On the New Left, 1966

A new generation and the movement's isolation in the 1930s

Cannon: Now, the points that we decided to put up for discussion tonight are a couple of problems that confront the new generation of revolutionists assembled here, whose introductory experience has been much different from that of the originators of our movement thirty-eight years ago. We had had a lot of experience in the mass movement prior to our expulsion from the Communist Party, and then we were suddenly cast out of the Communist Party and the movement and isolated from practically all external activities for a number of years. We were blacklisted and proscribed as counterrevolutionists.

There was not much doing in the labor movement as such. In the unemployment movement that started in the first years of the Depression, we were artificially kept out by the Stalinists, who had it under control. And the result was that our movement had to turn inward. It was partly our own choice. And we put in about five years of intensive discussion in the party and in our press of the great international issues of the time. The Russian question in the first place; the German question in the years leading up to the triumph of fascism, the counterprogram of the Left Opposition of the united front against fascism, which was rejected in Germany both by the Social Democrats and the Stalinists and resulted in the terrible catastrophe of the fascist victory in 1933; the issue of the Spanish Revolution that began in that period; the lessons of the Anglo-Russian Committee in connection with the British general strike; the lessons of the Chinese Revolution. All problems of world import and the deepest theoretical significance were studied by our young movement, and our comrades were educated both in the discussion of these issues and in the polemical struggle against the Stalinists and Social Democrats and other reformist tendencies in the labor movement.

The result was that when the mass movement really opened up, after five years of our isolation, and we had in the meantime assembled some cadres, we were well equipped to plunge into the mass movement effectively, because we had solved in our own ranks and in the minds of our new comrades most of the important problems. And they were able to make outstanding successes in one place after another in the mass movement in conflict with the other tendencies.

The New Left: indifference to theory

Now, there's a peculiar phenomenon apparent in the past few years in connection with what they call the New Left. That's the appearance of a widespread movement, especially among college students, of antagonism to the existing state of affairs, combined with an indifference to theory and program, and a general tendency to turn their back on all the experiences and lessons of the past. And I see in this movement, which gets a lot of uncritical praise in many circles, a dual quality.

One that is positive is the obvious sincerity and earnestness and at least semi-seriousness of thousands and thousands of young people in their revolt against the sick society in which they live. That's positive. Their tendency to assume that all previous experience is useless, and that we can start with a clean slate as if nothing had happened in the past, is not only the greatest absurdity but contains within it the danger of a total collapse of the entire movement and a black eye to the whole movement of student protest.

It's almost as if one were to start with the science of medicine. Scientific medicine as we know it today is based upon the accumulated experiences and the conclusions and generalizations drawn from these experiences and discoveries over many centuries. And it would be hard to find an intelligent, educated person who found something sick in his own person or that of one of his family who would look around for someone who had had no previous experience. On the contrary, we know that very rigorous prescriptions are laid down for the practice of medicine, the science of medicine. Just to get a degree in medicine requires premedical education, I think four years of instruction, both in theory and practice, in hospitals and schools, a year or so of experimental practice as an intern in a hospital, before one can really begin to hire himself out as a doctor fit to cure a sick human being.

But what we're dealing with now is a sick society, and it's certainly an absurd assumption that you don't even need to diagnose the sickness, to say nothing of getting an antidote from someone who at least has studied the experiences of others in the medical school. There are such doctors, and God help us, there are thousands of people who prefer such doctors. But we who can pride ourselves upon minimal intelligence and a minimum of education call such doctors quacks. And we call the people who go to them to get a cure for cancer from some kind of a pill or a magnetic lamp or something of that sort victims of swindlers. Now here you are dealing not with a sick person. You're dealing with a sick and corrupt society.

That's what the revolt is all about, isn't it? The recognition, the almost instinctive recognition, that there's something fundamentally wrong with a social order that can't produce anything but war after war and depression and fascism and the corruption of values and the prostitution of talents to personal ends against the interests of the community, the lack of comradeship and cooperation and solidarity which was characteristic even of primitive society thousands of years ago. A widespread recognition that there's something about that society that is really sick and really corrupted, but a refusal to even inquire: has there been any study of this society in the past? And have any generalizations been made from past experiences? Well, there certainly have.

