FOUR

Stuck in the Middle

ON MARCH 30, 1972, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Frank E. Fitzsimmons, entered the Oval Office to meet with President Richard Nixon. In a meeting arranged by the White House assistant Charles Colson, who would later do time in prison for his part in the Watergate scandal, the two men fell quickly into a freewheeling conversation lasting more than an hour. Captured on Nixon’s now famous running recorder, the conversation included discussions of the president’s pardon of Fitzsimmons’s predecessor, James “Jimmy” Hoffa, the economy, and a shared philosophy of governance. Offering his vision of effective leadership, Fitzsimmons confided in Nixon, “Only one principle [has] carried me through all these years.… I never won an argument standing on the outside throwing a brick [and] I never represented my people properly by being on the outside when I couldn’t be [on] the inside.”

Nixon, experiencing a rare moment of trust in a labor leader, expressed gratitude toward “Fitz” for his candor and assured him that he understood how “[Fitzsimmons] must have caught hell from a lot of [his] colleagues” for his decision to meet. “Your decision [will] prove to be a good one,” Nixon promised the Teamster boss. “I’m going to do my very best in our shop to see that this comes true.”¹ Through the remaining months of Nixon’s troubled presidency, Fitzsimmons enjoyed an open line of communication, which afforded him unparalleled influence on labor and economic policy. Such access proved decisive not only in determining the fortunes of the Teamsters, but also in shaping the direction of the farm worker movement and the new economy of the 1970s.

At first glance, Fitzsimmons’s presence in the Oval Office seems unusual, given Nixon’s notorious rants against organized labor. The spring of 1972, however, was no ordinary time for either man. The Vietnam War had severely compromised U.S. credibility in the world, while domestic protests had placed Nixon in a precarious position going into his reelection campaign. To make matters worse, Nixon had entered office at a moment of mounting economic turmoil that had reached a peak in 1971, with U.S. exports shrinking, unemployment climbing, and prices of food and durable goods at an all-time high. Economists used the term stagflation to describe the dilemma: price inflation without continued growth in the economy. The weakened state of the nation seemingly played into the hands of organized labor leaders, who looked for ways to mobilize the righteous indignation of the working class against a pro-business Republican president. No one wanted to unseat him more than Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, who had fought Nixon during the 1968 campaign and tussled with him throughout his first term.

Frank Fitzsimmons, however, felt no solidarity with his labor compatriots, least of all Chavez. Although the farm workers counted the Teamsters as early allies of the movement, the relationship had turned progressively sour the more success the farm workers enjoyed. As early as the fall of 1970, the Teamsters attempted to expand their contracts covering employees in food processing and warehouses to include field workers in Salinas, California. These actions preempted the UFW’s plans to move from grape workers in Coachella and the San Joaquin Valley to the new challenge of organizing lettuce workers in the salad bowl of Salinas. George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, successfully averted all-out war between the two by convincing Fitzsimmons to leave field workers to Chavez. Fitzsimmons, however, flouted the agreement in 1972 and invited grape growers to sign with the Teamsters, effectively replacing UFW contracts set to expire the following year. Taking advice from Nixon’s undersecretary of labor, Laurence Sibelman, Fitzsimmons addressed growers at the annual convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation on December 12, 1972. In a speech in which he chided Chavez for leading a “revolutionary movement [that] is perpetrating a fraud on the American public,” Fitzsimmons called for an alliance between the Teamsters and the farmers.² During the 1973 spring harvest, Fitzsimmons followed through, signing contracts with grape growers and initiating a fight that plunged California rural communities into two years of bloody conflict.

The Teamsters’ actions illustrate one of the major ironies of agricultural unionism in California: the union that proves it can organize farm workers invites more, not less competition from competing unions.³ The rise of the National Farm Workers Association on the heels of the AWOC strike represented a similar phenomenon, but with a much more amicable solution that produced the UFW. Unlike AWOC and NFWA, however, inequality in size, wealth, and experience distinguished the Teamsters from the fledgling UFW. The Teamsters represented the largest number of employees in the country during the early 1970s, whereas the United Farm Workers confronted the daunting task of converting a protest movement into a bonafide union. Chavez and his young organizers also had to manage the expectations of field workers in other crops and other states who appealed to them to organize their workplaces. For a well-oiled machine like the Teamsters, adding such tasks constituted a relatively minor challenge that promised to pay dividends in the form of more dues-paying members. Ironically, by signing grape contracts in 1970, the UFW became a victim of its own success.⁴

Labor theories and unrealized union dues notwithstanding, Fitzsimmons’s move on the UFW at such a crucial moment in the history of California farm labor organizing represents an especially divisive act that defies easy explanation. The level of violence alone that Teamster representatives committed against UFW organizers signaled Fitzsimmons’s extraordinary dedication to destroying the United Farm Workers at any cost. Through outright physical intimidation, the Teamsters attempted to quite literally beat the UFW into submission. That was the experience of Alicia Uribe, a committed Chavista (UFW supporter) who picketed against the hiring of scab workers in Coachella Valley during the 1973 season. Reporting for Rolling Stone magazine, journalist David Harris shared Uribe’s story: “ ‘Los Teamsters,’ the woman next to [Alicia] said. As the word jumped from ear to ear, the pickets began shouting and waving their red and black flags.… Making a sudden skip on the loose dirt, the car swerved right and one of the [men] in the back window leaned out and laid a pair of brass knuckles along the side of Alicia Uribe’s head. Ever since, her face has had a little dent to it. The blow fractured Alicia’s cheek, broke her nose and dug a scratch across her right eyeball.”⁵ As such violence became the norm, Cesar Chavez used his now famous hunger strikes to quell the urge for retaliation among his followers, although nothing and no one seemed to quell the Teamsters’ rage. As Chavez fasted, solidifying his reputation as a paragon of nonviolent protest, local families endured a decade of trauma. Meanwhile, within the union, debate raged about how best to repel the Teamsters and capitalize on the momentum of the grape boycott.

The roots of such chaos reside in the seemingly cosmic convergence of events that worked against the farm workers during the first half of the 1970s from forces within and outside of the union. The unique economic circumstances inherited by Nixon inspired a Faustian pact with Fitzsimmons that made the UFW’s goal of organizing all California field workers under the banner of the black eagle more difficult, if not impossible. Yet to say that the actions done to the union, not by the union, precipitated such struggle ignores important errors in judgment by UFW leaders, especially Cesar Chavez. Chavez grew increasingly frustrated with the dissonant advice coming from all corners of the union, as some of the most seasoned organizers came home from the front lines of the boycott to negotiate contracts, manage hiring halls, and organize new workers. Rather than draw valuable lessons from the learning community that the union had become, Chavez began to show signs of addiction to the boycott and his own power.

THE GREAT TREASON

In the years prior to the grape contracts, the Teamsters had shown faint interest in organizing field workers. Their one success story came before the founding of the UFW in 1961, when the union included field workers in contracts covering packers and haulers working for lettuce grower, Bud Antle. An anomalous arrangement, the contracts turned out to be an excuse for the Teamsters to invade Salinas in 1970. Before the ink had dried on the grape contracts in Delano, the Teamsters built on this unlikely beachhead by arranging contracts with sixty other growers. The move by the Teamsters put a damper on the UFW celebrations and required Chavez and other union officials to relocate to Salinas immediately. Speaking to a sea of angry lettuce workers, Chavez called the Teamsters’ moves “a great treason against the aspirations of men and women who have sacrificed their lives for so many years to make a few men (growers) rich in this valley.”⁶ Chavez punished the growers by reprogramming the network of forty-two boycott houses to wage a new campaign against lettuce.

The Teamsters’ decision to move into the fields after 1970 grew out of a number of circumstances, not the least of which was that the United Farm Workers had proven that farm workers were worth the time and effort it took to organize them. By August 1970, the United Farm Workers claimed 12,000 grape pickers in its membership and garnered a considerable number of donations and positive publicity from the success of the grape boycott. Still, the size of the membership paled in comparison to the Teamsters’ 1.9 million members. The West, however, constituted an important area of growth in the United States as people and industry continued to relocate from the industrial Northeast to the warm weather and the right-to-work states of the Southwest. The rise of the Sunbelt promised a shift in the balance of power in the Teamsters’ empire. Not a union to miss out on any opportunity, no matter how meager the spoils, the Teamsters’ representative Bill Grami eventually negotiated contracts covering 9,000 lettuce workers with 170 growers from Santa Maria to Salinas without surveying the wishes of employees.⁷

The campaign by the Teamsters to usurp the farm workers’ momentum failed as a consequence of poor planning and ill-tempered behavior on the part of Teamsters representatives and skillful political maneuvers on the part of Chavez and the UFW leadership. The Teamsters tried to bully their way into the lettuce fields, at one point beating Jerry Cohen unconscious and attacking Jacques Levy, a writer who would later document the farm workers’ struggle in his book Cesar Chavez: The Autobiography of La Causa.⁸ Newspapers captured the brutal act on camera, creating a public relations nightmare for the Teamsters and establishing their reputation for violence.

