed attempt to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, had shattered the alliance between liberals and radicals in the early civil rights movement. The 1965 Selma march and the passage of the Voting Rights Act would prove to be the capstone of that movement, rather than a prelude of victories to come. The 1964 peace candidate, Lyndon Johnson, had escalated the war in Vietnam soon after he was elected, and the liberals’ support for the war soon alienated them from the vast majority of the nation’s politically active young people. In the midst of massive new violence against the Vietnamese, the Watts rebellion foretold the violent possibilities of what might happen when the civil rights struggle moved out of the South. To liberal eyes the Watts riot was pure nihilism; it marked the end of the sunny optimistic days of the early 1960s and the beginning of liberalism’s long dark night. Liberals had been ready to ride the civil rights movement into a new world; it was their best hope since the Popular Front victory in World War II. But by the second half of the sixties the civil rights movement was no more, and white liberals could find no home in the movement for black power. So many people who had been so hopeful now had nothing to do except watch the twin horrors of the nightly news: black rioters burning American cities, and white radicals burning draft cards and American flags.

Enter Cesar Chavez and the table grape boycott. Here was a constructive, nonviolent, political alternative to the rioters and radicals. “Boycott, Baby, Boycott,” the picketers chanted to make sure that everyone got the point. The simple peaceful act of not eating grapes would actually help poor (and grateful!) farm workers win a union contract. The beautiful simplicity of the appeal attracted millions. With so many Americans committed to not eating grapes, and thousands actively working on the boycott campaign, that wonderful calculus of politics once again took hold. As Chavez had maintained all along, if you can get enough people together, you can change the world. The contract was won, and although the boycott did not belong to liberals alone, they were major players in the new coalition, a regrouping that allowed them to relive, in a minor key, the hopes of the early civil rights years.

The civil rights organizer Marshall Ganz and the union president Walter Reuther were on opposite sides in Atlantic City in August 1964 but on the same side in Delano in December 1965. They were flesh-and-blood examples of how the farm workers’ union in the boycott years became neutral territory in the ongoing battle between American liberals and radicals. People who couldn’t talk to each other anywhere else worked together on boycott committees, and the farm workers union received special dispensation to sit out the conflicts that divided its supporters. Not until the war in Vietnam was almost over did the UFW take a position against it, and yet the union received support from all wings of the antiwar movement. The liberals stayed on board even though the farm workers accepted Black Panther support and welcomed the black-jacketed, black-bereted militants in their marches and on their picket lines. Each side had its reasons. Radicals could not oppose a new union of third world workers, no matter that it waffled on the war; liberals could not oppose this oasis of nonviolent social change, even though they shunned others who tolerated support from black revolutionaries. The warmth generated by working together on the boycott was not enough to thaw overall relations between radicals and liberals in the late 1960s, but it did provide much of the energy for the UFW’s first significant victories.

Marshall Ganz, destined to become a major force in the UFW, arrived in Delano in September 1965, soon after the grape strike began. At twenty-one he was a veteran of Mississippi Summer, Atlantic City, and the doomed attempts after the convention to keep the old SNCC alive and functioning. He and many other white SNCC field secretaries, no longer wanted as organizers of blacks, were looking for a place to put their radical energies. Some tried to organize poor whites; some went into the liberal establishment; some went back to school; most ended up in Students for a Democratic Society or the antiwar movement. Ganz and a handful of others found Cesar Chavez.

