For
more than two decades I’ve argued, whenever the subject comes up, that Cesar
Chavez was the classic tragic hero — a man of greatness brought down by a fatal
flaw. In his case the flaw was an utter lack of interest in actually running a
labor union and an unwillingness to delegate the job to someone who could do
it.
It’s
not an argument that endears you to people on either side of the political
spectrum. Conservatives, who tend to view Chavez as the illegitimate spawn of
Mao and Karl Marx, don’t buy into the greatness. Liberals, who want to believe
in his saintliness, want to blame the collapse of the UFW on the growers and
Republicans and excuse or absolve Chavez of any part in it.
To
me, the greatness is self-evident. With no legislative or legal structure to
build upon, he organized a labor movement among people who worked in the fields
and who had largely been forgotten by society. That movement succeeded, for a
while anyway, beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. It was clearly the work of
a visionary and uncommon man, accomplished, to be sure, with the help of many
others.
Over
Memorial Day weekend I read Frank Bardacke’s Trampling Out the Vintage, a history of the UFW under Chavez. It’s
a wonderful book: Thorough, fair-minded, highly readable. And it documents
Chavez’ own contribution to the demise of his union in a way that will make it
nearly impossible for future historians and biographers to engage in
hagiography.
It
has long been clear that Chavez regarded the union as only one part of a much
larger farm worker movement, and I had assumed he neglected the nuts and bolts
of the union operation solely because of his focus on the larger vision.
Bardacke shows that the story was more complicated.
Chavez
was a classic control freak, and because his leadership was unquestioned, that
aspect of his personality did untold damage. It led to UFW administration of
contracts being structured in ways that maximized union control over
everything, to the point that the hiring halls couldn’t process workers fast
enough to get them into the fields during the harvest, when time was of the
essence. At the same time, Chavez was running the union like a small-town
drugstore owner, trying to oversee and sign off on everything. At best that
caused delays; at worst, things didn’t get done.
It’s
often said that nothing ruins a man like success. In one sense that was true
for Chavez. Having won his initial grape contracts through a nationwide
boycott, he became the classic case of the man with the hammer who sees every
problem as a nail. Bardacke makes a well-documented and persuasive argument
that by focusing on boycotts, rather than on organizing workers and building a
democratic, sustainable union, Chavez helped sow the seeds of his own
destruction.
In
the late 1970s the UFW moved its headquarters to La Paz, an isolated former
county building in the hills above Tehachapi. Not only did the move distance
the union leadership from the people it was serving, it spawned a culture of
self-absorption, pettiness and paranoia. By the time the union was crumbling in
the early 1980s, the toxic atmosphere at La Paz made the Nixon White House look
like Mister Rogers’ neighborhood.
A
lot of people won’t want to hear any of this. They’ll continue to blame the
growers, Republicans and the Establishment in general. But the hard fact of the
American labor movement is that the bosses have always been against it, and the
legislatures and courts have usually been against it. Many unions succeeded
despite those circumstances; the UFW didn’t. Chavez has to own his part in the
failure.
