style="font-size:15px;"> 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 receive them and to recover their faith in God and humanity. Rabbi Ganz did what he could for three years, until 1949, but never completely recovered from the stories he heard. After a stint in Washington, he worked as a rabbi in Philadelphia, Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and finally San Diego. Not quite right after his time in Germany, he had a full mental breakdown in his later years, and his son, who was then coordinating the national grape boycott, had to put him in a hospital. With as much justification as anyone might have, Dad had gone crazy.1
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.
