Anglo fruit tramps, but he had learned a pretty good Spanish over the years. Well versed in Clive Knowles’s strategy of encouraging strikes by locals so that the Labor Department would be pressured to remove braceros from the struck fields, he asked the men if they were willing to strike. That’s what they had come there for, they said, so Breshears and the lechugueros wrote up a leaflet asking people to come to a meeting about the pay cuts. Eight hundred lettuce cutters showed up and voted to strike. Breshears had to urge them to wait until Knowles returned from an out-of-town trip.8
Knowles was enthusiastic. The thunder in the distance was getting louder. A few months before, in the summer and fall of 1960, Anglo fruit tramps working in the orchards of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys had resumed their infamous practice of stopping work at harvest time to force growers to raise the picking rates. Ninety-two of their strikes had been officially certified by the state of California, but countless others were not.9 The pickers had come down off their ladders and walked out of the fields because they knew the AFL-CIO-financed Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) was nearby, and the tramps figured that support from the AWOC would magnify the power they had always had during harvests.10
Knowles also knew that the growing militancy in the fields was matched by increased opposition to the Bracero Program in the rest of the country. The National Advisory Committee on Farm Labor, the first organizational expression of that opposition, had been founded in 1958, co-chaired by A. Philip Randolph, the social democratic vice president of the AFL-CIO, and Frank Graham, a liberal southern Democrat. Public hearings sponsored by the committee in 1959 had convincingly demonstrated the adverse effect of the Bracero Program on farm worker wages. As the deepening African American civil rights movement, in which Randolph was prominent, began to transform American politics, ending the Bracero Program was becoming a regular item on the new liberal agenda, alongside legislative support for the end of segregation, federal aid to depressed areas, increased health care for the elderly, and a higher minimum wage.
Singularly important in mobilizing public opinion in favor of farm worker organizing and against contracted labor was Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame,” which was televised on November 25, 1960, the day after Thanksgiving, soon after the delegation of workers led by Francisco Olivares had had its first conversation with Jerry Breshears. The program, a portent of the power of TV news, featured impoverished farm workers from Florida and California and concluded with the anguished confession of Eisenhower’s secretary of labor, James Mitchell, a liberal Catholic Republican:
I feel sad. I feel sad because I think that it’s a blot on my conscience as well as the conscience of all of us whom society has treated a little more favorably than these people. They have no voice in the legislative halls. They certainly have no voice in Congress, and their employers do have a voice . . . As a citizen, in or out of this office, I propose to continue to raise my voice until the country recognizes that it has an obligation to do something for farm workers.”11
He was true to his word. In more than half of the 1960 farm worker strikes called when braceros were in the fields, Mitchell prevented the continued use of the contracted workers after the strikes were declared.12
The November victory of John F. Kennedy made the UPWA organizers even more optimistic, as the 1960 Democratic Party platform had explicitly denounced the Bracero Program. Surely, they thought, Kennedy’s new secretary of labor, AFL-CIO Special Counsel Arthur Goldberg, would be even more willing to intervene on the side of the strikers.13 The UPWA called all of its organizers to the Imperial Valley in preparation for a strike throughout the lettuce fields, and successfully petitioned its union rival, the AFL-CIO’s AWOC, active in the the ladder strikes, to co-sponsor it. The lechugueros elected their own ten-member strike committee and prepared for what they believed would be a defining battle.
The strike began on Friday, January 13, 1961, when eighty-three of the ninety-eight lechugueros working in grower-shipper Bruce Church’s lettuce fields walked out and set up a picket line. Company supervisors immediately sent braceros to continue the cutting and packing. UPWA and AWOC representatives brought Labor Department officials to the fields to see the braceros working behind a picket line, and sent telegrams of complaint to Washington. On Monday, James Mitchell’s Labor Department (Kennedy had not yet been inaugurated) rescinded Church’s authorization to use braceros and ordered the removal of six hundred braceros from the company’s camps. The unions sent roving picket lines to other large ranches, and over the next two weeks, they struck all eighteen major grower-shippers.14
It was now the middle of the harvest season, and the strikers were racing the clock. Would the Labor Department remove braceros from all the struck fields before the season slowed down and ended? And if it did, would the growers negotiate with the unions, something they had sworn they would never do? The sit-down in front of the Dannenberg Ranch labor camp had aimed to bring those questions to a head. It was also intended to force the hand of Kennedy’s new secretary of labor, Arthur Goldberg. That hand turned out to hold a big surprise.
Instead of removing braceros from the Dannenberg camp, Goldberg set up a meeting in Los Angeles to “resolve the strike.” At that two-day affair, Under Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz was obliged to travel back and forth between the two parties, because the growers’ representatives refused to meet in the same room with the union men. Clive Knowles, the primary union leader of the strike, was not invited. At the conclusion of the meeting, Goldberg and Wirtz announced that the braceros would be prohibited from working only on fields that were being picketed. Moreover, no braceros would be sent back to Mexico; rather, they could be transferred to other growers, whose fields were free of pickets. It was a disastrous ruling for the strikers. They couldn’t picket all 40,000 acres at once, and so the struck growers could continue to use bracero labor. In addition, some growers had lured local trios back to work by unofficially restoring piece-rate wages. Knowles was furious at Goldberg. The Imperial Valley News reported, bluntly, “Growers are now said to feel that Secretary Goldberg is more sympathetic to their cause than was his predecessor James Mitchell.”15
The only hope that remained for the strikers was the Mexican government, which had ordered the removal of all braceros from the struck ranches after the Dannenberg sit-in. That order had been ignored in the Goldberg settlement, an insult to Mexican officials. They were further annoyed when a federal judge in San Diego issued an unprecedented order restraining the Labor Department from interfering in any way with the struck growers’ use of braceros.
In response, the unions planned a second, more aggressive, labor camp demonstration, playing to the oft-stated Mexican fears for the safety of braceros during strikes. This time some strikers ran through a labor camp, brandishing broomsticks and attacking the camp manager, a labor contractor, and even a few braceros. Next, the Mexican ambassador in Washington sent an official, public letter to Secretary Goldberg calling the judge’s ruling and the Labor Department’s settlement “an affront and a challenge to the sovereignty of Mexico . . . which has all the undertones of holding Mexican citizens in peonage.”16 When its complaints went unheeded, the Mexican government announced that no more braceros would be sent to California until the Imperial Valley strike was over and it was safe for them to work. In response, on March 5, Goldberg finally ordered the complete removal of all braceros from all the fields of the eighteen struck ranches.17
It was much too late. The lettuce harvest was just finishing up. Braceros and a few scab trios had cut enough lettuce to maintain sufficient levels of production. Sheriffs had raided the union office and arrested more than fifty strikers, some of whom were charged with multiple felonies. In court, one judge even ruled that all local picketing was illegal because its intent was to subvert Public Law 78, which authorized the Bracero Program. Even the Mexican government’s threat eventually fizzled. Goldberg reauthorized the use of braceros in time for the upcoming cantaloupe harvest, and plenty of workers arrived from Mexico to do the job.
In the immediate aftermath of the strike, Fathers Donald McDonnell and Thomas McCullough,