Even when the UFW lost in court, Chavez still managed to find a way to capitalize on his popularity. In December 1970, Bud Antle won an injunction against the boycott, which forced Chavez to appear before Judge Gordon Campbell to answer how he intended to end the boycott. At the hearing, Chavez defiantly refused to call off the picket lines and inspired a local crowd of 3,000 supporters to “boycott the hell out of them” as authorities took him away in handcuffs. His incarceration touched off several days of continuous protest in Monterey County, including a twenty-four-hour vigil in front of the jail, prayers and a mass held in downtown Salinas, and public visits to Chavez by the recently widowed Coretta Scott King and Ethel Kennedy. The barrage of negative publicity and the chaotic conditions in the county finally persuaded Judge Campbell to release Chavez on Christmas Eve, twenty days after putting him behind bars.⁹

The struggle in Salinas proved to be a prelude rather than an apogee in the fight against the Teamsters. Cohen succeeded in convincing the courts that the Teamsters had created a “company union” to preempt the UFW from organizing lettuce workers. In their decision, the six California Supreme Court justices acknowledged that a precise number or percentage of field workers favoring the UFW could not be reached, but agreed that a majority preferred the United Farm Workers to the Teamsters.¹⁰ The court order cleared the injunction against the boycott, and public opinion swayed Fitzsimmons in mid-March 1971 to leave the organization of field workers to the UFW. George Meany, who had been lukewarm in his support of the Salinas campaign, brokered the deal in Washington, far from the front lines of the battle. In California, however, the UFW’s difficulty in building an effective infrastructure continued to fuel Teamster hopes of one day replacing the farm workers union.

In the days following the grape contracts, the task of fending off the Teamsters competed with the UFW’s need to establish control over the hiring process of field workers, a responsibility that the young union now assumed. During the grape strike and boycott, Chavez frequently inspired farm workers and activists to think beyond the constraints of the seasons, encouraging them to organize for social change because “the wheels of justice do not move as fast as nature grows grapes.”¹¹ Chavez’s observation is useful for understanding why the union placed so much importance on establishing hiring halls in the 1970 contracts. By the time pickers organized in a given location, the grape harvest had moved on to another location, allowing growers (and their foremen) to dictate who would work and under what conditions. The United Farm Workers created hiring halls with the belief that a network of union-controlled clearinghouses for selecting workers would lead to a more just system of employment. The UFW attempted to end the cycle of migration that challenged workers’ ability to sink roots into local communities and develop year-round networks that union officials presumed would strengthen the hand of labor at harvest time across multiple growing regions of the state. Under such a system, grapes could grow at any rate nature and modern agricultural science dictated; in theory, the workers would be organized and ready to deal with the harvest on their own terms.

This type of labor organizing, however, butted up against deep-rooted and, in some cases, culturally bound practices among a significant portion of the workforce. Many workers adapted their lives to a cycle of migration that not only spanned the area of the grape harvest in California but, in some cases, extended across state and national boundaries. In addition to field workers who followed the grape harvest from Coachella through the San Joaquin Valley, some workers came from surrounding states. Filipino workers, in particular, established migratory patterns that involved work in the fishing industry in Alaska, traveling down through Puget Sound and into Washington, then taking field work in apple orchards in Washington, and eventually harvesting a variety of crops in California during the summer and fall. For example, before serving as the first vice president of the UFW, Larry Itliong traveled up and down the Pacific Coast, working on ships and in docks in the fisheries of Alaska and in a variety of crops, including asparagus, lettuce, and grapes in Washington, Oregon, and California. Such migrations were common among Filipino migrants, many of whom came from Luzon, in northern Philippines. Frequently referred to as Ilocano, based on their ethnolinguistic group, these migrants came from a heavily agricultural region that helped define their identity. As in much of the early Mexican and Chinese migrations, single men dominated the initial Filipino migration to the agricultural districts of California.¹² Similarly, Mexican immigrants with experience in agriculture traveled across the U.S.-Mexican border; some had even participated in the bracero program from 1942 to 1964. Joining these populations were a sprinkling of Yemeni immigrants, Puerto Rican migrants, and Texas Mexicans (Tejanos), whose expertise in agriculture came in handy in the fields of California. All of these migrations complemented—and at times competed with—the settled Mexican American, black, and poor white populations that dominated the inland valleys of California.

In the wake of the 1970 contracts, the United Farm Workers confronted the challenge of managing this heterogeneous and far-flung population of workers. The rhythms of the harvest and the entrenched practices of acquiring labor assignments complicated social relations, producing tension among workers who sought solidarity across cultural divides. Although Filipinos and Mexicans found themselves in a similar position in terms of the hierarchy of class and race in California society, they maintained different approaches to organizing labor and migration. As the union settled on the formation of hiring halls to act as clearinghouses for labor on the grape plantations, it encountered difficulties that threatened its ability to sustain the movement.

Philip Vera Cruz, vice president of the UFW from 1966 to 1977, later acknowledged the struggle over the hearts and minds of the Filipino workers: “The Filipinos have been used and pulled back and forth by the UFW, the Teamsters, and the growers for many years.”¹³ To his dismay, Vera Cruz witnessed the departure of several Filipino leaders from the organization, including Ben Gines, who belonged to AWOC in 1966 when it merged with the mostly Mexican National Farm Workers Association to create the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. Vera Cruz recalled: “At the time of the merger, I counted about seven Filipinos who went with Ben [Gines] over to the Teamsters. Of course, it was like the tip of an iceberg. You see, later on, when the UFW made mistakes in the Hiring Hall about dispatching jobs, and some Filipinos felt they weren’t being treated fairly, many of them switched over to the Teamsters.”¹⁴ Gines ultimately found the Teamsters equally incompatible and left union organizing altogether to pursue a career in watch repair.

The resignation of Larry Itliong on October 15, 1971, was the most painful defection from the UFW, given the timing and his position in the union. Itliong had served as the leader of the original 1965 AWOC strike in Delano and maintained the closest contact with the AFL-CIO representative at the time, Al Green. Perhaps the most experienced and radical labor organizer among the leaders, Itliong conceded the leadership of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee to Chavez largely because the majority of the farm workers were Mexican. Itliong assumed the position of assistant director of UFW but never settled comfortably into his role. During his tenure, he offered his resignation or threatened to resign several times over disputes concerning the union’s failure to reimburse his expenses, the growing distance between UFW leaders and the rank and file, and the union’s unwillingness to address issues related to Filipinos, especially the lack of support for aging Filipino farm workers.¹⁵ In the wake of his resignation, Itliong explained his decision to his friend Bill Kircher: “I left at my own accord because of many reasons. But my biggest disappointment is that the Organization I participated in to fight for Justice and Dignity is not turning [out] as planned. So I had to go in order to save my reputation (insignificant as it may [be]) and my conscience. Do you know that since my leaving[,] the Delano office has lost its appeal … its liveliness and that people working in the offices seem to be doing their work only because they are told that’s what they should do and not because they wanted to do it.… Many of the workers around here, Filipinos and Chicanos, are very unhappy on how the Union is being operated.”¹⁶

Vera Cruz and Itliong disagreed privately on the issue of strategy, and the two maintained a tense relationship throughout their years together in the union.¹⁷ Yet for all their differences, they shared many of the same concerns. Both worried about the aging population of Filipino workers and where these men would live once their time as farm workers had passed. They both vigorously advocated for the construction of Agabayani Village, a retirement home for UFW workers; Itliong worked on behalf of this population through the Filipino American Political Association, a bipartisan organization created to lobby on behalf of Filipinos among lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. Both also felt the sting of being a minority within a union run by minorities.¹⁸

FIGURE 10. Dolores Huerta and Larry Itliong, ca. 1970s. ALUA, UFW Collection, 197.

