John DeSimone's Blog - Posts Tagged "non-violence"
Why I wrote Road to Delano
The Story Behind
The Road to Delano
I chose to write a book about Cesar Chavez’s nonviolent campaign to organize Central Valley farmworkers because I believe what he accomplished was heroic. In my research, it became evident that Cesar has his critics. There are questions about some of his decisions in his later years. But in my reading of his earliest organizing efforts centered on Delano, they were principled and heroic. What he accomplished through advocating nonviolence was unprecedented in the bitter agricultural wars with labor. So many before him had attempted to organize permanent solutions in the ongoing labor struggles, and they had failed.
Many organizers in the 1930s ended up in jail because of their Communist Party affiliations. In the immediate post-World War II years, the labor movement in California was dead in the water because of Public Law 78, authorizing unlimited and inexpensive bracero labor. The growers gloated that they could rent as many bodies as they needed from the U.S. government.
The growers kept wages low by the use of cheap bracero labor, which kept workers impoverished. They tamped down any rebellion against their wage structure by using the political poison of the times—McCarthyism.
During my research, I reviewed an entire decade of 1960s editorials from the Delano Record and surrounding newspapers. The writers consistently claimed that the growers’ objection to Chavez and the UFW was that they were a communist front. Many editorials went further, stating that Chavez’s ultimate goal was to control all food production in the United States by gathering all farm workers under the UFW banner. Then Chavez could dictate farm policy nationwide, effectively putting our nations' food supply under the control of a foreign power inimical to our ways. This fabrication not only polarized the very conservative Central Valley community against Chavez but was far from his intentions and principals. The fact the average reader swallowed this red herring whole indicates the heightened state of our public fears.
One must remember those days to appreciate our story. The Red Scare was a national syndrome played out in Congressional hearings. Communists could be among the people we knew. The Vietnam War was a bloody but necessary conflict designed to keep the domino effect of communist aggression from reaching American shores. Children practiced duck and cover drills in school classrooms. People were building bomb shelters under their homes, against the inevitable fusillade of Soviet nuclear ICBMs.
I remember in the middle ’60s sitting in my front yard in Southern California with my friend. We watched a backhoe dig a big hole in his side yard across the street. I asked if he was getting a swimming pool. No, his dad was building a bomb shelter. I remember him telling me later that his father, a high-ranking naval officer, warned them that when the bombs started falling, he would have to put a machine gun on top of the shelter to keep the neighbors away. Anti-communist fears had seeped into our daily lives, and there was no dodging it.
In reading these newspaper clippings, and in personal interviews, I began to ask myself—did the smart, educated, well-informed growers believe this communist claptrap? Some perhaps. Why wouldn’t they? They were sons of their times. But most of the large growers ran corporate operations whose costs were nuanced down to the penny. How much they considered the rumors surrounding Chaves’s ideology, I don’t know. But I do know they looked carefully at their bottom line. They didn’t see how they could afford his union’s demands to reform working conditions and raise wages so farm workers could live decently. Chavez didn’t see how they could refuse to accept them. They were reforms based on human values and human dignity.
This conflict over the nature and extent of reform became a war of words, of court orders, and eventually of violence. Communist ideas of state ownership of the means of production didn't motivate Chavez; neither did he buy into the notion that the proletariat was at war with the bourgeoisie. Instead, he sought peace between farm workers and owners, despite what many pundits at the time believed. Governor Reagan twice vetoed legislation to extend Workers' Compensation insurance to farm workers after virulent grower-sponsored campaigns smearing the UFW as a communist front. These low-wage workers needed meaningful work to survive, but they needed to work with dignity and with the same protections other Americans enjoyed. They wouldn’t get either unless someone stood up for them.