And our tendency, our Young Socialist Alliance, represents that section of the new youth revolt that, like the sensible medical student, tries to study the science that has been evolved from previous experience. We call Marxian socialism scientific socialism precisely because of that, because it's based upon an analysis of society which sees in it a course of evolution, that recognizes certain historical forces which have pushed it in a certain direction, recognizes the antagonistic forces of the classes which are leading to a collision, and sees in the working class the power that can and must, for its own preservation, do away with this present system and install a new socialist order based on cooperation and solidarity.

Cooperation in action, and the differences that must stay sharp

Now, can we under any circumstances reconcile these two schools, the school of political quackery and the school of socialist science? No, you can't. There's absolute conflict. But in the course of daily actions, and here is a striking difference between your experiences and those which we went through thirty-eight years ago. (That sounds like the Students for a Democratic Society [?] trying to interrupt a scientific lecture. Or maybe a Stalinist, I don't know.) Whereas our young cadres of thirty-odd years ago went through a long period of schooling, study, discussion, exchange of views, out of which came clarification and education, our young movement has been recruited largely in the course of actions, one after another, beginning with the fight in defense of the Cuban Revolution, the free speech movement, the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, and so on.

And in the course of these actions, they've been intimately associated with various other tendencies, reformists, and so on, including Stalinists, Students for a Democratic Society, the Du Bois Clubs, the various Negro organizations and so on. And I wonder if the time hasn't come for our comrades to take a calm and critical view of the experience up to now and ask themselves wherein we can sharpen our weapons for the next stage of the fight.

The cooperation in action, action itself, is certainly not to be condemned, because faith without action doesn't amount to anything. But in the course of the action and the cooperation, the question arises of whether some of our comrades, perhaps unconsciously, have failed to make a sharp enough distinction between our tendency and that of the others, and have failed to put the necessary emphasis on these differences and delimitations in order to harden and strengthen our ranks and recruit from the other tendencies to our ranks.

We can't speak against cooperation in action. That is a Leninist principle known as the united front, cooperation in practical actions aimed against the class enemy. It is an imperative duty of a revolutionary grouping, however small it may be. But submergence in a general unification of the movement, a tendency to feel that after all we're all buddies and the differences between us are far less important than the fact that we're acting together in this particular demonstration, can lead to some very sharp and painful surprises. As, for example, at the Washington conference nearly a year ago, when our comrades suddenly found themselves colliding with a Stalinist, social-democratic, reformist bloc that wanted to derail the antiwar movement from its main line of fighting to withdraw the troops into a general mishmash which could be herded into the support of the Democratic Party.

Now, they have what appears to be a persuasive argument. If you talk about the past, they say that's all dead. These are dead issues, let's not bicker among ourselves, let's not thrash over old fights which the older generation occupied themselves with, let's start afresh and anew. The trouble with that argument is that all the problems of the movement are illuminated in the experiences of the past. If a Stalinist or a social democrat says he's against this war in Vietnam, he's against Johnson and his baby-burning gang, isn't it fit to ask him (improper, since he is trying to get support for his party): didn't you a couple of years ago ask the workers to vote for this party that's burning the babies in Vietnam? What can he answer? That's precisely the advice they gave then, and that's a mark against them. And I can understand how it's very inconvenient for them to be confronted with such a question. But you'll have the same question arising again in the coming election, where they're trying to herd the workers and the antiwar fighters into the same party that got us into the war they say they're fighting against.

The most you can get out of that, if you duck the issue, is to give them free play to continue their treacherous policy. And I think it's our duty to mercilessly expose all those actions of all tendencies in the past that have contributed to the disorientation and defeat of the workers and consequently to the strengthening of the capitalist system. And I believe that can be done without in any way interrupting our activity in the daily fight. That's one thing. But our press, our propaganda, our literature, our lectures, our discussions with individuals have to be permeated with our conviction that scientific socialism has analyzed the problems of the working class in the past and has pointed the way toward the future, and that you can only build a movement that can lead to victory if you make these questions all crystal clear.

What theory is, and the Russian Revolution

The issues of the past are not dead. They rise over and over again in one form or another. Not only on the negative side, but also on the positive side. Theory, as we understand it, is not some prescription cooked up in a corner by a few fanatics or pretentious pedants. Our theory is the generalization of past experience. It's intended not as a dogma, as they say, but as a guide to action, to be constantly tested by action. And we hold that's true also of the so-called theories of the others.