The complaints of Mexican dominance, however, constituted just one of many factors that shaped the Filipino defections. For a worker interested in the ability to feed himself and send money back home to his family, the issues of contract management and fairness in work assignments loomed even larger. Vera Cruz, Itliong, and Gines understood this, and all commented on problems of managing the contracts, with Vera Cruz specifically citing problems with the hiring halls. These complaints resulted less from ethnic rivalries than from management concerns that skewed the hiring process in favor of settled, mostly Mexican American farm workers living in the San Joaquin Valley. These biases developed in part out of a desire to curb itinerancy in farm work, but they also reflected a degree of inexperience that plagued the union in the months immediately following the signing of the grape contracts.

Cesar Chavez had little experience running a union, and the mismanagement of the hiring halls, in particular, became an issue not only among growers who scrutinized every move of the young union, but also among some of the rank and file who expected fairness in work assignments. Doug Adair, a longtime UFW farm worker and a veteran of the Philadelphia boycott, worked at the Freedman and Tenneco plantations in Coachella at the beginning of the contracts. Adair recalled the difficulty in getting the halls started: “The first contracts, we didn’t know what we were doing. We’d never been there before. We had no idea.”¹⁹ Although a seemingly mundane issue, how the hiring halls operated became the Achilles’ heel of the UFW when it came to fending off the Teamsters.

The UFW organizer Reymundo Huerta arrived in Coachella in 1971 from the front lines of the grape boycott in Los Angeles amid disputes regarding work assignments and the management of the local grape contracts. A small but vocal minority sought to establish local control over the new hiring system, whereby workers showed up at the tiny hiring hall in Coachella to receive their work dispatches. Chavez reassigned Huerta to assist Marshall Ganz, who was trying unsuccessfully to quash the rebellion and shore up local support for the union. Although Huerta arrived thinking he would serve Ganz for a “few days,” he soon discovered that he, not Ganz, would remain in Coachella to manage the hiring halls.²⁰

Conflict developed when the workers themselves resisted the UFW organizers. According to Huerta, “We had to enforce the contracts not only with the companies, but also with the workers because they didn’t know too much about contracts either.” These efforts included tutorials on the requirements of the contract and translation of documents into Spanish. Although this helped allay the concerns of many Mexican workers, Filipino workers continued to show resistance to the new system. Referring to these workers as “disgruntled,” Huerta explained the Filipino reaction: “In the process of us enforcing the contracts, a lot of the Filipino workers were offended because they didn’t hold any seats of power in the union, although there were Filipinos in the union. There was a whole bunch of them. These guys didn’t want to accept that, a lot of them. So they kind of resisted.”²¹ According to Adair, the union elections, which eventually took place in 1973, proved the Filipino dissatisfaction with the UFW: “The Filipinos began peeling off. And then I think in the elections here, probably 70 to 80 percent of the Filipinos voted against [the UFW].”²² The feeling of losing ground within a union dominated by Mexican workers contributed to their discord. In Huerta’s opinion, these conditions predisposed the Filipinos to supporting Teamster overtures, which, in turn, led to their defections from the UFW.

A coworker of many Filipino farm workers, Doug Adair believed that the radical transformation in the Filipinos’ working and living conditions under UFW contracts accounted for much of the discord among them. Under AWOC in the 1960s, prior to the formation of the UFW, foremen controlled the hiring of their pickers, and some, especially Filipino foremen, managed their crews like a family. Adair recalls the conditions under the first contracts: “In the first contracts, the Filipino foreman was part of the unit. Many of these crews were very tight around the foreman. They were relatives. They were from his province. They were like his family. They moved from the grapes to the asparagus and from here to there as a unit. And the foreman would loan them money.”²³ Prior to 1970, workers had to pay dues year-round because the union paid insurance annually. Consequently, workers accumulated substantial debts in the off-season as a result of unpaid dues that some foremen covered for their employees when workers traveled back home or moved on to work in other regions. Filipino workers established significant ties to the Northwest, whereas Mexican workers traveled in all directions, including east to Texas and south to Mexico, for work or to visit family. In either case, a good relationship with the foreman allowed for a degree of job security, as Adair recalls: “The foreman, if he was a good foreman, gave them a little bit of benefits that they could be sure of. If they’d gone to Seattle or somewhere and they got back a little late, he made sure there was a bed in the camp for them. He got them into the crew.”²⁴

The UFW, however, insisted on the formation of hiring halls as an equitable solution to a system that frequently favored growers over workers. For the Filipinos, an aging, mostly male minority population in a labor pool dominated by Mexicans, the loss of power among the foremen gave them some cause for concern. Under this new system, Filipino foremen could no longer hold jobs for co-ethnic workers who came to expect such privileges. Adair observed, “To get their jobs, instead of going to … whoever had given them a job before, they had to go to the union and stand in line with all the Mexicans and they finally get to the window and there aren’t any jobs, or not at that company.” Their disappointment drove many to support the Teamsters. According to Adair, “There were reasons—good reasons—why they preferred the Teamsters’ system.”²⁵

The Teamsters exploited this tension by imposing a system that returned power to the foremen. The restoration of hiring and firing privileges to the foremen reestablished a sense of continuity for mobile workers from one season to the next. The hiring halls, on the other hand, tended to benefit the local, sedentary populations of workers, which did not sit well with more itinerant laborers. Adair explained how the system worked: “You had a friend of your neighbor, a cousin of your compadre, and the word would get around: ‘There’s going to be dispatches tomorrow.’ You are here. You are local. You are there in line; you get them. And the guys from Texas come in and [the hiring hall worker would say]: ‘No, you’re a day late. We gave that to the dispatches yesterday.’”²⁶

For many migrant workers who lived hand-to-mouth and often traveled with a family, the irregularity of the dispatches made it impossible to wait around for the next assignment. The growers and foremen complained because they had grown accustomed to hiring workers as they needed them, with no regard for the structure of a union. Foremen demonstrated an immediate preference for the Teamsters’ approach and shared this sentiment with migrant workers dissatisfied with the new system. Adair again: “The worker would go in and if he didn’t get the job, then the foreman would say: ‘I would have hired you but the union doesn’t [allow it].’” In addition to Filipinos, a significant number of Mexicans traveling from Texas opposed the system, because they too found it difficult to negotiate work assignments in California from a distance.²⁷ These problems cut across racial lines, although, because of the unique relationship many Filipinos had with Filipino foremen and because Filipinos constituted a minority within the union, their defections drew more attention from growers who wanted to point out the waning support for the UFW.²⁸ Mexicans who traveled from Texas and, increasingly, Mexico also expressed frustration with the UFW’s system of hiring.²⁹

This disgruntled minority continued to give the Teamsters a reason to plot against the United Farm Workers. Although in 1971 Fitzsimmons agreed to leave these workers alone, the Teamsters held contracts with warehouse workers, packers, and haulers in California agriculture, placing them in close proximity to farm workers. As a consequence, the Teamsters continued to agitate against the UFW, flaunting the benefits of belonging to the strongest and richest union in the nation. In appealing to potential members, Teamster officials liked to point out that the union’s benefits package rivaled that offered by the farm workers union, including fewer limits and costs related to medical procedures, a greater range of services, and no age or amount limits in payments to survivors of fallen workers.³⁰ For some, the Teamsters offered superior services that served as a reminder that alternatives existed.

Cesar Chavez also contended with serious complaints from within the movement, including criticism of his decision to relocate union headquarters to a mountain resort in Keene, California. Although initially Chavez treated the former tuberculosis sanitarium rented to him by a wealthy movie producer as a place of respite, by 1971 a deal was struck to purchase the 280-acre plot and its buildings and rename the site La Nuestra Señora de la Paz, or La Paz. Soon after, Chavez moved most union operations off the valley floor and into the Tehachapi Mountains, where former farm workers and volunteers alike could learn to become “union professionals.” Chavez converted the decrepit facilities into the nerve center and training ground for the union and reduced “Forty Acres” in Delano to a field office.

