The Browns of California by Miriam Pawel

Author:Miriam Pawel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt, who met in 1971, were both public figures who valued their privacy. The couple did not often appear together at public events. But when Jerry ran for president, Ronstadt headlined a fundraising concert at the Capital Center in Maryland on May 14, 1976, four days before Jerry Brown won an upset victory in the Maryland primary. (Associated Press/Karin Vismara)

Marshall Ganz, son of a Bakersfield rabbi, had spent the summer of 1964 in Mississippi and dropped out of Harvard to stay and work in the civil rights movement. A year later, he joined a different crusade, close to home, and learned to organize from Chavez. Ganz’s only experience with a political campaign was watching Chavez turn out the vote for Robert Kennedy in 1968. Sent to Canada to stop the sale of grapes, Ganz had organized one of the union’s most successful boycotts. Then he figured out tactics to win union elections under the new law. Both operations required ingenuity with little resources. Like all successful leaders in the union, Ganz knew how to make things happen, fast.

He landed in Oregon with a team of UFW volunteers dispatched to run a write-in campaign. They recruited and trained dozens of people and assigned them to specific polling places, where they would explain on Election Day how to vote for Jerry Brown, even though he was not on the ballot. The novelty of the campaign and the youth of the candidate drew large crowds. Students at the University of Oregon in Eugene hung out of balconies in the quad and climbed trees for a better view of the candidate in his double-breasted suit, who arrived late because he had signed a bill that morning that gave tax credits for solar heating installations. Jerry told the students the most important thing was to “restore honesty25 to Washington” and “rebuild the cities of America.” Without that, “no matter how many missiles we have in our silo we lack the collective strength and political will to defend anything.”

In the May 25, 1976, Oregon primary, Jerry was just edged out by Carter, an impressive showing for a write-in candidate. The next day, Ganz and his group of boycott volunteers were in the airport headed for New Jersey when they were paged and diverted to Rhode Island26 to tackle a tougher campaign. Jerry was not on the ballot. Write-ins were illegal. The only way for Jerry to win required voters to follow a complicated set of instructions and pull multiple levers to elect an uncommitted slate. The Brown team had five days, including Memorial Day weekend.

Most businesses were closed for the holiday. UFW volunteers went through the phone book until they found a union printer willing to produce posters, billboards, and handouts the next day. One group of volunteers hit the streets. They created instant rallies by using “the Dragnet”—a team swarmed through any offices near a campaign event and dragged people out into the street with them. Another team worked the phones, with sleeping bags under their desks.

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