We know that the theory of Marxism, as it was elucidated and practiced in action in the Russian Revolution, tore one-sixth of the world out of the orbit of world capitalism, and made all the difference between the pre-revolutionary period and now. The world has never been the same since the Russian Revolution of 1917, precisely because prior to the revolution, a group of determined Marxists had refused to start all over again as if nothing had happened, but went all the way back to the teachings of Marx and Engels and brought them up to date and applied them and organized a party to put them into practice, which led to the victory of the Russian Revolution.

I've said many times, the Russian Revolution not only changed the world and started a new epoch dating from November 7, 1917. It changed the lives of every one of us. We sit here in this room today, how many of us would even know each other if it had not been for the Russian Revolution of 1917? It was the Russian Revolution that gave birth to the Communist Party in the United States. It was the entrance into the Communist Party of some of us old-timers, and our successors, that brought about the association between us and those who came after us, and one way or another we got acquainted with each other. But if you eliminate the Russian Revolution, you'd eliminate all relations between us, with the exception of an individual here and there who are associated in other ways.

It changed everything because it was fundamental. It did not attempt to simply put a poultice over a sick society. It set out to overthrow it, and the entire tsarist system, the landlord system, the capitalist system of exploitation in the factories, was all knocked over almost by a single blow through the power of the working class.

The power of the American working class

And if you listen for one moment to people who suggest that the American working class wouldn't have the power to do what the Russians did, stop to look at the statistics for a while. Russia had a population of over a hundred million under the Tsar, and less than three million were industrial workers. Less than three million out of the hundred, concentrated in heavy industry, exercised such power as a compact unit, and by virtue of their strategic position in production they were able to turn over the whole system.

The United States is at the opposite pole from Russia, which was the most backward country of capitalism on a big scale in 1917; the United States is the most advanced. And you hear talk all the time of the tremendous power wielded by Washington, the power of America represented by its armaments and its ships and its airplanes and its bombs and its money. They don't say anything about the power of the working class here, which represents a majority of the population. Not the three million of Russia in 1917, but according to the latest statistics, I think about seventy-five million in the enrolled workforce of the United States. About sixteen or seventeen million of them organized in unions have become, in the course of their organization, their struggle, so union conscious that you never see a strike anymore with strikebreakers. You never see a strike anymore that doesn't shut down the works right then and there.

And you see revolts in the most unexpected places, which was not unknown before the uprising of the thirties. In the old days, every strike was a semi-civil war. We'd expect a few people to be killed, innumerable people to be wounded and thrown into jail, strikes more often broken by professional strikebreakers than won. Now the airplane mechanics call a strike, the whole work shuts down, and a few pickets are sufficient to keep everybody off the job. In New York, just after everybody got through saying, well, finally the working class is finished, and just after they'd heard the last speech of an expert from the Students for a Democratic Society [?] explain that the working class doesn't count anymore, the transport workers decided to shut down the town, and the speaker had to walk home.

You see it in the most unexpected places. It used to be the craft unions in a given industry would strike one at a time and the others would stay at work and break the strike. Now you've seen within the course of two years two prolonged strikes tie up New York's powerful newspapers. Nobody crosses the picket line. Everybody grumbles, there are all kinds of criticism, but there's no crossing picket lines, for one reason because it has entered into the consciousness of the workers themselves that that is unethical, and for those who have no regard for ethics and morality, it's dangerous. And the result is the same. You're going to have, in my opinion, a great expansion of the working class in its organized form.

All kinds of sparks from the cold volcano are to be seen. You have a nurses' strike or a threatened strike in L.A., and an immediate offer of the authorities to give them pay raises undreamed of a few years ago. You had a threatened strike of nurses here in San Francisco. I don't know whether it came off or not. I didn't follow the papers. But I'm sure that it either came off or else they got substantial increases. And it's timely and significant and symbolic that it should happen in San Francisco, that the first nurses' strike should actually take place here, because San Francisco was an old union town in the days before the First World War, when Los Angeles was a scab town, and the only answer, in the desperation of the workers, even in the building trades, was that they had to resort to dynamiting, to call attention to the fact that the place was not organized. San Francisco was in the vanguard of the organization of the maritime industry in the mid-thirties, as you recall.