Chavez cultivated a commune-like atmosphere at La Paz, which appealed to many volunteers invested in the counterculture, although it did not sit well with some union stalwarts. The population at La Paz fluctuated between 100 and 150 mostly white or Mexican residents who came for a month to a year to be a part of the experience. Residents lived in drafty and occasionally cramped living quarters, but few felt they could complain given the terrible conditions farm workers had to endure.³¹ For white volunteers like Melanie Coons working the picket lines in Los Angeles, going to La Paz was like a “journey to Mecca” and produced a reverence for Chavez that overshadowed other leaders: “The minute you meet [Chavez], you just know he’s special, he’s so patient and forceful at the same time.”³² For those like Itliong, who preferred that the union stay in touch with farm worker families in their communities, La Paz placed unnecessary distance between the leaders and the rank and file in and around Delano.

As white boycotters moved to La Paz to work and live, the changing ethnic composition of the movement fueled additional anger. For Itliong, the aging of the mostly male Filipino population within the UFW, coupled with his years of service to a mostly Mexican and Filipino membership, accentuated his feelings of betrayal. He publicly questioned Chavez’s reliance on what he derisively referred to as “the Anglo Brain Trust,” particularly the service of young white (and Jewish) volunteers such as Marshall Ganz and Jerry Cohen. Although these people had no connection to the corporate world, their participation in the union as managers of contracts and service centers signaled for some a move away from the grassroots. The presence of the Teamsters, who employed salaried, professional organizers, introduced a model that contrasted sharply with a UFW volunteer system dependent on the dedication of many young activists. The increased reliance on attorneys and doctors also ignited a debate within the UFW about whether this system could adequately compensate those who had more lucrative, “professional” opportunities outside of the union. Regardless of the National Executive Board’s decision to pay some and not others, competition from the highly experienced Teamsters required the UFW to become more organized in their delivery of services.

FIGURE 11. Jerry Cohen, head of the legal department for the United Farm Workers, testifies before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Labor, Washington, DC, date unknown. ALUA, UFW Collection, 3365.

As the UFW moved toward greater professionalism, Chavez made no excuses for the trend away from “a minority-oriented union.” His position remained constant, even when questioned about his loyalty to the ethnic Mexican base of the movement. “Now the union has a Chicano thrust,” Chavez admitted to a reporter, “but that will change as we spread to other areas.” For him, the struggle constituted “an economic movement by poor workers” that transcended issues of race and ethnicity. In making this point, Chavez, perhaps unwittingly, promoted a class-first, color-blind philosophy, proclaiming, “A poor black worker in Florida hurts me as much as a poor Chicano worker in Texas.” His inclusion of and dependence on middle-class white volunteers, however, complicated his claims of leading a movement “by poor workers,” a fact his critics were only too happy to point out.³³

Conflicts over boycott strategy signaled a more immediate danger to unity within the movement. The first wrangling about strategy occurred between the UFW and the AFL-CIO, over a campaign against Heublein Inc., a wine and liquor company based in Hartford, Connecticut. From the UFW’s point of view, Heublein’s incorporation of United Vinters, a subsidiary invested in smaller California grape growers not under contract with the farm workers, made them fair game for a targeted boycott. George Meany disagreed. The number of farm workers working for Heublein subsidiaries paled in comparison to the overwhelming number of unionized distributors in the AFL-CIO–affiliated Brewery Workers Union employed by the company. As a consequence, Meany refused to back the boycott and made his displeasure with the UFW well known in the media. Although it took the union and Heublein less than two weeks to reach an agreement, the conflict over the use of the boycott demonstrated that not all in the UFW’s corner agreed with the strategy.³⁴

Chavez’s commitment to the boycott also altered the union’s philosophy regarding the inclusion of workers under the National Labor Relations Act (also known as “the Wagner Act”). In the years leading up to the 1970 contracts, advocates for UFW, including Chavez, used the exclusion of field labor from the NLRA as evidence of the federal government’s neglect of farm workers. This argument more than any other compelled dock workers in Europe to execute the blockade requested by Elaine Elinson. As Chavez realized the power of the boycott, he privately shifted his position regarding farm workers’ inclusion in the NLRA. He was particularly concerned about the restrictions against secondary boycotts for workers covered by the NLRA as a result of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. For these reasons, he publicly lamented the exclusion of farm workers from collective bargaining rights but privately relished the freedom to use the boycott whenever and wherever he saw fit. Chavez’s true feelings became public once the UFW had gained legitimacy and growers, legislators, and competing unions had become much more serious about extending the act to cover farm workers after 1970. As growers and politicians began to warm to the idea of extending collective bargaining rights to farm workers, in part to limit the UFW’s use of the boycott, Chavez became protective of the tactic and more skeptical that recognition from employers and the state would be the panacea everyone imagined.

Lettuce farmers were the first growers to advocate for the inclusion of farm workers in the NLRA. They had watched with horror how the boycott had devastated the grape growers’ profits and feared that the new boycott against lettuce would have the same effects on their product. Mike Schultz, an El Centro lettuce grower and vice president of the Western Growers Association, offered the first signs of change among growers who had famously fought against the Wagner Act during the 1930s. In 1971, Schultz secured a commitment from his peers to seek federal legislation to bring farm workers under federal labor laws and added that they would also support a state-level “little Wagner Act.” “We have just decided to be realistic about the situation,” Schultz announced, “and [will] try to bring our industry into the 1970s.”³⁵ In truth, growers understood that the laws governing labor organizations, if extended to farm workers, would deny Chavez the boycott, the tactic they feared most. The Teamsters, who had learned to thrive within the parameters set by the Taft-Hartley Act that included a restriction against secondary boycotts, also endorsed the inclusion of farm workers under national or state labor legislation and went to great lengths to highlight Chavez’s change of heart on this matter.³⁶

Growers and the Teamsters demonstrated that they had become wise to what fueled the movement by adopting a strategy that would potentially short-circuit the UFW’s growth. These tactics included the Teamsters’ use of the boycott against the UFW during their failed struggle in 1971 to sign lettuce workers in Salinas to Teamsters contracts. As with the large corporate grape growers (like DiGiorgio and Schenley) who had agreed to contracts long before their family-owed peers, United Fruit Company’s Inter-Harvest division and S. S. Pierce Company’s Pic N’ Pac sued for peace with the UFW by agreeing to contracts on their lettuce farms in Imperial Valley during the 1970–71 season.³⁷ The deal with InterHarvest, in particular, precipitated the Teamster boycott, as Ganz remembered: “We were striking in Salinas, and we were boycotting Chiquita [another subsidiary of United Fruit Company], and after a week, [InterHarvest] signed.” United Fruit’s president, Eli Black, the liberal Jewish mogul who would become famous for his 1975 suicide plunge from a Manhattan skyscraper after being exposed for corruption and bribery in Honduras, became a supporter of the union, attracting the ire of the Teamsters and growers alike. Ganz recalled that Black’s agreement in the midst of the lettuce boycott “blew the growers away in Salinas” and produced, in Ganz’s words, “anti-Semitic shit that came out for a long time.”³⁸ To punish both Black and the UFW, the Teamsters appealed to wholesalers in Los Angeles and San Francisco not to unload “boycotted” lettuce coming from InterHarvest farms in an attempt to sway the company to cancel its contracts with the UFW. Although the Teamsters had limited success, the act contributed to a growing confusion among consumers about which products to boycott. The UFW’s decision to start and stop boycotts in grapes and lettuce and its many threats of boycotts against melons, grapes, lettuce, and citrus growers, not to mention wine and liquor producers, began to confuse consumers.³⁹

Growing tension with Governor Ronald Reagan and President Richard Nixon, both Republicans, posed perhaps the most serious check against the UFW’s strength. Although Reagan and Nixon had a competitive relationship, they shared a pro-grower position when it came to farm labor politics. During their election campaigns, both politicians took a strong position against the UFW and openly advocated for growers’ rights to market their products free from the constraints of a secondary boycott.⁴⁰

Reagan campaigned against the boycott in New York City during the development of Dolores Huerta’s “hostage store” strategy and used the power of the podium to deny the existence of a boycott even in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary.⁴¹ When the boycott’s reality could not be denied, Reagan famously took to the television airwaves to eat grapes in a show of solidarity with growers.⁴² As the clock ran down on the industry after Steinberg and his Coachella peers agreed to sign contracts in 1970, Reagan reversed his opposition to unionization by advocating for secret ballot elections on each farm in hopes of stalling the movement. The governor failed in this and his advocacy for California Senate bill SB40, which, if passed, would have instituted secret ballot elections and restricted unions from using the secondary boycott. Reagan repeated this act in 1972 by supporting Proposition 22, an initiative heavily funded by the growers to place limits on the secondary boycott. The union campaigned against the initiative, and voters responded by soundly defeating it, 57.9 to 42.1 percent.⁴³

Reagan also used the power of the purse to punish farm worker families by scaling back on social programs, such as California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), an organization designed to alleviate inequalities within the countryside. Founded in 1965 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, CRLA provided poor farm workers free legal assistance in labor disputes. Although the nonprofit agency was nonpartisan, the cases it accepted skewed toward support of a farm worker union. In fact, Jerry Cohen, the head of the UFW’s legal department in Salinas, left the agency in 1967, ironically because he found it too tepid in its support for the downtrodden.⁴⁴ When Imperial Valley growers criticized CRLA for giving the UFW an unfair advantage in labor disputes, Reagan pulled the plug on the agency’s funding, vetoing its $1.8 million budget in 1971.

