Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (39 page)

The town of Arvin, a small outgrowth on Di Giorgio
Road, was named for a grower named Arvin Missakian;
otherwise, it is too nebulous to be described. On the far side
of its railroad spur, toward the mountains, are the packing
house, sheds and offices of John J. Kovacevich, whose views
I sought on the subject of the $50-million suit. Ann Israel
came with me, and as we drove across the tracks into the
shed area, we saw grapes coming off a belt and dropping
into a gondola, to be pressed for wine, an almost certain
sign that Mr. Kovacevich had more table grapes than unfilled
orders. (The alternative to wine is raisins, a product
in chronic surplus.) The day before, Julio Hernandez had
reported from Cincinnati that the price of Kovacevich
grapes had dropped from 49 cents to 29 cents a pound.

At the office I asked to see the boss, and the secretary
said she thought this could be arranged. But just at this
moment a door opened and out came Joseph Brosmer. We
gazed at each other in mutual consternation, and then he
said, “I’ll pave the way for you,” and went back into the
office, closing the door behind him.

A few minutes later Mr. Kovacevich came out. He is a
tall, balding man in his late fifties, with fierce eyebrows
pinching in on a big hawk nose. Making no effort to be
hospitable, he demanded to know what we wanted, then
told us to follow him into his office, where he slammed the
door. I took a seat beside the desk, and Mrs. Israel sat
down beside Joseph Brosmer on a couch against the wall.
As usual Mr. Brosmer, though indoors and seated, had his
arms folded on his chest.

Kovacevich, who was breathing hard, glared at me
expectantly, and I said straight off that I was partisan to
the Union, as no doubt Mr. Brosmer had told him, but that
I was anxious to talk to as many growers as I could, to make
certain that their side got a fair hearing. In the interests of
accuracy, I continued, I would like permission to use a
tape recorder, and I was in the process of unlimbering my
small machine when Kovacevich snatched a copy of the
San Francisco
Chronicle
from his desk and flung it against
my chest.

“Are you silly or something?” he shouted. “Do you know
how it feels to get sued for fifty million dollars?” In the
bad silence that ensued, I glanced at Brosmer; he was
staring like a corpse at his maddened client, as if seeking
to subdue him by hypnosis. Kovacevich, declaring his
innocence in no uncertain terms, swore that he would file
a countersuit for libel; what the hell did I think this did to
his good name? This seemed an implied acknowledgment
that wrongdoing had been done, but having no wish to
elicit extreme statements, I did not point it out. As a group
the growers are so defensive that one must bend over backward
to keep them from presenting themselves unfairly;
the unprovoked opinions that they offer seem damaging
enough.

Over Mr. Kovacevich’s head were the Kovacevich labels,
which include
ROYAL K
and
K & K
, and on a table to his right
were photographs of his sons; I recognized one as an intelligent-looking
boy of college age who had been sitting on
the office porch when we came in. There was a certain
resemblance to the father, though not just at this moment;
in profile, calming himself, Kovacevich reminded one of a
beaky bird whose crest, raised high in outrage or alarm,
moves up and down as it settles back again. He was reeling
off the usual arguments against Chavez, which once again
were so uniform in their clichés that I wondered if they
had not been memorized by all the growers up and down
the Valley. Already that day, in the New York
Daily News
,
the same arguments had been made in a full-page ad taken
out by the California Grape and Tree Fruit League: once
again, the consumer was informed that California farm
workers enjoyed higher wages and more protective laws
than any in the nation, and therefore wanted no part of a
union: “They have
not
walked off the job! THEY ARE NOT
ON STRIKE!” The ad concluded with an appeal to the
consumer: “As a consumer you have the inalienable right
to demand free access to any product.  .  .  .  Protect your
pocketbook from chaos in the food stores!  .  .  .  Demand that
your local food store carry California Table Grapes!” The
growers ceaselessly suggest that wage increases will put
their product out of reach of the consumer, but according
to figures issued by the U.S. Department of Labor, the
workers are paid but 2 to 5 cents out of each dollar invested,
so that even a very large increase in pay could not
increase the retail price by more than a few pennies.

