ACLU and Mother Jane

Jane Addams had a vision of free people living in a free country. Again and
again, she said that what America needed was more democracy -- more
opportunities for people to speak out and make decisions. To advance these
ideas, she played a key role in the formation of a host of organizations.
Included: NAACP, National Women's Suffrage Association, League of Women
Voters, PTA, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Events in 1919 and 1920 prompted her to play a key role in forming another group -- the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In November 1919, federal agents all over the arrested over 10,000 people. Those detained were targeted solely because of their leftists or anarchist political views. Most were never charged with any crime. Many were held in jail for months. About 250 of those arrested, including Emma Goldman, were deported.

Addams spoke out against this injustice in a November 1919 speech in Chicago:

"Hundreds of poor laboring men and women are being thrown into jails and
police stations because of their political beliefs. In fact, an attempt is being made to deport an entire political party.

"These men and women, who in some respects are more American in ideals than the agents of the government who are tracking them down, are thrust into cells so crowded they cannot lie down.

"And what is it these radicals seek? It is the right of free speech and free thought; nothing more than is guaranteed to them under the constitution of the United States...

"We are trying to suppress something upon which our very country is founded -- liberty." (For more about this speech visit Teaching History Online:
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uj/USAaddams.htm.)

Initially, the protests of Addams and others were ignored by US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, his special assistant. In fact, the two federal officials ordered the arrest of an additional 6,000 people in January 1920. Again, few of these were ever charged with a crime and many were held for months.

That prompted Addams and others to meet and talk about forming a group to respond to this threat to civil liberties. That must have been some meeting.

Addams, founder of Hull House, was there. So, too, was her friend John Dewey, a leading voice for progressive education. (His book, Democracy and Education, is a powerful and eloquent argument for experiential learning rather than learning based on tests and lectures.)

Upton Sinclair, author and journalist, was there. He was one of the writers referred to as Realists, along with Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis and others. His book, The Jungle, tells the story of the horrors of working in a meatpacking plant and inspired the first federal meat
inspections.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a labor organizer and leader in the IWW, was there, too. Her autobiography, Rebel Girl, takes its title from a song Wobblie
troubadour Joe Hill wrote for her in 1915 while he was in jail awaiting his
execution in Utah. The story of Hill's life and the Wobblie movement is movingly told in the play Salt Lake City Skyline.

Others there for the meeting were some of the best-known people in America including: Helen Keller, Jeannette Rankin and James Weldon Johnson.

The group decided to form a new organization dedicated to protecting the rights of individuals and political groups. They chose the name
American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU is still around today and still doing the work it started out to do more than 80 years ago. It is the ACLU, for example, which has been pointing out excesses of the Patriot Act and the lack of basic legal protections for the individuals detained by the US government at Guantanamo.

Hull House was a center of feminism

Women's History Month is a good time to recall that Hull House was
much more than an experiment in social work. It was also a center of feminist
thought and action, something which is not widely known.

Hull House opened in 1889. It very quickly emerged as a leading center of the "first wave" of feminism which was sweeping across the United States in the late 19th century. Suffrage was at the center of this movement, but there were plenty of other issues as well, including temperance and pacifism. The women of Hull House were active in all of these. Three of the Hull House residents -- including Jane Addams -- emerged as major national figures in the women's movement.

Addams and the other women at Hull saw themselves as feminists. They were committed to gender equity in all areas of political and social life. Addams used the word feminist in her writing. One early example, in 1916, can be found in The Long Road of Women's Memory. In that book, she contrasts "feminist" with "militarist," concluding that one cannot be a
true feminist unless one committed to pacifism.

The women of Hull House worked with feminists in Chicago and across the United States. For example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an important feminist theorist, lived at Hull House for a time. Shortly after her visit, she wrote Women and Economics (1898).

Also, the women of Hull played a leading role in the organization of a host of social and political groups for women. Hull House Maps and Papers (1895) outlines some of the earliest ones: A Hull House Women's Club supported a wide range of civic improvement projects and was connected "with some of the most vigorous movements in the he city." A Monday evening girls club called Libuse studied heroic women in history. The Eight Hour Club was organized by young working women to lobby for an eight hour day.

