Officials of the Farm Bureau Federation in Bakersfield admitted to the Housing Authority that the housing was kept miserable because they wanted the migrants to work, then leave the area; good housing might encourage them to stay and become a burden on the schools and facilities of the community. Instead, farm workers pile up in the urban slums, where they go on welfare and become dependents of municipalities with grim problems of their own; in effect, the cities pay for the selfishness of the rural communities. This situation will worsen as automation continues and populations grow, since the great majority of farm workers are untrained in any other work. “One of the most ominous developments is the appeal for law and order by many politicians,” Ernesto Galarza, author of Merchants of Labor and a veteran defender of the farm workers, has said. “They are lining up on one side the Negro and the Mexican, who are dependent and who know it, and who feel the humiliations and frustrations of this dependence, and on the other side the middle-class taxpayers, who are hard pressed by the growing tax burden. This is the confrontation of the future. The anger it will generate will make the Black Panther movement look trivial.”
The town of Arvin, a small outgrowth on Di Giorgio Road, was named for a grower named Arvin Missakian; otherwise, it is too nebulous to be described. On the far side of its railroad spur, toward the mountains, are the packing house, sheds and offices of John J. Kovacevich, whose views I sought on the subject of the $50-million suit. Ann Israel came with me, and as we drove across the tracks into the shed area, we saw grapes coming off a belt and dropping into a gondola, to be pressed for wine, an almost certain sign that Mr. Kovacevich had more table grapes than unfilled orders. (The alternative to wine is raisins, a product in chronic surplus.) The day before, Julio Hernandez had reported from Cincinnati that the price of Kovacevich grapes had dropped from 49 cents to 29 cents a pound.
At the office I asked to see the boss, and the secretary said she thought this could be arranged. But just at this moment a door opened and out came Joseph Brosmer. We gazed at each other in mutual consternation, and then he said, “I’ll pave the way for you,” and went back into the office, closing the door behind him.
A few minutes later Mr. Kovacevich came out. He is a tall, balding man in his late fifties, with fierce eyebrows pinching in on a big hawk nose. Making no effort to be hospitable, he demanded to know what we wanted, then told us to follow him into his office, where he slammed the door. I took a seat beside the desk, and Mrs. Israel sat down beside Joseph Brosmer on a couch against the wall. As usual Mr. Brosmer, though indoors and seated, had his arms folded on his chest.
Kovacevich, who was breathing hard, glared at me expectantly, and I said straight off that I was partisan to the Union, as no doubt Mr. Brosmer had told him, but that I was anxious to talk to as many growers as I could, to make certain that their side got a fair hearing. In the interests of accuracy, I continued, I would like permission to use a tape recorder, and I was in the process of unlimbering my small machine when Kovacevich snatched a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle from his desk and flung it against my chest.
“Are you silly or something?” he shouted. “Do you know how it feels to get sued for fifty million dollars?” In the bad silence that ensued, I glanced at Brosmer; he was staring like a corpse at his maddened client, as if seeking to subdue him by hypnosis. Kovacevich, declaring his innocence in no uncertain terms, swore that he would file a countersuit for libel; what the hell did I think this did to his good name? This seemed an implied acknowledgment that wrongdoing had been done, but having no wish to elicit extreme statements, I did not point it out. As a group the growers are so defensive that one must bend over backward to keep them from presenting themselves unfairly; the unprovoked opinions that they offer seem damaging enough.
