The county agricultural commissioner testified that “no farm workers have been injured by the application of economic poisons in Kern County to my knowledge,” and his counsel supported this astonishing statement by fighting introduction of evidence to the contrary from the records of the state Department of Public Health. The assistant state director of agriculture, a recognized authority on pesticides, also refuted the commissioner: he referred repeatedly to poisoning cases in Kern County, including an episode in Delano in which sixteen out of twenty-four workers who entered a field more than a month after it had been sprayed were hospitalized for parathion poisoning.
For want of a better defense, the growers had called on the crop-dusting companies to fight public identification of the “economic poisons” on the grounds that the poisons were “trade secrets.” But one crop duster testified that four of the five men who mixed his chemicals had been too sick to work at one time or another during the past year, and another acknowledged that his company abandoned the use of TEPP (tetraethyl pyrophosphate) after he himself had become very ill from exposure to it. The hearings were recessed after one week at the request of the crop dusters’ attorney. A few days later, at hearings of the state Department of Agriculture at Tulare, a department expert, noting that California used more pesticides than any other state, admitted that his department made no tests on these products, preferring to accept the word of the chemical companies. This policy was vigorously attacked by a Los Angeles physician, Dr. Bravo, who owns a ranch in the Imperial Valley and is a member of the state Board of Agriculture: in his opinion, the word of the chemical companies isn’t nearly good enough. Accusing them of fraud in labeling their fertilizer and pesticide products, he declared that their prices were exorbitant—one common pesticide, he said, sells at a 3,000 percent profit—and that the labels were misleading in regard to the dangers of the products; research on the immediate and long-term effects had been totally inadequate. “Seven or eight hundred persons per year,” he understood, “are injured from these chemicals. The mortality rate is high.” It was also brought out that much pesticide use was inspired by unscrupulous advertising campaigns rather than a real need. Since the chemical companies had failed to regulate their own ethics, the doctor called for legislation of the kind that had been imposed on the drug companies, which like so many other American industries had failed miserably in its responsibilities to the people who made it prosperous.
On March 14 (in the Medical World News), there appeared a preliminary report on a five-year study by the National Cancer Institute which declared that many common pesticides act as carcinogens; the institute felt obliged to deny that it was under pressure from the chemical industry when, at the last minute, the five-year study was withdrawn as inconclusive. Meanwhile, at the hearings in Bakersfield, a Public Health Department report was cited to the effect that among ninety-four agricultural workers reported injured by pesticides in Kern County in 1968, fifty-four were farm laborers, and Judge George Browne of the Kern County Superior Court, in a decision handed down on March 27, acknowledged that “many commonly used pesticides—particularly the organic phosphate and chlorinated hydrocarbons—are highly toxic and can constitute a hazard to human health and welfare, including death, if not properly regulated and used.” Nevertheless, Judge Browne prohibited disclosure of the public records on pesticide use, basing his decision on the pesticide industry’s economic importance to the state and on the growers’ contention, which he dutifully accepted, that UFWOC’s “efforts to organize agricultural workers, and the grape strike and the boycott having been unsuccessful, the intervenor’s [i.e., Jerry Cohen and UFWOC] motive and purpose are not in fact as herein above stated, but are to use the information acquired to keep alive controversy with the growers, to assist in selling unionization to workers, and to invoke public sympathy and support and to force unionization not only through publicity but by using the information to commence and prosecute groundless lawsuits for alleged pesticide injuries against growers and owners.”
Though it called the Superior Court decision “appalling,” the Union had won a propaganda victory. To keep the issue alive, it appealed the decision, and in April filed a series of suits with the declared intention of forbidding further use of DDT in California, where over 1,300,000 pounds of this long-lived poison are still used annually in the San Joaquin Valley alone. In Washington, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin was calling for a national ban on DDT (“The accumulation of DDT in our environment . . . is reaching catastrophic proportions”), citing the recent confiscation by the FDA of ten tons of contaminated salmon from Lake Michigan, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare announced that the average American diet contains 10 percent more DDT than the limits set down by the World Health Organization. California’s leading newspapers, the conservative Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, were also clamoring for regulation of the pesticides which had grossly polluted California’s rivers and were threatening the fisheries. Under the circumstances, the California Farm Bureau Federation thought it best to join the hue and cry against DDT, which it did officially on May 25.