Kovacevich also related the sad plight of the grower,
crying out at one point that he could not buy a car; he had
to rent one. (Perhaps he assumed that a left-wing reporter
would be ignorant of corporation tax devices, and
as a matter of fact, he was right; it was Mrs. Israel who
smartened me up when we got outside.) In the course of
this speech he let it be known that he was a friend of
former Governor Pat Brown and Hubert Humphrey as
well as of the workingman; Humphrey had been his guest
at the Bakersfield Country Club, of which Mr. Kovacevich
is a past president, and also at his house.

In effect, what we were hearing was a sincere and
impassioned speech of self-justification by a man fighting
angrily to banish a painful truth, and losing inch by inch to
his own honesty. “Don’t tell
me
about social consciousness!”
he exclaimed to Mrs. Israel, who had been talking to him
rather bluntly about just that. “I’ve got a boy who is studying
sociology at Notre Dame, and I know all about it!” He
indicated the picture on the table. “Sometimes a young man
can be too social-conscious for his own good,” he added
somberly. He looked haggard and upset, and I wondered
about that boy out on the porch, and about what he thought
of the fight for a new order that was taking place in his
generation.

Mr. Kovacevich says “Don’t tell
me!
” a lot, and clearly he
is a man who has not been told things very often. Like all
of the growers that I talked to except Bruno Dispoto, he
is sincerely sorry for himself, yet he seemed more reasonable
than all the rest. He pointedly dissociated himself from
the position of Jack Pandol, and he admitted that small
“shotgun” labor camps still existed. He spoke of Leroy
Chatfield, who had taught his sons at Garces High School
in Bakersfield, as “one of the brightest people I ever met,”
and when I asked how he accounted for the fact that this
bright person so fervently endorsed Cesar Chavez, he did
not tighten up but said quite simply, “He must be an
idealist, I guess.” Saul Alinsky, whom he had once seen on
TV, was “brilliant”—an extraordinary statement in a community
which had made Alinsky the Bolshevik evil genius
behind Chavez—and alone among all the growers that I
talked to, he made no attempt to identify Chavez with
Communism. On the contrary, he spoke of Chavez as a
human being, not some nightmare figure waving the
bloody flag of revolution.

In consequence, the case Kovacevich made for the real
problems of the American farmer in America, which are
considerable, was much more effective for being free of
slicked-over racism and self-serving patriotism, and as I sat
there listening it struck me how sad it was that a man as
otherwise intelligent and articulate as this one could not or
would not meet with Cesar Chavez. I said as much, and to
my sorrow John Kovacevich retreated, saying that Chavez
was vengeful and could not be reasoned with: hadn’t he
sworn that before he was through he would stamp the
damned growers right into the mud? I asked where he had
heard that story, and he said, “At the Delano Kiwanis.”

I wondered if John Kovacevich believed what he was
told about Chavez because as a big grower in the Valley,
it would take such courage not to; among the producers of
table grapes, the first to acknowledge right on the side of
Chavez will not be invited to the Delano Kiwanis or any
place else.

Still, John Kovacevich is a natural leader and a highly
respected farmer. A grower from Fresno, who told me that
this man raises the best grapes in California and therefore
America, refers to him as “Mister Grape.” One of the
reasons why Mister Grape is so respected, said my informant,
is because of his willingness to experiment, to
break new ground. Apparently Kovacevich has long since
conceded that a farm workers union is inevitable: the
question is whether he will follow the retreat of the right-wing
growers to a “sweetheart” contract with the Teamsters,
or follow his own conscience.

My impressions of Kovacevich were affirmed later by
Leroy Chatfield, who said that the man was not only a
Democrat—and therefore a near-radical by grower standards—but
someone genuinely concerned about social
issues. He had been a member of the State Labor Committee,
and once told Leroy that he had refused to join the
California Farm Bureau because it was so hopelessly right-wing.
“He wants to do right,” Leroy said, “he really does.
And I admire him because as a parent he never gave me
any problems. All the other growers did—Giumarra and
the potato people, all of them. They thought their children
were being poisoned by reading books on civil rights, the
Peace Corps, and everything, but not Kovacevich. I was
challenging his kids to read and to think and to discuss,
and he genuinely seemed to appreciate it. When Mike
changed from a business major to sociology or something,
he went along with it, and as for the kids, they’re fine. They
had new cars and lots of money, but they weren’t spoiled;
in fact, they were sometimes worried about the workers.”
Leroy sighed. “You know something? I’ve always had a
funny idea that John J. would call me up before this is
over and say, ‘Okay, let’s talk.’”

