since 1950, saw their organizing careers ended because of their support for the strikers. Under pressure from the growers and their allies in the San Diego diocese, their bishop disbanded the Mission Band and transferred McCullough and McDonnell away from farm worker parishes. Back in Chicago, Ralph Helstein, the head of the UPWA, decided to pull his union out of farm worker organizing and focus on the shed workers whom the union already had under contract. Clive Knowles left the union and returned to Oxnard, where he and John Soria formed the Emergency Committee to Aid Farm Workers, an effort that didn’t last long. In June, George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, disbanded the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee.
Knowles blamed Goldberg—and behind him, Kennedy—for the loss of the strike and the dismantling of AWOC: “Later I found out that Kennedy had said to Goldberg, ‘Get rid of that thing, get it out of our hair, we don’t have time for it.’ ” Knowles’s story, though undocumented, is easy to believe.18 In those early days of the administration, Kennedy would not have had much patience with some Imperial Valley farm worker strike that threatened to foment diplomatic trouble with Mexico. He was considering what he hoped would be his twin policy for Latin America: the stick of the Cuban invasion and the carrot of the Alliance for Progress. Kennedy needed acceptance, if not complete support, for this dual policy from other Latin American countries, especially the diplomatically important ones such as Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. The feelings of Mexican officials had rarely been high on the list of priorities of those in the United States who administered the Bracero Program, but this time the U.S. could not ignore Mexican complaints entirely. Although Goldberg’s final order to remove all the braceros from the struck ranches did not affect the strike, it did mollify the Mexicans and was a harbinger of the administration’s subsequent reforms of the program.
Once the strike was over, the best way for Kennedy and Goldberg to ensure that such a difficult situation did not recur was to muscle the AFL-CIO into abandoning its organization of farm workers. Goldberg was Meany’s man in the White House, and Meany would not have been hard to convince. He had not been enthusiastic about setting up AWOC two years earlier and had done so simply to blunt criticism that organized labor was doing nothing about farm labor conditions and to head off efforts in the fields by his rival, Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers, who had been funding various small farm worker projects. Meany closed down AWOC because, he said, the group had spent a lot of money and had not recruited any workers, and because of internal bickering among the various unions. No doubt those factors played a role, but neither had been unexpected two years earlier. If Goldberg did indeed ask Meany to shut down AWOC, neither would have said so publicly, and the request would have carried far more weight than Meany’s other explanations.
Goldberg would have been a willing executor of Kennedy’s order. One of the chief architects of the CIO’s expulsion of the Communists in 1947, he was no friend of rank-and-file militancy. In a speech to the National Association of Manufacturers on December 7, 1960, just before he was named secretary of labor, he argued that ensuring that “our military establishment and our industrial way of life remain superior in all respects to that of the Russians requires the wholehearted cooperation of all elements of our society, including, as a first priority, that of management and labor.” A failure to cooperate would be “disastrous,” as it would “lead to an eventual militant class consciousness, the absence of which has been one of the strengths of democratic America.” Goldberg advocated the establishment of a tripartite Advisory Board to the president, modeled on the War Labor Board of World War II, which would bring together high-level labor, management, and government officials to “help settle great disputes by mediation, fact-finding, and recommendations which, though not binding, will help the conflicting parties find satisfactory common solutions to their problems.”19
Goldberg never got the Advisory Board, but his intervention in the Imperial Valley strike and his subsequent reforms of the Bracero Program are excellent examples of his cold war labor theories in action. The first priority was to get rid of the strike and any agitation that might threaten U.S. foreign policy objectives. Then, through administrative reforms, Goldberg proposed to look out for the interests of the workers whose strike he had helped to break, and whose prospective union he had helped destroy.
In October of 1961, when President Kennedy signed the new extension of Public Law 78, reauthorizing the Bracero Program, he publicly acknowledged that braceros had adversely affected farm worker wages: “Therefore, I sign this bill with the assurance that the Secretary of Labor will, by every means at his disposal, use the authority vested in him under the law to prescribe the standards and to make the determinations essential for the protection of the wages and working conditions of domestic workers.”20 And so Goldberg did. In 1962, he established a federally mandated minimum wage for California braceros of $1 an hour (the national minimum wage was $1.15), placed fifty-seven new Labor Department officials in the fields to monitor the growers, restricted the amount of time that braceros could be used, and, finally, ordered the restoration of piece rates in the Imperial Valley lettuce deal. In other words, the government had officially mandated the wage concession the workers had unofficially won during the strike the year before. Union leaders were properly thankful. Bud Simonson, director of West Coast operations for the UPWA, put it simply: “It looks like we won the Imperial Valley strike of 1961 after all.”21
As it happened, neither Arthur Goldberg nor George Meany could shut down the incipient farm worker movement. The AWOC’s chief, Norman Smith, a veteran of the 1930s CIO wars, had held some money in reserve. He had put the union dues that organizers were collecting into a separate trust fund, which he did not turn over to Meany. With that money he maintained some of the old union offices, which were staffed by some AWOC veterans and a new set of volunteers, including students and farm workers. These independent “area councils” carried on their own organizing campaigns, primarily in the Sacramento and upper San Joaquin valleys, but also as far south as Delano, where Larry Itliong, who had a long history in farm worker unions, led efforts among Filipino grape workers.
Many of the area councils began to work with the Mexican American families who lived in the small barrios and colonias. Others focused on the braceros. Smith continued to focus on the mostly white ladder workers. Some councils collected dues; most of them concentrated on educational and agitational activities. They did not encourage strikes, but the strike movement among the workers, once begun, was not so easy to turn off. In 1961 there were forty-seven other state-certified strikes, most of them without any outside support from labor organizers.22 The ladder workers continued to be active, but they were no longer alone. Row crop workers—in the peas, cauliflower, asparagus, and Brussels sprouts—also struck. The majority were in Imperial County, but others hit Salinas, Oxnard, and San Diego County fields. After Meany’s shutdown order, moreover, the ratio of informal walkouts to certified strikes increased.
AWOC’s volunteer period died, or rather was murdered, in its infancy. In 1962 AWOC sent a delegation of workers to the AFL-CIO national convention to ask that body to resume support for its organizing efforts. After hearing an inspiring speech from Maria Moreno, a farm worker, the delegates voted to resume funding. But Meany was determined not to let things get out of hand. His appointee to head up this new version of AWOC, a conservative AFL career official named Al Green, immediately ordered all the area councils to disband and told the farm worker and student volunteers that they were no longer needed. One of the first people he fired was Maria Moreno. “You can’t fire us, we are the union,” one farm worker volunteer objected, to which Green replied, “You may be the union, but I’m the boss.”23
Green put all of AWOC’s efforts into getting out the 1962 vote for Governor Pat Brown, who by then had become one of the country’s most ardent advocates of the bracero program. Next, Green signed agreements with labor contractors, who simply took union dues out of farm workers’ checks without giving them any benefits. But Green could not corral all farm worker organizing. Itliong continued to organize among Filipino grape workers; nominally part of AWOC, Itliong was collecting his own dues and running his own operation. Many of the dispersed volunteers simply regrouped, in organizations such as Citizens for Farm Labor (headed
