Brookwood Labor College<\/a> in New York, they wanted Commonwealth to provide practical training for class struggle, and for the college to play a more activist role in the existing labor movement. They envisioned Commonwealth not as an isolated idyll where workers could quietly receive a well-rounded education before being released back into the world, but as a place that would be oriented toward equipping workers for the tasks of movement-building, which need not wait until graduation.<\/p>\nThe Left as a whole was experiencing a changing of the guard, and the new pedagogical turn was emblematic of its evolving outlook. Romantic oratory from flamboyant prairie preachers was going out of style, replaced by an angular urban socialism which was associated more with the Communist Party than the Socialist Party. As the decade came to a close, students increasingly came from the second milieu. Debsians had founded Commonwealth, but as Commonwealth modernized, it grew disenchanted with Debsianism.<\/p>\nA class at Commonwealth College in the 1930s. (University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nZeuch was vehemently opposed to the proposed turn, decrying the tendency \u201cin the labor movement to confuse education with propaganda,\u201d and arguing:<\/p>\n
Workers\u2019 education is not simply vocational training, training as organizers, publicists, etc.; it is not merely a matter of a year\u2019s or two yeas\u2019 learning of \u2018pointers\u2019 on organizing, publicizing, etc. Workers\u2019 education . . . involves complete reeducation of our thinking in terms of labor. It means education to a thorough understanding and appreciation of social forces and their manipulation in control of social processes in the interest of labor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Detractors reasoned that:<\/p>\n
Commonwealth is coming of age at a time when the need for workers\u2019 education is becoming daily more obvious. The increasingly serious problems which will face the labor movement of the future call as never before for men and women trained to take an active and intelligent part. . . . The time has now come when it should intensify its militant mission of educating people who will do something in addition to being broadminded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Commonwealth was one of several labor colleges across the country in the early decades of the twentieth century, and most were having some version of this same debate. Rather than keep up with the times, some dissolved under the pressure of the worldview divide.<\/p>\n
But after a years-long power struggle, during which the founders each located an excuse to drift off campus, Commonwealth changed hands to become a paragon of practical worker-activist education, just as it had been a paragon of socialist liberal arts education.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n New Militancy<\/h2>\n \n Beginning in 1931, Commonwealth\u2019s new director was Lucien Koch, who, along with his siblings, matriculated at Commonwealth. As the son of the original New Llano recruits, Lucien was quite literally the offspring of Debsian socialism. He acknowledged his great intellectual and political debt to his forebears, but subscribed wholeheartedly to the more modern philosophy.<\/p>\n
Under new administration, Commonwealth offered fewer traditional courses and more that taught the basics of organizing to future labor organizers, of activist journalism to future movement journalists, of public speaking to future agitators, of labor law to future movement lawyers, and so on. In the arts, its emphasis was on labor drama: students wrote original plays that illustrated core socialist concepts and began to perform them around Arkansas for general audiences.<\/p>\nCommonwealth changed hands to become a paradigm of practical worker-activist education, just as it had been a paradigm of socialist liberal arts education.<\/q><\/aside>\nUnder Koch, the college became far more outward-facing, and its activities were hardly restricted to performing plays. Commonwealth was determined to become an influential presence in Arkansas politics, running a handful of Commoners for office. It was even more determined to integrate its activities with those of the labor movement, which had been repressed nearly to the point of nonexistence in the South but was showing signs of new life.<\/p>\n
In 1932, Commonwealth dispatched a contingent (including Koch) to Harlan County, Kentucky, to provide direct support to striking miners. For their trouble they were beaten bloody by police. Over the coming years, Commoners traveled to Illinois, Iowa, Oklahoma, and all around Arkansas to support strikes and help organize union drives. In many cases they were arrested. They were also threatened by racist mobs for the trespass of fraternizing with black workers, profaning the sacred social order of the Jim Crow South.<\/p>\n
Word spread of Commoners\u2019 direct engagement in labor struggles, which drew an even more radical (and often younger) student body down from big cities like New York and Chicago. In the coming years, Commoners embraced their reputation for militancy, nicknaming the bulletin boards in the dining hall the Pink Peril and the Red Menace. They established on campus a \u201cMuseum of Social Change\u201d whose installations depicted the horrors of capitalism, the advance of the working class, and the dawning of socialism.<\/p>\n