Over Mr. Kovacevich’s head were the Kovacevich labels, which include ROYAL K and K & K, and on a table to his right were photographs of his sons; I recognized one as an intelligent-looking boy of college age who had been sitting on the office porch when we came in. There was a certain resemblance to the father, though not just at this moment; in profile, calming himself, Kovacevich reminded one of a beaky bird whose crest, raised high in outrage or alarm, moves up and down as it settles back again. He was reeling off the usual arguments against Chavez, which once again were so uniform in their clichés that I wondered if they had not been memorized by all the growers up and down the Valley. Already that day, in the New York Daily News, the same arguments had been made in a full-page ad taken out by the California Grape and Tree Fruit League: once again, the consumer was informed that California farm workers enjoyed higher wages and more protective laws than any in the nation, and therefore wanted no part of a union: “They have not walked off the job! THEY ARE NOT ON STRIKE!” The ad concluded with an appeal to the consumer: “As a consumer you have the inalienable right to demand free access to any product. . . . Protect your pocketbook from chaos in the food stores! . . . Demand that your local food store carry California Table Grapes!” The growers ceaselessly suggest that wage increases will put their product out of reach of the consumer, but according to figures issued by the U.S. Department of Labor, the workers are paid but 2 to 5 cents out of each dollar invested, so that even a very large increase in pay could not increase the retail price by more than a few pennies.
Kovacevich also related the sad plight of the grower, crying out at one point that he could not buy a car; he had to rent one. (Perhaps he assumed that a left-wing reporter would be ignorant of corporation tax devices, and as a matter of fact, he was right; it was Mrs. Israel who smartened me up when we got outside.) In the course of this speech he let it be known that he was a friend of former Governor Pat Brown and Hubert Humphrey as well as of the workingman; Humphrey had been his guest at the Bakersfield Country Club, of which Mr. Kovacevich is a past president, and also at his house.
In effect, what we were hearing was a sincere and impassioned speech of self-justification by a man fighting angrily to banish a painful truth, and losing inch by inch to his own honesty. “Don’t tell me about social consciousness!” he exclaimed to Mrs. Israel, who had been talking to him rather bluntly about just that. “I’ve got a boy who is studying sociology at Notre Dame, and I know all about it!” He indicated the picture on the table. “Sometimes a young man can be too social-conscious for his own good,” he added somberly. He looked haggard and upset, and I wondered about that boy out on the porch, and about what he thought of the fight for a new order that was taking place in his generation.
Mr. Kovacevich says “Don’t tell me!” a lot, and clearly he is a man who has not been told things very often. Like all of the growers that I talked to except Bruno Dispoto, he is sincerely sorry for himself, yet he seemed more reasonable than all the rest. He pointedly dissociated himself from the position of Jack Pandol, and he admitted that small “shotgun” labor camps still existed. He spoke of Leroy Chatfield, who had taught his sons at Garces High School in Bakersfield, as “one of the brightest people I ever met,” and when I asked how he accounted for the fact that this bright person so fervently endorsed Cesar Chavez, he did not tighten up but said quite simply, “He must be an idealist, I guess.” Saul Alinsky, whom he had once seen on TV, was “brilliant”—an extraordinary statement in a community which had made Alinsky the Bolshevik evil genius behind Chavez—and alone among all the growers that I talked to, he made no attempt to identify Chavez with Communism. On the contrary, he spoke of Chavez as a human being, not some nightmare figure waving the bloody flag of revolution.
In consequence, the case Kovacevich made for the real problems of the American farmer in America, which are considerable, was much more effective for being free of slicked-over racism and self-serving patriotism, and as I sat there listening it struck me how sad it was that a man as otherwise intelligent and articulate as this one could not or would not meet with Cesar Chavez. I said as much, and to my sorrow John Kovacevich retreated, saying that Chavez was vengeful and could not be reasoned with: hadn’t h
e sworn that before he was through he would stamp the damned growers right into the mud? I asked where he had heard that story, and he said, “At the Delano Kiwanis.”
I wondered if John Kovacevich believed what he was told about Chavez because as a big grower in the Valley, it would take such courage not to; among the producers of table grapes, the first to acknowledge right on the side of Chavez will not be invited to the Delano Kiwanis or any place else.
Still, John Kovacevich is a natural leader and a highly respected farmer. A grower from Fresno, who told me that this man raises the best grapes in California and therefore America, refers to him as “Mister Grape.” One of the reasons why Mister Grape is so respected, said my informant, is because of his willingness to experiment, to break new ground. Apparently Kovacevich has long since conceded that a farm workers union is inevitable: the question is whether he will follow the retreat of the right-wing growers to a “sweetheart” contract with the Teamsters, or follow his own conscience.
