Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Hi, friends. Dick Plax here with another episode of Talking Strategy, Making History, joined here, of course, by Daraka Larimore hall, my partner in this crime and in so many other ways. Hi, Daraka.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Hello.
Glad to be here.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: You're doing okay.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: I am.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: So we are blessed. We are blessed and really privileged today with. With our guest, who is Miriam Powell. She is, I would say, one of the foremost journalists of California over the last several decades.
And she's gotten a lot of press, inevitably, because she's written two books about the life and career and work and historical meanings of Cesar Chavez, and when the scandals broke about him, she was naturally someone that people turned to to get some insights. And so we have two.
But I'm also interested. Miriam, Hi. Hi, how are you?
[00:01:18] Speaker C: Hi, Dick. How are you? Nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: And we're going to have some time to talk about your coming book, which is out this fall, called California Dreams. It's a what I would imagine a major history of the University of California, and in particular, from the angle of what does the university contribute to social equality and inequality in. In the history of the university. And that's a big story.
And I know something about it because you.
You interviewed me for that, which I was very happy to do.
So let's get started with the Cesar Chavez story. There are two books that you wrote, the Union of Their Dreams, Power, Hope, Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker movement. That was 2010.
And then a couple years later, 2014, you're out with a second book, the Crusades of Caesar Chavez.
And I can just see that the first book is remarkable in terms of the approach that you did to writing it, which is to tell that story through the oral history, through the testimony of something like eight people who were active in one way or another in the farm worker movement.
The second book is obviously informed by a tremendous dive that you took into the remarkable amount of material that Chavez preserved himself in terms of tape recordings and so on. And. But why two books? How did that happen?
[00:03:06] Speaker C: Okay, that's a good starting point. So the first book really grew out of my journalism life. I spent the last year at the Los Angeles Times as a reporter. I spent the whole year on an investigative project about what had become of the ufw, what it was doing today, what it was not doing, and how far away from the fields it had become.
And as part of that, that is responsible for my sort of transition from journalist to historian without a license, because I originally went back to talk to people who had been involved in the movement at its height in the late 60s and the 70s, to understand sort of how we had come so far away from those days and those ideals and that progress.
And what I found in talking to them was that the events of those years were so directly tied to the. The future of the UFW and its absence from the fields today that we ended up doing this very unusual thing for a newspaper, which was going back and doing an entire piece on the years between 1977 and 1981, which was a sort of very pivotal time.
And that history was so engrossing to me. And the people who I met in doing that were. You know, I mean, this will resonate with you, of course, because it was a movement. It really was a very powerful movement, and it was a movement that changed people's lives. And I wanted to understand more about that, what that force was, and also what went wrong. And, you know, I started talking to these people in 2005.
Many of them had not talked about what had happened to them.
They were purged. They left the movement. They were disappointed, deeply disillusioned, but they still held out hope for a long time that the UFW was the best hope for farm workers. And so there was that reluctance to, you know, we don't want to air our dirty linen in public. We're the left. We don't do that. And nobody had, for many years, sort of talked about what went wrong. And I kind of. I think I came along at a good time when people were willing to view it as history and to talk about it more. And also because the UFW was not doing anything really anymore of. Of any usefulness in the fields, people didn't feel there was anything to harm, and they could talk about it because there was nothing left.
And so the deeper that I got into those conversations, the more I also realized that, you know, I keep reminding people when I talk to them now that that was an era where there was no mass communication and no instant. You know, all the things that we take for granted now didn't exist. So you had these people in sort of, you know, in Coachella, in Salinas, who knew what was going on in their world and really did not know what was going on in the rest of the union. And I. And I still had not understood it. And I sort of thought I could be the person to piece that together in some ways and to sort of tell that larger story.
I always talk about the, you know, the. The thing about the blind men who feel the different Parts of the elephant, and they all describe a completely different animal. And that's a lot what it was like.
So the union of their dreams was an effort to tell that story, as you said, from the point of view of other people.
And Cesar Chavez was on stage the whole time because he's such a central figure in all of this, but he was not, it was not told from his point of view. It was told from their points of view. And when I finished that book in 2010, people started to say to me, you should write a biography of Cesar Chavez, because there isn't one. Nobody's done it.
And he had already been dead for, you know, he died in 1993. So it had been a long time. Lots and lots of people knew that. There were these incredible archives that you referred to that he preserved at Wayne State University in Detroit, the Walter, Walter Reuther Labor Library. You know, hundreds of boxes, hundreds of tapes. I mean, just an amazing resource. And of course there are other archives as well, but, but that was there and nobody had done it because lots of people knew that there was, as you know, what you referred to as a dark side, that there was a much more complicated story about Chavez than the way he had been presented, which was in this very hagiographic terms. And we can talk about a little bit more later about the dangers of doing that, which I think we are becoming more clear now.