The growers’ troubles were just beginning. Under the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, all new labor groups must file a report on their organization with the U.S. Department of Labor, and on February 22—eight months late—the report of the Agricultural Workers Freedom to Work Association was finally filed by its president, Gilbert Rubio, and Shirley Fetalvero, its secretary-treasurer. The report declared that AWFWA was and had been from the beginning an organization set up by the growers, with the support of the John Birch Society, to fight the effect of Chavez’s union by disrupting UFWOC efforts to organize and boycott, to seek worker support for AWFWA (propaganda, free picnics, no dues), to obtain information on UFWOC sympathizers, activities, and future plans, and so forth. The AWFWA staff was paid through a front outfit that called itself “Mexican-Americans for Democratic Action,” and was furnished office space and typewriters at the Edison Highway headquarters of the Giumarra corporations in Bakersfield; use of mimeograph machines, office supplies, and the like, were furnished by the Di Giorgio ranch at Arvin, despite a clause in Di Giorgio’s contract with UFWOC that prohibits activities tending to undermine the Union.
The report also stated that AWFWA was set up originally at a lunch meeting in Sambo’s Restaurant in Bakersfield, in May 1968. At this meeting it was decided that Gilbert Rubio and Joe Mendoza would be hired at $120 a week to oppose Chavez, and that a number of growers not present at the meeting would be solicited for support. “Several meetings involving many persons were held but only John Giumarra, Jr., Robert Sabovich and Jack Pandol gave orders to Mendoza and AWFWA.”
In early March, UFWOC announced that court action would be filed in Bakersfield against the John Birch Society, the National Freedom to Work Committee and a group of growers on grounds of conspiracy to form an illegal employer-dominated union; a separate suit would be filed against the Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation for intentional subversion of its Union contract. Meanwhile Mendoza, claiming that AWFWA no longer existed, had been sent on an anti-boycott lecture tour of the Eastern cities by the National Right to Work Committee, and appeared at a committee banquet in Washington, D.C., where he was presented with an award by Senator Everett Dirksen for his efforts on behalf of American farm workers.
On March 7, two weeks after he had filed the AWFWA report, Gilbert Rubio was haled into the Delano court for his part in the October disturbance for which his gang had been arrested. Although his probation report had recommended a maximum of thirty days, he was given a sentence of three months. (After a week the Union got him freed on a technicality, but the jail term is still pending. Since then, the luckless Gilbert had been hospitalized with head injuries suffered in a fall, and has been arrested once again, charged with drunken driving.)
If its own report is true, AWFWA was nothing more than an inept right-wing conspiracy whose founders undertook to destroy a legitimate organization and
smear the reputation of its leader, Cesar Chavez. The usual cheap Americanism was invoked, and the law of the land purposely broken, for no worthier cause than their own wallets. In the list of sponsors of this enterprise, most of the names are predictable enough: I was sorry to see “John J. Kovacevich” among them.
During the winter the Union had maintained the boycott pressure. Except for the Gristede chain, New York City was reported “clean” of grapes by January, and in Chicago the wholesalers acknowledged that the warehouses held fifty thousand boxes, still unsold. In California, storage grapes were sold off for wine at the disastrous price of $26 a ton. The boycott had even taken hold in the big cities of the South; in Atlanta the campaign was led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., in recognition of the esteem in which Chavez had been held by his late son. In London, on February 12, British stevedores refused to unload a grape shipment of seventy thousand pounds, and their protest spread to other ports in England, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The following day, February 13, Jack Pandol and Martin Zaninovich declared at a public meeting of the state Board of Agriculture in Tulare that no strike existed and that the boycott had had no effect.