Now, these nurses' strikes don't stop there. There are, I venture to say, not less than a million or two hospital workers outside those who are registered as nurses. And they belong to the submerged class of exploited people who now haven't even had the benefit of the miserable minimum wage. I venture the prediction that following the spark lighted by the nurses, you'll have a movement across the country of hospital workers to organize and get some of the benefits of organization, unionism, solidarity, militancy, and so on. You have down here in California in the agricultural industry an uprising of the submerged and exploited and disinherited that's attracting the attention of the entire country and attracting support from all sections of the working class.

Carrying the student movement into the working class

Now I believe that our young comrades, after an apprenticeship of a number of years in activity of various kinds, in cooperation with other elements, have to put on their program a thorough consideration of ways and means of carrying the student movement into the working class, into the labor movement, because that's where the power is. You can think as highly as you wish of the universities, and you can think the professors are great men, and you can think that students can lift the world on their shoulders, but you're wrong on all three counts. The role of the student is to recognize where the power in society is, and that's in the working class, that has the interest to overthrow the society and needs only the consciousness of their own interests and some leadership and organization to bring it about.

It's time, in my opinion, to just begin now to look ahead. Those who are in college are just finishing. Look ahead to find their way to the source of continued activity in the revolutionary movement. And where should we get into the workers' movement? That isn't always easy, as we found out in the thirties. You have to enter where a door is open and push it open wider and bring others with you into it. You find it in the most unlikely places, where you happen to have a concentration of people in a favorable situation. And every place you go you recruit for the party, because the party is the conscious expression of the historic process that leads unavoidably to the socialist revolution.

And the students in this country, as in Europe, can be a great force and a great power in such a movement, provided they understand their own role: as ideologists and as organizers and teachers and participants and learners. I add learners, because those who go into the working-class movement thinking they know it all and that they come only to teach and not to learn are due for some very bad bumps. They have to learn the hard way. But if they go from the beginning willing to learn from the workers as well as to teach, they'll have a much easier time and do a much better job.

Now, I believe our task is to clarify the problem in our own minds and in the minds of those whom we can reach with our propaganda. The object is nothing less than a correct diagnosis of the social system to begin with. That diagnosis is that we live in a corrupt society that's long outlived itself and threatens the world and the human race with extinction, that it has to be overthrown, and that there's only one power in the world that can do it, and that's the working class. And all the working class needs in order to accomplish that mission is to be conscious of its interests and conscious of its power. And our task is to organize a party that represents this consciousness and try to impart it as widely as we can.

The dress rehearsal

When we look back at the Russian Revolution and all that it did in the world and is still doing, all that happened in China and Eastern Europe and the colonial revolution are all the direct repercussions of the Russian Revolution in 1917. But when we look at all that, and then look at the United States, where the greatest power of world imperialism is and where the greatest potential force of the American working class is, we say all that's happened up till now has been a dress rehearsal for the final showdown. And we happen to be in the place, in the country, connected with the class that's going to bring about the showdown.

We have to pay for that great historical privilege. Comrade Dobbs [?] said this morning or yesterday, participation in that showdown will be worth the price of admission. I believe that's correct. Whatever the price may be, even if it costs our lives, even if it costs a hundred times over anything we can foresee, the privilege of participating in the movement for the transformation of society and making this world available for the human race to develop its full potentiality. Just the vision of such a prospect is worth anything that we can give to it, and the alternative is not worth a cent. Once one has fully grasped this alternative and has committed himself to the side of progress and the regeneration of human society, he cannot consider any alternative. And if we can inspire others with the same conviction that we have in that respect, we'll do all that we're called upon to do by virtue of our presence in this world at this hour and this date. And if we do less than that, we will never find satisfaction among ourselves, and we won't be worth much to anybody else either. Thank you.

Introducing the Delano report

Chair: Okay, I think we can go right into questions, but first Bill Kiesel, if he could possibly come up, has been active in support of the Delano strike, and Jim wanted that he should come up and talk a little about this strike before we go right into the question period. Are you here, Bill Kiesel? Thank you.

[Gap in the recording]

Bill Kiesel on the Delano strike

Kiesel: [inaudible] this speech, and I'm just a substitute now. And the way Virginia would have brought the story up, well, I would be the second best. So the comrades have to know that they're only listening to the second best, because Virginia has done a tremendous job on this. I wouldn't be giving this speech with any kind of feeling, or I would have been scared, but I've seen there's two comrades who also participated in this Delano situation: Comrade Tom Cagle, who was another worker from my plant, who was very active, and his good wife, whom I call a comrade, who's not in the movement. They did a tremendous job. So if I miss out on anything, I know I've got support tonight.