For the most part, however, Reagan distinguished himself by not intervening during moments of conflict in the war between the UFW and the Teamsters. The California secretary of state and Reagan’s Democratic successor, Edmund “Jerry” Brown, criticized him for allowing a “bloody civil war” to rage in rural communities by not resolving the legal “no man’s land” farm laborers found themselves in: exempt from federal and state labor laws regulating labor relations. Reagan’s inaction in rural California contrasted sharply with his campaigns to end antiwar demonstrations and violent rebellions in urban California, most vividly illustrated during his terms as governor by the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the bank robbery by the Symbionese Liberation Army in Berkeley, the bombings by the antiwar group Weather Underground in San Francisco, and the gun battles between the Black Panther Party and police on the streets of Oakland. Reagan failed to take a similar interest in protecting the rural poor from violence, even when it resulted in the death of farm workers. However, his message “to clean up the mess in Berkeley” and “send the welfare bums back to work” struck a chord with a suburban, white electorate worried about the violent turn in the counterculture and the cost of urban social programs.⁴⁵

As president of the United States, Richard Nixon found himself dealing with a greater range of economic problems that denied him the luxury of seeking refuge in issues-oriented politics that fed Reagan’s popularity. Unlike his California Republican contemporary, to remain in office Nixon could not depend solely on white homeowners’ resentment of the urban poor and anger toward radical youth. A member of a national Republican Party still committed to a degree of bipartisanship, Nixon had not fully embraced an emerging, conservative ideology promoted by those on the right who laid the problems of the United States primarily at the feet of those who advocated for government programs. The vagaries of a slowing economy, not to mention the continuation of the Vietnam War, required Nixon to engage labor organizations and experiment with economic policies in an attempt to solve the growing trade imbalance between the United States and the world while creating a foundation for his reelection in 1972. His maneuvers to dismantle the United Farm Workers and empower agribusiness in the name of economic recovery demonstrated how far he would go to achieve his goals.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

Nixon assumed office during a period in which U.S. economic stability had begun to falter for the first time since the Great Depression. During the immediate postwar period, the relative strength of the U.S. economy helped the world economy back to health. By the 1960s, however, U.S. consumers’ taste for imports diminished a balance of trade surplus enjoyed by U.S. manufacturers, eventually leading to a trade deficit in 1971, the first time in the twentieth century. The trade imbalance put less money into the federal budget as manufacturers’ profits stagnated or declined even as prices on goods continued to rise.

The new trade imbalance and the failures of U.S. manufacturers to improve efficiency tempered the Nixon administration’s expectations for an economic recovery completely, or even primarily, based on manufactured goods. By 1971 the United States needed to generate a $13 billion turnaround in the balance of payments to eliminate the trade deficit. The rise of Japan and West Germany, however, augured a new world order in which the United States would have to exploit all of its advantages in order to reignite its economy and maintain the value of its currency. Agriculture constituted an area of nearly unparalleled strength in global markets and a sector of the economy that could be expanded through exports. Although not a new idea, the context and purpose of agricultural exports changed in the 1970s. In the past, the United States shared its bounty with the world to help win wars and nurse allies and conquered nations back to health. Now agriculture would be used to return the United States to economic supremacy.

As the first president from California, where food production played a prominent role in the state’s economy, Nixon understood the profit-making potential of agriculture. In 1973, agriculture accounted for one-third of the jobs in California and better than half of the Golden State’s accumulated wealth.⁴⁶ Nixon confirmed the importance of agriculture nationally in the Flanigan Report, a 1973 Council on International Economic Policy task force study headed by his friend and trusted advisor Peter Flanigan.⁴⁷ In the report, Flanigan vigorously argued for a significant expansion of farm exports by lowering government subsidies for wheat and feed grains, allowing the free market to dictate trade. He believed that such a policy would lower the cost of these items and increase their export to countries such as the Soviet Union, China, and Japan. The reduction in trade barriers, Flanigan argued, would pressure trading nations to import more U.S. agricultural goods, raising U.S. farmers’ incomes by approximately $4 billion. In negotiations of new trade policies with Europe, Japan, and Canada in 1973, Flanigan’s report figured prominently in the position advanced by the United States. “From our point of view,” Flanigan reported, “it is especially important that these negotiations include trade in agriculture. Our goal needs to be the fullest possible liberalization of policies with regard to agricultural trade.”⁴⁸

Nixon sought to achieve his goals under a New Economic Policy (NEP) that included a government freeze on prices and wages and tax cuts for businesses and individuals.⁴⁹ For big agriculture, NEP exempted unprocessed agricultural commodities and inputs in the production of farm products from price regulation. Such conditions allowed profit margins to rise on raw agricultural goods and led to the administration’s goal of expanding agricultural output faster than domestic consumption of food. The new surplus in agricultural products could now be traded internationally. As an incentive, food processors and retailers were restricted from passing along price increases to American consumers, but they did not have to abide by these same regulations on exports. Consequently, NEP encouraged domestic food producers to sell in foreign markets where higher profit margins could be realized. U.S. agribusiness quickly took advantage of these favorable terms by selling more of their products abroad, improving the trade surplus on agricultural goods from $1.56 billion in 1972 to $10.53 billion in 1974.⁵⁰

The administration’s plans depended on the containment of labor unions. Some advisors within Nixon’s administration predicted that the freeze on wages would invite criticism from labor groups and precipitate organized demonstrations. George Shultz, one of Nixon’s chief economic advisors and secretary of labor in 1971, predicted, “A freeze will stop when labor blows it up with a strike.” Nixon tried to head off such criticism by establishing the Pay Board and inviting labor leaders such as AFL-CIO president, George Meany, and Teamsters president, Frank Fitzsimmons, to participate. Meany declined the invitation, although he initially acceded to the popularity of the price-and-wage freeze. The administration’s decision to deny raises negotiated before implementation of NEP to 1.3 million workers eventually moved Meany and two other prominent labor leaders, Harry Bridges of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Leonard Woodcock of the United Auto Workers, to publicly oppose the president’s wage-and-price-control program.

Nixon took an especially aggressive posture toward the United Farm Workers. During his first term in office, as the boycott began to gain strength and inspire new legislation in Congress, Nixon stymied liberal reforms in 1969 at the last minute by working with the pro-grower senator from California, George Murphy, to submit an alternative proposal that would have limited harvest-time strikes, prohibited secondary boycotts, and instituted a three-person farm labor relations agency to oversee union representation elections and monitor labor relations generally.⁵¹ Nixon accompanied these maneuvers with a dramatic increase in U.S. military purchases of table grapes for soldiers fighting the war in Vietnam. The Defense Department’s purchase of grapes rose from 7.5 million pounds in 1966 and 1967 to 16 million pounds in the first year of Nixon’s presidency. The federal government also encouraged South Vietnam to import more fresh grapes, increasing their consumption from 350,000 pounds per year in 1967 to 2.8 million pounds in 1969. Such purchases elevated Vietnam to the world’s third largest importer of grapes and inspired union criticism of Nixon for artificially creating “a market of last resort” for struck grapes.⁵²

In 1972, at a time when the UFW threatened to go national, it signed a contract with the Coca-Cola Company to represent Florida citrus workers picking fruit for use in its Minute Maid orange juice. The Nixon administration responded by suing to place the union under the restrictions of federal labor statutes, including restrictions against secondary boycotts. UFW supporters responded by flooding the National Republican Committee office with more than one million protest letters. Although the administration eventually backed down in response to negative press, Nixon’s actions secured his reputation with farm worker advocates as an enemy of the farm worker movement.