Marshall, an only child, was born in Michigan in 1943 but moved with his mother and father to Germany when he was only three. His father was a U.S. Army rabbi, assigned to help the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust emigrate to countries willing to receive them and to recover their faith in God and humanity. Rabbi Ganz did what he could for three years, until 1949, but never completely recovered from the stories he heard. After a stint in Washington, he worked as a rabbi in Philadelphia, Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and finally San Diego. Not quite right after his time in Germany, he had a full mental breakdown in his later years, and his son, who was then coordinating the national grape boycott, had to put him in a hospital. With as much justification as anyone might have, Dad had gone crazy.¹

Marshall Ganz turned five in a camp for children whose parents had been killed. He got no gifts for his birthday; instead he gave presents to the other kids. But painful lessons on sacrificing for those less fortunate than himself were not all he took from Germany. He also received an early education in living in another culture and speaking multiple languages. By the time his family settled in Bakersfield in 1953, the 10-year-old Marshall was fluent in German and English and familiar with Yiddish and Polish. He also learned some Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah. This early education took hold. The adult Ganz’s ability to learn Spanish quickly, to master the linguistic and cultural subtleties of Mexicans, to be at home among farm workers, is famous among early UFW staffers. When his Spanish fluency was combined with his large Mexican-style mustache and his proud, substantial belly, Ganz’s actual origin became a mystery to many farm workers. I remember one time listening to him talk to a crowd of workers, and the man next to me asked in Spanish what country Ganz came from. I said he was a gringo, like me. The other worker wouldn’t believe it. I finally said that he was a Jew. “Ahhh, that explains it,” he said.

At Bakersfield High School in the late 1950s, Marshall was the only white boy in an otherwise all-black jazz band. His favorite novelist was Jack Kerouac. His parents, especially his mother, were strong antiracists, but he remembers his own concerns as more cultural than political. For college, he confidently applied nowhere but Harvard, where he was admitted in 1960. It seemed that Marx and Freud were on every reading list, and classes with two popular professors, Perry Miller and Stanley Hoffman, encouraged him to expand his notion of culture to include politics. He was attracted to the Cuban Revolution and also to Jack Kennedy, who visited Harvard soon after the 1960 election. As far as Ganz can recall, the Bay of Pigs with its obvious contradiction between Kennedy’s liberal imperialism and Castro’s radical revolution, did not make him reconsider his dual enthusiasms.

Uneasy at Harvard, in 1962 he moved to Berkeley, which was crackling with cultural and political energy. Berkeley students and a whole community of people around the campus were engaged in battles for nuclear disarmament, educational reform, and civil rights. This emerging sensibility was nurtured and welcomed by a Bay Area political and cultural left-wing community that had managed to survive McCarthyism and the fifties. With the International Longshore and Warehouse Union providing jobs and ballast, and the North Beach poets contributing a spirit of uncompromising cultural rebellion, the West Coast version of the new student politics not only enjoyed a sense of being new but also had a healthy connection to the old. Marshall dropped right into the middle of it. He got a job in an insurance office in Oakland and an apartment in Berkeley, and started attending night classes at the university. He went to concerts by Barbara Dane and Malvina Reynolds, attended a few Dubois Club meetings, and grew increasingly interested in the civil rights movement. One event he remembers in particular was Pete Seeger singing at the ILWU hall in San Francisco. The place was packed with an impressive combination of African American longshoremen, Old Left veterans, and student radicals. Seeger brought down the house with a roaring medley of “Wasn’t That a Time,” in which the last line became, “Isn’t this a time, isn’t this a terrible time, isn’t this a time to try the souls of men, isn’t this a wonderful time.” It was the spring of 1963.

Marshall returned to Harvard, invigorated. He wanted to study, to figure out how politics and culture fit together. He took on Brecht. He wanted to understand what had happened to artists in the Soviet Union. He had a whole agenda he intended to explore. But the study of politics took second place to politics itself. He went to the first meetings of the campus SDS chapter. He got involved with the local Friends of SNCC. During the spring break he went to a SNCC staff meeting in Atlanta, where he learned that Harvard owned stock in the Mississippi Power and Light Company. He came back, he remembers,

. . . as a man with a mission, to try to get something going on that. A number of us got involved. We had articles in the newspaper, and we picketed. That would have been in early 1964. By that time I was a banjo player, singing civil rights songs. And I got more attracted to the whole thing. People would come to Harvard and speak. And Barney Frank, the tutor in Winthrop House, was pushing us to get involved in civil rights stuff. There were a lot of connections. So when the Mississippi Summer Project came along, it was just made to order.

