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HANSON: Who was Cesar Chavez -- and who will he become?

But this past week's recent disclosures -- long known among his inner circle and always suppressed for the supposed greater good of the union movement -- have revealed that Chavez was a hero with feet of clay

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Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, eventually became the symbolic leader of the entire Mexican-American community of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, he was eventually enshrined in the pantheon of modern leftist activists and civil rights leaders alongside Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King Jr., and Betty Friedan. His Chavez Foundation today emphasizes Chavez’s saintlike status as “a genuinely religious and spiritual figure.” His Tehachapi redoubt remains a national monument.

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In public, Chavez stressed nonstop his common-man roots, his strong Catholicism, and his devotion to wife and family, and thereby turned the struggle to provide a livable wage and humane working conditions for farm workers into a broader civil rights movement — led by the Christlike martyr Cesar Chavez himself. He carefully constructed an image of the long-suffering moralist, at odds with greedy capitalist “growers,” whom Chavez often publicly said he loathed.

HANSON: Who was Cesar Chavez -- and who will he become? Back to video

Chavez frequently quoted Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and went on well-publicized fasts and nonviolent marches. The Camelot Kennedys........

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