Before I moved to Illinois, I’d never
heard of Casimir Pulaski. I’ve recently learned that he was a
Revolutionary War hero, the “father of the American
cavalry,” and that he died at age 32 of gangrene after being
shot in the leg during battle.
Of course, you probably already know all
that, because your children get to play hooky on Casimir Pulaski
Day.
But I had heard of Jane Addams. I knew that
she founded Hull House and became the “mother of modern
social work.” She got laws passed setting safety standards
for factories, prohibiting child labor, and establishing a
juvenile-court system. She helped start the American Civil
Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, the settlement-house movement, and several
international peace organizations. She was the first American woman
ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Addams was born and raised in Illinois.
Pulaski, on the other hand, never set foot in the Midwest. Yet, for
some reason, Illinois — unlike any other state — has
deemed Pulaski worthy of an official state holiday.
Addams doesn’t get that kind of respect.
The father of the cavalry apparently trumps the mother of social work,
right in her own homeland.
A group of eighth-graders in the
southern-Illinois town of Dongola is working to remedy this
imparity. They have started a petition drive seeking to make Dec.
10 Jane Addams Day — and, believe it or not, they just may
succeed.
“This project has just gone way beyond
what I ever imagined,” says teacher Cindy Vines.
It started last summer when Vines attended a
workshop sponsored by the Center for Civic Education. There she
learned about Project Citizen, a program designed to inspire
middle-schoolers to become active participants in government.
It’s a five-step process that begins
with having kids identify a problem in their town. Next, they
gather information and possible solutions, then propose a new
public policy and an action plan.
Vines’ class quickly homed in on
holidays and found that there was no state holiday honoring any
woman. They identified that disparity as the problem and Addams as
the solution.
Their research has been compiled into a
series of display boards, now on view at the state Capitol along
with other schools’ Project Citizen efforts. The Dongola kids
have a 2-inch-thick binder with their boards simply documenting the
phone calls that they made trying in vain to determine the price tag of a state holiday.
“Nobody knows what it costs,”
Vines says.
Earlier this month, on one of the hottest
days of the year, the kids dressed up in their nicest khakis and
rode school buses to Springfield to participate in Youth in
Democracy day. They arrived to find that no other students had made
posters or banners, and they felt uncomfortable waving their Jane
Addams signs during the outdoor rally.
“I was disappointed,” Vines says,
“but, hey, we went about our business. I’m not about to
apologize for my students.”
The kids had designed trifold brochures, and
Vines took them into the Capitol and told them to hand the leaflets
out to anybody who looked important. “They were little
politickers,” she says.
They attracted the attention of Lt. Gov. Pat
Quinn’s staff, and this week the students traveled to Chicago
to meet with him. They made the trip by train from Dongola to
Chicago and back in 24 hours — leaving at 2 a.m. Monday and
arriving home at 2 a.m. Tuesday.
While in Chicago, the kids visited the Shedd
Aquarium and Navy Pier and, of course, toured Hull House, where
they discovered even more information about Addams, including her
role in establishing the first public playgrounds.
“Playgrounds are something we take for granted,” Vines says. “We
didn’t realize they were once accessible only to the
rich.”
Their meeting with Quinn was productive, but
he stopped short of endorsing their idea for an official holiday,
recommending instead a state “commemorative day”
— exactly what Vines was afraid of.
“We have dozens of commemorative days.
Do you know of any?” she asks. “That’s why I
don’t want it! All it means is, you think you got rid of me.
That’s not going to do it.”
After all, Pulaski — the war hero whose
only connection to Illinois is the large population of Polish
people in Chicago — has a real holiday.
“There are more Polish people living in
Chicago than there are in Poland,” Vines says. “But
guess what? There are more women than there are Poles.”
Quinn’s communications director, Claude
Walker, says that everything depends on the Dongola kids’
petition drive. If the petition garners enough signatures to get a
holiday, so be it.
“The will of the people will be the law
of the land,” he says.
Anyone wanting a copy of the Jane Addams
state-holiday petition may contact Vines at
cjvines@earthlink.net.
This article appears in May 26 – Jun 1, 2005.
