Northwest labor press., August 19, 2016, Page 22, Image 22

PAGE 22 | August 19, 2016 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
The master organizer behind César Chávez
Fred Ross believed a good union
organizer should fade into the
crowd while others step forward.
By Marcus Widenor
Fred Ross is not a familiar name
to most, because he stood in the
shadow of the immensely
charismatic César Chávez, who
built the United Farm Workers
(UFW). But Ross was a master
organizing strategist, and he pre-
ferred playing a secondary role.
As Chávez’ field lieutenant, he
thrust forward
the community
activists he had
groomed as
spokespersons
for the farm-
workers move-
ment, rather
than lead him-
self.
As Gabriel
T h o m p s o n ’s
America’s So-
cial Arsonist:
Fred Ross and
Grassroots Or-
ganizing in the
Twentieth Cen-
tury (University of California
Press, 2016) tells us, Ross was
born in 1910 into a well edu-
cated, upper-middle-class fam-
ily. He grew up in Depression-
era Los Angeles as it was
becoming a multi-ethnic caldron
of American life.
Ross first rubbed shoulders
with other social activists while
a student at USC in the early
1930s. Unlike many of them,
Ross did not turn to the Com-
munist or Socialist parties as a
platform for his activism. In
fact, a stubborn ideological ag-
nosticism characterized his en-
tire career as an organizer. Ross
approached organizing more as
a craft than as an ideology.
By the early 1940s, Ross had
worked for state and federal
agencies in the impoverished
communities of California’s
Mexican-American farmwork-
ers. He became convinced that,
whatever the liberal intentions
of the state, change would only
come through popular action by
citizens. He became an acolyte
to Saul Alinsky, a one-time aide
to the CIO’s John L. Lewis.
Alinsky was now focusing on
community-based, rather than
workplace-based organizing.
Ross mentored hundreds of
young organizers who cycled
through the ranks of the UFW,
beginning with the young César
Chávez, who he met in 1952.
The two shared workaholic per-
sonalities, an attention to the de-
tails of building grassroots
movements, and a skepticism of
reform organizations led by
middle-class activists who were
beholden to the power structure.
Ross brought an almost fanat-
ical focus to his work. Whether
it was registering voters, chal-
lenging substandard housing, or
organizing a labor union, his
campaigns were an endless se-
ries of house meetings and or-
ganizer re-as-
sessments,
plotted out on
huge sheets of
butcher paper.
Ross insisted
on empirical
metrics for
measuring or-
ganizing suc-
cess. Or, as he
put it in one of
his quotable
“axioms for
organizers” (a
corollary to
A l i n s k y ’s
“Rules for
Radicals”)—“If you can’t count
it, it didn’t happen.”
A demanding taskmaster,
Ross insisted that organizers
show absolute loyalty, work
around the clock, and continu-
ally critique the progress of their
campaigns. The toll on his fam-
ily life was brutal.
Many of Ross’ techniques are
now standard fare for organizers
who practice what might be
called “social unionism,” such
as rank-and-file leadership de-
velopment, one-on-one organiz-
ing, and quantifiable organizing
objectives. But there is another
legacy that is more problematic.
As numerous recent histories
have noted, the UFW took a
bizarre organizational turn after
the successful lettuce and grape
strike/boycott campaigns of the
early 1970s. It became increas-
ingly insular and autocratic, uti-
lizing extreme, some would say
“cult-like,” psychological tech-
niques to enforce loyalty to
Chávez. This involved the red-
baiting of radicals, and even
anti-Semitism in the end.
According to Thompson,
Ross was largely silent on the
degeneration of the UFW during
the 1980s. Neither his children
nor his contemporaries seem
able to explain why he did not
oppose Chávez’ purging of
many of the union’s most dedi-
cated organizers. The fact that
Ross’ long-anticipated autobiog-
raphy never appeared before his
1992 death from Alzheimer’s
leaves the reader to wonder how
complicit he was in the tragedy.
If César Chávez would have lis-
tened to anyone, it would have
been Fred Ross.
There are other loose ends as
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