America's Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century - Hardcover

Thompson, Gabriel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520280830 ISBN 13: 9780520280830

Publisher: University of California Press, 2016

Synopsis

"A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire."—Fred Ross

Raised by conservative parents who hoped he would “stay with his own kind,” Fred Ross instead became one of the most influential community organizers in American history. His activism began alongside Dust Bowl migrants, where he managed the same labor camp that inspired John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. During World War II, Ross worked for the release of interned Japanese Americans, and after the war, he dedicated his life to building the political power of Latinos across California. Labor organizing in this country was forever changed when Ross knocked on the door of a young Cesar Chavez and encouraged him to become an organizer.

Until now there has been no biography of Fred Ross, a man who believed a good organizer was supposed to fade into the crowd as others stepped forward. In America’s Social Arsonist, Gabriel Thompson provides a full picture of this complicated and driven man, recovering a forgotten chapter of American history and providing vital lessons for organizers today.

About this title

About the Author

Gabriel Thompson is a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. He is the author of several books, including Working in the Shadows, and has written for Harper’s, New York, Mother Jones, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Nation.

From the Back Cover

“Without Fred Ross, there would have been no Cesar Chavez. With careful research and deft prose, Gabriel Thompson has brought to life a seminal figure whose legacy continues to resonate in social movements across the country. America’s Social Arsonist is the best kind of history—an engrossing, thought-provoking story with great relevance for anyone who cares about community organizing and social change.”—Miriam Pawel, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

“Fred Ross Sr. was one of America’s leading labor organizers and educators, dedicating his life to lifting the voices and earnings of the oppressed. Here’s a superb biography and introduction to Ross’s life, thoughts, teachings, and techniques—as applicable for America today as they were when he was alive and kicking.”—Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor

“Fred Ross was a quiet leader who inspired greatness in those he met and worked with. He had real insight and knew how to move people to action. Cesar Chavez himself got his first organizing instructions from Fred Ross.”—Jerry Brown, thirty-ninth governor of California
 
“A compulsive read, full of keen social insights, sage historical judgments, and a telling narrative of a man who sacrificed family for the good fight. By rescuing Ross from obscurity, Thompson offers twenty-first-century social arsonists essential lessons that cannot be ignored even in an age of social media and capitalist hegemony.”—Nelson Lichtenstein, coeditor of The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of the New Left’s Founding Manifesto
 
“A superb, revelatory biography not only of the legendary Fred Ross but also of the rank-and-file activists in the barrios and fields whose heroic persistence made possible the rebellions of the 1960s.”—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
 
“This compelling biography chronicles how previously powerless farmworkers were brilliantly organized by the charismatic Fred Ross. With painful honesty, it also documents Ross’s sacrifice, personal pain, and loss to himself and to his loved ones involved in this campaign across a lifetime of heroic effort.”—Kevin Starr, author of the Americans and the California Dream series

From the Inside Flap

&;Without Fred Ross, there would have been no Cesar Chavez. With careful research and deft prose, Gabriel Thompson has brought to life a seminal figure whose legacy continues to resonate in social movements across the country. America&;s Social Arsonist is the best kind of history&;an engrossing, thought-provoking story with great relevance for anyone who cares about community organizing and social change.&;&;Miriam Pawel, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

&;Fred Ross Sr. was one of America&;s leading labor organizers and educators, dedicating his life to lifting the voices and earnings of the oppressed. Here&;s a superb biography and introduction to Ross&;s life, thoughts, teachings, and techniques&;as applicable for America today as they were when he was alive and kicking.&;&;Robert B. Reich, Chancellor&;s Professor of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor

&;Fred Ross was a quiet leader who inspired greatness in those he met and worked with. He had real insight and knew how to move people to action. Cesar Chavez himself got his first organizing instructions from Fred Ross.&;&;Jerry Brown, thirty-ninth governor of California
 
&;A compulsive read, full of keen social insights, sage historical judgments, and a telling narrative of a man who sacrificed family for the good fight. By rescuing Ross from obscurity, Thompson offers twenty-first-century social arsonists essential lessons that cannot be ignored even in an age of social media and capitalist hegemony.&;&;Nelson Lichtenstein, coeditor of The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of the New Left&;s Founding Manifesto
 
&;A superb, revelatory biography not only of the legendary Fred Ross but also of the rank-and-file activists in the barrios and fields whose heroic persistence made possible the rebellions of the 1960s.&;&;Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
 
&;This compelling biography chronicles how previously powerless farmworkers were brilliantly organized by the charismatic Fred Ross. With painful honesty, it also documents Ross&;s sacrifice, personal pain, and loss to himself and to his loved ones involved in this campaign across a lifetime of heroic effort.&;&;Kevin Starr, author of the Americans and the California Dream series

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

America's Social Arsonist

Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century

By Gabriel Thompson

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28083-0

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
PART ONE: THE EDUCATION OF AN ORGANIZER (1910–1947), 
1 • All That You Do, Do with Your Might, 
2 • Dealing Firsthand with the Rotten System, 
3 • Witness to The Grapes of Wrath, 
4 • Doing Penance, 
5 • The Mexican Problem, 
6 • Red Ross, 
PART TWO: ORGANIZING A MOVEMENT (1947–1963), 
7 • Viva Roybal, 
8 • Bloody Christmas, 
9 • Finding Cesar, 
10 • On the Road, 
11 • Growing Pains, 
12 • The Life and Death of the CSO, 
PART THREE: ORGANIZER AS TEACHER (1964–1992), 
13 • Poverty Fiasco, 
14 • David vs. Goliath, 
15 • Don't Buy Grapes, 
16 • The Battle of the Butcher Paper, 
17 • Blind Spot, 
18 • The Forever Project, 
Appendix: Axioms for Organizers, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

All That You Do, Do with Your Might

BEFORE HE BECAME AN ORGANIZER, Fred Ross wanted to be a writer. He wasn't a particularly good writer, and his penmanship was often illegible. But throughout his life he would fill countless yellow notebooks with his left-handed scrawl, working on various versions of an autobiography that was never published.

In his writings he tended to repeat the same stories. There was the college party he attended, where he passionately argued in support of striking citrus workers until a woman boldly interrupted. "All you do is blab, blab, blab," she said. "When are you going to do something about it?" There was the episode, several years later, when he experienced the misery that can be farm work, spending twelve hours in the carrot fields and coming home, exhausted, with eighty-four cents to show for it. There was the Depression, when Ross took a job as a relief worker and visited his first client, an older man who had spent most of his life working in a cement quarry. The company had fired the man just days before he was to earn his pension. He now sat mute, staring at a blank wall in the corner while his wife sobbed. And there was, of course, the evening when Ross first crossed paths with a young Cesar Chavez, an encounter that would eventually be told so many times, by so many people, that it took on the power of a myth.

For Ross, these were the stories that explained who he was and how he had become that way. About his childhood he had less to stay, though it would also leave a mark.

Ross described his childhood home as located on a hill that also served as a status marker: the wealthier you were, the higher you lived. "We lived fairly close to the bottom," he remembered, "but not so close that we couldn't look down on other people." Above the Ross household lived lawyers and doctors; below, construction and service workers. When his parents sent him out to play with neighborhood kids, they always encouraged him to travel uphill.

The hill was in Echo Park, a middle-class neighborhood of Los Angeles kept entirely white by the restrictive racial covenants that forbid people of color and Jews from buying properties. To his parents, this homogeneity was both natural and desirable, but the effect on the youngster was a budding fascination with those kept out. The only person of color wh

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520280830
• ISBN 13: 9780520280830
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 294