And so, and in particular, there also were, you know, a lot of people who were like Latino historians who would have been obvious people to do this story, who really didn't want to go there and for reasons that I understand.
So I, and that was my first reaction too. You know, I don't need to be the person to tarnish the preeminent Latino figure in this country. But the more that I sort of thought about it and really in talking to historians, became convinced that, you know, people don't know who he was. I still think people on the whole know almost nothing about him.
And although I'd like to think that I and others have tried to rectify that situation in the last 15 years. But, but you know, I, I'm not, I have no illusions about that. And, and, and it's because, you know, one dimensional figures are not very interesting. And, and he, that it was really doing him a disservice in some way to not have serious scholarship about him that examined him in all his complexity and examined the movement and its failures and its successes. And so that led me to, you know, do a very different type book where I really was also, you know, had to switch my point of view because I had spent all this time thinking about him from the point of view of other people. And the biography was, you know, a very different kind of book.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: And I think it isn't only a disservice to him to ignore this.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: Go ahead.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: But it's a disservice to, to everybody in struggle because the.
Throughout history, the, the leaders, however exemplary on one hand they seem to be, are a danger as well as a resource for movements. And understanding this story in that light, I think is one of the things I'd like to get into a little bit here.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: I'm just curious, when did your biography come out in relation to Bardicke's book? Trampling out the vintage?
[00:09:46] Speaker C: So I think Bardicke's book came in between my two books, as I recall. And I knew I first met Frank when I was actually working on the stories at the newspaper. So we sort of knew each other and actually collaborated a little bit on getting some of the tapes digitized and things like that early on. And so his book came out in between my two books, I think.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: So he's also did a lot of digging and revelation.
And so that's why, I'm sure why you brought that up, Daraka.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: So, yeah, just that in exactly. In sort of academic circles, he did that book did a lot to open up conversation and allow people to start talking about the movement from. In the critical frame. And I just remember being. He came to speak at UCSB at some point. And I remember in that conversation, you know, there were folks from Chicano studies, Latin American studies, and people with personal connections to the farm worker movement and chicanismo and so forth who you could tell were just starting to reckon with the legacy in an open way, in a public way. And it was, you know, it was good. It was cathartic, but it, it, it definitely. You could feel it. You could feel the what it was, the, the weight of it. So it's really interesting to also hear that story from a sort of more public facing, you know. Yeah. Journalistic, public education standpoint as well and how those played in against one another in a way.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: Right. So.
[00:11:15] Speaker C: And we, you know. No, no, I was just going to say that Frank's book was. It was more ideological than my book and told from his perspective as a farm worker who, you know, was very much part of that and was, you know, an important part of the, the student movements at Berkeley before that. And so, so it, I mean, they complement each other and I Think you're right. They opened up a lot of conversations that were, particularly for a certain generation, were, you know, really difficult for people to start to grapple with.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: So anyway, in your various interviews that I've seen online that you've done since the scandal, revelations about Cesar Chavez, and maybe you'll briefly summarize what those have been, what they were. But you, you were quoted or you said pretty regularly you were not surprised. These were not surprising to you, but you had not known about them. And you want to sort of springboard off that, to talk about your reactions to that news and to why you weren't surprised but hadn't heard about it, that, you know.
[00:12:28] Speaker C: Sure, sure.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Yes, it is interesting.
[00:12:31] Speaker C: You know, I think, right. What I said was shocked but not surprised. That was my standard response. I mean, shocked in the sense that I think anyone who read about allegations of grooming 13 and 14 year old girls, you know, it was very upsetting.
Those were very disturbing stories, but they were not inconsistent to me with the other things that I knew and wrote about in terms of Cesar Chavez and his, his abusive behavior in different ways towards people, what he did to people who were some of his most loyal and trusted allies, the ways that he turned on people, then demonized them. And sort of, there's some, some of the meetings are, when you listen to the tapes that he made of these meetings, it's sort of a Lord of the Flies kind of, you know, environment where everybody suddenly gangs up on someone and you know, he accused people of stealing money, of being spies, of setting him up, all sorts of things. And, and then ultimately, you know, what to me, in some ways and many others is, is the most disturbing. And this is something Frank wrote about also, you know, ultimately he perjured himself in court in order to fire the farm worker leader, the farmworkers who should have been the, and would have been the leaders of that movement and continued the strength of the Union in the 1980s.
So, you know, he was a very complicated guy. He could, he was non violent, but he condoned violence. And there was a wet line on the border where they beat up and really seriously hurt people trying to cross the border. And that was run by his cousin and he knew about that. So there are a lot of pieces of his history that, you know, are not, you know, are not pleasant. And that, that also almost cult like leadership that develops at La Paz.