Nixon attempted to counter the negative press and neutralize labor’s opposition by courting the favor of Teamsters’ president Frank Fitzsimmons. As the union representing more workers than any other in the nation, the Teamsters constituted a primary target for Nixon’s divide-and-conquer strategy. He began by commuting the jail sentence of ex-Teamster president, James “Jimmy” Hoffa, on December 23, 1971. Nixon assuaged Fitzsimmons’s concern that Hoffa would try to regain the presidency of the union by making Hoffa’s release conditional on his agreement not to participate in the union for ten years. Fitzsimmons benefited from the perception that he had negotiated Hoffa’s release, while the restriction on Hoffa’s involvement in the Teamsters strengthened Fitzsimmons’s hand in the fight to maintain control. Nixon’s preferential treatment of Fitzsimmons solidified his loyalty to the administration and forged a mutually beneficial relationship. The frequent meetings with the president earned Fitzsimmons the reputation among Nixon’s advisors as “our man” on matters pertaining to labor. Their relationship enabled Fitzsimmons to contain the farm worker movement that threatened to derail Nixon’s plan to increase agricultural profits.⁵³

Fitzsimmons’s investment in Nixon was both political and self-serving. He had risen to the Teamsters’ presidency with the approval of Hoffa, who, according to union insiders, “treated [Fitzsimmons] like a gopher or a servant.”⁵⁴ Six years Hoffa’s elder, Fitzsimmons had allied himself with the charismatic labor leader while working as a truck driver and serving as a shop steward for two dozen fellow workers at CCC Trucking Company in Detroit. In 1937, Hoffa, recently elected president of Teamsters local 299 in Detroit, embraced Fitzsimmons as a member of his cadre of loyal supporters. Fitzsimmons’s deferential nature may explain why Hoffa chose Fitzsimmons to replace him when he went to federal prison in 1967. Hoffa apparently confused style with substance and assumed that his old friend would do his will until he completed his sentence and returned to the union presidency. Fitzsimmons, however, surprised many by choosing to ignore Hoffa’s instructions from behind bars. Instead, he consolidated his power as president of the Teamsters by assigning more autonomy to his vice presidents, hiring staff on the basis of nepotism and political patronage, and cooperating with the president of the United States in exchange for influence and favors. These favors included not only the restriction against Hoffa’s involvement in the union, but also a pullback on federal investigations of Teamster-mob schemes under Fitzsimmons’s watch.

The investment in Nixon paid its greatest dividends during an FBI investigation into possible relations between the mafia and Fitzsimmons. The controversy became known to the public on April 29, 1973, when the Justice Department rejected an affidavit by FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, to continue electronic surveillance of People’s Industrial Consultants, a shell business for mafia operations in Los Angeles. The FBI believed that members of the Los Angeles and Chicago crime syndicate had negotiated a deal with Fitzsimmons to siphon $10 million a year from the union’s pension fund. Between golf tournaments in Palm Springs and La Costa, California, Fitzsimmons met with mafia figures, including Chicago mobster, Lou (the Tailor) Rosanova, on February 12, 1972. According to an anonymous FBI agent, Fitzsimmons approved of the scheme during this meeting. The following morning, Fitzsimmons drove the short distance from the Teamsters-supported La Costa Country Club in Carlsbad, California, to El Toro Marine Air Station near San Clemente, where he boarded Air Force One and accompanied Nixon on the six-hour cross-country flight back to Washington. No record of what Fitzsimmons and Nixon discussed exists. Within months, however, the FBI surveillance of the Teamsters-mafia relationship ended, and on July 17, 1972, Fitzsimmons announced the Teamsters’ endorsement of Nixon for reelection.⁵⁵

The suspension of wiretapping demoralized the FBI and ended an investigation of the mafia and Fitzsimmons, allowing Fitzsimmons to escape prosecution and leaving unanswered many questions regarding the scheme and the motivation of the Justice Department.⁵⁶ The decision of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst so angered FBI agents working on the case that someone in the Bureau leaked the contents of the investigation to the New York Times reporter Denny Walsh. Although Walsh and other reporters pursued the case, the nation’s preoccupation with the events of Watergate forced the story from the headlines and eventually out of public consciousness. Walsh labeled the scandal “the lost story of Watergate,” but media and government attention became so overwhelmed by the Watergate break-ins that neither pursued an investigation of the affair.⁵⁷

Fitzsimmons also contributed gifts of cash to Nixon and his aides, both directly and indirectly. Along with the 1972 endorsement, Fitzsimmons asked all Teamsters vice presidents and organizers to give $1,000 to Nixon’s campaign, while he personally gave $4,000. According to Steven Brill, author of The Teamsters, sources close to Allen Dorfman and Tony Provenzano, both Teamsters officials convicted of corruption, revealed a scheme in 1973 to have approximately $1 million siphoned off from Las Vegas casinos—a growing area of influence for the Teamsters—and redirected to Charles Colson, Fitzsimmons’s primary sponsor within the White House. Colson allegedly approached Fitzsimmons first in 1971 about the transaction in hopes of securing funds for the 1972 campaign.⁵⁸ Time estimated that the Teamsters ultimately contributed $1 million dollars toward Nixon’s reelection campaign.⁵⁹ In 1974, as the Watergate scandal intensified, Fitzsimmons contributed $25,000 from Teamsters’ coffers to an anti-impeachment group. By that point, Colson had left the White House but had not yet been indicted for his role in the cover-up involving the Watergate break-ins. That year, Fitzsimmons moved the legal business of the Teamsters, worth approximately $100,000 per year, from the law firm of Edward Bennett Williams, the prosecuting attorney in the lawsuit against the Watergate burglars, to one employing Colson.⁶⁰

Nixon and Fitzsimmons’s collaboration came at the expense of the Teamsters’ rank and file, whose dues not only financed the extravagant lifestyles of union officials but also funded the third and most serious breach of an agreement to leave the organization of field workers to the UFW. The replacement of UFW grape contracts in 1973 initiated a bloody war in rural California, as farm worker volunteers attempted to defend their turf with picket lines in the fields. Although Coachella growers, Steinberg and Larson, chose to renew their contracts, most of the other grape growers defected to the Teamsters. The Teamsters prepared for UFW challenges by funding a mercenary army that carried baseball bats, knives, and whatever else they could put their hands on to drive Chavistas from the field.

The “Battle of Coachella” opened perhaps the most tumultuous season in rural California since the 1933 cotton strike in the San Joaquin Valley and the 1913 wheatland hop riots in Northern California. The assault on Alicia Uribe on April 16, 1973, was followed by scores of violent attacks that traveled with the harvest. In Coachella, growers such as the Gimmian brothers and Milton Karahadian aided the Teamsters by supplying grape stakes, clubs, baseball bats, and pieces of irrigation pipe to use against UFW picketers. These attacks spilled into places of business, where Teamsters encountered picketers such as Father John Banks, who had come to the desert to show his support for the farm workers union. Teamster, Mike Falco, recognized the Catholic priest and punched him in the face, breaking his nose. In nearby Mecca, another Teamster, Johnny Macias, recognized farm worker, Silverio Torres Madrid, in a local market, followed him out, and beat him with a two-by-four. Throughout the valley, Teamsters patrolled the lonely rural highways, looking for familiar UFW faces. On one particularly violent day, June 26, 1973, Teamsters found and beat Marshall Ganz unconscious, ran down UFW representatives, Bill Encinas and Alfredo González, and punched them through their car window, forced a carload of picketers driven by UFW volunteer, Michael Drake, off the road, and attacked a UFW picket line at a grape ranch, sending several UFW volunteers to the hospital. At one point, the Teamsters became so indiscriminate in their violence that they mistook allies for enemies. Riverside County sheriff’s deputies arrested two Teamsters, Guadalupe Tamez of Santa Ana and Guadalupe Sausedo of Salinas, when they mistook Israel Guajardo, a foreman at Maag Citrus Company, for a UFW member. Tamez and Sausedo were charged with attempted murder and kidnapping for running Guajardo off the road near Mecca, pulling him from his car, and stabbing him six times with an ice pick. In another embarrassing case, Teamsters accosted Murray Westgate, a Las Vegas publicist who had been hired to improve the image of the Teamsters. The Teamsters physically removed him from the Morocco Motel in Indio, kicked him into the parking lot, and told him to “get out of town.”⁶¹

Violence occurred on both sides, with UFW supporters burning down storage facilities and cars and, at one point, striking Western Conference Teamster representative, Bill Grami, in the head with a rock during one of his visits to Indio. Manuel Chavez, Cesar’s cousin who had done hard time in prison, encouraged aggressive behavior by UFW affiliates by ordering them to work with INS agents to stop undocumented immigrants from entering the labor pool and block the flow of scab laborers into the fields. Yet the occasional acts of arson or the apprehension of undocumented immigrants did not compare with the daily incidents of violence committed by the Teamsters. To ensure that UFW actions did not escalate, Cesar Chavez fasted and encouraged volunteers to participate in civil disobedience by resisting a new grower injunction against picketing. “We had over 3,000 people arrested that summer,” Jerry Cohen recalled, “because you could get arrested in this state by violating an unconstitutional injunction.”⁶² Although these acts played well in the media, they did nothing to deter the Teamsters.

