Newsletter of Historic Arkansas Labor College Now Online

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The newsletter of Commonwealth College, a controversial labor college that operated from 1924 to 1940 near Mena, Ark., is the newest digital collection available on the Web site of the University of Arkansas Libraries’ special collections department.

Commonwealth College was one of the nation’s most famous and longest lived experiments in cooperative living and labor education. The newsletter, titled the “Commonwealth Fortnightly,” is available free of charge online.

Labor colleges, an outgrowth of the noncommunist reformist labor movement, flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, an era rich in educational experimentation. Socialists Kate Richards O’Hare, Frank O’Hare and William E. Zeuch founded Commonwealth in 1923 near Leesville, La. The college moved to Arkansas in 1924. “Commoners,” as students and staff were known, carved a campus and farm out of the wilderness 13 miles west of Mena near the Oklahoma border.

Commonwealth’s founders believed that a different type of education for the new industrial class would bring about a series of social changes that would transform American capitalism into a utopian cooperative commonwealth. The college offered a liberal education curriculum, taught from a working class perspective. Faculty members were unpaid and expected to participate in the communal work required to contribute toward the school’s self-sufficiency. Students labored four hours per day in return for their subsistence and education. Commonwealth gave no grades and conferred no degrees, but it offered a rich intellectual life. The school’s most famous alumnus was Orval E. Faubus, a six-term Arkansas governor, whose previous attendance at the school became a campaign issue in 1954.

The newsletter documents the school’s social activities, curriculum information, lectures, plays, cooperative living projects and community relations efforts, along with satirical pieces, labor union news, letters from prominent supporters and commentaries on social issues and current events.

In 1926 the American Legion’s State Convention accused Commonwealth College of Bolshevism, communism and “free love.” Although an investigation by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover cleared the college of these charges, Commonwealth College continued to be associated with communism in popular opinion. The Great Depression radicalized staff and students, who worked to establish a new Arkansas Socialist Party in 1932. The party nominated Clay Fulks, a Commonwealth instructor, for governor in 1932. These events generated negative publicity throughout the nation.

The school closed in 1940 due to shattered finances, a deteriorating physical plant, acrimonious relations with the neighboring community and harassment by the state legislature. In a last ditch effort to save the school, the Commonwealth College Association attempted to transform the college into a drama school under the auspices of the radical New Theatre League of New York City. Local citizens filed charges against the school in the Polk County Court for anarchy, failure to fly the American flag during school hours and displaying the hammer and sickle emblem of the Soviet Union. The court found the college guilty and fined it $5,000, a sum it could not pay. Commonwealth’s property was ultimately sold to pay the fine.

Digitization of the “Commonwealth Fortnightly” was made possible by Stephen A. Smith, professor of communications in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. The Walter B. Reuther Library at Wayne State University and the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania provided assistance to the project. The collection includes nearly a complete run of the newsletter, which was issued from Jan. 1, 1926, through March 5, 1938. The Libraries’ special collections department also holds manuscript collections related to Commonwealth College, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation Files on Commonwealth College (MC 1323) and the Clay Fulks Papers (MC 1473).