An increasing number of students, and a few faculty, were established members of the Communist Party. That meant, among other things, that they were accommodated to a factional style of politics that was mostly alien to Commonwealth.<\/p>\n
Lucien Koch had been responsible for this more radical turn, but he soon found some of the student body a bit doctrinaire, and careless with accusations of oppression. Raised by socialists and educated at Commonwealth, the young Koch was shocked and stung when the students, particularly those calling themselves Communists (some party members, others merely sympathetic), began to agitate against his administration. In particular, they took issue with the school\u2019s long-standing refusal to affiliate with any party, which they considered a cop-out and a dereliction of revolutionary duty given the rise of the Communist Party.<\/p>\nCommoners embraced their reputation for militancy, nicknaming the bulletin boards in the dining hall the Pink Peril and the Red Menace.<\/q><\/aside>\nThe Communist students likened Koch to a boss and themselves to workers. \u201cBy bringing up the class struggle analogy,\u201d Koch lamented, \u201cthe Communists can make it an issue of superior against inferior . . . attempts on our part to settle differences amicably and reasonably become \u2018attempts to break student solidarity.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Koch was personally wounded. He was accused of being a boss, but had he not just returned from Harlan, Kentucky, bruised and battered for the cause of the working class? He was accused of dragging his feet on racial integration, but had he not forged the school\u2019s first alliances with black workers? Rival camps began to emerge: those sympathetic and those unsympathetic to these arguments in Koch\u2019s self-defense.<\/p>\n
There were now hostilities between students and faculty, and factionalism among the student body itself. Koch found the new campus environment frustrating. It was more militant and activist than the old Commonwealth, by design, but at the expense of an atmosphere of camaraderie. \u201cThe atmosphere,\u201d he wrote to a friend, was \u201cno longer congenial.\u201d<\/p>\n
Koch had significant difficulties with Communists in person, but no grievance with their being at Commonwealth on principle. An avowedly nonpartisan institution, Commonwealth had always accepted leftists of all stripes, and Koch felt obliged to keep it that way.<\/p>\nCommonwealth College director Lucien Koch and his mother, Frieda, also a Commoner. (Radical Education in the Rural South: Commonwealth College, 1922\u20131940<\/cite> by William H. Cobb)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBut some progressive and labor movement allies did object to the Communist presence on campus. Chief among them was H. L. Mitchell, founder and leader of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Under Koch, Commonwealth College would pledge loyalty to the STFU, and the cause of poor sharecroppers would emerge as the school\u2019s cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre. But in the end, the loyalty flowed one way.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n Uneasy Union<\/h2>\n \n The height of Commonwealth\u2019s militant activity was yet to come. In 1934, sharecroppers in Arkansas formed a multiracial union to combat their immiseration, which was already considerable and had been exacerbated by the Great Depression. The racial makeup of tenant farmers in the South was about 40 percent black and 60 percent white, and as Cobb writes, most of them \u201clived in conditions that would appall a medieval leper.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Koch heard about the formation of the STFU, he was enthused, and promised Mitchell that Commonwealth would be a steadfast ally. Only a few months later, in early 1935, Mitchell took him up on the offer for support. A white STFU organizer named Ward Rogers had been arrested on charges of being a Communist Party member and advocating racial equality. Commonwealth swiftly dispatched a delegation to organize sharecroppers in Rogers\u2019s defense.<\/p>\n
Mitchell was always interested in distancing the STFU from Communism. Interestingly, despite Koch\u2019s tensions with Communists on campus, Mitchell\u2019s first impression of Koch was that he was too much of a Communist sympathizer. Still, Mitchell was grateful for the help, and put the Commonwealth delegation to work holding meetings in towns around eastern Arkansas.<\/p>\n
Koch and a young Communist student named Bob Reed were sent to Gilmore, where they collaborated with black organizers to hold a meeting in a black church. As Koch took the pulpit, four armed white men burst into the church and ordered the black attendees to leave on threat of lynching. They then beat Koch and Reed, held them at gunpoint, and marched them into cars headed toward an unknown destination. The Commoners were convinced they\u2019d be killed, but instead they were taken to the county seat, where they were gravely admonished for socially mixing with black people.<\/p>\nThe Commoners were convinced Koch and Reed would be killed, but instead they were taken to the county seat, where they were gravely admonished for socially mixing with black people.<\/q><\/aside>\nKoch and Reed were then taken back to the church and ordered to get into their own car. Before they did, they picked up a rope tied into a hangman\u2019s knot which had been left by the racist mob on the church steps. Koch later installed the noose in the Museum of Social Change.<\/p>\n