Ganz was in the second group of volunteers to arrive for training at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, where he met Bob Moses, the SNCC organizer most responsible for the Summer Project. Soon after Marshall arrived, Moses announced that Andrew Goodman, one of the students from the first group that had already left for Mississippi, was missing and probably dead along with two comrades, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. Moses carefully explained the Summer Project strategy, accepted SNCC’s own measure of moral responsibility for the murders of civil rights activists, and allowed the volunteers maximum space to return home with honor if they did not agree with the strategy or did not want to take the inevitable risks. Ganz was impressed. He soon came to share the almost universal opinion among the white volunteers that Moses was an organizer of unparalleled stature.

Later, Marshall Ganz saw many similarities between Bob Moses and Cesar Chavez: both were quiet, a little mysterious, critical of extravagant demonstrations and rhetoric. But this was still the spring of 1964, a year and a half before Ganz would meet Chavez. In Mississippi, he was assigned to Holmes County to help organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). His roommate was Mario Savio, who had been assigned to teach in a Freedom School. Whoever was making those assignments gets five stars as a casting director: Ganz went on to be a principal organizer of the United Farm Workers; Savio became the leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Amid the thrill and danger of Mississippi nights, Ganz and Savio stayed up late talking. Through his heavy stutter, Savio agonized about how to make political sense of his Jesuit training, and about the relationship between education and liberation, while Ganz wondered about alternative political strategies and how radical change actually happened.

Marshall and Mario were willing, conscious instruments of people with large political plans. The short-term goal of Mississippi Summer was to increase pressure on the Democratic Administration to protect voter registration in the South by putting white students from affluent, influential families and prestigious colleges in harm’s way. But SNCC wanted more than that. It hoped that the sacrifices of Mississippi Summer could force the national Democrats to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Atlantic City, and thus begin a serious realignment of the Democratic Party, with new southern African American voters replacing the old-time Dixiecrats, southern segregationist members of the Democratic Party. Once burned—the Kennedy brothers had not lived up to their backroom promise to protect southern civil rights workers—SNCC now proposed to rush into the fire through the front door, and force an open, public, televised defeat of President Lyndon Baines Johnson at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. This strategy had been put together by Moses and Democrats such as Allard Lowenstein and Joseph Rauh. Lowenstein was a wild-card Democratic Party youth operative who had made a career out of keeping liberal student organizations within the limits set by the party leaders. Rauh was general counsel for Walter Reuther’s United Automobile Workers, vice president of Americans for Democratic Action, and a leading practitioner of then-triumphant cold war liberalism. SNCC, a band of self-defined nonviolent revolutionaries with less than four years of political experience, now intended to push its radical vision of direct democracy into American establishment politics. Of all SNCC’s wildest dreams, this was probably the most outrageous. Most everyone sensed that the times were changing. But changing enough so that SNCC could beat the regular Democrats on their own turf, at their own convention?

Ganz accompanied the 200-strong Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to Atlantic City. His job there was to try to convince members of the California delegation to support a floor debate on the question of seating the MFDP delegates. Although by the summer of 1964, most people in SNCC doubted the power of liberal conscience, they calculated that they had a good chance of winning an open floor debate, especially after the highly publicized killings and church bombings in Mississippi and Alabama. What SNCC didn’t count on was the inexorable logic of presidential politics. Lyndon Johnson, facing both Dixiecrat defection in the South and the George Wallace–led beginnings of white backlash in the North, decided that the MFDP was not a useful part of his coalition. Georgia’s Governor Carl Sanders made the point most clearly in a telephone call to the president at the start of the convention: “It looks like we’re turning the Democratic Party over to the nigras.”² That impression would only be reinforced by an open floor fight between pro–civil rights liberals and southern segregationists. Since Johnson already had the pro–civil rights part of his coalition in his pocket, he could sacrifice the MFDP.