Neither did the UFW’s actions please the AFL-CIO, whose leader, George Meany, had grown cold toward Chavez. In addition to his opposition to the campaign against Heublein, Meany questioned directing the boycott at supermarkets that employed AFL-CIO–affiliated meat cutters and retail clerks whose livelihoods suffered as a consequence of the UFW picket lines. Chavez’s shifting position on the inclusion of farm workers in the NLRA also baffled Meany, leading to a deafening silence from the national labor leader as the battle raged on in the desert. When asked by the media whether the AFL-CIO would support the UFW in its time of need, Bill Kircher, a longtime farm worker supporter and liaison for the AFL-CIO, responded, “No. We can only subsidize organizing committees.”⁶³

The cost of maintaining the strike and boycott during the first two months of the 1973 grape harvest forced Chavez to seek an infusion of cash from the AFL-CIO, an organization that had granted the UFW an independent charter the year before. In anticipation of the harvest in the San Joaquin Valley, Chavez made an overture to Meany that was followed by a formal invitation to Washington, D.C. to discuss the role of the AFL-CIO in the battle with the Teamsters. At the meeting, Chavez defended his commitment to the hiring halls and the boycott but focused his attention on securing strike funds for the ongoing struggle against the Teamsters. Meany took umbrage with Chavez’s go-it-alone approach, but ultimately decided to provide monetary support for the farm workers. At a news conference, Meany announced, “The Council voted in the next three months to give Mr. Chavez $1,600,000 to try to help him conduct an effective strike against the most vicious, strikebreaking, union-busting effort that I’ve seen in my lifetime on the part of the Teamsters.” For this support, Meany expected Chavez to accept a legislative solution once the struggle had ended.⁶⁴

The continued threat of violence and the AFL-CIO’s renewed support brought Chavez back to the negotiating table with grape growers in an attempt to avert a blood bath as the season moved north. The new boycott of grapes did little to shame the Teamsters, but it remained a powerful tool against growers. Although the AFL-CIO remained dubious about the tactic and the union now juggled several tasks along with maintaining a network of boycott houses, the boycott managed to force wholesale prices down and move more table grapes into cold storage or to raisin and wine production. The lettuce boycott never really succeeded in getting off the ground; however, the experience of boycotting grapes and the public’s memory of the first grape boycott allowed the union to achieve a degree of success.⁶⁵ For example, the new grape boycott did not quite achieve the low price of $3.19 per lug of grapes in 1969, but it did succeed in knocking it down from $7.44 in 1972 to $4.60 in 1973. Coachella growers not carrying the union label took the brunt of the losses, from a total profit of $3,705,000 for all varieties in 1972 to a deficit of $3,322,000 in 1973.⁶⁶ Both the losses and the violence in Coachella foretold a possible scenario in the San Joaquin Valley, one growers wished to avoid if at all possible.

Once again John Giumarra Jr. became the primary negotiator on behalf of growers in a new round of talks with the UFW. Giumarra had become extremely disenchanted with the hiring halls, at one point bringing his own crew down to Delano, jumping behind the counter, and dispatching his own workers to his farm.⁶⁷ His frustration with the process led him to the contracts with the Teamsters, but the violence brought him back to the bargaining table with the UFW.

Jerry Cohen, who oversaw the negotiations with Giumarra, believed that, despite his problems with the hiring halls, “Giumarra was ready to sign with [the UFW].”⁶⁸ According to Cohen, the growers—especially those who had learned from the first boycott experience—saw the union as “an economic problem” that they wanted to remove as quickly and efficiently as possible. Giumarra entered negotiations in 1973 looking for two things: to resolve the hiring hall problems effectively and to avoid a repeat of the 1969–70 public relations nightmare. On the hiring halls, Chavez and his team negotiated in good faith, admitting that the struggles with the Teamsters in lettuce and the newness of being a union had caused them to make mistakes. Privately, the union acknowledged that their dependence on one staff member, Richard Chavez, to administer the contracts had been “a huge factor” in creating disorder in Delano and displeasure among grape growers in the San Joaquin Valley. “When you look at the administration of the grape contracts,” Cohen explained, “you’ve got to look at where the talent went.” Chavez shifted the most skilled organizers to Salinas, leaving a vacuum of leadership in the grape fields of Coachella and the San Joaquin Valley. As a consequence, most of the negotiating team offered convincing remedies to the hiring halls and reached a tentative agreement on reform of the system without scrapping it. As Cohen remembered, however, “Cesar never bought into [the agreement]” forged by his negotiating team.⁶⁹

Chavez’s doubts about the agreement crystallized into open hostility when he introduced another issue: sexual relationships between Filipino male workers and prostitutes. On the verge of a settlement, Chavez surprised his colleagues and Giumarra by breaking into a rant against “whores in the camps” that derailed the negotiations. Chavez had heard of prostitutes frequenting Filipino men in their off hours and demanded that Giumarra do something to prevent it as a prerequisite for signing a deal. Giumarra pleaded ignorance, which enraged Chavez, who became intransigent despite appeals from his negotiating team to relax. “That’s one of the first strange things Cesar does,” Cohen remembered, “when he jump[ed] around and said, ‘we have to deal with whores in the camps!’” Cohen called for a break in the negotiations to calm Chavez down and get him to refocus on the issues at hand, but Chavez refused to listen to reason. Cohen recounted the conversation: “[I said] ‘What the hell was that?!’ And, you know, [he] started bitching, ‘You don’t understand this, Jerry. I do. We have to deal with whores in the camps.’ I said, ‘These are single, old Filipino guys; leave them alone. Leave them alone! What the hell does it have to do with us?’”⁷⁰ Chavez never offered an explanation for his tirade beyond the cryptic assertion that he knew best, and others, such as Cohen, did not. Perhaps he thought the new strike funds from the AFL-CIO would lead to a better deal with the growers if he prolonged the strike. Perhaps he had become obsessed with the trouble of retaining and controlling Filipino farm workers within the union. Regardless, his position sank the deal with Giumarra, extended the strike, and led to a long, hot, murderous summer in the Central Valley.

UNION SUBSTITUTION

The grape contracts of the 1970s were a wake-up call for lettuce growers, who became the first growers to switch from union-busting tactics to a new strategy of “union substitution,” replacing the United Farm Workers with the Teamsters as the union representing their employees.⁷¹ Although the negative product identification with lettuce was a harder sale to the public, the UFW’s success in popularizing unions as a solution to injustice on California farms neutralized the old tactics of aggression against labor organizing in the fields. Lettuce growers dealt with the stigma of being anti-union by embracing a union that would do business with them: the Teamsters. Unlike the UFW, the Teamsters looked at field workers as new dues-paying members who would contribute to the wealth of the union. The Teamsters’ rejection of hiring halls appealed to growers weary of turning over such responsibilities to a union bureaucracy.

