Rabindranath Tagore

In 1940, Dartmouth University Professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy opened Camp William James as a leadership training center for the Civilian Conservation Corps, the great youth mobilization program inaugurated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The camp was named for William James, who gave a famous address at Stanford in 1906 entitled, "The Moral Equivalent Of War." For James, the moral equivalent was voluntary work service, going to war in peace time, devoting oneself to a cause, with the same virtues of hardihood, self-sacrifice and patriotism, sharing out the menial tasks of society.

This theme was adopted by Gandhi for civil rights, returned to the U.S. through Martin Luther King, Jr., and passed on to Cesar Chavez, where militant nonviolent action in behalf of social justice became a version of the moral equivalent of war.

Among the enrollees at Camp William James was one of Rosenstock-Hussey's students, Page Smith, who later became one of America's foremost historians and founding Provost of Cowell College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1962, while on the faculty at UCLA, Smith wrote a letter to Hubert Humphrey proposing the Peace Corps as an international version of the Civilian Conservation Corps. He saw this as the latest installment of James' "moral equivalent." Humphrey took the idea to John F. Kennedy and by 1963, the Peace Corps was a reality.

In 1972, Page Smith and Paul Lee founded the William James Association in Santa Cruz to re-establish the Civilian Conservation Corps. They were invited by Gov. Jerry Brown to help organize the California Conservation Corps in 1976, and held a number of encampments with interested parties to discuss the formation of the corps.

The great British gardener Alan Chadwick was the main speaker at one of the meetings. Chadwick arrived in the US in 1967 and became the head gardener at the Student Garden which Lee had organized at UCSC. Lee saw the California Conservation Corps as a vehicle for integrating Chadwick's organic gardening system, the French Intensive/Biodynamic Method, with the concept of public service in an expanded vision of the "moral equivalent."

In 1985, Smith and Lee opened the first public shelter for the homeless in Santa Cruz and organized the Citizens Committee for the Homeless. In 1989, Lee and Lynne Basehore Cooper started the Homeless Garden Project, in order to employ homeless people and provide them with a safe haven for gardening using the Chadwick method. All this was part of an ever-evolving understanding of James' original idea.

Now Lee and his colleagues have received a grant from the Corporation for National Service to start an AmeriCorps program in Santa Cruz, the Santa Cruz Service Corps. In cooperation with the California Conservation Corps and its California Bays District Director, Joe Griffin, who will act as fiscal agent for the project, the Service Corps will recruit 24 Members who will receive minimum wage plus a $4,725 educational bonus. The program will recruit six to twelve members from the homeless garden, six to twelve from the UCSC Agroecology Apprentice Program (both programs train in the Chadwick Method), and others from the community large.

These Members will do half their service at the Homeless Garden and half at gardens in Santa Cruz area schools. They will also mentor at-risk youth and develop their own 250-hour volunteer public service projects as part of the theme of the AmeriCorps Grant. The project will provide technical assistance to the schools in using the produce they grow, either through community supported agriculture programs or by cooking and eating the food themselves. Noted local chefs Joe Schultz and Charlie Deal have volunteered to help teach cooking.

This effort coincides with a mandate recently issued by State Superintendent of Schools Delain Eastin to develop a garden at every school in the state by the year 1999, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of California statehood. The Santa Cruz Service Corps will be the model for this goal.