In Delano there was two movements there. There was the NFWA, which is the National Farm Workers Association, and AWOC, that's the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. Now AWOC is an organization which was brought up by the AFL-CIO. It was strictly a Filipino organization. The majority of them were Filipinos. The minority there was Mexicans and a few Negroes. Very strong, very militant. Chavez's group, the National Farm Workers Association, the NFWA, was organized in a step-by-step process by this one individual who was married, has a family of six or eight, and learned the hard way, from town to town, picking up recruits in the farm community. After he developed an organization of a couple thousand farm workers, he had, he was going to start (it wasn't actually an organization of farm workers, it was sort of a cooperative organization, which was going to be a recruiting step to be moved into areas to organize farm workers) sort of a college training program for agitators.

When they walked out on strike in September, they knew they had a fight on their hands. They couldn't count on the AFL-CIO. They called on Chavez of the National Farm Workers Association. Two weeks after, the National Farm Workers Association came to their aid. Now, what they needed was support from the outside. In the early days, when the radicals moved in to support the farm workers, they had the support of the community. But on a national basis, they didn't have this support. In many sections of the country, they wouldn't know that there was a strike going on there unless they read it in the paper, and they just probably read it through. But with this National Farm Workers Association, there was an appeal to come to the aid. They called for students. SNCC. Now, as the Teamsters would call it, it was no organization at all. But they found out by surprise.

I'm going to read an article from the Teamsters Union, an issue of August 16, 1966. It states that the National Farm Workers Association, said Bill Grami [?], in charge of the Teamsters Farm Workers Organization, "is not a labor union as the Teamsters know a labor union, rather the mixture of a new left, a combination of civil rights demonstrators, university students, beatniks and revolutionaries." I'm going to read the whole story here. "One character," he explained, "a principal in the NFWA called Valdez, was trained in Cuba." Comments: I don't know where they picked up this information, but they dug quite deep.

As Cannon was stating not too long ago, there's a new youth movement rising. A new thinking process has been taking place. "They are following the policies: down with the gringo, viva la revolución." What they mean, the gringo was the boss, not the white workers themselves. But here they stated that it was sort of a prejudiced remark that was made. They used the word "wetbacks" when they were talking to the Filipinos, saying that the wetbacks will come in and take your jobs away, et cetera. They used very discriminatory words. "Demonstrations by university students have gathered food and clothing throughout the state which is used to maintain a new look [?] and a small number of migrant farm workers. The Delano farm workers received nothing. These people who have" (I need my glasses, may I have yours? Yes. Poor Lenny) "these people who have found it impossible to infiltrate the American labor movement are using the farm workers to build a labor political base of their own. They're abusive to the workers, degrading them in many ways. They misuse religion on one hand, and on the other resort to tactics of religious fear for any who will not join the revolution against the gringo. The Teamsters, who represent more than 100,000 workers involved in processing food," et cetera, et cetera.

They talk how powerful they were. And this little nothing was no organization at all. Well, they found out that this was an organization of a young bunch of students from various political groups. I'm not talking about the Democratic or Republican Party. But they had background from families who belonged to radical organizations, and helped to participate and made this movement possible.

How the support was organized

Now, how did they get these organizers? It was simple. There was an appeal made. And one young student got this appeal, a high school student about seventeen years old, [inaudible] Virginia, she's the director in the south Alameda County area, to check on this student, knowing that she knew this student, knew the mother. She okayed it. So when he went down into Delano, he thought it was going to be a big professional job, and he found out that to be an organizer, you don't get paid. You have to pay. So it cost him ten dollars to go to school to be trained to become an organizer. And when he got finished they told him, "Your area is New York City." I think that's all he had was the ten dollars, so he said, "How am I going to get there?" He says, "Well, the best you can." Finally hitchhiked, went to New York. Being unpolitical, he came back with great stories to his mother, because of school being open, and he met people like from the Du Bois Club. They were picketing, raising money, gathering food.

Now, in certain areas in the farm area countries, not here alone but throughout the country, they were setting up these boycotts. S&W; first it was Schenley's [?], and after Schenley, they jumped to S&W. Now, here's what they do. They have one or two persons in town. They find out how many farms there are in that area, the names of the owners, how many people they employ, what is the wage scale. Then they find out who is the councilman, is he a friend of labor? And if he is, is he employed by one of the farm industries? Well, there's your political base there, see? And this is one of the many methods that they use in the organization.