This was too much for Lionel Steinberg, the Coachella grower who is thought of as the “liberal” on the Board; most of Steinberg’s workers had gone out on strike in June 1968, after his refusal to hold elections or negotiate with the Union, and another Coachella grower, Harry Carrian, had declared bankruptcy. Steinberg said it was “short-sighted” of the Board to pretend that no strike existed. He was also annoyed that the rice farmers, dairymen and others on the Board, in the hope of deferring their own confrontation with the Union, were crying fiercely for a “fight to the death” against Chavez; it was the grape growers, after all, who were doing all the fighting, and it was the grape growers who were faced with death in 1969. The harvest season in Coachella was only a few months away, and markets all over the country were pleading with the growers to resolve the boycott crisis before the start of the new season.
Of all the supermarkets, the most intransigent was Safeway, which has well over two thousand stores and is the largest buyer of table grapes in the West. The interlocking business interests of Safeway’s board of directors give a vivid idea of what is meant by “agribusiness.” One director, J. G. Boswell, is also president of J. G. Boswell, Inc., one of the largest cotton growers in California—it owns 135,000 acres in California alone—and the largest grape grower in Arizona: in 1968, for not growing cotton, Boswell received over four million of the taxpayers’ dollars in subsidies from the U.S. government. Another director is Ernest Arbuckle, who is also a director of the Kern County Land Company; KCL received $838,000 in cotton subsidies. Other board members own, direct or have large financial holdings in sugar plantations, the Southern Pacific Railroad, Del Monte canned foods, the 168,000-acre Tejon Ranch, and other huge components of California agribusiness. (Compared with agri-businessmen like these, the Giumarras are small farmers, having received but $278,000 in cotton subsidies in 1968.)
Nevertheless, Safeway styled itself “neutral” in the grape dispute, stating its intention to protect the consumer by offering grapes as it has always done. Robert Magowan, the company’s chairman of the board, declared that “there has been flagrant injustice for the Mexican migrant worker . . . but we are not a party to the dispute. That is between the growers and the Union.” The chairman is a director of the J. G. Boswell farm empire as well as of such huge agribusiness corporations as Del Monte, Southern Pacific and Caterpillar Tractor: his recognition of “flagrant injustice” and his simultaneous refusal to act on it call to mind the signs that appeared this winter in East Los Angeles, after one of the street kids was killed by a policeman: GRINGO JUSTICE IS SPELLED M-O-N-E-Y.
In early March, Chavez was visited by Dr. Janet Travell, whose treatment had worked so well for President Kennedy. Dr. Travell discovered that Chavez’s “disc trouble” was actually a painful muscle spasm: his right leg is shorter than his left, one side of his pelvis is smaller, and he has what is known as a “transitional vertebra”; in consequence, the muscles on his right side were doing all the work. As he grew older and less resilient, these muscles could no longer compensate, and spasms developed which gradually became constant. “She is really phenomenal,” Marion Moses wrote me on March 20. “By a few simple mechanical adjustments, using books, scissors, paste and felt, she got him where he was comfortable. Then she uses a spray technique with a surface anesthesia which relaxes the muscle so it can be stretched to relieve the spasm. Today for the first time in years Cesar said that he woke up without pain. He looks much better, most of the pain lines are gone from his face most of the time—and most importantly of all, he is following the treatment very faithfully. He really is very anxious to get well and start organizing again.” In fact, he was anxious to go to the Coachella Valley, but Manuel Chavez and many others were dead set against it: the strong possibility of victory should not be endangered by the increased tension that Cesar’s presence there would bring.