Union substitution succeeded in shifting the struggle from the UFW versus the growers to a battle between two unions. In this context, the growers appeared to the public as hapless victims of an internecine labor war that had little to do with them. To the general public who had participated in the early boycotts, the announcement of victory in 1970, coupled with growers’ acceptance of unions, made it appear as though the farm workers had won their battle. Few consumers distinguished one union from another, even with the negative publicity generated by the Teamsters. With Hoffa out as president, the problems of the Teamsters appeared to be behind them. The new boss, Fitzsimmons, had been embraced by Nixon, a president who, in 1972, won an election in a landslide and still had credibility with the public prior to full exposure of the Watergate scandal. Moreover, the public understood little about the virtues of hiring halls versus foreman selection in the hiring process, nor did they see the purpose of boycotts that seemed to start and stop within a period of several months in 1972. Like the Stealers Wheel’s hit song of that year, growers seemed to be stuck in the middle between the UFW and the Teamsters, who were unable to work out their differences for the benefit of the workers.⁷²

The success of the union substitution strategy among lettuce growers quickly spread to grape growers, especially in the wake of the failed negotiations with Giumarra. Rather than renew the contracts, grape growers substituted the Teamsters for the United Farm Workers just as the lettuce growers had done earlier in the season.⁷³ By 1973, the United Farm Workers, despite its success in 1970, had lost a majority of its contracts and teetered on the brink of collapse.

For their part, Fitzsimmons and the Teamsters saw the success of the farm workers as yet another opportunity to usurp the momentum of the grape boycott and take over representation of farm workers. This approach to labor organizing was not aberrant behavior for the Teamsters, but rather a longstanding organizational strategy for growth. From the 1930s through the period of Hoffa’s leadership in the 1960s, the Teamsters had demonstrated a commitment to expansion into sectors of the economy that adjoined their base of short-haul drivers. In the 1930s, they expanded from organizing drivers in the cities to cross-country haulers. Under Hoffa, the Teamsters branched out to cover warehouse workers, forklift operators, and packing shed employees, whom Teamster drivers encountered in storage facilities. The contact between Teamster packers and warehouse workers and nonunion field workers encouraged the next phase of their expansion. Similarly, employers, although resistant to unions in general, were partial to the Teamsters when push came to shove over the unionization of their field workers because they knew the Teamsters through their presence in packing sheds.⁷⁴

Why Fitzsimmons broke his pact with the UFW can best be explained by the changing economic conditions, his friendship with Nixon, and the politics within the Teamsters. Nixon’s New Economic Policy, with an emphasis on increasing agricultural exports, signaled the expansion of the agricultural workforce. The Teamsters saw in these developments an increase in the number of possible dues-paying members, a fact that was not lost on Einar Mohn, head of the Western Conference of Teamsters, who infamously commented in 1973, “We have to have them in the union for a while. It will be a couple of years before they can start having membership meetings, before we can use the farm workers’ ideas in the union. I’m not sure how effective a union can be when it is composed of Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals with temporary visas. Maybe as agriculture becomes more sophisticated, more mechanized, with fewer transients, fewer green carders, and as jobs become more attractive to whites, then we can build a union that can have structures and that can negotiate from strength and have membership participation.”⁷⁵ Mohn’s comments reveal the cold business logic of the Teamsters. The merits of the farm workers union as a social movement were minimal; the real value in their success was the potential for an organized (and white) workforce as agriculture matured with NEP. In the short term, the mostly Mexican workforce under Teamster control would cost the union little in the way of services, while bringing in $8 per member in dues each month. Such dues contributed to the wealth of the Teamsters under Fitzsimmons. The very public drive to organize new workers and contributions to the Western Conference of Teamsters promised to shore up Fitzsimmons’s strength in the West and counter any threats among loyal followers of Hoffa in the Central and Eastern Conferences.

Chavez’s refusal to reach a settlement with Giumarra played into the hands of the Teamsters. When the fight came north, the violence escalated, given the heavy-handed approach of law enforcement officials in the Central Valley compared to Riverside County sheriffs in Coachella. On June 28, Kern County sheriffs arrested twenty to twenty-five Teamster members for attacking a UFW picket line at the Kovacavich Ranch. The assault sent four UFW volunteers and farm workers to Kern General Hospital, including sixty-two-year-old Juan Hernández, who suffered a fractured skull. Such occurrences happened with greater frequency and involved firearms, as growers began to feel the effects of the strike and boycott. On August 1, an unidentified assailant shot UFW striker, Joe Moncon, in the right shoulder at Tudor Vineyard in Delano. Just ten days later, another unknown gunman opened fire on a UFW picket line at Missakian Ranch in Kern County, wounding two. Kern County sheriffs did not make an arrest in either case. Finally, the conflict turned deadly on August 14, when a striker, Nagi Daifullah, an immigrant from Yemen and a UFW member, suffered a fatal beating at the hands of Kern County sheriffs as law enforcement officials scuffled with UFW protesters on a picket line in Lamont. Two days later, on August 16, an armed strikebreaker shot and killed Juan De La Cruz, a sixty-year-old veteran of the movement from Arvin who was picketing at Giumarra’s vineyard. The carnage of the summer spurred the National Executive Board of the union to call a halt to the strike while Chavez engaged in another fast to draw union members’ attention away from acts of retaliation. The murders also triggered an impromptu funeral march by 7,500 UFW members and supporters, which was covered by reporters and filmmakers from across the nation.⁷⁶

Although the march inspired new volunteers to join la causa and garnered public sympathy at a critical time for the union, the missed opportunity to achieve a new contract with Giumarra earlier in the season must have weighed heavily on the conscience of those involved in the failed negotiations. If Chavez had used the excuse of “whores in the camp” to squelch a deal with the grape growers in an attempt to capitalize on the economic pressure of the strike and boycott, the death of two farm workers and numerous injuries suffered by scores of volunteers must have led him to doubt his own tactics. Whether Chavez acknowledged these links, others within the union did, prompting some to question his executive abilities. As the fight with the Teamsters wore on and the decision to accept a legislative solution to achieving collective bargaining rights for farm workers loomed in the near future, such questions continued to grow.

In 1974 the Teamsters engaged in their most aggressive and expensive assault on the United Farm Workers. Fitzsimmons set aside more than $100,000 a month to fight the UFW and an additional $1 million for the establishment of a new local in Salinas Valley. On the ground, coordinators from the Western Conference of Teamsters in Burlingame, California, worked with farm workers in Salinas to organize lettuce workers. In typical Teamster fashion, the union usurped the name of a successful but short-lived movement of local workers associated with the AFL-CIO in 1965: the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. The new AWOC hoped to attract the support of workers for contracts already negotiated by the Teamsters. Even before the campaign began, the union had 308 contracts with growers who hired about 50,000 workers in the peak season. Conversely, at the beginning of the 1974 season, the UFW had fewer than a dozen growers still under contract and fewer than 10,000 members.⁷⁷

The tumultuous years of 1973 and 1974 brought results in the farm labor battle that neither group expected or perhaps wanted. The Teamsters’ naked aggression against the UFW in Coachella discredited the organization in the eyes of both workers and the public. Moreover, their attempt to change their image from a union that had contempt for Mexican workers to one that valued them proved to be too steep a curve. Within a year, many of the original Mexican American organizers hired by the Teamsters were fired, and the union lost credibility with the rank and file, never to be regained.⁷⁸ For the United Farm Workers, the conflict stretched their budget beyond its limits and confused consumers about the purpose and target of the boycott.

That the Teamsters never fully succeeded in organizing field workers mattered little to Fitzsimmons or Nixon. In spite of their personal failures as leaders, both men succeeded in achieving the goals each set for himself at the beginning of their relationship. Nixon succeeded in strengthening the hand of agribusiness over laborers and winning Fitzsimmons’s support for his economic policy. Although Nixon’s forced resignation due to the Watergate scandal denied him an opportunity to see the full implementation of his policies, the decade witnessed a decisive expansion in agricultural exports. In 1983, the Congressional Budget Office reported, “Today, two of every five [U.S.] acres produce for world markets, making exports a critical part of U.S. agricultural sales.”⁷⁹ For his part, Fitzsimmons successfully neutralized Hoffa’s challenge to his presidency, avoided prosecution for schemes to rob the pension fund, and consolidated his power in the union through expansion in the West.

For Cesar Chavez and other UFW leaders, the conflict with the Teamsters precipitated a reevaluation of strategy that would make the union less dependent on the boycott. With membership in precipitous decline and volunteers dying in the line of duty, Chavez was forced to consider working with friends in government who might be able to deliver an agricultural labor law worthy of their sacrifices. Such a change in strategy would, of course, require a reversal of Chavez’s opposition to government regulations of labor disputes. It also demanded his acceptance of a much more bureaucratic approach to solving the problems that confronted farm laborers. In a world dependent on lawyers and union field organizers to win union elections, Chavez would have to learn how to share the spotlight and decision-making powers, something that had become foreign to him by 1975.