Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, eventually became the symbolic leader of the entire Mexican American community of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, he was eventually enshrined in the pantheon of modern leftist activists and civil rights leaders alongside Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King Jr., and Betty Friedan. His Chavez Foundation today emphasizes Chavez’s saintlike status as “a genuinely religious and spiritual figure.” His Tehachapi redoubt remains a national monument.
In public, Chavez stressed nonstop his common-man roots, his strong Catholicism, and his devotion to wife and family, and thereby turned the struggle to provide a livable wage and humane working conditions for farm workers into a broader civil rights movement—led by the Christlike martyr Cesar Chavez himself. He carefully constructed an image of the long-suffering moralist, at odds with greedy capitalist “growers,” whom Chavez often publicly said he loathed.
Chavez frequently quoted Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and went on well-publicized fasts and nonviolent marches. The Camelot Kennedys made yearly hajjes to California to meet with the holy man. 1960s college students ensured that table grapes were banned in campus cafeterias.
In 1971, as a bumbling freshman farm kid entering UC Santa Cruz, I can remember being confronted my first day on campus by screaming students outside my dorm door for bringing to my new room a tiny box of grapes I picked on our small 120-acre farm.
Trying to explain to furious (mostly) wealthy white kids from Los Angeles that family raisin farming had little to do with the labor fireworks over table-grape production in Delano was a waste of time. To these suburbanites, Chavez was a god. And anyone anywhere who grew any type of grape for any reason was Satanic. So effectively had Chavez spread his gospel of evil farmer oppression to the estates of Brentwood, Palos Verdes, and Malibu.
Yet even then, there were always elements of the mythical Chavez that did not quite ring true. The supposedly nonviolent Chavez sent his toughs down to the southern border to form a “wet line” to stop and sometimes assault illegal aliens—in a way that would make ICE today look tame. But assaulting such “scabs,” Chavez preached, was necessary to ensure cheap nonunion “strikebreakers” did not drive down his union’s wages.
Rumors in small farming towns swirled—and were tossed off as “grower” lies—that he was a serial adulterer with a string of female liaisons, an image at odds with his carefully cultivated shy and introspective persona.
Nonviolence was his ostensible Catholic-Gandhian creed. But, in reality, his union strongmen salted packing-house driveways with nails, sometimes rushed into the fields to interrupt harvests and drive out workers, sabotaged produce shipments, and used illegal secondary boycotts. A table-grape vineyard besieged at harvest by an army of UFW union strongarms was a frequent and scary spectacle. All that was to be justified for La Causa—the effort to accord farm labor the same rights enjoyed by other union workers.
Despite the rhetoric, most of the table-grape growers of Delano in the central San Joaquin Valley whom Chavez fought were not so easily caricatured as evil billionaire corporate predators. Most were successful family-run farms and packing houses, founded in the Depression by tough first-generation immigrants who came with nothing from Sicily, Croatia, and Serbia.
The private Chavez’s own authoritarian habits and intolerance only grew more severe as his inept union leadership and forays into socialist utopianism lost members and misused state and federal funding. Finally, Chavez brought on the violent, wacky Synanon cult to indoctrinate his top echelon through bizarre group therapies, characterized by screaming sessions of profanity and ridicule. Synanon kooks as Chavez’s enforcers did not go over well with either his college-educated white leftist lieutenants or his inner circle of long-serving traditionalist Mexican American deputies.
Chavez’s growing paranoia and his hounding of “disloyal” union subordinates coincided with the late 1980s and 1990s, when farm mechanization, open borders, radically improved farmworker conditions, higher pay, and the changing nature of California agriculture had largely made the once-feared Chavez UFW irrelevant.
No matter—following his premature death at 66 in 1993, Chavez was canonized, as his postmortem reputation reached angelic status. There is hardly a major California city today that does not have a street named after him. His name is emblazoned on state and federal buildings. His birthday, March 31, at least for now, is still a California holiday. There is a USNS Cesar Chavez cargo ship. Chavez statues dot California campuses. Until recently, few have ever questioned the canonization of Chavez.
But this past week’s recent disclosures—long known among his inner circle and always suppressed for the supposed greater good of the union movement—have revealed that Chavez was a hero with feet of clay.
