Jencks, Clinton

JENCKS, CLINTON (1918-2005). A leftwing labor leader, Jencks became famous, along with his union’s strike against a mining company in New Mexico, thanks to the 1954 film Salt of The Earth. Effectively banned from showings in US theaters, this highly realistic film of Mexican American life and work found audiences around the world and became, in later decades, a classroom and film festival favorite.

Born in 1918 in Colorado Springs, Jencks could trace his antecedents back to colonial Massachusetts, including a long line of Christian missionaries. Raised as a devout Christian in a mining community, he believed these two influences shaped in his life’s journey. During early adulthood, he had trouble reconciling his family church’s preaching about “all God’s children” when the pews had been strictly segregated. A good student, he progressed from reading about mining history to socialism and Eugene V. Debs. At the University of Colorado, he joined the Young Communist League.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Jencks enlisted in the US Air Force, serving on a B-24 crew in the Pacific during World War II. In 1945, having flown forty missions as lead navigator, Jencks received the Distinguished Flying Cross and six air medals, the highest decoration short of a Congressional Medal of Honor. Following the war, he and his wife, Virginia, moved to Denver, where he joined the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, known informally as “Mine Mill.” He quickly became a shop steward. Having severed his Communist Party (CP) membership when he joined the armed forces, he now rejoined the Party. Mine Mill asked the Jenckses to relocate to Grant County, New Mexico, home to several large gold and lead mining operations. He became the lead organizer for several union locals, nearly all them Mexican American in membership.

Jencks faced a Grant County strictly segregated, with a Jim Crow structure of separate schools, theaters, and restaurants aimed at Mexican Americans. Work sites, restrooms and pay lines, all segregated, limited Mexican Americans to the most difficult jobs and lowest pay. By the time he arrived, the contract with Empire Zinc (EZ) had almost expired. The Anglo power structure claimed that Jencks had upset the Mexican workers who, they insisted, had been previously content with their lot. When the company walked out of negotiations, refusing to bargain with Local 890, the members voted overwhelmingly to strike.

The classic labor battle barely fictionalized in the film Salt of the Earth. included lock-outs, beatings of members (including Clint and Virginia Jencks) by hired thugs, local vigilantes and sheriff’s deputies, also mass jailings, with the miners’ wives taking over the picket lines to fight the scabs, tear gas and injunctions. The film, written and directed by Hollywood Blacklistees and a cast nearly entirely made up of Local 890 members including Jencks himself, was destined in later decades to become a cult favorite. Its suppression from showings exhausted the savings of the Blacklistees who had intended to make a series of realistic left-wing films on various subjects.

Jencks found himself subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security about “Communist Domination of Union Officials in a Vital Defense Industry.” The Mexican mineworkers and Jencks were accused of threatening national security and endangering US troops in Korea. A year earlier, in the interests of protecting Mine Mill from the CIO purge and government repression, Jencks again left the Communist Party.

In Congressional hearings, Jencks declined to answer any questions about his political associations or beliefs. The Senate subcommittee had its friendly professional witness, Harvey Matusow, who testified that Jencks was a CP member and had told Matusow as much. In, April 1953, the FBI arrested Jencks and brought him before a judge in EZ-dominated Silver City, charging him with two counts of filing a false affidavit claiming he was not a member of the Communist Party, although he had left the Party when he signed the affidavit. His trial jury in El Paso excluded women, Mexican Americans and other minorities, and workers; the prosecution’s case rested entirely on testimony from employees of the mining industry, including law enforcement officers, and professional informers, most notably Matusow.

To succeed in the pre-trial hearing, the Jencks defense needed access to the testimony and exhibits that the government intended to use to prove guilt. The judge denied the motion, leaving Jencks’s attorneys with no plan to defend him from the government charges. They asked to see Matusow’s FBI reports, another request denied by the judge. The trial went on for weeks. But the jury took only twenty minutes to return a verdict of guilty. Jencks found himself sentenced to two concurrent five-year terms.

The case soon gathered legal importance. As Jencks’s attorneys began their appeal of the conviction, Matusow acknowledged he lied in an unrelated hearing when he claimed that he possessed lists of Communists at The New York Times and Time magazine. Matusow would soon publish a full confession, False Witness (1955), in which he admitted being a serial perjurer.

Jencks appealed for a new trial. At the hearing on the motion, his attorneys again demanded the government produce all reports and materials given by Matusow to the FBI. The court rejected the request, as did the Fifth Circuit appellate court. The Supreme Court, now under Chief Justice Earl Warren, shredded the case against Jencks. As Justice Hugo Black explained, “You can’t retain evidence and send a man to jail on it because it’s too confidential. If the government wants to keep the evidence confidential, they should try the case without the evidence.”

In essence, the Supreme Court’s Jencks decision in June 1957 established the principle that the government could no longer prosecute and then withhold evidence relevant and useful to the defense. Within months, Congress codified the decision known as the Jencks Act. Henceforth, witness statements would be produced upon a defense demand.

This important legal outcome seemed at first to offer an empty triumph for Jencks himself. With the Court’s Jencks decision, and the Jencks Act now the law of the land, the government dropped all its prosecution of him. Nevertheless, he found himself blacklisted from employment throughout the Southwest. In 1960, he won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to study economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his doctorate and taught at San Diego State University until his retirement. Clinton Jencks continued his social activism as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America until his death on 15 December 2005, at the age of eighty-seven.

Caballero, Raymond. McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2019

Lorence, James J. The Suppression of "Salt of the Earth": How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Lorence, James J. Palomino: Clinton Jencks and Mexican-American Unionism in the American Southwest. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013.