Books and Arts; Book Review;American agribusiness;The power in the union;

Trampling Out the Vintage: César Chávez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers. By Frank Bardacke.

“He is trampling out the vintage” is part of a line from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. It continues “where the grapes of wrath are stored”. Thus the title of Frank Bardacke's history deliberately echoes John Steinbeck's novel, a proletarian classic which tells the story of tenant farmers driven off their fields in Oklahoma and forced to cross the country to seek work in California.

But, as Mr Bardacke stresses, a huge demographic difference divides then from now. In the Depression of the 1930s Steinbeck could present his impoverished “Okies” as deserving of government help “because they were true American whites”. It was harder for their Mexican-American successors to win public sympathy. They were brown, Spanish-speaking and “considered aliens and sojourners”.

It took the genius of César Chávez, whose family was dispossessed of its land during his boyhood, to bring them into the American mainstream. As a vegan inspired by Catholic social teaching and the non-violent methods of Mohandas Gandhi, Chávez was more comfortable with religious people than political ones. He set out to create a movement rather than a union, leading a “pilgrimage” across the Central Valley of California to the state capital, Sacramento, in 1966. When his followers were blocked by the police they knelt in prayer behind a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The idealism of Chávez's movement and the fasts he endured to win support for striking farmworkers caught the public imagination. Other labour leaders looked on aghast as he built an odd but strong coalition of farmworkers, religious enthusiasts, student radicals, politicians, artists and union officials. Working together they persuaded consumers in their millions to boycott the grapes, lettuces and other products of agribusinesses which refused to negotiate sincerely with the United Farm Workers (UFW). The tactic they perfected was described by critics as “victimhood”. A photograph of a starving urchin was, for instance, captioned: “Every grape you buy helps keep this child hungry”.

Mr Bardacke is only half-impressed with all this. As he sees it Chávez had two main responsibilities: to sustain support for boycotts, “which he did magnificently”, and to administer the union, “which he did badly”. The author notes that the union's membership continued to decline in the late 1980s even after Chávez fasted for 36 days to support its grape boycott and anti-pesticide campaign. His verdict seems unduly harsh but then Mr Bardacke is an old-fashioned leftist. For him, strikebreakers are almost always “scabs” and growers not even worth listening to. This is a pity, for such prejudices mar an otherwise intelligent, thorough history.

The UFW is indeed, as he contends, a shadow of its former self, but the odds against it ever succeeding as a conventional labour union were always impossibly large. Illegal migrants from Mexico, poor and desperate for work, poured across the border to take the jobs of UFW members and doom their strikes. The rival Teamsters union was no help. Its operatives sabotaged UFW recruitment drives by telling farmworkers they would be much better off in a tough professional union like theirs.

Nonetheless Chávez left a significant legacy which is insufficiently acknowledged by Mr Bardacke. In leading by example and through the sheer force of his will he raised the stature of Mexican-Americans not just in California and the south-west but throughout the United States. In consequence, he is now held in the same high esteem as his black equivalent, Martin Luther King. César Chávez's portrait hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. His statue stands on university campuses. Streets, parks and buildings are named after him. In California his birthday, March 31st, is a state holiday. His truth is marching on.