Ganz saw firsthand the pressure being put on California delegates not to support the Mississippi Freedom Democrats—all the typical moves like threatening to deny judicial appointments or to withdraw administration support for locally favored legislation. He was not at the various high-level meetings where Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Reuther tried to force an unwanted compromise on SNCC and other civil rights leaders, or at the final, phony negotiations that tied up the MFDP leadership while party operatives maneuvered an unannounced voice vote by the credentials committee on the very question supposedly being negotiated. But he heard all about it in wrenching detail afterward. SNCC leaders were sure they had been the victims of a typical backroom ruse executed by the very people who had encouraged them to come to Atlantic City in the first place.

Ganz, like most of the SNCC organizers and those sympathetic to them around the country, was furious. He stood vigil with others from SNCC across the street from the convention center on the Boardwalk, amid a replica of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney’s burned-out car, a bell from a bombed Mississippi church, and huge photographs of the three martyrs. He was there when Johnson came out on the balcony after his nomination and received the applause of the Atlantic City crowd, many of them deep into the drunken revelry of postconvention celebration. Huddled around the destroyed car, the SNCC vigilers had a good view of the triumphant president. Marshall hated him. August 1964: emotionally and politically as well as chronologically, the early sixties were just about over.

After the convention, Ganz traveled to the West Coast to visit his family and his friend Mike Miller, whom he had met through SNCC. Miller suggested that while in Bakersfield, Ganz might try to organize a local Friends of SNCC chapter, so Ganz called Brother Gilbert, with whom he had become acquainted as a youth. Brother Gilbert—now the vice principal and dean of discipline at Bakersfield’s Catholic high school, Garces Memorial—was interested in SNCC. He agreed to hold a meeting at the high school, where Ganz showed a movie about SNCC, gave a speech, and answered questions. It was quite an event. A group of Catholic grape growers in the audience denounced Brother Gilbert for holding such a radical get-together at the Catholic high school. They didn’t break up the gathering, but they were rambunctious and threatened further action. Their performance had a double, almost contradictory edge: while assured of their own power to control what should happen in their church, school, and community, they felt nervous enough about the times to make a fuss about a small meeting. Their uneasiness, not their confidence, turned out to be prophetic. It was just ten months before the Delano grape strike.

Back in Mississippi a few months later, Ganz worked with E. W. Steptoe in Amite County, the most dangerous area of the state. Although publicly committed to nonviolence, Ganz, like many other civil rights activists at the time, kept a gun in his truck. He accepted what he called the “ambiguity” of the situation. SNCC did everything it could to keep the struggle nonviolent; at the same time Marshall did not intend to be murdered on a lonely Mississippi road if a gun could prevent it. Together with Steptoe, Ganz was organizing leadership groups, Freedom Schools, and community centers, but SNCC was falling apart. Overwhelmed by the enormity of the their sacrifices (scores killed since 1960, thousands badly beaten), many SNCC organizers lost their faith in the power of nonviolence. Others doubted the ultimate effectiveness of long-term community organizing. Most smoldered with contempt for the white liberals who had betrayed them at the Atlantic City convention, and many grew suspicious of the whites in their own ranks. The most respected SNCC leaders fell ill. Executive Secretary James Foreman had an abscessed arm and ulcer. A friend said of Chairman John Lewis, “He resembled a corpse . . . so great was his exhaustion.” The psychiatrist Robert Coles reported that many of the young organizers were “clinically depressed.” New divisions appeared: Northern and Caribbean sophisticates versus rustic southerners; organizers versus floaters; men versus women. Staff meetings were filled with recriminations and went on through the night without reaching any conclusions. Perhaps worst of all, Bob Moses became more and more quiet, skipped meetings, and eventually lapsed into complete silence.³

Ganz was there for most of it. He was there at the meeting when Moses announced, “You can have Bob Moses; I am now Robert Paris,” and passed out bread and wine as some sort of final benediction. “Has he gone crazy?” Ganz wondered. And what should he himself do? While working with Steptoe, Marshall had received a copy of The Movement, which had a front-page picture of the NFWA-sponsored march in support of the Linnell rent strike. There in the front row, with his black robes, was Brother Gilbert. Ganz returned to San Francisco to talk over the situation with Mike Miller. The grape strike had just begun, and Miller encouraged him to remain in SNCC but to see if he could get a job organizing for the NFWA. By this time Brother Gilbert had quit his job at Garces Memorial and gone to work for Cesar Chavez. He was preparing to leave the priesthood if his order didn’t like it, and was already going by his given name, LeRoy Chatfield. As it happened, Chavez was scheduled to speak about the strike a couple of days after Ganz arrived in Bakersfield.