My impressions of Kovacevich were affirmed later by Leroy Chatfield, who said that the man was not only a Democrat—and therefore a near-radical by grower standards—but someone genuinely concerned about social issues. He had been a member of the State Labor Committee, and once told Leroy that he had refused to join the California Farm Bureau because it was so hopelessly right-wing. “He wants to do right,” Leroy said, “he really does. And I admire him because as a parent he never gave me any problems. All the other growers did—Giumarra and the potato people, all of them. They thought their children were being poisoned by reading books on civil rights, the Peace Corps, and everything, but not Kovacevich. I was challenging his kids to read and to think and to discuss, and he genuinely seemed to appreciate it. When Mike changed from a business major to sociology or something, he went along with it, and as for the kids, they’re fine. They had new cars and lots of money, but they weren’t spoiled; in fact, they were sometimes worried about the workers.” Leroy sighed. “You know something? I’ve always had a funny idea that John J. would call me up before this is over and say, ‘Okay, let’s talk.’”
Kovacevich had cited to me the case of Lionel Steinberg, a Coachella grower who treated his workers better than average, and who had bitched hard when his ranch was one of the first to be picketed. “Why him?” Kovacevich demanded. “He’s been more liberal than anybody!”
Chatfield nodded when I told him about it. “Of course,” he said. “That’s exactly why we picked on him. He understands more, so he’s more responsible.”
Late in the day at the motel pool I scraped acquaintance with two growers who would not reveal their names: they lay on lounge chairs, white as potato except for their faces and arms. They were Italo-Americans and brothers, and they told me about the old Italian gardeners on their farm who were now dying out; with these old men, the old standards would disappear. “Everybody in this country is cutting corners on quality these days,” one said; it was all the same to him. “Your quality product is a thing of the past,” he added, dismissing my regrets, as well as quality itself, with one aw-get-outta-here wave of his hand.
These two men assured me that no outsider—they meant myself and said so—could understand the situation in the Valley, where even doctors and lawyers had worked as children “in the grape”; this was why all that trouble at Giumarra’s over child labor laws was a bunch of baloney. The Giumarras had been poor fruit peddlers in L.A., for Chrissake, and they had worked hard, we all did, to make that money, and what was being done to them was a crying shame.
My bathing companions took the official Valley line that there was no labor problem and therefore no strike; that the growers would let their grapes rot before they let Chavez near them; that in any case, automation of wine- and raisin-grape harvesting had already begun, and automation of the table-grape industry would be under way within five years. (The five-year figure is as invariable as it is wrong: even if the machine is perfected and produced in that space of time, there will be a hiatus while the old vines are uprooted and replaced by new ones trained in a different way to accommodate mechanical harvesting. Either the defeat of Chavez or his victory could delay this problematical machine indefinitely.) “If that guy hasn’t signed up the table-grape boys by this October,” one brother said, “he’s finished.” This time the same hand motion dismissed myself and Chavez. “But he’s making a lot of money, that’s for sure.” I shook my head. One brother actually sat up at that, cocking his head to look at me. “If he isn’t,” he said, “he’s stupid. Or a Communist.” I said he was neither. “Do you mean to tell me that’s not a Commie flag, that one with the sickle on it?”
“That’s not a sickle,” I said, wishing Manuel were present. “That’s an eagle.”
“An eagle?” He didn’t say “What’s the difference?” but his shrug did.