To me, this is the epitome of heroism. Chavez could have stepped out of the lowest class into a comfortable middle-class existence, but he chose to identify with the poorest and fight for them. He is often criticized for his call to suffering on behalf of la causa. The critics have to live with their consciences, and maybe that's what bothers them. But when the first strike ended in 1970, with the signing of three-year agreements with all the major growers, it brought to a close one hundred years of frustrated efforts to organize an effective union. No one had ever accomplished what he did. He did not do it alone, for sure, but his iron will to bring it about was the gasoline in the engine of change. Whatever you may believe about unions, if it weren’t for the ability to bargain collectively with all-powerful management, the abuses in the fields would never have been stopped.
How could an eighth-grade dropout pull this off?
Though he worked for the Community Services Organization (CSO) beginning in the early 1950s until he quit in 1962 to found a farm workers union, he had many mentors. Fred Ross, who introduced him to the CSO and the organizing strategies pioneered by Sol Alinsky, taught him practical organizing for change. Father Donald McDonnel mentored him from a spiritual and theological point of view that shaped his commitment to nonviolence. McDonnel introduced him to the idea of nonviolence through books on Gandhi and St. Francis of Assisi. He also introduced Cesar to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, an encyclical on the duties of capital and labor. The Catholic Church’s view of capital and labor had responsibilities on each side of the equation. Growers had a right to own their land, and workers had a right to a fair wage and to be treated with dignity.
Chavez’s insistence on nonviolence became an insurmountable obstacle to the growers. During the 1930s, the Associated Farmers prevailed in breaking strikes through their use of vigilante violence. Once strikes began, deputized vigilantes armed with axe handles attacked picket lines. When a melee broke out, sheriff and highway patrol officers waded in and arrested the farm workers. The growers broke the back of every strike.
Chavez knew that unless he took a radically different tack from responding blow for blow, as his predecessors had, his organizing efforts would only end in failure. The courts, the police, the legislative bodies of the state, and federal law were against farmworkers. Back in 1935, when Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, it granted every worker in America the right to organize for the purpose of collective bargaining with management—except farm workers. They were purposely excluded in deference to Southern Democrats who feared such a law would grant blacks rights that would lead to upending Jim Crow laws. Farm workers nationwide had no rights to elections to decide the question of unionizing or not. Organizers had no right to even speak to workers on private land. They were denied benefits the majority of American workers enjoyed.
But that didn’t hinder those with a vision for change. The first grape strike began in 1965 and lasted five bitter years. I chose this first period of labor action because, during this critical time, violence began to spin out of control, with strikers threatening to arm themselves as a defense against the growers' hired thugs. In 1968, Chavez was afraid what gains they had made would erode if strikers responded to this violence. That’s when he took it upon himself, as an act of penance, to fast until his followers were committed to nonviolence. That event becomes the backdrop of this story.
So when I began this story, I was intrigued by the ripple effect of Chavez’s strategy. How a labor movement that looked like a social movement would affect the broader community around him. Jack, Adrian, and Ella, who are the high school characters central to my story, were forced to respond to this call to nonviolence. I wanted them to engage with the implications of the social movement that threatened to upend their lives. Each has their battle, their cause, and their goals in life.
As I built my characters, I sought out stories of growers who didn’t take the predictable route of resistance to change. Not all growers were against reform. I didn’t want to paint them with a broad brush as greedy and self-centered in their opposition to a unionized workforce. Many small growers signed on with the UFW early in the strike and had an excellent relationship with their workers. But I still wanted more information on growers’ intentions and reasons behind their intransigence.
Little is written from the grower’s point of view, except for the newspaper articles I’ve already mentioned. I did find one farmer who, in the late 1950s undertook a risky campaign to change the way the agricultural industry viewed farm labor. I based Sugar Duncan on that single grower. He worked hard to change the minds of his colleagues about the value of an organized and skilled workforce managed through a hiring hall. He was eventually forced to flee the valley because of threats of violence against his family. In the early ’60s, he left his beloved farming behind convinced that the growers’ stubbornness of not negotiating with a union, any union, at any time, would lead to war.
He was right. It did lead to war. A war of ideas about who was entitled to participate in the full promise of the American Dream.
That’s the story I present to you, Road to Delano. Please Pre-order and place on your shelf to read. Thank you.