“I introduced myself and [Chavez] said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, LeRoy’s told me about you.’ I was very cautious because at that point in the civil rights movement there was a lot of polarization developing between blacks and whites, and it was sort of like, there’s no role for whites in the movement . . . and so I was very cautious and sort of like, well, you know, I said . . . ‘If you want support or help or something like that’ . . . but he said, ‘Oh no, no. You should come, come to Delano.’ ”⁴

Cesar quickly arranged for Marshall to drive him to the Bay Area for another speaking tour, and they had plenty of time alone in the car to check each other out. Ganz was immediately surprised that Chavez didn’t hold his whiteness against him. Although they talked about organizing, what really seemed to spark Cesar’s interest were Marshall’s ideas about religion. It turned out that Chavez had met Ganz’s father, and wanted to hear about Jewish belief, tradition, and custom. It was the first of what would be a long series of religious conversations. Ganz always thought that the reason he got so close to Cesar so quickly was that Chavez was more comfortable with religious people than political people, and he could see a little of both in Ganz. By the time they returned to Delano, they were sold on each other. Ganz would set up a new NFWA office in Bakersfield. It would be a backup, just in case the strike turned out to be a complete defeat. And for the time being, Ganz could still receive his symbolically important $10 a week stipend as a SNCC field secretary.

On a slim budget that was carefully monitored by Chavez, and using money he raised from Bakersfield’s small liberal community, Ganz rented an office with a room in the back where he could live, bought an old car, and began his work in a barrio still called Little Okie, now filled with people who had come from Mexico in the 1940s or whose parents had come in the 1920s. He did some agitation against scab herders who were operating in Little Okie, but his main task was to set up a Service Center where he helped people with welfare, disability, and income tax problems. A student from Bakersfield Junior College, Jessica Govea, started coming by to help run the office. Her parents had been CSO activists and she had known Cesar Chavez since her early childhood. Jessica had been a semiregular on the early grape strike picket lines and a volunteer in Delano. In the Bakersfield office and back room she taught Marshall Spanish. They fell in love over flash cards.

Soon after he began his work in Bakersfield, Ganz was called to Delano. Walter Reuther, president of the powerful United Automobile Workers, was coming to town, and since Reuther was one of the first national figures to endorse the grape strike, Chavez wanted all hands in Delano to help mobilize the turnout. At the time it bothered Ganz only slightly that Reuther had been the staff sergeant most responsible for carrying out the betrayal of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats. That summer, just over a year before, Reuther had been in the middle of negotiations with General Motors when Lyndon Johnson convinced him to fly to Atlantic City to get the situation under control. Once there, Reuther took command: he threatened to fire Joe Rauh if he didn’t cooperate; he told Martin Luther King that the UAW would stop giving money to SCLC if King didn’t help avoid a floor fight; he told Moses that not a penny more would be sent to Mississippi from anyone if SNCC didn’t back down. When all that failed, he arranged the final slap in the face: the negotiations charade.⁵

