| On Monday, millions of Americans will joyfully stay home, fire up a grill, or head to the beach— traditions enshrined, indirectly, in 1894, when Congress made Labor Day a national holiday. For many, the day is now so deeply entwined with leisure, pleasure, and department-store sales that it’s easy to forget its origins in the labor movement. In 1969, The New Yorker’s Peter Matthiessen profiled one of that movement’s most famous contemporary leaders: the organizer Cesar Chavez, who had attracted significant attention the previous year by subsisting on nothing but water for twenty-five days. The son of Mexican American migrant workers, Chavez had served in the Navy during the Second World War, and had returned home afterward to an arduous life as a farm laborer. For reasons that remain relevant today, agricultural workers were easy to exploit, and Chavez’s eventual activism would require strategic choices about stolen pay, how to fight racism, and, perhaps most controversially, the risks and advantages of unionizing. In the California vineyards previously immortalized in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” Chavez persuaded a nation to care about some of its poorest workers. He was, in the words of Robert F. Kennedy, “one of the heroic figures of our time.” | 
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