and his friend Mike Miller, whom he had met through SNCC. Miller suggested that while in Bakersfield, Ganz might try to organize a local Friends of SNCC chapter, so Ganz called Brother Gilbert, with whom he had become acquainted as a youth. Brother Gilbert—now the vice principal and dean of discipline at Bakersfield’s Catholic high school, Garces Memorial—was interested in SNCC. He agreed to hold a meeting at the high school, where Ganz showed a movie about SNCC, gave a speech, and answered questions. It was quite an event. A group of Catholic grape growers in the audience denounced Brother Gilbert for holding such a radical get-together at the Catholic high school. They didn’t break up the gathering, but they were rambunctious and threatened further action. Their performance had a double, almost contradictory edge: while assured of their own power to control what should happen in their church, school, and community, they felt nervous enough about the times to make a fuss about a small meeting. Their uneasiness, not their confidence, turned out to be prophetic. It was just ten months before the Delano grape strike.
Back in Mississippi a few months later, Ganz worked with E. W. Steptoe in Amite County, the most dangerous area of the state. Although publicly committed to nonviolence, Ganz, like many other civil rights activists at the time, kept a gun in his truck. He accepted what he called the “ambiguity” of the situation. SNCC did everything it could to keep the struggle nonviolent; at the same time Marshall did not intend to be murdered on a lonely Mississippi road if a gun could prevent it. Together with Steptoe, Ganz was organizing leadership groups, Freedom Schools, and community centers, but SNCC was falling apart. Overwhelmed by the enormity of the their sacrifices (scores killed since 1960, thousands badly beaten), many SNCC organizers lost their faith in the power of nonviolence. Others doubted the ultimate effectiveness of long-term community organizing. Most smoldered with contempt for the white liberals who had betrayed them at the Atlantic City convention, and many grew suspicious of the whites in their own ranks. The most respected SNCC leaders fell ill. Executive Secretary James Foreman had an abscessed arm and ulcer. A friend said of Chairman John Lewis, “He resembled a corpse . . . so great was his exhaustion.” The psychiatrist Robert Coles reported that many of the young organizers were “clinically depressed.” New divisions appeared: Northern and Caribbean sophisticates versus rustic southerners; organizers versus floaters; men versus women. Staff meetings were filled with recriminations and went on through the night without reaching any conclusions. Perhaps worst of all, Bob Moses became more and more quiet, skipped meetings, and eventually lapsed into complete silence.3
Ganz was there for most of it. He was there at the meeting when Moses announced, “You can have Bob Moses; I am now Robert Paris,” and passed out bread and wine as some sort of final benediction. “Has he gone crazy?” Ganz wondered. And what should he himself do? While working with Steptoe, Marshall had received a copy of The Movement, which had a front-page picture of the NFWA-sponsored march in support of the Linnell rent strike. There in the front row, with his black robes, was Brother Gilbert. Ganz returned to San Francisco to talk over the situation with Mike Miller. The grape strike had just begun, and Miller encouraged him to remain in SNCC but to see if he could get a job organizing for the NFWA. By this time Brother Gilbert had quit his job at Garces Memorial and gone to work for Cesar Chavez. He was preparing to leave the priesthood if his order didn’t like it, and was already going by his given name, LeRoy Chatfield. As it happened, Chavez was scheduled to speak about the strike a couple of days after Ganz arrived in Bakersfield.
“I introduced myself and [Chavez] said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, LeRoy’s told me about you.’ I was very cautious because at that point in the civil rights movement there was a lot of polarization developing between blacks and whites, and it was sort of like, there’s no role for whites in the movement . . . and so I was very cautious and sort of like, well, you know, I said . . . ‘If you want support or help or something like that’ . . . but he said, ‘Oh no, no. You should come, come to Delano.’ ”4
Cesar quickly arranged for Marshall to drive him to the Bay Area for another speaking tour, and they had plenty of time alone in the car to check each other out. Ganz was immediately surprised that Chavez didn’t hold his whiteness against him. Although they talked about organizing, what really seemed to spark Cesar’s interest were Marshall’s ideas about religion. It turned out that Chavez had met Ganz’s father, and wanted to hear about Jewish belief, tradition, and custom. It was the first of what would be a long series of religious conversations. Ganz always thought that the reason he got so close to Cesar so quickly was that Chavez was more comfortable with religious people than political people, and he could see a little of both in Ganz. By the time they returned to Delano, they were sold on each other. Ganz would set up a new NFWA office in Bakersfield. It would be a backup, just in case the strike turned out to be a complete defeat. And for the time being, Ganz could still receive his symbolically important $10 a week stipend as a SNCC field secretary.
On a slim budget that was carefully monitored by Chavez, and using money he raised from Bakersfield’s small liberal community, Ganz rented an office with a room in the back where he could live, bought an old car, and began his work in a barrio still called Little Okie, now filled with people who had come from Mexico in the 1940s or whose parents had come in the 1920s. He did some agitation against scab herders who were operating in Little Okie, but his main task was to set up a Service Center where he helped people with welfare, disability, and income tax problems. A student from Bakersfield Junior College, Jessica Govea, started coming by to help run the office. Her parents had been CSO activists and she had known Cesar Chavez since her early childhood. Jessica had been a semiregular on the early grape strike picket lines and a volunteer in Delano. In the Bakersfield office and back room she taught Marshall Spanish. They fell in love over flash cards.
Soon after he began his work in Bakersfield, Ganz was called to Delano. Walter Reuther, president of the powerful United Automobile Workers, was coming to town, and since Reuther was one of the first national figures to endorse the grape strike, Chavez wanted all hands in Delano to help mobilize the turnout. At the time it bothered Ganz only slightly that Reuther had been the staff sergeant most responsible for carrying out the betrayal of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats. That summer, just over a year before, Reuther had been in the middle of negotiations with General Motors when Lyndon Johnson convinced him to fly to Atlantic City to get the situation under control. Once there, Reuther took command: he threatened to fire Joe Rauh if he didn’t cooperate; he told Martin Luther King that the UAW would stop giving money to SCLC if King didn’t help avoid a floor fight; he told Moses that not a penny more would be sent to Mississippi from anyone if SNCC didn’t back down. When all that failed, he arranged the final slap in the face: the negotiations charade.5
Reuther had traveled a long way to become the instrument of a maneuver that strangled the possibility of a liberal progressive realignment of the Democratic Party—a goal he had worked for much of his political life. Originally a skilled craftsman in the automobile industry and a democratic socialist organizer, he was among the thousands of leftists who helped build and lead the working-class movement that propelled the Congress of Industrial Organizations to victory in the late 1930s. An astute strategist and a master of polemical debate, Reuther survived a series of faction fights inside the UAW and took control of the union in 1947. Using rising anti-Communism as his main weapon, he then consolidated his hold over the union, and over the following two decades transformed the UAW from a lively body whose spirited conventions were a model of popular participation and debate into a one-party union machine. His midlife anti-Communism was principled rather than just tactical; he was a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action, which became the ideological vanguard of cold war liberalism. Although not a major theorist of this particular version of liberalism, he was its main organizational hope, as most ADA activists were intellectuals without any mass base. Reuther, while no slouch as a thinker and talker, was very much a man of conventional power, and as the leader of one of the biggest, tightest working-class organizations in the country, he was in a position to use it.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Reuther put that power to the service of what labor historians call “social unionism,” a second cousin of democratic socialism, and an idea of unionism that was especially attractive to Cesar Chavez. It held that