The Road to Delano
I chose to write a book about Cesar Chavez’s nonviolent campaign to organize Central Valley farmworkers because I believe what he accomplished was heroic. In my research, it became evident that Cesar has his critics. There are questions about some of his decisions in his later years. But in my reading of his earliest organizing efforts centered on Delano, they were principled and heroic. What he accomplished through advocating nonviolence was unprecedented in the bitter agricultural wars with labor. So many before him had attempted to organize permanent solutions in the ongoing labor struggles, and they had failed.
Many organizers in the 1930s ended up in jail because of their Communist Party affiliations. In the immediate post-World War II years, the labor movement in California was dead in the water because of Public Law 78, authorizing unlimited and inexpensive bracero labor. The growers gloated that they could rent as many bodies as they needed from the U.S. government.
The growers kept wages low by the use of cheap bracero labor, which kept workers impoverished. They tamped down any rebellion against their wage structure by using the political poison of the times—McCarthyism.
During my research, I reviewed an entire decade of 1960s editorials from the Delano Record and surrounding newspapers. The writers consistently claimed that the growers’ objection to Chavez and the UFW was that they were a communist front. Many editorials went further, stating that Chavez’s ultimate goal was to control all food production in the United States by gathering all farm workers under the UFW banner. Then Chavez could dictate farm policy nationwide, effectively putting our nations' food supply under the control of a foreign power inimical to our ways. This fabrication not only polarized the very conservative Central Valley community against Chavez but was far from his intentions and principals. The fact the average reader swallowed this red herring whole indicates the heightened state of our public fears.
One must remember those days to appreciate our story. The Red Scare was a national syndrome played out in Congressional hearings. Communists could be among the people we knew. The Vietnam War was a bloody but necessary conflict designed to keep the domino effect of communist aggression from reaching American shores. Children practiced duck and cover drills in school classrooms. People were building bomb shelters under their homes, against the inevitable fusillade of Soviet nuclear ICBMs.
I remember in the middle ’60s sitting in my front yard in Southern California with my friend. We watched a backhoe dig a big hole in his side yard across the street. I asked if he was getting a swimming pool. No, his dad was building a bomb shelter. I remember him telling me later that his father, a high-ranking naval officer, warned them that when the bombs started falling, he would have to put a machine gun on top of the shelter to keep the neighbors away. Anti-communist fears had seeped into our daily lives, and there was no dodging it.
In reading these newspaper clippings, and in personal interviews, I began to ask myself—did the smart, educated, well-informed growers believe this communist claptrap? Some perhaps. Why wouldn’t they? They were sons of their times. But most of the large growers ran corporate operations whose costs were nuanced down to the penny. How much they considered the rumors surrounding Chaves’s ideology, I don’t know. But I do know they looked carefully at their bottom line. They didn’t see how they could afford his union’s demands to reform working conditions and raise wages so farm workers could live decently. Chavez didn’t see how they could refuse to accept them. They were reforms based on human values and human dignity.
This conflict over the nature and extent of reform became a war of words, of court orders, and eventually of violence. Communist ideas of state ownership of the means of production didn't motivate Chavez; neither did he buy into the notion that the proletariat was at war with the bourgeoisie. Instead, he sought peace between farm workers and owners, despite what many pundits at the time believed. Governor Reagan twice vetoed legislation to extend Workers' Compensation insurance to farm workers after virulent grower-sponsored campaigns smearing the UFW as a communist front. These low-wage workers needed meaningful work to survive, but they needed to work with dignity and with the same protections other Americans enjoyed. They wouldn’t get either unless someone stood up for them.
To me, this is the epitome of heroism. Chavez could have stepped out of the lowest class into a comfortable middle-class existence, but he chose to identify with the poorest and fight for them. He is often criticized for his call to suffering on behalf of la causa. The critics have to live with their consciences, and maybe that's what bothers them. But when the first strike ended in 1970, with the signing of three-year agreements with all the major growers, it brought to a close one hundred years of frustrated efforts to organize an effective union. No one had ever accomplished what he did. He did not do it alone, for sure, but his iron will to bring it about was the gasoline in the engine of change. Whatever you may believe about unions, if it weren’t for the ability to bargain collectively with all-powerful management, the abuses in the fields would never have been stopped.