At the national level, Hull House women were involved in organizing the National Congress of Mothers (PTA), AAUW, General Federation of Women's Clubs and a national association of African-American women. Addams and others were also founders of the Women's peace Party and the Women's International League for Peace and freedom as well as the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

At Hull House, Addams and her colleagues created not only an alternative workplace for women, but also an alternative way to live. From its start, Hull was a cooperative living community of women (and a few men). This idea was extended to working women in the neighborhood through housing co-ops such as the Jane Club.

People around the US saw Hull as a center for feminism. The institution legitimized the involvement of women in public life. It offered a place for intellectual discussion among women (and of women with men). It served as a testing ground for a variety of institutions to help parents, particularly mothers. Among these: a nursery, a day care center, a
kindergarten, a well-baby clinic and a playground.

Many women around the country wrote to (Addams and other at Hull House) for advice. For example, one young woman, soon to be married, wrote to Addams in 1916 asking if she was required to change her last name to that of her husband when she married. Addams responded: "It is not a legal matter to
take the husband's name. It is, I believe, only a matter of custom."

Another woman, writing from Louisville, Kentucky, asked for advice on a
career. "I would like to do something good in the world -- not merely
exist," she wrote, noting that she would not settle for the stereotypical
women's job of stenographer. Still another woman wrote to Addams to thank
her for her support of working women: "I have tramped the streets, bewildered
and weary, looking for work," she wrote. "I have known the bitter, bitter
loneliness of the hired girl."

It's an extraordinary history. But it's a history which is largely absent from our textbooks, including those in social work. Women's History Month gives us an opportunity to reclaim this and other aspects of our past which have been lost.

Social work's other Jane

Social work's essential knowledge can be found in two books. One is by Jane
Addams; the other by Jane Jacobs.

Jane Addams (1860-1935) was the author of "Twenty years at Hull House," an account of the social work of Addams and others in a Chicago neighborhood from 1889 to 1909. The book is based on notes and research by Addams. It intersperses first person narratives with research results and political analysis. "Twenty years" describes a social work practice based on making connections across the lives of individuals, families and the community. It was a practice designed to "accommodate individual and community interests under one common framework," writes Cindy St. George (1997). Their idea of social work was rooted in a belief that "all lives are connected to other lives," observed Gisela Konopka (1991).

Jane Jacobs, who in 2006, was the author of "The death and life of
great American cities." Like Addams, Jacob celebrated "lively, diverse, intense cities" in her writing. Also like Addams, she points out the importance of
connecting the physical environment with the social environment in our communities. Too many city planners consider only the physicalenvironment, she observed. The result is the destruction of the social (or human)environment.

In her book, Jacobs chronicled the folly of the massive urban renewal in many
cities during the 1960s. Lively neighborhoods were wiped out in the name of
progress. Worse, those lively communities were often replaced by dead zones of
highways and office buildings.

Why is it that city planners plan in these ways which destroy cities, she asked. Why don't we plan cities for people instead? "If we understand the principles behind the behavior of cities," she wrote, "we can build on potential assets and strengths, instead of acting at cross-purposes to them."

Together, the two Janes provide all the wisdom we need to guide us in building
and maintaining strong, vibrant, diverse families and communities. Their
insights can be applied wherever we live -- whether New York or New
Hampton, IA; Minneapolis or Milbank, SD.

Resources for more reading

Addams, Jane (1910). Twenty years at Hull House. New York: Macmillan.

Jacobs, Jane (1961). The death and life of American cities. New York:
Random House.

Konopka, Gisela (1991). All lives are connected to other lives: The meaning of
social group work. In Theory and practice of group work. New York:
Haworth Press.

St. George, Cindy (1997). Mission of social work revisited. MSW clinical
research paper. St. Paul, MN: School of Social Work, College of St.
Catherine/University of St. Thomas.

Fireflies as social work symbol

ANY DAY now the fireflies will be back in the Midwest. It's always
exciting when they appear again. You can hear the oohs and ahhhs up
and down the block the night they first appear.

I don't recall the first time I saw them. But I do remember the first
time young Tom saw "lightning bugs." We were just leaving Casa Zamora,
a Mexican restaurant in Albert Lea, Minnesota when he saw them. "What
are those?" he asked. I told him; he was thrilled.

I also remember the excitement when customers spotted fireflies out
the windows of Bill's Coffeeshop. Those were wonderful moments, ones
to be scooped up and saved.

