With much fanfare, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock recently opened its downtown facility in the River Market District. I wrote a column last June about the partnership between UALR and the Central Arkansas Library System. CALS had opened a 160-space parking deck adjacent to its main campus in 2016. The five-story deck at the corner of Rock Street and Clinton Avenue provided needed parking for a thriving neighborhood, but the ground floor wasn't being used.
Enter CALS director Nate Coulter and UALR Chancellor Andrew Rogerson. They formed a partnership that should raise the university's visibility and stress its urban setting. The centerpiece of the downtown facility is a 44-by-9-foot mural painted by social activist Joe Jones during the Great Depression. The mural, titled The Struggle in the South, was painted in 1935 at Commonwealth College near Mena. The college was small and always controversial, as it trained students to participate in the labor movement and other reform efforts of the day.
Media coverage of the mural's unveiling in downtown Little Rock has increased interest in Commonwealth's short but fascinating history. The late historian William H. Cobb described the school as "the accidental by-product of natural beauty, cheap land and desperation."
The college was established in 1923 near Leesville, La., at the New Llano Cooperative Colony. The colony had been founded in 1917 when members of the socialist commune Llano del Rio in California relocated to 20,000 acres of cutover land south of Leesville. The Gulf Lumber Co. had operated a sawmill there that burned in 1913 and 1916. When it burned the second time, the company decided not to rebuild since timber reserves had been depleted.
Commonwealth was founded by Kate Richards O'Hare, her husband Frank, and William E. Zeuch. Cobb described them as "socialists and lifelong adherents of the principles established by Eugene V. Debs. Drawing on their mutual experience at Ruskin College in Florida, where they had been impressed with the possibility of higher education combined with cooperative community, the O'Hares and Zeuch decided to create a college specifically aimed at the leadership of what they designated as a new social class, the industrial worker."
Due to conflicts between the Louisiana colony and the college, the founders decided to move the school. They found a site near Ink in Polk County. More disagreements led to the school renting property in Mena in December 1924.
"On April 19, 1925, Commonwealth moved to its permanent home 13 miles west of Mena," Cobb wrote. "Like pioneers, the Commoners carved a campus out of this virtual wilderness while carrying on with schooling and tending crops. Its college building was made possible by critical financial help from Roger Baldwin's American Fund for Public Service. The serenity of these exhausting early years was shattered in 1926, however, when the American Legion charged Commonwealth with Bolshevism, Sovietism, communism and free love. It moved to investigate and close the little school.
"The resulting uproar and unwanted publicity lasted several months and ended only when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover denied that the college had any record of such ideas and activities. Though exonerated and at this point innocent, Commonwealth became permanently identified in the popular mind as 'Red.'"
In 1931, students and staff members seized control of the college and ousted Zeuch, who had sought to maintain cordial relations through the years with the college's neighbors. The school demanded four hours of labor per day from staff and students. Faculty members weren't paid. They simply had a place to live and plenty of food to eat. Classes began at 7:30 a.m. each day and usually took place in an instructor's cottage. There were no grades, no degrees and no required class attendance. There were never more than 55 students at the school.
"The only entrance requirements were intelligence, a sense of humor and dedication to the labor movement," Cobb wrote. "Commonwealth's most famous student, Orval Faubus, in an interview just before his death, said he had 'never been with a group of equal numbers that had as many highly intelligent people as there were at Commonwealth.'"
When Faubus took on Gov. Francis Cherry in the 1954 Democratic primary, Commonwealth became an issue. Faubus biographer Roy Reed wrote that Faubus "proved himself as a campaigner, attacking electric utility interests and Cherry's political awkwardness. He stood up for old people on welfare. ... Faubus forced Cherry into a runoff. Cherry panicked. When his advisers dug up Faubus' old connection with Commonwealth College, Cherry made it public in a way that suggested his opponent might be a communist. The tactic backfired."
Faubus won the runoff and went on to serve 12 years as governor. At the urging of his father, an avowed socialist, Faubus had spent three months as a young man at Commonwealth. The school later became heavily involved with the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, which was headquartered at Tyronza in the Arkansas Delta. Cobb wrote: "It was, for the college, a fatal attraction."
A document surfaced in August 1938 that critics of the college and the union claimed was a detailed plan by communists at Commonwealth to take over the union. Union leaders moved quickly to disassociate themselves from Commonwealth. By the end of 1940, the college had ceased to exist.
"Commonwealth had lost its reason for being and all of its moderate leftist support," Cobb wrote.
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 02/16/2019