Word had gotten to Marked Tree, Arkansas, where another STFU meeting was being held, and the Commoners and union members there stopped the car caravan that had been assembled to escort Koch and Reed over the county line. The sharecroppers were armed to the teeth and ready for a fight, but no bullets flew. Koch and Reed were simply handed over to their comrades and warned never to return.<\/p>\n
Mitchell\u2019s reaction to the business in eastern Arkansas was mixed. He admired the courage of Commoners and appreciated their assistance, but he was angry to learn that Reed had passed out Communist Party literature at the union meeting. The Communist Party had ties to Moscow, and Mitchell felt the STFU, being a racially integrated union in the segregated South, had enough on its plate without charges of treason and sedition.<\/p>\n
When the Commoners returned to campus, they felt that the outing had been a great success. All factions on the campus were at last united: they would devote themselves to a campaign in support of the STFU. They were unaware that their love was unrequited.<\/p>\n
Mitchell held a series of grave phone calls with other Southern labor movement and progressive leaders who assured him that any association with the Communist Party was not strategic, as it spelled unnecessary and grave trouble for the fledgling union. They urged him to keep Commonwealth at arm\u2019s length.<\/p>\nA meeting of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, 1937. (Louise Boyle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nEven so, the STFU agreed to Commonwealth\u2019s offer to enroll about a dozen sharecroppers, deepening the relationship. Additionally, a few high-profile STFU organizers took posts as faculty at Commonwealth. All of this made Mitchell uneasy, but he wasn\u2019t ready to burn bridges with a potentially critical ally just yet.<\/p>\n
For his part, Koch, who had long found the atmosphere on campus insufficiently harmonious and personally stressful, made designs to exit the college. He left in 1936, and the college\u2019s downfall was not far behind.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n Betrayal and Counterrevolution<\/h2>\n \n After the college\u2019s first brush with infamy a decade prior, Arkansas conservatives had more or less left Commonwealth alone. But Commoners\u2019 high-profile field activity attracted their attention once again.<\/p>\n
A conservative pastor in Mena named L. D. Summers began preaching fire and brimstone against Commonwealth from the pulpit, and distributed pamphlets linking Commonwealth to the Communist Party. Summers \u201cwas a perfect caricature of the narrow, bigoted, fundamentalist, protofascist Americanism abroad in the South during the thirties,\u201d writes Cobb. \u201cHe had the same level of tolerance for the Commoners and their views that Savonarola had held for pregnant nuns.\u201d<\/p>\n
The passions of the Arkansas state legislature were also reawakened, as a viciously anti-communist young representative named Herman Horton declared war on Commonwealth. Horton introduced a sedition bill that was directly aimed at the college. A great deal of support for the bill poured in from wealthy landowners, indicating that the clever bourgeoisie understood the potential for Commonwealth\u2019s troubles to also drag down the STFU.<\/p>\n
The statewide offensive generated national publicity, most of it negative. The conservative magazine Liberty<\/i> sent an undercover reporter to pose as a prospective student, and he published an expos\u00e9 on Commonwealth under the headline \u201cRah, Rah, Russia!\u201d Mitchell began to panic, and so did Roger Baldwin, the leader of the ACLU who was the head of the AFPS, on whose money Commonwealth\u2019s existence depended.<\/p>\n
The STFU and the AFPS launched a defense of Commonwealth in 1937, but begrudgingly. Baldwin set about to convince Commonwealth to course-correct before it self-destructed. Conversations with the new Commonwealth administration, helmed by STFU organizer and Debsian-style radical minister Claude Williams \u2014 installed in a last-ditch effort at compromise \u2014 were unproductive. Williams\u2019s allegiances were split, and, in Polk County isolation, many suspected he was becoming something of a Communist himself.<\/p>\n
The relationships were growing strained on both sides now, as the impression began to form on campus that Mitchell was a reactionary and a sellout. Mitchell even stopped by for a visit and was fired upon by an STFU member, an old friend no less, who\u2019d enrolled at Commonwealth. The sharecropper may have suspected Mitchell was sleeping with his wife, but Mitchell took the shooting as proof that the Commonwealth student body was irrevocably poisoned against him, which was probably true.<\/p>\nThis idiosyncratic experiment in worker education in the rural South, which spanned the Debsian and Communist traditions, left an indelible imprint on thousands of lives and shaped the Left in the twentieth century.<\/q><\/aside>\nThe final straw came in 1938, when Jim Butler of the STFU, who also taught at Commonwealth, found a fateful slip of paper that had tumbled out of Claude Williams\u2019s pocket. It was an appeal written by students at Commonwealth to the Communist Party headquarters to send them funds so they could organize a Communist presence inside the STFU, unbeknownst to its leadership. Butler felt he had no choice but to report it to Mitchell, who was infuriated. All relations between the union and the college came to an abrupt end. The rest of the Southern labor movement, loyal to the STFU, immediately soured on Commonwealth.<\/p>\n
