Little Cesar Ralph de Toledano 1971 Foreword by United States Senator Paul J. Fannin There is much in this book to worry Americans. But what is most significant to me is the light it casts on the forgotten people of the “great grape strike” and the boycott which brought success to Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers’ Organizing Committee, and the AFL-CIO. Those forgotten people were the men and women who actually pick the grapes in the San Joaquin Valley. They bitterly opposed—and still do—the efforts of the Chavez group to force them into the straightjacket of a compulsory union—and one which has reverted to the closed shop practices which were declared illegal by the Congress in 1974. Most grape pickers of Delano knew that the Chavez “union” wouldreduce the size of their paychecks and deprive them of the freedom of action they had always enjoyed—and their fears proved to be true. The workers felt no sympathy for the revolutionary doctrines, espoused by Chavez and his handful of followers, which they tied to their unsupported demands for collective bargaining. But the forgotten people wee crushed by the machine. With almost unlimited funds from the great labor aggregations at his disposal, and the massive assistance of an unquestioning mass media, Cesar Chavez was able to deprive the grape pickers of their rights under the First Amendment of the Constitution. In this tragic process, the UFWOC and the AFL-CIO were the upper millstone. The grape growers of Delano were the nether millstone. Compelled by the threat of bankruptcy to sign contracts with Chavez, the growers agreed to arrangements which sold the grape workers into the indenture of a closed shop—with no other choice but go hungry. California’s labor statute made it illegal for the growers to discourage compulsory unionism as a condition of employment. But it allowed Chavez and the UFWOC to drive the pickers into a union against their openly-stated wishes. The contract, in short, was one in which the two signatory parties deprived a third party of his rights under law. This, it would seem, is anti-American and antihuman. Unfortunately, many of those who supported the Chavez strike and boycott were unaware of these vital considerations. They had been convinced that the grape pickers of Delano were earning starvation wages, and the pickers were being intimidated by grower violence. The exact opposite was true. This is what makes Ralph de Toledano’s fascinating and documented account of the events in the San Joaquin Valley so valuable. Toledano has not only dug long and hard to get at the facts, he has also brought to his account, experience and understanding as one of the country’s most perceptive political writers. Perhaps his recital of the facts will lead the voting public to press for the enactment by the Congress of a sane and equitable labor statute. If it does, the major beneficiaries will be the forgotten people of America who produce the fruits of our greatness. Introduction On December 8, 1965, the Manchester Guardian—a newspaper which prides itself as being in the great tradition of British liberalism—published a story about what was then a little known happening in the faraway town of Delano, California. It was written in the hortatory style so dear to crusading reporters, painting a tragic and indignation-filled picture of a strike of grape pickers. And it was filled with the kind of detail which makes a newspaper account convincing. “The verdant San Joaquin Valley, California’s ‘fruit bowl,’ has again become the principal battleground in organized labor’s decades-old fight to organize the workers in the fields,” said the Guardian. “Although the agricultural farm workers are not being rousted from their shacks inn the dead of night by armed mobs of vigilantes and American Legionnaires as they were before the war, and in spite of the absence of the Communist agitators, the new conflict reflects the same basic struggle that John Steinbeck chronicled in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ . The battle-cry is ‘huelga’ (Spanish for ‘strike’) . The focal point of the union’s organizing drive is Delano, an unattractive vineyard community of about 11,000 in northern Kern County . “The town is divided by the highway—and the huelga, which began September 8 when 3,000 Mexican-American and Filipino-American grape pickers walked off the job. The stoppage resulted from the refusal of the growers to recognize their collective bargaining agents, the AFL-CIO Agriculture Workers’ Organizing Committee and the National Farm Workers’ Association. The two unions had jointly asked for a wage increase from $1.20 an hour to $1.40 an hour. “Most of the workers in the Delano work harvest are members of migrant families who eke out marginal livings by ‘following the crops’ around the United States. They live in primitive rented quarters in employer-owned labor camps, and, in many instances, are forced to purchase their food from farm-owned stores . “The growers, better organized than the unions, speak through ‘protective associations’… All have steadfastly refused to deal with the unions as lawful representatives of the workers, and their members have methodically set about the task of breaking the strike. But the time-honored anti-labor practices which proved so effective 30 years ago don’t seem to work any more. “The first step was the wholesale eviction of the strikers from their rented home… (But) any attempts at intimidation (by the growers) has been thwarted by the presence of dozens of clergymen, joined by university students and labor leaders who have helped to man the picket lines around ranches and vineyards…” There was only one thing wrong with the Manchester Guardian’sdramatic story: None of it was true. It was, in fact, but the precursor of a vast spillage of propaganda into the American and world mass media which ignored or suppressed the facts, shut out answering voices from the channels of information, and finally struck down the very people it was presumably devoted to benefiting—the grape pickers of Delano. There was another victim—the ethics of the mass media, caught with its bias showing and a smug look on its face. These words are not lightly written. I have probably been to Delano more times and spoken to more grape pickers than any other writer for the national press. Because I speak Spanish, I have been able to reach many whose English is either primitive or non-existent. My columns on Delano won me the enmity of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, until recently a paper organization, and of much of the mass media. The Manchester Guardian, at least, had the excuse of its long remove from California. But as Cesar Chavez made his nonexistent “huelga” a national issue, reporters from near and far flocked into Delano, spent several hours at the UFWOC headquarters, and returned to write stories and articles that should have won them the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Stanford Daily, just a few hours drive from Delano would “report” seriously that in the San Joaquin Valley “the average farmworker works ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and earns less than $2,000 a year.” Then, to show how callously the farm workers were treated, how they had no medical care, the newspaper told a harrowing tale: “This June, a young woman, pregnant and in labor, entered the Kern County General Hospital. Eight hours passed before she received any medical attention. Both she and her baby died.” A careful check showed that there had been no maternity deaths of farm workers at the hospital for four years. This kind of fictionalizing and pamphleteering was not limited to a few newspapers. The New York Times, Newsweek, Time magazine, the major opinion journals took up. the wondrous and phony tale. The television networks joined in—and all efforts to correct the record were ignored. The grape pickers writhed and complained and held mass meetings to tell their side of the story—but they were ignored. The mass media decided that Delano was a classical case of noble union versus grasping employers, and in time the workers found themselves crushed between the upper and nether millstone. What follows is the true story of Delano and its grape pickers, of a three-cornered fight in which their side was rarely told. They are a warm, generous, and courageous people, delivered into “slavery”—their word—by the ambitions of Cesar Chavez, a man whose “charisma” is felt only by the rich and highly placed of the world, applauding comfortably from the sidelines, and by a clergy which has sold its ministry for a handful of newspaper clippings. In preparing this document, I have spoken to people in all walks of life and of all religions. I have discovered that the Chavez charisma grows in direct proportion to the distance from Delano where his name evokes expression of hatred and fear. The grape pickers of Delano know that in spite of the almost unlimited funds at his disposal and the ceaseless support of the mass media, Cesar Chavez was never able to recruit more than 2,500 members nationwide, 500 in their area, if that many, into his “union.” They know that the capitulation of the growers to the UFWOC has forced them without their consent into a closed shop in which they are subjected to economic blackmail and where their standard of living has gone down. They know that Delano, which once gave them a good and contented living, has changed into a city of conflict and misery.