Volume 22, Number 18 · November 13, 1975
The Progress of Cesar Chavez
By Francis Carney
Chavez and the Farm Workers
by Ronald B. Taylor
Beacon Press, 342 pp., $10.00
Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa
by Jacques E. Levy
Norton, 546 pp., $12.95
Back in 1939 Carey McWilliams, then an official in a liberal California state government, asked a Senate committee under Robert LaFollette, Jr. for national legislation that would 'substitute democratic processes for shotgun tactics in California agriculture.' McWilliams's language on this occasion was controlled, neutral, almost chaste. For the LaFollette subcommittee was slowly putting together—and meticulously documenting—a terrifying tale of the industrialization of agriculture in California, of the domination of the fields by a handful of giant companies linked to other industrial and banking giants. These, 'growers,' as the owners are called in California, sweated their field labor and mistreated them with contemptuous savagery, denied them even the most rudimentary forms of labor organization, and turned loose their hireling police, judges, and prosecutors on any who dared to protest or to demand a voice for the despised and wretched workers. McWilliams had already described this system memorably in Factories in the Field. There he called it 'fascism.' In Grapes of Wrath and his earlier In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck wrote his searing though not exaggerated popular accounts of the misery and powerlessness of migratory field laborers in California.
Review, 3757 words
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