Drake and Miller had it wrong—the secondary boycott was legal because farm workers were not covered by the national labor law—but it didn’t matter because the actual boycotters simply ignored the instructions (if they even saw them) and began to apply pressure directly against liquor stores. CORE picketers swept through Harlem and reported back to the NFWA that all of the forty-nine liquor stores they had visited had agreed to stop handling Schenley products. In one store the thirty pickets had to “visit” for quite some time, milling around inside without making any purchases, before the owner agreed that justice was on the farm workers’ side. Similar militant black and white picket lines forced the removal of Schenley liquor and wine from stores in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco, where fourteen of fifteen Mission District liquor stores got rid of Schenley products in one afternoon. Many store owners refused to comply, hoping to wait out the storm, but the new wind was just beginning to blow. Picket lines became more enthusiastic and more diverse. Trade unionists arrived; church activists joined. A new coalition was beginning to form.21
Back in Delano, Drake could hardly keep up with the new developments. Often he didn’t go back to his home in Porterville at night but instead slept on the floor of his office. One night it rained especially hard, and as water seeped onto the floor, he moved to the top of his desk. But it wasn’t big enough for his six-foot-one-inch frame and the only way he could keep his feet out of the water was by resting them on the board over the commode. It didn’t bother him one bit. Rain was pouring in, but so were the stories. His favorite one involved a teenage boy and girl who had arrived in Delano early in the strike, holding hands. As soon as the boycott started, Drake asked them to go to New York. They didn’t hesitate. They simply picked up their sleeping bags and hitchhiked east—in the middle of December. In a snowstorm outside of Denver, they were picked up by the police and arrested for vagrancy. The cops threw them in jail, where the couple told the story of the strike and the boycott to the inmates and guards. The next morning, the police took up a collection, gave them some money, and put them on the highway outside of town to resume their journey. Drake told the story around the NFWA compound, punctuating it with “Viva la huelga! ”22
But the boycott was just one of many NFWA activities. Hartmire was busy arranging for religious delegations to visit Delano and “inspect” farm-worker conditions. Chavez was particularly effective with the visiting priests, nuns, ministers, and rabbis, and he was also talking to people in the Democratic Party about how to take advantage of Governor Pat Brown’s upcoming campaign for reelection. The NFWA renewed some small organizing projects in Fresno, Salinas, and Bakersfield. Drake and the boycott remained headquartered in the women’s toilet.
* Who was white and who was not has been an issue of much confusion and some contention in California farm worker history. Sometimes Mexicans have been considered white, other times, not. Armenians had to win a lawsuit to be included in the “white race.”
* “Scab,” the traditional union term for strikebreakers, is a strange choice for a derogatory epithet. A scab, after all, is a good thing. It helps a wound heal. The word for “strikebreaker” in Mexican Spanish is esquirol, which means squirrel, and was the most common insult yelled at those working on the other side of the picket line.
12 “Boycott, Baby, Boycott! ”: The Civil Rights Coalition Regroups
August ’64 to January ’66
Large numbers of Americans, especially liberal Democrats, needed the grape boycott as much as the boycott needed them. The failed attempt to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, had shattered the alliance between liberals and radicals in the early civil rights movement. The 1965 Selma march and the passage of the Voting Rights Act would prove to be the capstone of that movement, rather than a prelude of victories to come. The 1964 peace candidate, Lyndon Johnson, had escalated the war in Vietnam soon after he was elected, and the liberals’ support for the war soon alienated them from the vast majority of the nation’s politically active young people. In the midst of massive new violence against the Vietnamese, the Watts rebellion foretold the violent possibilities of what might happen when the civil rights struggle moved out of the South. To liberal eyes the Watts riot was pure nihilism; it marked the end of the sunny optimistic days of the early 1960s and the beginning of liberalism’s long dark night. Liberals had been ready to ride the civil rights movement into a new world; it was their best hope since the Popular Front victory in World War II. But by the second half of the sixties the civil rights movement was no more, and white liberals could find no home in the movement for black power. So many people who had been so hopeful now had nothing to do except watch the twin horrors of the nightly news: black rioters burning American cities, and white radicals burning draft cards and American flags.
Enter Cesar Chavez and the table grape boycott. Here was a constructive, nonviolent, political alternative to the rioters and radicals. “Boycott, Baby, Boycott,” the picketers chanted to make sure that everyone got the point. The simple peaceful act of not eating grapes would actually help poor (and grateful!) farm workers win a union contract. The beautiful simplicity of the appeal attracted millions. With so many Americans committed to not eating grapes, and thousands actively working on the boycott campaign, that wonderful calculus of politics once again took hold. As Chavez had maintained all along, if you can get enough people together, you can change the world. The contract was won, and although the boycott did not belong to liberals alone, they were major players in the new coalition, a regrouping that allowed them to relive, in a minor key, the hopes of the early civil rights years.
The civil rights organizer Marshall Ganz and the union president Walter Reuther were on opposite sides in Atlantic City in August 1964 but on the same side in Delano in December 1965. They were flesh-and-blood examples of how the farm workers’ union in the boycott years became neutral territory in the ongoing battle between American liberals and radicals. People who couldn’t talk to each other anywhere else worked together on boycott committees, and the farm workers union received special dispensation to sit out the conflicts that divided its supporters. Not until the war in Vietnam was almost over did the UFW take a position against it, and yet the union received support from all wings of the antiwar movement. The liberals stayed on board even though the farm workers accepted Black Panther support and welcomed the black-jacketed, black-bereted militants in their marches and on their picket lines. Each side had its reasons. Radicals could not oppose a new union of third world workers, no matter that it waffled on the war; liberals could not oppose this oasis of nonviolent social change, even though they shunned others who tolerated support from black revolutionaries. The warmth generated by working together on the boycott was not enough to thaw overall relations between radicals and liberals in the late 1960s, but it did provide much of the energy for the UFW’s first significant victories.
Marshall Ganz, destined to become a major force in the UFW, arrived in Delano in September 1965, soon after the grape strike began. At twenty-one he was a veteran of Mississippi Summer, Atlantic City, and the doomed attempts after the convention to keep the old SNCC alive and functioning. He and many other white SNCC field secretaries, no longer wanted as organizers of blacks, were looking for a place to put their radical energies. Some tried to organize poor whites; some went into the liberal establishment; some went back to school; most ended up in Students for a Democratic Society or the antiwar movement. Ganz and a handful of others found Cesar Chavez.
Marshall, an only child, was born in Michigan in 1943 but moved with his mother and father to Germany when he was only three. His father was a U.S. Army rabbi, assigned to help the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust emigrate to countries willing to