Kovacevich had cited to me the case of Lionel Steinberg,
a Coachella grower who treated his workers better than
average, and who had bitched hard when his ranch was
one of the first to be picketed. “Why him?” Kovacevich
demanded. “He’s been more liberal than anybody!”

Chatfield nodded when I told him about it. “Of course,”
he said. “That’s exactly why we picked on him. He understands
more, so he’s more responsible.”

Late in the day at the motel pool I scraped acquaintance
with two growers who would not reveal their names: they
lay on lounge chairs, white as potato except for their faces
and arms. They were Italo-Americans and brothers, and
they told me about the old Italian gardeners on their farm
who were now dying out; with these old men, the old
standards would disappear. “Everybody in this country
is cutting corners on quality these days,” one said; it was
all the same to him. “Your quality product is a thing of the
past,” he added, dismissing my regrets, as well as quality
itself, with one aw-get-outta-here wave of his hand.

These two men assured me that no outsider—they
meant myself and said so—could understand the situation
in the Valley, where even doctors and lawyers had worked
as children “in the grape”; this was why all that trouble
at Giumarra’s over child labor laws was a bunch of baloney.
The Giumarras had been poor fruit peddlers in L.A., for
Chrissake, and they had worked
hard
, we
all
did, to make
that money, and what was being done to them was a crying
shame.

My bathing companions took the official Valley line that
there was no labor problem and therefore no strike; that
the growers would let their grapes rot before they let
Chavez near them; that in any case, automation of wine- and
raisin-grape harvesting had already begun, and automation
of the table-grape industry would be under way
within five years. (The five-year figure is as invariable as
it is wrong: even if the machine is perfected and produced
in that space of time, there will be a hiatus while the old
vines are uprooted and replaced by new ones trained in a
different way to accommodate mechanical harvesting.
Either the defeat of Chavez or his victory could delay this
problematical machine indefinitely.) “If that guy hasn’t
signed up the table-grape boys by this October,” one
brother said, “he’s finished.” This time the same hand
motion dismissed myself and Chavez. “But he’s making a
lot of money, that’s for sure.” I shook my head. One brother
actually sat up at that, cocking his head to look at me. “If he
isn’t,” he said, “he’s stupid. Or a Communist.” I said he was
neither. “Do you mean to tell me that’s not a Commie flag,
that one with the sickle on it?”

“That’s not a sickle,” I said, wishing Manuel were
present. “That’s an eagle.”

“An
eagle?
” He didn’t say “What’s the difference?” but
his shrug did.

Outside my motel room when I returned was an old blue
station wagon belonging to Gilbert Rubio of the Agricultural
Workers Freedom to Work Association. I invited
him inside and gave him a drink, which he scarcely
touched; he sat stiffly in the chair nearest the door and said
that he wished to talk to me, but did not wish to talk to me
in the absence of “Mister Joe Mendoza,” with whom he
would return later in the evening. Since I was in a hurry,
I said fine, but Rubio kept talking, and as he never returned
later, or ever again, I am sorry now that I was not
more hospitable. Not that what he said was interesting,
because it wasn’t; it was the way he said it. Invariably, he
said “Mister” Mendoza, “Mister” Chavez, even when complaining
in intense yet monotonous tones of how Mister
Chavez had wrongfully accused him of “embezzlement.”
Almost everything he said was already written in the same
words on a green AWFWA leaflet that he handed me, and
most of it was directed against Chavez. I suggested that
AWFWA was merely a mouthpiece for anti-Chavez propaganda
that would fold up if Chavez were defeated, and
Rubio said eagerly that this was true.