Lately, I've been thinking that fireflies would make a great gift for
graduates in social work. In fact, I think they would make a great
symbol for the profession.

Other professions have symbols, like stethoscopes for doctors,
calculators for engineers and hammers for carpenters. But there's
never really been anything for social work.

So why not fireflies? We could start by presenting each graduate with
a "lantern" of fireflies.

One reason for choosing fireflies is that they illuminate dark places.
And they
do it in such a wonderful way.

Another reason for fireflies is that they are a great symbol of hope.
No matter how cold the winter or wet the spring they always return.

Both of these -- illumination and hope -- are roles associated with
social workers.

Like so many things in this Newsletter, the idea of a gift of a
firefly came to me in a coffeeshop. Leah gave it to me along with a
double mocha.

She had told me her parents were "firefly farmers." It was supposed to
be a joke, she told me later. But at the time I believed her. After
all, I've met people who grow worms and ladybugs. And we all know
about "ant farms."

So why not "firefly farms." We could raise fireflies and then
distribute them to communities which don't have any -- or don't have
enough.

Of course, I wonder what Bill's reaction might have been to fireflies.
I would guess that he was delighted with them. "Hey buddy," he might
have said, "Look at the lights on those little bugs."

So when you see the fireflies for the first time this year, consider
the possibility that they could be symbols for social work.

Looking for peace

A man stands on the corner holding a sign
People yell at him as they drive by
I wonder what they read
That made them so upset
I looked at the sign and all it said was

One word
Peace
In the neighborhood
Peace
One word
Peace
In my own backyard

A man in a foreign land kneels to pray
Wonders where the bombs will fall today
My leaders tell me to fear him you see
But love conquers all
Is what I believe

One word
Peace

-- From "One Word (Peace) by The Subdudes (2005, Behind
the Levee)

Searching for peace? It's been hard to find this past year.

But if you live in the Midwest there is a place where you can catch a
glimpse of peace. One of the few US monuments dedicated to peace is
located in the southwest corner of Minnesota. The Pipestone National
Monument has been a sacred site dedicated to peace for hundreds of
years. Since 1937, it has been a national monument maintained by the
US Park Service (www.nps.gov/pipe).

"Monument" makes one think of big statues or a granite wall of some
sort. But you won't find those at the Pipestone monument, located just
outside the community of the same name. This place is different.

Most of the "monument" is a tall grass prairie -- more than 200 acres
of it. It's a small slice of the prairie which once covered the whole region.

Roughly in the center of the site are small areas which have
been excavated for "pipestone." This is the red tile rock which has
been used by Native American tribes of the northern plains for
generations to make sacred pipes or "Pipes of peace."

You can walk paths past the excavations and out into the prairie.
Signs along the way give the history of pipestone and of the prairie.

In the summer, you are likely to see the pipestone being excavated. At
the nearby visitors center, the red rock is carved into sacred pipes
by Native American artists.

The peace of Pipestone comes partly from its prairie setting. But it
also comes from the history of the place, a "sacred ground," a place
of peace, for many hundreds of years.

It's a small place which celebrates peace in a very low-key way. But
it has the potential to be a big inspiration in the quest for peace in
our neighborhoods, our communities and our countries.

Reinvigorating social work

Bill's Coffeeshop is not only a model for employment of individuals
with disabilities. It is also a model for reinvigorating the "social"
in social work.

Coffeeshops like Bill's were a part of many early centers of social work, including Hull House in Chicago. Jane Addams, a founding mother
of social work, called for an integrated social work practice which
was committed to strengthening neighborhoods as well as strengthening
individuals.

This model of social work was a "holistic rather than specialization
approach, advocating for social reform while giving services," writes
Rolland F. Smith in an essay for the Encyclopedia of Social Work. This
approach has "an orientation to family and neighborhood strengths
rather than to individual pathologies."

Addams' idea of social work was a radical notion when she first proposed it in the late 19th century. It's at least as radical today in a society which is based in many ways on an exaggerated notion of
individualism. Modern society has been built around segmenting the lives of people in many different ways.

First, there is the separation between work and home. This is compounded by the increasing distances between on and the other.

Second, there is the separation at work itself. Many jobs have become very specialized. From construction to social work, from education to manufacturing, jobs have been moving away from general skills and towards specialist skills.

