SACRAMENTO — Two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson once described a hypocrite as someone "who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation."

His words come to mind when critics, especially growers, say that Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers should spend more time organizing field laborers instead of boycotting table grapes.

Before I’m accused of faking objectivity, let me be candid: I don’t have any. I’ve been a UFW partisan since 1969, when, as a college student, I helped organize a grape boycott. Lack of detachment doesn’t necessarily destroy your perspective; it just colors it. I’ve seen a lot of recent California farm labor history up close. Since it is frequently ignored, history is a good place to begin.

It was the law of the jungle for at least 80 years in California fields before Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. pushed through the pioneering farm-labor act in 1975. Dozens of labor groups had tried and failed to organize farm workers. Farm workers were excluded from New Deal reforms conferring organizing rights on industrial employees.

In 1965, Chavez revived the farm workers’ cause when he led a major strike against Delano-area grape producers. That walkout was also headed for failure until Chavez tried something different: He asked North American consumers to boycott California table grapes. It worked. By 1970, grape growers were signing their first-ever union contacts. A second grape boycott, along with pressure from supermarkets, forced growers to accept Brown’s law, which guaranteed the right to organize and to have secret-ballot elections conducted by the new state Agricultural Labor Relations Board.

Since 1975, the UFW has won 646 union elections. It usually prevailed over "no-union" choices and the Teamsters Union, which many growers invited in during the 1970s to oppose the UFW. Despite long delays and the farm board’s bureaucratic inertia, farm workers made progress. By the early ’80s, tens of thousands enjoyed UFW contracts’ improved wages, family medical coverage and other protections.

Most farm workers still remained unprotected in 1983, when George Deukmejian took over as governor after receiving more than $1 million in campaign contributions from agribusiness. All but the most biased observers now admit that, under Deukmejian, the ALRB stopped enforcing the law.