Then they want to get some publicity. So they started a march from Delano all the way into Sacramento, step by step. Took probably a couple weeks. I don't remember how long, but it was successful. And every town they stopped in, they talked, they met people, and they were welcome. And this was an educational process of itself. Finally, they got into Sacramento to meet the great white father, Brown, and as the Times magazine stated, where is this "Tower of Jelly" [?]? We never gave them any support until only about a week ago, sent them a telegram, knowing which way the wind was blowing, of congratulations. This was on a Sunday, and of course the victory was on a Wednesday afternoon. They were celebrating, but I noticed that the paper said they won on a Saturday. They didn't count the ballots, but the farm workers knew already who won.

They had a tough struggle first. Before I was going to make this speech, I was going to get all my papers and everything. I was going to round it up, and I tell them, Virginia, please. I said, don't worry about the cold. They got a beautiful mic, and maybe your voice will sound better. I said, you won't get emotional or anything like this. So I asked her for a couple of leaflets, which I brought over, which would have entertained the comrades here. Pictures. Well, she said, finally, she's still in bed. She says, it's maybe on top of my dresser. I looked at the top of the dresser. There's a lot of Delano papers. She said, well, maybe go into the living room. I went to the living room and more Delano papers. But the two I wanted weren't there. So I come back after working for a half hour. She said, well, look on top of the bookshelf. If not on top of the bookshelf, then look on top of the file cabinets. And she had literature all over. I still couldn't find it. But of course, I'm not an individual who knew how to stack things and keep things in the right place. So I go over to my area, on my cabinet, lo and behold, I know they're somewhere in the house, but you have to learn how to dig it out. I know Virginia can have it on the tip of her fingers, but I couldn't.

It was a picture that, when DiGiorgio knew, after eleven months, that they were going down and defeating, they snuck in the Teamsters. Now nobody knew this until it came out openly that there was an election within forty-eight hours between the Teamsters and DiGiorgio. And the leaflet had a picture of DiGiorgio in bed with a Teamster, and they're both smoking a cigar and have their arms around each other. And on top of the bed they had, what it says, a marriage license. And underneath it, it stated, "Look, honey, we don't have to hide behind the vines or behind the sheds. You can kiss me now, we're married."

Well, one thing, the rank-and-file Teamsters themselves, there is an undercurrent of thinking: now what type of leadership have we got? Now, for an example, when I was there Sunday, a telegram came in from Oxnard, where the rank-and-file Teamsters sent a telegram to one of the leaders who was in Delano, who was a member of the Oxnard local, and asked him to get your butt back, what the hell are you doing in Delano? Now, this is the process. The rank and file will have to know the type of rotten leadership and the tactics that they have to work with. Now, we know that the Teamsters are going to give the Farm Workers Association a bad time.

Now, the picture is the AFL-CIO hopped in in the last stages. They were drawn in because of the Teamsters' role with DiGiorgio. Now, the way that it worked, these farm workers were isolated from the local milieu, not from the outside community. Oh, they had a lot of support there. The press, the radio, the TV, the cooperation of DiGiorgio, the councilman, the police and the chiefs was all working together. Never saw anything like it. But money, food, and clothing were coming in from the rank and file of practically every local in the state of California.

Now, since this fund was coming in from every major local, from every local in the union, the AFL-CIO figured out, well, here's the leadership sitting here when every local of the AFL-CIO is contributing money, food and clothes, tons and tons of it pouring in. Sometime like on Christmas, I never saw anything like it, truckload after truckload was piled in there. And of course they never went hungry, but they were financially short. Many of them lost their homes, many of them lost their cars. There's of course a bad side to it too, and this was the thing that was needed. But they kept up their courage, and as they stated, if we don't win this Christmas, this coming Christmas, then we'll stay out until next Christmas. This was the courage they had because of the support nationwide for these workers. I never saw anything like this in my life. The comrades had to be there to feel it, to see it.

I slept, and one of the people who were one of the militant elements there, before I know it he started giving me the People's World. Sat up until four o'clock in the morning in discussions with them. I sat up with another one, one of the major people of another organization of the farm workers, and there's a man who comes out across the ocean there. You've been in various activities. I never saw an organization like this. Even some who were coming in from Mexico and organizing and going back into Mexico. And I think our comrades missed the boat here, because this was something big, and this is a wonderful way to learn how to organize and become organizers.