Reuther had traveled a long way to become the instrument of a maneuver that strangled the possibility of a liberal progressive realignment of the Democratic Party—a goal he had worked for much of his political life. Originally a skilled craftsman in the automobile industry and a democratic socialist organizer, he was among the thousands of leftists who helped build and lead the working-class movement that propelled the Congress of Industrial Organizations to victory in the late 1930s. An astute strategist and a master of polemical debate, Reuther survived a series of faction fights inside the UAW and took control of the union in 1947. Using rising anti-Communism as his main weapon, he then consolidated his hold over the union, and over the following two decades transformed the UAW from a lively body whose spirited conventions were a model of popular participation and debate into a one-party union machine. His midlife anti-Communism was principled rather than just tactical; he was a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action, which became the ideological vanguard of cold war liberalism. Although not a major theorist of this particular version of liberalism, he was its main organizational hope, as most ADA activists were intellectuals without any mass base. Reuther, while no slouch as a thinker and talker, was very much a man of conventional power, and as the leader of one of the biggest, tightest working-class organizations in the country, he was in a position to use it.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Reuther put that power to the service of what labor historians call “social unionism,” a second cousin of democratic socialism, and an idea of unionism that was especially attractive to Cesar Chavez. It held that unions should lead a movement of progressive social change throughout society rather than just represent the immediate interests of their own members. This watered-down version of the Marxist idea that working-class liberation meant the liberation of the whole society was explicitly reformist, with its strategy and goals tailored to meet what Reuther saw as the actual political opportunities of his time. Full employment, universal health care, high wages, stable prices, and racial harmony could all be achieved, Reuther (and many others) believed, by forcing the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party, where they served as a brake on New Deal policies. With the two parties realigned—the Dixiecrats part of a truly conservative Republican Party and the eastern Republicans part of a thoroughly liberal Democratic Party—the new Democrats could take their progressive program to the American people.

Reuther remained committed to this goal into the early sixties. But with his power in labor officialdom diminished in the newly merged AFL-CIO (where he took a back seat to the federation president, George Meany) he began to pin his hopes on a more conventional alliance with liberals inside the actual existing Democratic Party. Initially, he wooed and was wooed by the forces represented by Hubert Humphrey, then was enchanted by the Kennedy brothers, and finally was captured by the charms of Lyndon Johnson, the master politician, who kept Reuther and most of the rest of the cold war liberals close by his side as he took them into the jungles of Vietnam and down the path to political oblivion, where Reuther landed shortly before his physical death in a plane crash in 1970.

Reuther’s main problem was that in the late 1950s and early ’60s, following a decade of declining militancy among American trade unionists—that had been kicked off by the anti-Communist purges, which Reuther abetted—he had become deeply ensnared in the web of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. Reuther’s chief hope for cutting through that snare was the civil rights movement. It could reinvigorate what was left of a progressive liberal-labor alliance, he thought, and provide the energy and social weight necessary to carry out his faltering agenda. But neither official labor nor the triumphant liberalism of the cold war years could quite bring itself to embrace civil rights activists on their own terms. At the same time that he called for racial justice in general, Reuther opposed efforts by blacks inside the UAW to reclassify jobs so that they could advance into more skilled positions held by Reutherites on factory floors and workplaces in Detroit and elsewhere. Meany and many other AFL-CIO bosses were worse. With their social power partially based on the exclusive right of white workers to relatively privileged working-class jobs, they were not about to risk their place in the establishment with a wholehearted endorsement of even the early civil rights movement. The liberals of the labor-liberal alliance for their part had well-worked-out suspicions of any movement that emerged from the lower levels of society, seemingly beyond institutional control. The challenge for Reuther was to find a way to support the civil rights movement while making sure it stayed within limited, acceptable bounds.

He had powerful means: money, personnel, and his particular mixture of well-articulated progressive goals and strategies tightly woven together with anti-Communist, anti-utopian rhetoric and ideology. But he couldn’t turn the trick. The gulf between the needs, interests, and demands of black Americans in the 1960s and the limits of Democratic Party–AFL-CIO politics was too wide to bridge. The young SNCC organizers had adopted the Mississippi Summer–Freedom Democrat strategy despite grave internal doubts and at the cost of a few lives and much suffering. But they had been convinced, and had convinced themselves, that it would all be worth it if at the end of the day they could remake the politics of the South and with it, all of America. Instead, SNCC militants were left with nothing but a handful of apologies and a mouthful of humiliation. Eventually, many reemerged as full-blown revolutionaries who staked their hopes far from home, in the worldwide struggle against the American empire. But over the next few years, as they went down in flames, they managed to leave a legacy that would last: a push toward the idea of black pride based on black power, an uncompromising early opposition to the war in Vietnam, and the hope that an unfettered, democratic movement by ordinary people might change the world.