I think a lot of the behavior that was described in the New York Times stories, you know, is consistent with that, you know, and you had heard
[00:14:46] Speaker A: that he had adult adulterous relationships.
[00:14:49] Speaker C: Right, thank you. That's the other point I was going to make, is that his adultery was really very well known. I mean, and to the point where, you know, his wife always blamed the women, you know, floozies from the movement who were like seducing him and that whole line.
And, and I wrote about, you know, one incident where he, where his wife is opening the mail and intercepted a love letter from an 18 year old and left him briefly and they reconciled and so on. And I knew about that story from other people. I mean, I heard that from multiple, I heard accounts of how that unfolded from multiple people who were involved at the time.
And you know, an 18 year old is of legal age, so it's not, not a crime, but he's 50 something years old and what is he doing with an 18 year old? I mean, so again, that, that age gap was a rather red flag.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: On the other hand. So I just, what I thought of when I first heard these, these revelations was this is a lot that I've known throughout my life about leaders, so including in, in the New Left that I was very involved in, it was kind of taken for granted that there'd be a womanizing on the part of some, at least some of the people who were, you know, presidents of sds, for example, or Martin Luther King was, you know, had some. And, and then I thought, well, I've known stories of beloved Unitarian ministers who had 10 or 15 relationships in their parish and so on. So there's some, you know, speaking as a sociologist kind of thinking, there's a, there's a pattern here that is very pervasive in certain kinds of relationships, organizational, institutional relationships. And that's not news.
So, so maybe that's partly how you felt when you first were aware of his various adult, adulterous affairs is, oh, well, that's what happens, right? That's what goes on.
So, so the difference is that he was exploiting young women, you know, witch girls.
And then of course, Dolores Huerta's statements that he raped her. Do you have any reaction to that? That's a kind of almost somewhat separate story in a sense. Is it?
[00:17:23] Speaker C: Yeah, you know.
Well, I will just say that they had a very complicated relationship. I'll say that was the subject of lots of speculation at the time.
I, when I wrote about her, I called her a fanatic. That, well, so Chavez used the word fanatic as a compliment. You know, if you were a fanatic, it meant that you valued the movement above everything else. And Nothing else got in your way. And I have always said that she was the one fanatic who matched him in that, you know, if he asked her to do something, she dropped everything.
She was widely known as, you know, a terrible mother. She had, we now know, you know, more than 11 children, but, but 11 that she acknowledged at the time. And they were always being left at other people's houses and brought up by people and so forth. And because, you know, and she did a lot of his dirty work. I mean, when we talk about the farm worker leaders, I mean, she's the one who went and fired them on his behalf.
So, you know, I think her, her story is more complicated than it's been. You know, it's another example of someone whose story is a lot more complicated than the way it has been presented. And I mean, the other thing I've always said is that, you know, when Caesar was alive, he created his own mythology.
And he did that to give him the benefit of the doubt. Certainly in the early years he did that in, in the interests of advancing his movement. Right. So, you know, he, back when he, when he moves to Delano in 1962, he starts organizing farm workers, right, and is sort of trying to, you know, I'm doing this. What to me is sort of one of his bravest moments. He gives up a full time job, moves to Delano to try to organize a union for farm workers, which has never really successfully been done. And he goes around doing house meetings and he backdates his naval service to say that he was in the Navy from 44 to 46, when he really was in the Navy from 46 to 48.
And he does that so that he can be a vet, you know, so that people think of him as a veteran, because he's sort of looking for any little advantage that he can get to try to persuade people to do this, you know, very radical and scary thing. So in writing about hybrid and biography, I always sort of tried to not make that a gotcha, but to explain, you know, why he was doing that. And I. There's always this paradox that at the same time that he's doing that, he's making this incredible effort to preserve all the history and all the tape recordings of these meetings, which, you know, the lawyers say to him, you shouldn't be saving these, you should be erasing them. And he says, oh yeah, we just use them to do the minutes. But he doesn't. And he, you know, and I've always thought, I don't, you know, we'll never Know if this is true, but that on some level, as a student of history and an admirer of Machiavelli and various other, you know, historical figures, that he, on some level, understood that the history was important.
And I would say that Dolores, you know, has created her own mythology and has been using that to organize and, you know, more power to her. But someday there should be some sort of rigorous examination of her history, too, which is certainly an interesting one.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: On that.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: I'm sorry, just to follow up on Dolores, there is an episode you described where he's screaming and pretty much was kicking her out of the. Off the board and so forth in public at a board meeting.
[00:21:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: So it wasn't simply that. That she.