How could an eighth-grade dropout pull this off?
Though he worked for the Community Services Organization (CSO) beginning in the early 1950s until he quit in 1962 to found a farm workers union, he had many mentors. Fred Ross, who introduced him to the CSO and the organizing strategies pioneered by Sol Alinsky, taught him practical organizing for change. Father Donald McDonnel mentored him from a spiritual and theological point of view that shaped his commitment to nonviolence. McDonnel introduced him to the idea of nonviolence through books on Gandhi and St. Francis of Assisi. He also introduced Cesar to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, an encyclical on the duties of capital and labor. The Catholic Church’s view of capital and labor had responsibilities on each side of the equation. Growers had a right to own their land, and workers had a right to a fair wage and to be treated with dignity.
Chavez’s insistence on nonviolence became an insurmountable obstacle to the growers. During the 1930s, the Associated Farmers prevailed in breaking strikes through their use of vigilante violence. Once strikes began, deputized vigilantes armed with axe handles attacked picket lines. When a melee broke out, sheriff and highway patrol officers waded in and arrested the farm workers. The growers broke the back of every strike.
Chavez knew that unless he took a radically different tack from responding blow for blow, as his predecessors had, his organizing efforts would only end in failure. The courts, the police, the legislative bodies of the state, and federal law were against farmworkers. Back in 1935, when Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, it granted every worker in America the right to organize for the purpose of collective bargaining with management—except farm workers. They were purposely excluded in deference to Southern Democrats who feared such a law would grant blacks rights that would lead to upending Jim Crow laws. Farm workers nationwide had no rights to elections to decide the question of unionizing or not. Organizers had no right to even speak to workers on private land. They were denied benefits the majority of American workers enjoyed.
But that didn’t hinder those with a vision for change. The first grape strike began in 1965 and lasted five bitter years. I chose this first period of labor action because, during this critical time, violence began to spin out of control, with strikers threatening to arm themselves as a defense against the growers' hired thugs. In 1968, Chavez was afraid what gains they had made would erode if strikers responded to this violence. That’s when he took it upon himself, as an act of penance, to fast until his followers were committed to nonviolence. That event becomes the backdrop of this story.
So when I began this story, I was intrigued by the ripple effect of Chavez’s strategy. How a labor movement that looked like a social movement would affect the broader community around him. Jack, Adrian, and Ella, who are the high school characters central to my story, were forced to respond to this call to nonviolence. I wanted them to engage with the implications of the social movement that threatened to upend their lives. Each has their battle, their cause, and their goals in life.
As I built my characters, I sought out stories of growers who didn’t take the predictable route of resistance to change. Not all growers were against reform. I didn’t want to paint them with a broad brush as greedy and self-centered in their opposition to a unionized workforce. Many small growers signed on with the UFW early in the strike and had an excellent relationship with their workers. But I still wanted more information on growers’ intentions and reasons behind their intransigence.
Little is written from the grower’s point of view, except for the newspaper articles I’ve already mentioned. I did find one farmer who, in the late 1950s undertook a risky campaign to change the way the agricultural industry viewed farm labor. I based Sugar Duncan on that single grower. He worked hard to change the minds of his colleagues about the value of an organized and skilled workforce managed through a hiring hall. He was eventually forced to flee the valley because of threats of violence against his family. In the early ’60s, he left his beloved farming behind convinced that the growers’ stubbornness of not negotiating with a union, any union, at any time, would lead to war.
He was right. It did lead to war. A war of ideas about who was entitled to participate in the full promise of the American Dream.
That’s the story I present to you, Road to Delano. Please Pre-order and place on your shelf to read. Thank you.
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New book review over at https://bit.ly/2Tk3Arj