The liberals who had helped design the particulars of the MFDP strategy actually turned out to be the chief victims of its betrayal. Reuther, Rauh, and Lowenstein lost all influence within the most energetic element of the civil rights movement. Cut off from the southern civil rights activists, unable to deal with the coming black power struggle in the North or with the white backlash it generated, and finally becoming the apologists for an unpopular war, the liberals lost most of their connection to any actual, existing movements or political forces in American society. Nixon and Reagan would pick up the pieces. Within a generation, the word “liberal” (although hardly the basic set of ideas it stood for) would become the “L-word” of American politics.

Reuther’s trip to Delano in December of 1965 symbolized white liberalism’s last, best hope for relevance. And Chavez understood the liberals well. Older and much more experienced than the SNCC radicals, he was expert at preventing the divisions that had crippled the civil rights movement from damaging his own organization. Certainly, he was able to do that because the needs and demands of the people he represented—at least as formulated by him—were potentially easier for American capital to accommodate, or so it seemed for a while. But he was also sophisticated about what he asked of his allies. He did not try to realign the Democratic Party; rather, he simply joined one segment of that party and did his best not to alienate the rest. Similarly, he tried not to get involved in the many internal battles of the church groups that supported his organization, nor in the divisions within the constantly changing student groups. He was careful to stay neutral on the gut-wrenching question of the war. Finally, he was quite conscious of the possible entanglements that went along with accepting support from powerful allies, and he did his best, in the context of the boycott alliance, to maintain maximum independence for himself and the farm workers organization.

On December 16, 1965, Reuther arrived in Delano in the UAW’s private plane. Two carloads of national newsmen had preceded him to report on his visit. After disembarking, in full view of the cameras, Reuther gladly grabbed the NFWA’s black eagle symbol and jauntily joined a supposedly illegal march through town, defying the police to arrest him. On this short visit, Reuther’s national prominence secured him meetings with both the mayor and a committee of growers, whom he admonished to begin negotiations. He publicly announced his unqualified support for the barely existent three-month-old strike, which he guaranteed would be won sooner or later. In a speech at Filipino Hall he began by saying, “This is not your strike, this is our strike,” and then announced to the cheering crowd that the UAW and the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department, which he chaired, would donate $5,000 a month to the strike, split between AWOC and the NFWA. He did not neglect to mention the boycott, which had been officially announced just one week earlier. Thus, at a stroke, the national boycott of Schenley and DiGiorgio unexpectedly won the support of one of the most important liberals in the country, at the same time that it was being organized on the ground by radical civil rights groups that Reuther and his allies opposed. Ganz was amused by the peculiar swing of political fortunes. In the audience at Filipino Hall, Marshall felt he had compromised nothing; for him, the NFWA was a logical extension of the radical work he had been doing in SNCC. In fact, he was still working with SNCC. It was Reuther who was scrambling for a connection to another social movement.⁶

After Reuther left Delano, Ganz was invited to Richard Chavez’s house to celebrate with the top NFWA leaders. Amid the eating, drinking, and exuberant toasts, only Cesar was prescient enough to offer a word of caution. “Tonight we lost our independence,” he said, telling his closest associates that the AFL-CIO money and support would eventually extract a price. They were no longer their own little association, doing what they thought best, responsible to no one but farm workers. In the future, he told the surprised celebrants, they would have to guard their freedom even more closely.⁷ A first move in that direction quickly followed in the form of protecting themselves not from their new labor allies, but rather from their earlier supporters in the student left. When Mike Miller, accompanied by Paul Booth, a national leader of SDS, visited Delano after the Christmas holidays to discuss the structure of the boycott, Chavez adamantly insisted that the boycott would be carried out by the NFWA alone, not in association with SNCC and SDS, as Miller and Booth had hoped. The two groups were welcome to work on the boycott and consult on strategy, but major decisions would be made by the NFWA exclusively.⁸