She blindly followed him. There was explosive relationship there. That's. That I didn't know about until.
[00:21:13] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And she was. And people would just like they were. It happened so often that they were sort of blase about it, like, oh, yeah, here they go again, the two of them, you know, And. And. Which always led to speculation about their relationship because they were all, you know, sort of like a bickering couple, you know, so.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Okay, well.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: So, yeah, to pick up on that. I mean, I. I certainly believe Dolores's account of what happened to her. I don't have any reason to doubt it, you know, nor do I question why it would take so long to come forward with it, as with all of his victims, survivors. But. But. But I also. I completely agree that it's not the whole story and that there's, like, There's. There's also. There's something about getting ahead of the narrative and wanting to shape it. And I don't even mean that in a cynical way, but just in, like, she lived it, A lot of things happened, and she wants to make sure that, you know, parts of the story are front and center while others were gonna have to wait for the. You know, for the book or et cetera.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: But I agree, It's. It was complicated, and it's sort of a.
The way that it's complicated is.
Is sort of at the heart of everyone's curiosity or maybe anger even, whenever these kinds of revelations come out, which is, what did people know? When did they know it, what did they do about it, how did they reconcile it, et cetera. And so, you know, having been in a political organization, an environment and community with an abuser hiding in plain sight, you know, has certainly shaped my thinking about it, and I'm far more sympathetic or nuanced, I guess you could say. About judging people in that circumstance. Because what I read, and, and this is my kickoff to the question to you is like, what I read is that this is a guy who was being abusive and horrible in public to every, you know, like, in front of everyone. And for various reasons, nobody was pushing back on it. And then there was an even more horrific kind of abuse that was going that he probably was very careful about. Who knew? And that is a paradox for people to kind of understand because. And this gets to Dick's point that, like, you, everybody can be, oh, that guy's a womanizer. Like, he likes him kind of young or something like that.
That then is a cover for something that's just like, you know, a thousand times worse. So anyway, so I'm curious about what you uncovered in the, like, sort of the people, the individuals that you profiled for the first book or in research, any of it of like, what did. What do you think people were thinking about him and how did they reconcile what must have made them uncomfortable in certain moments, et cetera.
[00:24:04] Speaker C: If you are Eliseo Medina, you know, and you were a farm worker with an 8th grade education, and now, you know, you've become a board member of the ufw, what he has accomplished is so remarkable that it was very hard for people to believe that he could be leading them astray. Right. So he's doing some stuff that seems a little crazy and a little wacky and, you know, this sort of gets into Synanon in the cult, like stuff. But it's like part of it is he must know what, you know, and he played on that, you know, and he played on it very, very effectively and strategically. So at the meetings it would be like, you know, I got you this far. Like, you gotta believe in me. Right. And that was sort of the undertone, or he would just threaten to leave. So, you know, at the period when things are really falling apart, which is the inability to make the transition from a movement to a functioning labor union.
Right. And it's the 1975 law that really brings about the downfall of everything, ironically.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: Can you say more about that, about the law?
[00:25:12] Speaker C: Yeah, sure, sure. So in 1975, California Governor Jerry Brown, in his first year, used a lot of political capital to get past the California Agriculture Labor Relations act, still on the books, stronger than ever. So sort of hailed at that time as one of the most pro labor acts, you know, had a lot of provisions that the National Labor Relations act did not have. You could have, you know, elections first and objections later and all kinds of Other things that were really very favorable to the union.
And California becomes the only state to have that, and the union then has to go out and win elections. And they do, right, because there is that pent up.
Pent up excitement and organizers and you have lawyers who are becoming labor lawyers, you know, practicing labor law and designing it as they go. You know, it's an enormously exciting time in 75 and 76 for some people.
And, you know, I mean, incredibly moving stories. I mean, farm workers who had never voted in their lives for anything, being able to vote for the union of their choice.
So. But that required the UFW to be a labor union. I mean, to have, you know, to negotiate contracts and to administer contracts and to. I mean, all of those things, which to Chavez was, you know, mundane work. He was not. He's very clear about that, that he's really not that interested in it. And I, you know, he sort of saw the union piece of it as being kind of set it and forget it. We get dues, and this is going to be income. You know, the UFW has never in its entire existence lived off of members dues. I mean, they never began to.
To be enough. It always lived off of money from contributors and particularly labor unions.
And so he really struggles. And that 1975 law is a real dividing point. And then you begin to hear at these meetings, these really anguished conversations where the thing is, are we a movement or are we a union? And people like his brother Richard, who was sort of the practical one, is like, you know, we can't be both and we have to choose. And Caesar's response at that point is, fine, I understand, you know, you people go off and be a union. I'm not really that interested in that. I'll go do my own thing. You know, I'll leave. And, you know, that was not conceivable to any paani. So.