The growers, expecting sympathy from a Nixon Administration, were lobbying for new farm labor legislation, and on April 16 Dolores Huerta, Jerry Cohen and Robert McMillen, the Union’s legislative representative in Washington, appeared before the Subcommittee on Labor of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, which was holding hearings on a new bill to include farm workers under the National Labor Relations Act. Other farm workers, from Wisconsin, Texas, Florida and Colorado, also testified. Mrs. Huerta read a general statement by Chavez, who could not be present; he was concerned about the illusory protection that the NLRA would give to farm workers unless the new union was at least temporarily exempted from the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin amendments, which would deprive it of the only weapons at its disposal, and thus legislate it out of existence. “Under the complex and time-consuming procedures of the National Labor Relations Board, growers can litigate us to death; forced at last by court order to bargain with us in good faith, they can bargain in good faith—around the calendar if need be—unless we are allowed to apply sufficient economic power to make it worth their while to sign.
“We want to be recognized, yes, but not with a glowing epitaph on our tombstone.”
Unfortunately, the Union had not publicized its position on the NLRA before the hearings, and Chavez’s resistance was misunderstood and resented, even by some segments of the press that had been sympathetic. Inevitably, the growers and their spokesmen ridiculed his fear that the “protection” of the NLRA might legislate his union out of existence. “By opposing various measures newly introduced in Congress to improve the bargaining position of farm workers, the head of UFWOC has shown up his cause for what it is: neither peace-loving nor compassionate, but a ruthless grab for power,” cried an editorial in Barron’s on June 2; in this same issue, three months after AWFWA had been exposed as a disreputable fake, Barron’s was still taking it seriously. Meanwhile the growers were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on anti-Chavez propaganda prepared by expensive advertising firms, including an attack by the president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League which blamed UFWOC for “the terror tactics visited upon the grocery outlets of this nation”; he referred to the fire bombings at A&P stores in New York City in October 1968 which the Union long ago admitted were probably the work of misguided sympathizers. Out of context, Barron’s quoted from Chavez’s “Marxist” response to the League’s attack: “‘While we do not belittle or underestimate our adversaries, for they are the rich and the powerful and possess the land, we are not afraid or cringe from the confrontation. We welcome it! We have planned for it. We know that our cause is just, that history is a story of social revolution, and that the poor shall inherit the land.’” The word “revolution” is the key to Barron’s uneasiness, but the truth is that the United Farm Workers have never asked for land reforms, nor considered revolt against the American Way of Life; they ask only for a share in it.
An example of what Barron’s means by leg
islation “newly introduced in Congress to improve the bargaining position of farm workers” is the “Food Profits Protection Act,” sponsored by a legislator who has called the farm workers’ strike “dishonest.”
WASHINGTON, Apr. 30 [1969] (AP)—Senator George Murphy (Rep., Cal.) Tuesday unveiled a plan that he said would protect customers and agriculture from persons he called “of narrow interest, limited vision,” such as organizers of the California grape boycott . . .
Murphy said his bill would safeguard production and marketing of food products from labor disputes and provide “an orderly system within which agricultural workers may organize and bargain collectively.”
He would prohibit secondary boycotts, efforts to persuade a farmer to join a union or employer organization or to recognize or bargain with an uncertified union, picketing at retail stores, and inducements to employees not to handle or work on an agricultural commodity after it leaves the farm.
“Strikes at farms are not permitted if the strike may reasonably be expected to result in permanent loss or damage to the crop,” Murphy said.
He said that he expects to get President Nixon’s endorsement of his plan but has not solicited it . . .
President Nixon endorsed instead a plan attributed to his Secretary of Labor, Mr. Schultz, under the terms of which farm workers would remain excluded from the jurisdiction and protection of the NLRB but would be subject to the strike-killing provisions of the Taft-Hartley amendment that forbid secondary boycotts and organizational picketing; a special “Farm Labor Relations Board” could delay any strike at harvest time (in farm labor disputes, a strike at any other time is a waste of effort) with a thirty-day period of grace that could be invoked at the discretion of the grower. After thirty days, when the harvest in any given field would be largely completed, the workers could strike to their heart’s content.