Given the volatile situation in both SNCC and SDS—SNCC would merge with the Black Panther Party in less than two years, and SDS would fall apart in 1969—it is hard to fault Chavez’s decision. But it involved one complication that the young Mike Miller was keen enough to notice. In a letter that followed the Delano visit, he pointed out to Chavez that the new boycott plan would make the NFWA “an organization of farm workers and a staff organization—all in one.” Miller made the remark in passing; it was by no means the theme of his letter, and he did not attempt to spell out the possible difficulties inherent in such a two-chambered structure. That would have been far too much to expect, as the full consequences of this seemingly reasonable, apparently unimportant, and certainly innocent shift in the boycott structure would not become clear to anyone until much later. In early 1966 no note of alarm accompanied Miller’s comradely observation. He assured Cesar that civil rights organizations were still committed to helping the NFWA and the boycott. But Miller could also see that unless he was willing to join the association staff, there was now no point in continuing as the cochair of the boycott. Miller quietly left, without any great sense of disappointment.⁹

As 1966 began, Chavez put his new ideas about the boycott structure into practice. An old-time NFWA board member, Tony Orendain, was sent to Chicago to run the boycott organizing there; he was accompanied by the card-carrying Wobbly, Eugene Nelson, who had just finished writing Huelga, a book on the strike. Jack Ybarra was sent to San Francisco; three new NFWA volunteers, Eddie Frankle, Ida Cousino, and Sal Gonzales, were sent to Detroit, Cleveland, and Boston, respectively. Gilbert Padilla was directed to continue with the work in Los Angeles, which had become a model for boycott organizations elsewhere.¹⁰ In New York, where the boycott was also quite strong, CORE was allowed to remain in charge. By February, Jim Drake claimed that there were 100 boycott committees throughout the country, and although the vast majority had been set up without the presence of an NFWA staff member, they all were understood to be part of the NFWA structure. Drake’s status, too, had changed—he was given a small staff. Donna Sue Haber, one of the most competent new volunteers, was assigned to be his secretary, and they had a new office in downtown Delano. The boycott was now out of the bathroom.¹¹

Reuther’s visit had one other important effect. Newsmen had become interested in the NFWA—not in its structure or strategy or social base, but in the personalities of its leaders. Newsmen started to quote Chavez regularly and began to identify him, by name and title, in articles and photographs. Their interest in writing about Cesar was matched by the NFWA’s interest in promoting him. Drake remembers several conversations among the leadership about the usefulness of projecting Chavez in the press. The thinking went like this: “Well, we have their attention now, and we want them to know what is happening. Wouldn’t it be good to have Cesar as the ultimate source of information, the public representative of the effort?”¹² Chavez would not only lead the NFWA internally but also would be cast as its representative to the outside world. It didn’t seem to be much of a stretch: Chavez’s unique strategic sensibility had helped the NFWA survive what was essentially a losing strike and had put the organization in a position where its power was continuing to grow. Since his authority within the NFWA was well established, what could be wrong with projecting it outward? The only person who seemed to have doubts was Chavez himself. Drake remembers that Cesar, though quite comfortable about having the last word on strategic matters and quite willing to exercise his authority by, for example, asking staff members to move to cities and set up boycott offices, nevertheless did not like some of the tasks of a formal leader. He especially was uneasy as a public speaker. While driving to speaking engagements, Cesar, Drake said, “would be half desperate: ‘What should I say? What should I do?’ he would ask. We would talk over his speech, but when we got there he would talk for just ten minutes and then answer questions. He was good at that. But he couldn’t give a big charismatic speech.”¹³

Chavez never did learn to give that speech. But within two years he had mastered the big charismatic act.