So people went along with a lot of stuff that, you know, because of this, the history of what he had done, that. That's one big factor. I mean, the second thing is, you know, he was a charismatic leader in a very unconventional way. Not a great speaker or anything, but all. I mean, I. The number of people who said to me, you know, and then Caesar asked me to do this, you know, leave my entire family and life and get on a. Whatever. And I, you know, they did it because he was very persuasive and powerful in that.
So for all those reasons, I think, and. And, you know, and the third, why did people overlook and. And People kick that, you know, I mean, I, People are still kicking themselves for, you know, and what. And, and that was very much a part of the power of the union of my first book. And, and lots of, and I went to sort of lots of conversations with people who were not, you know, involved in any kind of social movements or sort of how do you know, how do you make progress and still have democracy? And when do you speak up and how do you speak up? Because there were many people who to this day are sort of like, what if we had said something, Would it have made a difference? Could we have changed something in terms of the future of the union itself?
Those are very difficult. And again, I think also the fact that there was so little lateral communication at that time also really change things.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: And yet you document some pretty heated discussions about the very issue of.
Here we have the prospect of really doing union effectiveness and him putting that down and ultimately purging people for that very thing. Marshall Ganz being, you know, the prime character, I think, at least from my, since I know Marshall being purged after having dedicated himself effectively to creating the basis for, you know, mass unionization in the, in, in Salinas and so forth. And, and that's where the overtly paranoid Cesar Chavez begins to emerge, isn't it? Or really comes to the fore. There's this leftist plot, this Jewish plot that gets into the, into the discourse and.
But he's, he's envisioned, his instinct is, as you say, to what, what, how would you describe if you were.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: Yeah, so he had Main Beats.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: He had a dream. It wasn't just about his own power. It was a dream of something.
[00:30:21] Speaker C: It was a sort of inchoate dream of a poor people's union. And that's what he talks about it as. But he never was able to really articulate that or figure it out. But he had this real commitment to the idea of sacrifice. You know, being a middle class hole was a big, you know, insult to people wanting to have a color tv. And he, so he really believed that people should not aspire to, to a higher standard of living, which becomes, of course, you know, a real difficulty if you're a union leader and you have a lot of members and, and, and the whole anti immigrant issue, which is complicated and not as, as, you know. I mean, he did launch the illegals campaign where people for a couple years were directed to report illegals to the, the ins.
But, but his feelings about immigrants are more complicated than that because I think a lot of it stemmed from the idea that immigrants Generally want to make money. That's, you know, they've come here to make money to support their families. And he knew that and that was a problem for him because he did not believe in that as a goal. So, you know, he was a very conflicted labor leader to begin with.
Marshall is actually one of the last to leave. Marshall stays till 81.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: That's my sense. Yeah, exactly, yeah.
[00:31:44] Speaker C: Marshall and Marshall and I have a slight disagreement about this. You know, Marshall believes that in the early days there was a real democracy and people had input and it was whatever. And then something happened to Caesar and things changed.
I don't subscribe to that. I mean, I think that, I understand why he thinks that, but I think it was really clear it was never a democracy.
It was just not as evident for many years. And the stakes were different. And it's really different if you're running a movement than running a union. And people did not, you know, didn't, didn't understand. It was very hard for Marshall in particular to accept that this goal that everybody thought they were jointly working to was really not the goal that Caesar was working to at all.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: There's a certain parallel between Cesar Chavez and Mahatma Gandhi's story that really I hadn't thought about fully until. I'm listening now.
Gandhi, you know, he's deified, but he was, he really was in favor of poverty and against modernization and wanting people to continue to weave their own clothes rather than industrialize.
And he.
I also had a strange relationship to young women.
[00:33:04] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: Which he wrote about in his autobiography, where in his autobiography he says, I tested, I had to reduce myself, he said, to zero. And the proof of it to me that I was successful was that I could have young women in my bed naked that I would not physically connect with.
And when I read this in college, I thought, well, that's a strange and weird thing. And I'm wondering to what extent he was covering up other things going on there. So did Cesar Chavez really know about Gandhi's life and so forth? Some. Is there a way in which that could have validated his own impulse? Have you thought about that?
[00:33:51] Speaker C: I have thought about that quite. I immediately thought about that because I knew the Gandhi stuff. And he, Gandhi was a, you know, he talks about Gandhi being a tremendous role model for him. And I think you're, you're absolutely right on both the poverty issues and potentially the young women issues, that was a real, you know, an inspiration for him.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Uh huh. So there was a way, he feels, Cesar, that this kind of Charismatic leadership is necessary for a movement that he's got a gift that he's more and more convinced of. This is, I'm trying to get inside his head that this, in that his relate, you know, his sexual life is not, not to be revealed, but it's something that it further validation of something about who he's trying to be. It's very hard for us to relate in any positive way to this.