The AFPS\u2019s abandonment of Commonwealth was not far behind. In 1938, a new organization had come into being: the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), whose purpose was to identify Communists and drive them out of public life. One of its primary targets was the ACLU, and by extension the AFPS. Baldwin had supported Commonwealth since the days of Zeuch and the O\u2019Hares and had tried to save the sinking ship in recent years, but the college\u2019s falling-out with Southern labor and the rise of HUAC spelled the end of that relationship.<\/p>\n
By late 1938, Commonwealth College was friendless, and consequently penniless, and the reactionary pressure wouldn\u2019t let up. \u201cThe history of the school for the next eighteen months was nothing more than a prolonged death struggle,\u201d writes Cobb. A fire destroyed part of campus, and the college lacked sufficient funds to repair the damage. The student body was dwindling. Williams left in bitter disappointment.<\/p>\n
A new director had the idea to transform Commonwealth into a theater college, where it could focus on labor drama, one of its longtime specialties. But a cast of antagonists \u2014 Pastor Summers, various right-wing legislators, and even the college\u2019s old nemesis, the American Legion \u2014 wouldn\u2019t be satisfied until the entire enterprise was shut down.<\/p>\n
In the end, it didn\u2019t take much to put Commonwealth under, just a steady barrage of fines (for failing to fly the American flag, for displaying a hammer and sickle, for \u201canarchy\u201d) resulting in debts the college couldn\u2019t pay.<\/p>\n
The college was finally finished in 1940. Out of spite, Pastor Summers bought up the school\u2019s library, numbering over five thousand volumes. He separated the classical and the radical works, donating the former to local institutions and keeping the latter for his own anti-communist research purposes. Summers was one of thousands of \u201cred-hunting\u201d zealots across the country whose activism would eventually give way to McCarthyism.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n Every One of You a Goddamn Red<\/h2>\n \n Over the 1940s and \u201950s, as anti-communism became more of a national preoccupation, many labor and progressive organizations continued to distance themselves from Communists in hopes of saving their own skins. These efforts were to little avail: the hammer of McCarthyism came down on the entire institutional Left, Communist and otherwise. The STFU and AFPS were some of the first victims of this onslaught, and hardly the last. In the final analysis, Commonwealth was abandoned in vain.<\/p>\nThe Weavers, (L-R) Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman, 1952.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBut Commonwealth is not defined solely by its ugly end. This idiosyncratic experiment in worker education in the rural South, which spanned the Debsian and Communist traditions, left an indelible imprint on thousands of lives and shaped the Left in the twentieth century. Many who put up a good fight against McCarthyism, racism, and union-busting over the next few decades were former Commoners, or knew and were influenced by them. The college even had international reach, as many alumnae traveled overseas to fight fascism with the international brigades during the Spanish Civil War.<\/p>\n
After the college folded, a Commonwealth theater teacher from Arkansas named Lee Hays<\/a> teamed up with Pete Seeger to form the Almanac Singers \u2014 which also included Woody Guthrie and former Commonwealth student Sis Cunningham<\/a> \u2014 and later the Weavers. When they weren\u2019t dodging red-baiting and trying to shake off HUAC, Hays and his collaborators wrote and recorded a number of folk songs that remain popular in American culture, like \u201c If I Had a Hammer<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\nBut digging a little deeper into their discography, one encounters more radical themes. In \u201cTalking Union<\/a>,\u201d you can hear the lessons learned and experiences lived by Commoners, finishing on a note of optimism despite everything:<\/p>\nNow, boys, you’ve come to the hardest time. \nThe boss will try to bust your picket line. \nHe’ll call out the police, the National Guard, \nThey’ll tell you it’s a crime to have a union card. \nThey’ll raid your meetin’, they’ll hit you on the head, \nThey’ll call every one of you a goddam red.<\/p>\n
[But] if you don’t let red-baiting break you up, \nAnd if you don’t let stoolpigeons break you up, \nAnd if you don’t let vigilantes break you up, \nAnd if you don’t let race hatred break you up, \nYou’ll win.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n
\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anyone who aspired to attend Commonwealth College in rural Polk County, Arkansas, in 1931 would first have to fill out the following application: Tell what you think of one or more of the following men: Lenin, Mussolini, Wilson, Hoover, Ramsay MacDonald. Give your opinions on one of the following subjects: Democracy, Capitalism, Socialism, Americanism, Imperialism, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1941,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203261"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1941"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203261"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204352,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203261\/revisions\/204352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}