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ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 23 (Spring 1964)
Commonwealth College Comes To Arkansas, 1923-1925
By WILLIAM H. COBB
Memphis State University
Commonwealth College of Polk County, Arkansas was founded in Louisiana in 1923. It moved to Mena, Arkansas late in 1924 and from the spring of 1925 until September 1940, when it was forcefully closed by an indignant public, was located at the rural campus site eight miles northwest of Mena, Arkansas. Commonwealth College was Arkansas' sole claim to progressive labor education. It was frequently a target of local and state critics, who associated its faculty and students with the bugaboo of international communism. But there is no proof that either the college of its faculty and students were ever internationally oriented. More correctly speaking, it seems to have been an overt manifestation of American general discontent in the between the wars era with the economic, social, and political inequalities under the capitalistic system in the United States.
The ideas that commonwealth promoted were far from new. As a utopian venture the school was the indirect heir of Plato's Republic, St. Augustine's City of God, More's Utopia, and Voltaire's ElDorado. The school found more direct roots in numerous nineteenth century expressions of discontent, both European and American. In Europe the work of Marx and Engels provided economic justification for early communal experiments, (1) while in America a rising wave of social discontent manifested itself in experimentation with actual cooperative communities. Easily the most
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1. Joyce Oramel Hertzler, The History of Utopian Thought (New York, 1923), 7; H.A. Watt and J.B. Munn, Ideas and Forms in English and American Literature (Chicago, 1926),974.