Outside my motel room when I returned was an old blue station wagon belonging to Gilbert Rubio of the Agricultural Workers Freedom to Work Association. I invited him inside and gave him a drink, which he scarcely touched; he sat stiffly in the chair nearest the door and said that he wished to talk to me, but did not wish to talk to me in the absence of “Mister Joe Mendoza,” with whom he would return later in the evening. Since I was in a hurry, I said fine, but Rubio kept talking, and as he never returned later, or ever again, I am sorry now that I was not more hospitable. Not that what he said was interesting, because it wasn’t; it was the way he said it. Invariably, he said “Mister” Mendoza, “Mister” Chavez, even when complaining in intense yet monotonous tones of how Mister Chavez had wrongfully accused him of “embezzlement.” Almost everything he said was already written in the same words on a green AWFWA leaflet that he handed me, and most of it was directed against Chavez. I suggested that AWFWA was merely a mouthpiece for anti-Chavez propaganda that would fold up if Chavez were defeated, and Rubio said eagerly that this was true.
AWFWA, which calls UFWOC a Communist conspiracy, is often cited by conservative magazines (Nation’s Business for October 1968 is one recent example) as evidence of the growers’ contention that “real” farm workers resist Chavez, but having read its publications and talked to its co-director, I would have found it difficult to take them seriously even if I were against Chavez. Gilbert Rubio, who had been arrested a month earlier for threatening the pickets at Giumarra with a rifle, was so taut with frustration that I felt he might snap at any moment. He is an unprepossessing boy not yet in his twenties, with thick glasses and thick-looking skin from which small, frightened eyes peer out, as through a mask; there was no way to reach him, and I saw immediately why Cesar felt so sorry for him.
Rubio and I gazed at each other, mutually perplexed, and then he went away in his blue car. A few days later I watched him circle the Union offices, rounding the block again and again, horn blaring senselessly, before he took off across the vineyards, howling south toward McFarland; the sound of Gilbert’s horn came trailing back long after the roof of his blue car had sunk into the green.
* Ernesto Laredo, Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1968.
11
ON Friday, August 9, at eleven in the morning, I met Chavez at the Civic Center in San Francisco. I was wandering the marble caverns of the second floor, in search of the mayor’s office, when I heard my name called in a voice with a soft ring that pierced the flat nasal clangor of the corridor. Chavez, waving, was penned in a circle of seven heavy men, perhaps fifty feet away. He had already met with Mayor Alioto, who said that if the growers would not negotiate, he would support the boycott. Now Chavez was dealing with lesser dignitaries, who were scraping an acquaintance that might prove useful to them later on: they were bunched like flies. “I wantcha to shake the hand of Seezer Sha-vez!” they hailed one another, anxious to be seen with him. Cesar stood quietly among them, hands in pockets, looking pleasant, gazing past the big avid faces with dark innocent eyes. In the cool air of San Francisco, he wore a dark-blue windbreaker over his plaid shirt.
The previous day Chavez had met wit
h Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of Cleveland, and had gotten the impression from people there that the Cleveland police were working actively to depose Stokes and would probably succeed. He feels strongly that police chiefs should be elected. “It’s becoming apparent to me now,” he said as we left City Hall, “that the real problem we have in America is whether or not we are becoming a police state. And if we do, the Negroes will get it first.” He was already worried about Nixon’s nomination, feeling as I did that the exhumed Nixon was only the same old article in a new plastic bag. The day before, Hubert Humphrey had destroyed whatever faint hope one could have in him with his jingo cry “No sell-out in Vietnam!” We sadly agreed that the hope of a new America that had begun with McCarthy’s wan revolution had probably been illusory.
Outside, on a rare day for San Francisco, a bright sun shone on the false gold leaf of the municipal façade, and far above, rippling nobly against the blue, American and Californian nylon flags flew in honor of the old imperial glories. Chavez talked more about Stokes, who apparently is a quiet man, much more to Cesar’s taste than most politicians. “He’s a real human being. And he’s got a lot of black people in city government, not just one showcase Negro like they have here; his offices are crawling with them.” Like Chavez, Stokes has been disappointed by the liberals, who cry out continually about principles but do nothing; a leader in office who was serious about reforms could not afford high principles that stood in the way of results. In Chavez’s opinion, liberals were rarely as helpful to the poor as old-style local politicians, who were corrupt and didn’t care who knew it, but worked hard for the poor because the poor got them elected.