Marshall Ganz turned five in a camp for children whose parents had been killed. He got no gifts for his birthday; instead he gave presents to the other kids. But painful lessons on sacrificing for those less fortunate than himself were not all he took from Germany. He also received an early education in living in another culture and speaking multiple languages. By the time his family settled in Bakersfield in 1953, the 10-year-old Marshall was fluent in German and English and familiar with Yiddish and Polish. He also learned some Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah. This early education took hold. The adult Ganz’s ability to learn Spanish quickly, to master the linguistic and cultural subtleties of Mexicans, to be at home among farm workers, is famous among early UFW staffers. When his Spanish fluency was combined with his large Mexican-style mustache and his proud, substantial belly, Ganz’s actual origin became a mystery to many farm workers. I remember one time listening to him talk to a crowd of workers, and the man next to me asked in Spanish what country Ganz came from. I said he was a gringo, like me. The other worker wouldn’t believe it. I finally said that he was a Jew. “Ahhh, that explains it,” he said.
At Bakersfield High School in the late 1950s, Marshall was the only white boy in an otherwise all-black jazz band. His favorite novelist was Jack Kerouac. His parents, especially his mother, were strong antiracists, but he remembers his own concerns as more cultural than political. For college, he confidently applied nowhere but Harvard, where he was admitted in 1960. It seemed that Marx and Freud were on every reading list, and classes with two popular professors, Perry Miller and Stanley Hoffman, encouraged him to expand his notion of culture to include politics. He was attracted to the Cuban Revolution and also to Jack Kennedy, who visited Harvard soon after the 1960 election. As far as Ganz can recall, the Bay of Pigs with its obvious contradiction between Kennedy’s liberal imperialism and Castro’s radical revolution, did not make him reconsider his dual enthusiasms.
Uneasy at Harvard, in 1962 he moved to Berkeley, which was crackling with cultural and political energy. Berkeley students and a whole community of people around the campus were engaged in battles for nuclear disarmament, educational reform, and civil rights. This emerging sensibility was nurtured and welcomed by a Bay Area political and cultural left-wing community that had managed to survive McCarthyism and the fifties. With the International Longshore and Warehouse Union providing jobs and ballast, and the North Beach poets contributing a spirit of uncompromising cultural rebellion, the West Coast version of the new student politics not only enjoyed a sense of being new but also had a healthy connection to the old. Marshall dropped right into the middle of it. He got a job in an insurance office in Oakland and an apartment in Berkeley, and started attending night classes at the university. He went to concerts by Barbara Dane and Malvina Reynolds, attended a few Dubois Club meetings, and grew increasingly interested in the civil rights movement. One event he remembers in particular was Pete Seeger singing at the ILWU hall in San Francisco. The place was packed with an impressive combination of African American longshoremen, Old Left veterans, and student radicals. Seeger brought down the house with a roaring medley of “Wasn’t That a Time,” in which the last line became, “Isn’t this a time, isn’t this a terrible time, isn’t this a time to try the souls of men, isn’t this a wonderful time.” It was the spring of 1963.
Marshall returned to Harvard, invigorated. He wanted to study, to figure out how politics and culture fit together. He took on Brecht. He wanted to understand what had happened to artists in the Soviet Union. He had a whole agenda he intended to explore. But the study of politics took second place to politics itself. He went to the first meetings of the campus SDS chapter. He got involved with the local Friends of SNCC. During the spring break he went to a SNCC staff meeting in Atlanta, where he learned that Harvard owned stock in the Mississippi Power and Light Company. He came back, he remembers,
. . . as a man with a mission, to try to get something going on that. A number of us got involved. We had articles in the newspaper, and we picketed. That would have been in early 1964. By that time I was a banjo player, singing civil rights songs. And I got more attracted to the whole thing. People would come to Harvard and speak. And Barney Frank, the tutor in Winthrop House, was pushing us to get involved in civil rights stuff. There were a lot of connections. So when the Mississippi Summer Project came along, it was just made to order.
Ganz was in the second group of volunteers to arrive for training at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, where he met Bob Moses, the SNCC organizer most responsible for the Summer Project. Soon after Marshall arrived, Moses announced that Andrew Goodman, one of the students from the first group that had already left for Mississippi, was missing and probably dead along with two comrades, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. Moses carefully explained the Summer Project strategy, accepted SNCC’s own measure of moral responsibility for the murders of civil rights activists, and allowed the volunteers maximum space to return home with honor if they did not agree with the strategy or did not want to take the inevitable risks. Ganz was impressed. He soon came to share the almost universal opinion among the white volunteers that Moses was an organizer of unparalleled stature.
Later, Marshall Ganz saw many similarities between Bob Moses and Cesar Chavez: both were quiet, a little mysterious, critical of extravagant demonstrations and rhetoric. But this was still the spring of 1964, a year and a half before Ganz would meet Chavez. In Mississippi, he was assigned to Holmes County to help organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). His roommate was Mario Savio, who had been assigned to teach in a Freedom School. Whoever was making those assignments gets five stars as a casting director: Ganz went on to be a principal organizer of the United Farm Workers; Savio became the leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Amid the thrill and danger of Mississippi nights, Ganz and Savio stayed up late talking. Through his heavy stutter, Savio agonized about how to make political sense of his Jesuit training, and about the relationship between education and liberation, while Ganz wondered about alternative political strategies and how radical change actually happened.
Marshall and Mario were willing, conscious instruments of people with large political plans. The short-term goal of Mississippi Summer was to increase pressure on the Democratic Administration to protect voter registration in the South by putting white students from affluent, influential families and prestigious colleges in harm’s way. But SNCC wanted more than that. It hoped that the sacrifices of Mississippi Summer could force the national Democrats to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Atlantic City, and thus begin a serious realignment of the Democratic Party, with new southern African American voters replacing the old-time Dixiecrats, southern segregationist members of the Democratic Party. Once burned—the Kennedy brothers had not lived up to their backroom promise to protect southern civil rights workers—SNCC now proposed to rush into the fire through the front door, and force an open, public, televised defeat of President Lyndon Baines Johnson at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. This strategy had been put together by Moses and Democrats such as Allard Lowenstein and Joseph Rauh. Lowenstein was a wild-card Democratic Party youth operative who had made a career out of keeping liberal student organizations within the limits set by the party leaders. Rauh was general counsel for Walter Reuther’s United Automobile Workers, vice president of Americans for Democratic Action, and a leading practitioner of then-triumphant cold war liberalism. SNCC, a band of self-defined nonviolent revolutionaries with less than four years of political experience, now intended to push its radical vision of direct democracy into American establishment politics. Of all SNCC’s wildest dreams, this was probably the most outrageous. Most everyone sensed that the times were changing. But changing enough so that SNCC could beat the regular Democrats on their own turf, at their own convention?
Ganz accompanied the 200-strong Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to Atlantic City. His job there was to try to convince members of the California delegation to support a floor debate on the question of seating the MFDP delegates. Although by the summer of 1964, most people in SNCC doubted the power of