Well, in the UAW we found this out in September, when one person who probably didn't know anything about organizational work began to set up little boxes around a plant to gather food. And I think he only picked up two or three cans or something like that and fifty cents. And so I invited him up to the house, Tom and I and him, Virginia got together, we start discussing this over, before you know it we had this [?] campaign going. A thousand-dollar donation from the local, we sent it to Paul Schrade, the regional director. He probably didn't know where Delano was anyways at that time. Began to see that this money was going to go to the farm workers. He wanted to probably know where these farm workers were. They're practically all over the state, but he didn't know probably about the strike. And this was two months after. And two months later than that, Walter Reuther came to the town. He spoke at our local, and Paul Schrade decided to take Reuther down to the Valley, and then Reuther, as everybody knows, donated five thousand dollars a month, which was split between AWOC and NFWA.

Now I've just got a call that the musicians' union, that Tom Cagle set up cans all over the place, and all the locals in Oakland, and I think there were sixty cans that Sylvia and Tom made up. And they placed it in each local with a statement, and the meaning of the strike was well written. A person could stay there five minutes just turning this one-quart oil can, which was emptied and drilled around, and giving the picture of the Delano situation. And they said that the can was loaded with money.

Well, what we did, we organized also the Fremont Agricultural Committee, which was some church groups, some liberal elements and everything. We explained the situation to them, the Human Rights Committee, and we were able to get clothes. And with this we started rummage sales. We raised funds through the rummage sales. When people asked what they're for, we tell them: this is for the Delano situation. We gave out pamphlets and leaflets, and every month we passed a leaflet in the plant explaining the needs of the farm workers and keeping it fresh in their minds, the meaning of this strike and what it means, this victory for these agricultural workers.

The march to Sacramento and Dolores Huerta's speech

Well, it came to the... Oh, I like to tell a story about Wednesday, which is important. But on Delano, the march from Delano to Sacramento, I'm not going to give the one that took place recently from Sacramento down to Delano, which is quite long, but just a brief story of what happened in Delano when Brown didn't show up. All you could hear was "Viva la huelga, viva Cesar Chavez, viva Castro, and viva la revolución." And, of course, he was quoted as the "Tower of Jelly" [?]. Now, Dolores Huerta is the wife of Cesar Chavez, a very militant woman.

Now Chavez, as far as I know, he's clear. But the people around him, either that or he's a very clever organizer, that these people, how he trained them, educated them step by step, and sent them out into various areas, what to look for, how to organize, how to set up picketing committees, how to set up committees to raise funds. Like in Berkeley and Ronald Co-op [?], they have a table and they sell buttons and stuff and raise money. Clothes, and clothes are used for rummage sales to raise more money. And what's left over is sent down to the farm workers.

And here was a speech in Delano. By the way, the funny thing, I've got to bring this up, in Sacramento. And when the workers marched into Sacramento, and they got into Sacramento, a few thousand strong, all the dignitaries were sitting down in the front seats: writers, newspapermen, photographers, union officials. And Chavez has said, please, these seats in front of the mic are made for those who made that march from Delano to Sacramento. They have that privilege of sitting in the front seat. Well, few people moved, but of course these $150, $200 suits were sitting around, you know. He says, there will be no talking, there will be no speech until everyone leaves the seats which are reserved for those who have made that march from Delano to Sacramento. Finally, a little at a time, they left, and the workers, the farm workers, took the front seats, and they sat up there as the dignitaries, instead of all these wheels, big union officials.

And here's one of the speeches that was made by Dolores Huerta: "The difference between 1959 and 1966 is revolution. The farm workers have been organized. We are not alone. We are accompanied by many friends, the religious leaders of the state spearheaded by the California Migrant Ministry, the student groups and civil rights groups that make up the movement that has been successful in securing civil rights for Negroes in this country. And organized labor are staunch allies and all in the revolution. The workers are on the rise. There will be strikes all over the state and throughout the country because Delano has shown what can be done. And the workers know they are no longer alone. If the rules to settle our economic problems are not forthcoming, we will call a general strike to paralyze the state's agricultural economy. The social and economic revolution of the farm workers is well underway and will not be stopped until they have received equality." And this is what they've done when they defeated Schenley [?] and they defeated DiGiorgio.