[00:34:48] Speaker B: But that's, I guess, but why are we doing this? I mean, I don't know. I, I, I, and, and he knows he can get away with it.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: And he got away with.
[00:34:55] Speaker C: He also like let me throw out one more thing and I'll get back to your cult issue because there was a period where he believed that he could heal people by laying on hands.
[00:35:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:04] Speaker C: Okay. Now, I mean that sounds a little, you know and there are people at the time who thought that was a little bit far out. But it's part and parcel of the same idea that he, and, and, and the degree to which people, you know, there were a lot of, I mean there were people who were in the movement for lots of different reasons. Right. And there were a lot of people who got, it was, you got, you didn't get paid. It was $5 a week in room and board and it was the 60s and the early 70s and so there were a lot of sort of do gooders there too. And there are a lot of people who just worshiped him and played into the idea that he was this, you know, cult like figure.
So you know, I, I also feel like all of this is that there's a period and, and I wrote about this to some degree where it goes to his head. Right. I mean, you know, on his 50th birthday they declare that March 31st is an official holiday called Founders Day and that you know, there's a poem and that everybody should stop what they're doing and celebrate Founders Day and do appropriate things and so on and so forth. So you know, it's, it all, all of this is happening at the same time.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: Well that's, so that's where I, I'd love to hear your thoughts about, put like thinking about the UFW in a con context, in a contemporary context of a time period of the growth of cults and high control groups. And so like Cesar Chavez is like one of a ton of dudes at the same moment sort of being convinced of their own metaphysical importance with a bunch of people around them feeding that.
Also in left wing revolutionary social change Zeitgeist also, you know, tied to and, and then also directly influenced by the technology of cult control that he borrows from Synanon, which, you know, then is a. Has a direct pedigree to Scientology to like a whole bunch of things where cult leaders figured out a system to get people to, to, to tell on themselves so they had collateral over them. And it's like all the way to, you know, Keith Renari's thing. Nixxiom. Right. Like these people have read each other and learned from one another. So I, I actually first read about issues inside the ufw. I mean, I'd read political critiques of their lack of organizing and contract negotiations, but like as a, any kind of. Yeah. Problems inside through cult studies, you know, as like, oh, and that Synanon was so powerful, they even influenced the ufw, blah, blah. Right.
[00:37:54] Speaker C: So.
[00:37:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So is it wrong to think about it as like another 60s cult almost?
[00:38:00] Speaker C: No, I, I think it absolutely is. I mean, I think there was Richard Offshay.
Offshay is the person who wrote a lot about this. It was really, you know, very on target. But, but right. I mean, 78 is Jonestown. Right. And you know, and, and, and, and he was an important figure in left wing political circles in San Francisco before he took everyone to gain. Jim Jones was a very well known. And you know, and there are, I know people who were involved at that time who sort of were a bit. 1978 was kind of. Everybody was like when Jones then happened was like, whoa, you know, are we getting to. I mean, what's going on here? You know, it was a bit of, of a wake up call for them. And that is Synanon. I mean, Chavez first takes the board to Synanon in February of 77.
And all of this is kind of,
[00:38:49] Speaker B: again, that was later than I thought.
[00:38:51] Speaker C: Yeah, that's.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: Thanks for saying that. Yeah.
[00:38:53] Speaker C: Because again, I think so much of it comes back to the law and elections and his trying to figure out how to do what he wants to do. And he feels like he's losing power. I mean, he knows he's losing power. As early as 1973 when they become an official AFL CIO union, he sort of says, you know, now, and there's this part that I quote of what he said to a guy who was sort of his official biographer at the time, Jacques Levy, where he sort of says, now it starts like, you know, now there are people who are going to want to take power away from me, basically. So, you know, again, as early as 73, he's sort of like, who's going to. You know, I got to make sure that nobody's in a position to challenge me. And, you know, I mean, he's a control freak. Absolutely. And. And so once the law passes, and this is not his expertise, and it's not Fred Ross's expertise, and it's not. It's Marshall and Eliseo and other people who know how to win elections that are going out there and doing it. And that's just a tremendous threat.
Not to mention the farm workers who are going to, you know, who believe that when you say that you're going to inherit the union, they believed him.
So he goes through these different phases of trying to get control. He brings in a guy named Crosby Milne, who's an efficiency expert, and, you know, gets involved with Peter Drucker. And because he's sort of. It's. I mean, it's very sad in this way, where you could see him kind of just trying to figure out, like, how do I get control over this? And then he meets Dietrich, Charles Dietrich, the head of Synanon, which was absolutely a cult by then.