His top aide, the now-95-year-old but once fiery Dolores Huerta, has just revealed she was raped in a grape field by her boss over a half-century ago. And she was coerced into sex on another occasion, along with being sexually and emotionally abused by Chavez. Two of her own children were fathered by Chavez—a secret kept for over sixty years.
Yet the most disturbing revelations were that Chavez sexually molested and groomed at least two small girls, both reportedly during their preteen and underage teenage years. Some of his victims are now in their sixties. What was once whispered is now a disturbing confirmation of the dark side of the so-called humanist Chavez and the trauma he inflicted on the most innocent and vulnerable.
Further disclosures and victims are promised, but for now, Cesar Chavez, iconic hero of the oppressed, may well have been a longtime pedophile, chronic sexual abuser, and rapist—in other words, an oppressor on the wrong side of the victim/victimizer binary. How and why these dark secrets were kept hidden reflects the cult of Chavez holiness, the fear of retribution from the St. Cesar industry, and the moral bankruptcy of the Left.
So the embarrassed Left has gone into hyperdrive to separate from its fallen hero, rather than seeking to defend him. Why?
The disclosures did not come from far-right conspiracy theorists. The charges arose from among his closest and most intimate union associates, who were no longer willing to remain silent and perpetuate the decades-long myth. And their stories surfaced initially only from the investigative reporting of the left-wing New York Times.
No one from the Chavez inner circle has come forward with angry denials. Instead, they are either silent or quietly confirm the victims’ narratives that Chavez’s abuse was a well-kept secret in Chavista circles for decades.
After the #MeToo movement and the political weaponization of the Epstein files, the Left established the precedent for all others that mere allegations of sexual harassment earn mandatory political and social erasure, characterized by Soviet-style name-changing, statue-toppling, damnatio memoriae, and the complete eradication of the fallen hero from the public consciousness. Indeed, already, impending Chavez Day festivities have been canceled and his statues on campuses hooded.
The Left, however, which had even stripped the names of liberal icons like Woodrow Wilson and Earl Warren from iconic campus buildings for their purported racial offenses, will have some difficulty applying the same unpersoning methods to Chavez. After all, in today’s terms, he was a Latino champion of the DEI movement and not a proverbial “old white guy” on the wrong side of the victim/victimizer ledger. Will that fact save Chavez from being relegated to Harvey Weinstein status?
So, the Left is on the horns of a dilemma. It was one thing to erase a liberal jurist like Earl Warren or a progressive president like Woodrow Wilson, given that they were white guys whose alleged sins came from their “privilege” as white males.
But what does the Left do in these cases of intersectional conflicts of interest, when a noble male of color is accused of violating noble women of color, and there is not a white male oppressor to be found amid this sordid mess?
In the case of the civil rights giant Martin Luther King Jr., it had long been alleged by his close aide Ralph Abernathy that King watched—and did not intervene, perhaps even egging on the attacker—when one of his subordinates raped a woman in a hotel room. And his biographer David Garrow has reluctantly chronicled the dark side of Reverend King as a promiscuous serial adulterer who, again, allegedly got violent with some of his liaisons.
Yet for the Left, the world retains a Manichean divide between all the noble oppressed, now defined by their innate race, gender, and sexual orientation, and all the evil oppressors, mostly white, male, and heterosexual.
Leftists toppled or removed statues of genuine heroes like Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and George Washington; what, then, will they do with Chavez, who, as a figure of the modern age, was well aware of the norms, mores, laws, and customs of the late twentieth century?
The Left has ended any talk that a person’s life is a sum of good and bad, to be weighed somehow one against the other. In their past record of blanket ostracism, they were incapable of assessing anyone outside their ideological circle as a terrible private person, but one who, nevertheless, as a public figure, did some good things, much less consider the context of the times in which the fallen hero had lived.
But will they then apply that reductionism to Chavez or King, or even to John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton?
Or will they revert to keeping quiet, as they surmise that, in order to make a good progressive omelet, inevitably even the most hallowed leftist saint regrettably sometimes callously breaks a few eggs and so should be forgiven for the collateral damage of a few utterly ruined lives?