Finally, there is the growing separation of neighborhoods by income. The growth of the suburbs (and urban renewal in the cities) has fueled this phenomenon, resulting in economic isolation for so many families and individuals.

Bill's Coffeeshop (and its cousin Uptown Bill's) are antidotes to this separation. These two coffee shops, and others like them, are working to restore the "social." They not only offer an alternative to the
separation in our communities, they also offer an alternative model for social work.

Coffeeshops offer three distinct advantages to traditional settings for social work:

1. A less formal setting than regular social work agencies
2. An environment with the potential of being shaped by the "client"
as well as the social worker.
3. An experience of community at the same time individual needs are getting attention.

Coffeeshops fit with the idea of "a reconstructed social work"
outlined by Harry Wasserman and Holly Danforth in their book, "The
human bond: Support groups and mutual aid." This kind of social work
"envisions a theory and practice in which the individual, family,
small group and community constitute an interdependent quartet. This
requires...an internally consistent set of concepts and...a web of
human connections."

Five minutes of war

OUR country is now spending $1 million every five minutes for the Iraq
war, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Five minutes of war would pay for 10 Bill's Coffeeshops and provide
jobs for 10 individuals to work in them for a year.

Five minutes of war would buy a home for every one of the homeless
individuals my friend Kelly Dobson feeds each Sunday afternoon in Minneapolis.

Five minutes of war would finance a college education for Judy and at
least a dozen other people I know who don't have money for tuition,

Five minutes of war would support Altman, Sierra, Jeremy and at least
two dozen other fine young musicians I know for an entire year. Think
of how much music they could make to brighten our lives.

Five minutes of war would endow a Gisela Konopka chair in social group
work at the University of Minnesota and allow at least a dozen
graduate students to study group work.

Five minutes of war would help close the gap in school spending in a
major US city. In San Jose, Calif., for example, it could close the
$1,000 per child difference in spending between the Alum Rock schools
and neighboring districts.

For one hour of war, we could do all of these and more. Just think
what we could do with a day or a week.

Powerful setting for social work

COFFEESHOPS like Bill's in Iowa City can be powerful forces in social
work. They are a contemporary example of the blending of clinical and community practice envisioned by social work's founders. Jane Addams and other founders outlined a social work practice which stretched from the individual level to the community level. This vision came from their belief that strengthening communities would help strengthen individuals and families. They tested a variety of concepts to carry out this vision, including community theater and a neighborhood coffeeshop.

Addams and the others had a "holistic rather than a specialization approach," writes Rolland Smith in an essay for the Encyclopedia of Social Work. Also important, he writes: "An orientation to family and neighborhood strengths rather than to individual pathologies."

A coffeeshop is a great place to do this work. It offers opportunities
for community as well as for individuality. And it offers a "home" for
individuals from many different backgrounds.

Every person needs places to experience a sense of belonging, scholar
Ernesto Galarza said. That means everyone, he said, even individuals
with mental illness and those with chronic alcoholism should have the
chance to "take part in some type of social relationships." In a
speech to social workers, he urged the profession to invest "much more
care and time and funding...in this direction." A coffeeshop offers a
great setting for such interaction.

This is not as easy as it sounds. In a 1998 essay for the journal
Social Work Janet Finn and Barry Checkoway said that the profession
has an "uneven record" when it comes to an integrated practice which
combines both clinical and community elements. They were looking
particularly at youth work and suggested the profession needs a
"reorientation from therapeutic models of individual treatment to
consciousness-raising models for group reflection and action." They
went on to call for a "redirection" of social work roles from
"counselor, case manager and broker to those of collaborator, mentor
and animator.."

Bill's, its crosstown cousin Uptown Bill's, and a number of other
coffeeshops are trying out these ideas every day. Perhaps you know of
another coffeeshop where this kind of social work is taking place.
Write to the Newsletter and tell us about it.

ANOTHER CREATIVE
WEB SITE FOR YOU

Have you seen the Body Secret website? It's a community art project on the web created by students at Sierra College (Rocklin, Calif.). It was inspired in part by the PostSecret website. This new website is based on anonymous submissions about body image. Among them are wishes to be taller, slimmer and wrinkle-free.

There are also startling submissions like these:

"I gave away the love and respect I had for my body...when...you gave
away your faithfulness."

"I want to be his everything."

You can find the website with a Google search for "Body Secret," and "Sierra College."