And Dietrich is like, this is how you do it, you know, And Dietrich has a lot of money and he flies around in jets, and everybody does everything he says. And that becomes, you know, very appealing and, you know, and introducing the game and all of this is, you know, incredibly destructive to the union.
[00:40:49] Speaker A: So I would say that one general point, besides understanding that particular what happened in the culture at that time, which is a great thing to talk about, but in terms of sort of organizing and how social movements and movement organizations are structured, to me, this is one of the great cautionary tales of allowing the notion in sds, we were obsessed with the idea that. And sncc, too, that leadership was dangerous, that we had to have.
You know, in sds, you couldn't be president for more than one year. There was a constant rotation. This is just a few years time. SNCC had no time. You know, they. They really created this.
They were experimenting a lot with how do you create collective leadership and collective participation, participatory democracy?
And all of those need to also be looked at and understood better. I mean, I'm still convinced that leaders are both maybe a necessary resource, but the kinds of leadership have to be scrutinized, and the methods of controlling leadership have to be very present in people's mind. And feminism added further to that critique, because I think we're talking about some. Some kind of feature of the masculine role in.
[00:42:23] Speaker B: In.
[00:42:23] Speaker A: In all of the cases that we're alluding to. So I really recommend people read, read both of these books because they are great books and, and. And really recognized as such, I think, by, by people.
[00:42:39] Speaker B: I.
[00:42:40] Speaker A: Is it okay if we talk a little bit about the, the.
The forthcoming book about University of California? It's called California.
[00:42:48] Speaker B: That'd be great if you could plug it, plug it some. Give us a taste.
[00:42:52] Speaker C: Sure, sure. Happy to. Excited about it. Coming out at the end of September. So pretty soon, you know, it's. I mean, as a New Yorker moving to California in 2000, I mean, one of the things that struck me immediately was the system of public higher education here, which is really just not like anything, you know, and I came from New York and SUNY and whatever, fine, but nothing that's comparable to the UC system. And the longer I was here and the more people. And as I got into the world of Chicano Studies as well, the, the, the impact that it's had, the transformative impact that it's had on people's lives was just, you know, I, I constantly ran into it over and over again. And then as someone who sort of became a California historian, and my last book was about the. Brown was really the first kind of attempt to tell a California history, and that was through the Browns family.
And again in there, that whole story of the Master Plan and Pat Browns was fascinating to me.
Sort of all of that began to make me think about how do I write about this. And then I did this fellowship about inequality and so forth, and how do you deal with that? And higher education, obviously, is one of the ways that you can deal with that sometimes to some extent.
So ultimately decided that I wanted to write a story about the history of the University of California.
I mean, there's so many things that people don't know about it, and its early history is so remarkable. And the fact that women were admitted, I mean, I meet people all the time now still who know a lot about California who do not know that women were admitted to, you see, from the beginning, basically.
And it's, you know, when you read the conversations in the early years about what the mission of the university is, it's very much about being, you know, an opportunity and an engine of mobility for anyone. And, you know, there's a. Even at the. And the fact that it's a constitutionally independent entity, which is also very unusual, one of only about six states, I think, where it has that degree of constitutional independence and the fight over establishing that in the constitutional convention in 1789, there are people who get up and say, you know, rich people can send their kids to Harvard and Yale, but the poor man can't, and we have to be a resource for that.
So, to me, there's this through line between that and that's the part of the university that appeals to me to write about it, to chronicle and to look at how does the university adjust to that as California changes, and how does it balance the mission of excellence and access, which are not always in sync and often in conflict.
And so I wanted to figure out a way to tell that story in very human ways, since what I do is write about people.
And so this book is sort of centered around the stories of five individuals, starting in 1868 and ending around 2014, but sort of into the 21st century, but not too far.
And I kind of use each person to anchor a different era in the university's history, and always with that kind of the theme being the university as a transformative entity, and not only for individuals, but for the state. And so, you know, it also, to me, is a place where all of the major social, political, cultural, demographic trends play out.
And so it's also, I think, in many ways, just a California history in sort of, you know, told through that lens.
[00:46:47] Speaker A: And it's really timely because there's so much assault on the value of higher education right now. And so I. It's not that you're singing simply singing the praises, though. You're right. I mean, you're right.
[00:47:03] Speaker C: Yeah, it's not. No, it's. It's not a singing of the praises at all. But it's.
I mean, I think that it's a. It's a hopeful book in the sense that it looks at the resilience of the university going through all sorts of crises and figuring out how to emerge and emerging changed, but still there.
