Commonwealth Changes

Commonwealth College, founded in 1923 as a heterodox academy where left-wingers of all shades might work and study, was oddly built, and oddly remains, on a 320-acre tract near Mena in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. A cluster of frame houses, halls and barns in which all the manual labor is done by faculty and students, the College is detested by many of the local citizenry who got the Arkansas Legislature to investigate "free love" and ''nudism" at Commonwealth, and last winter Rev. Luther D. Summers, a Baptist of Mena, led a crusade to make the College move away, exclaiming: "What can any decent person think of a school that teaches Communism, free love, Negro equality with white, atheism?"

Commonwealth has as yet given no John Reed, nor even a Heywood Broun, to the Cause, and in recent years its internal troubles have griped it more than the occasional forays of its students and teachers into areas of labor strife have irritated capitalists. Five years ago two-thirds of Commonwealth's student body went on strike, presumably because the institution's brand of radicalism was not radical enough, and several years later its young Director Lucien Koch resigned to take a job with the NRA as assistant economic analyst in the consumers' division. He was succeeded by a New Orleans Socialist named Richard Whitten, who left last autumn to work for his party. Commonwealth's most energetic official remained Charlotte ("Chucky") Moskowitz, executive secretary and wife of Lucien Koch's brother Raymond. Redhaired, 29, and freckled, "Chucky" Moskowitz raised money for the College, saw it through its legal and extra-legal baitings, got it electrical and water systems, a printing plant and the dairy in which the cows are now fed on the un-Marxian principle of "to each according to what she produces." Miss Moskowitz, during the last of her twelve years at Commonwealth, helped steer its policies away from doctrinaire paths, towards the more practical purpose of training people for trade union organizing. Last month "Chucky" Moskowitz left Commonwealth, to live and work in St. Louis with her husband, now a teacher for the Radio & Electrical Workers' Union. Last week Commonwealth got a new director, Rev. Claude Clossee Williams, who made ready to steer still another new course.

An Arkansas Presbyterian, now without a pulpit, Preacher Williams nearly ran for Governor on the Socialist ticket in 1932. Last year he attained nationwide prominence, in company with a Memphis social worker named Willie Sue Blagden, by getting soundly strapped by vigilantes at Earle, Ark. while looking for the corpse of a Negro who, it turned out, was not dead (TIME. May 31). In the estimation of Arkansas sheriffs and landlords, Claude Williams though a native is not much of an improvement over the Eastern and Midwestern radicals who have run Commonwealth. Like many another "agitator," he has been behind bars--six months for the rare crime of barratry (encouraging quarrels). Under Director Williams, Commonwealth's new aim will be to provide a hothouse in which to foster the labor movement in the South, an area in which that movement has never thrived. Henceforth, 75% of the 80 radicals to be found working and studying at Commonwealth through the winter must be from the South. Southern labor organizations will be asked to help in Commonwealth's activities, which will include establishing close educational relations with city and rural unions of garment workers, miners, oil, textile, lumber, maritime, iron, steel and automotive workers. New to Commonwealth's curriculum will be a course in "Labor Implications of Religion," to be held at the College for white ministers and students, mailed to Negro institutions for ministers and teachers. Says Director Williams: "We are a strictly non-factional and non-political labor school, partisan only to the wider interest of labor."

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