And I think that there's a quote from Daniel Coit Gilman, who was the second president of uc, and he talks about that this must be a university for these people in California. This is not the University of Berlin, it's the University of California. And it is for these people. And it's a quote that over the ages, gets kind of repeated over and over as people wrestle with, you know, how do you make that. How do you stay true to that mission? And I think that's very much, you know, at the heart of. Of the book for me is how does it, you know, and with mixed results, obviously, but. And I will say, just since, you know, Santa Barbara plays a big role in the book for a couple different reasons. It's not a book that I don't deal with each campus. I deal with certain campuses more than others. And Santa Barbara and Irvine actually both, which are not the places that people think of typically, at least outside of California.
And I mean every campus has its own interesting story and history and I could have gone to any of them and done this, but, but Santa Barbara also, you know, I, somebody, somebody who read it pre, read it for me. A historian said, you know, this is good. You're puncturing the myth of Santa Barbara as a party school. So I, and I do try to do that. I mean, I think that, you know, Santa Barbara's role as a historic hub of black and Chicano activism, you know, is really, is not a story that's known as well as it should be and that that's an important piece of the story. And then just the fact that, you know, again, Santa Barbara and Irvine in recent years have just become these, you know, first class, incredibly competitive campuses and the rise of, you know, in many ways it's not UCLA and Berkeley, which were up there for a long time, but it's the other campuses. And when you look at the whole system together, you know, it's, it's, it's a pretty remarkable entity.
[00:49:34] Speaker A: Yeah. And I've been here for 50 plus years more and it was 95% white when I got here. Now it's about 30% white. And it's a much more selective institution than it was in, in 50 years ago. It's, to me that's in itself a fascinating story. I worry too, and maybe your book will make a contribution encountering this. I think the newest generation of faculty and administrators don't really grasp what was achieved in terms of a certain, you know, autonomous and, and shared governance parti, you know, semi democratic institution. There's too much cynicism in the air and too much set, you know, sort of short term thinking and, and not, and not. And so maybe your work is going to help bring back a deeper understanding of, of that, of the fact that we, you know, the fact that it's a constitutionally independent university institution in the, in the state of California. The fact that it was, it should not be simply bowing to the whim of whim of corporate influence. That students and faculty have a direct role in running the institution is a vision that never fully achieved. But it was a principle that I'm not sure people understand now. That's just my.
[00:51:13] Speaker C: Oh, I totally agree with that. And I talk to people who are I mean, I talked to people who have been at Stanford and who don't know about the system of shared governance, don't understand the power of the faculty at uc. So I think that there's a lot there in the history that is. And it is. I think we need a hopeful story at this point, too. It would be good to have something to look back on to remind people of why people were so committed to this and what its importance is.
[00:51:45] Speaker A: So the name of the book, the title is.
[00:51:48] Speaker C: The title is California Dreams, the Making and Remaking of the University of California.
[00:51:54] Speaker A: And that'll be out in September.
[00:51:56] Speaker B: Yes, I can't wait to teach it. Can't wait to sign it in detail.
[00:51:59] Speaker C: And it's not that, like, by the way, it's not a tome. It's actually like reasonably linked, so. Which I'm very.
[00:52:06] Speaker B: Even better.
My students might actually read some of it. Yeah, it'd be great to have you. Absolutely.
[00:52:11] Speaker C: I'd love to.
[00:52:12] Speaker A: Well, your method in the.
In the union of their dreams, and I assume in this book too, is, as you've alluded, telling the story through the experience of individuals. And that there was something like Studs Terkel did that you. Did you learn from Studs Terkel?
[00:52:32] Speaker C: I did a little bit. And yeah. And he figures in. Actually he gets mentioned in a couple places by other people. But it is that effort to braid the stories and to connect it through people.
[00:52:45] Speaker A: So. And it's highly. Makes it highly readable and highly.
I mean, just great. And I. We didn't give the title of the, of the Brown book.
[00:52:55] Speaker C: Oh, the Browns of California.
The family dynasty that shaped a shaped estate and transformed a state and shaped a nation, I think is what it is. But.
[00:53:05] Speaker A: So I can't, I can't emphasize too much that these are really valuable books if you care about California, if you care about the kind of questions that would be raised and we've been talking about today.
Miriam Powell, thank you so much for all the work that you've been doing.
And we'll get this out pretty quickly so you can do with it what you want.
[00:53:29] Speaker C: Thank you for all your work in the last 50 plus years, Dick, you know, you've been a big factor in all this history.
[00:53:35] Speaker A: Well, thanks. Thanks a lot. So take care and we'll be in touch.
[00:55:45] Speaker B: Sociacion lima. Well, ghana.
[00:55:50] Speaker C: Yes, I.
