Lee Hays - Commonwealth College

Commonwealth College

In 1937, when Claude Williams was appointed director of Commonwealth College in Mena Arkansas, a labor organizing school, he hired Lee Hays to direct a theater program. The school newspaper, the Commonwealth Fortnightly, announced that:

Lee Hays, a native of Little Rock, will join Commonwealth's faculty at the beginning of the fall quarter ... to teach Workers' Dramatics and to supervise Commonwealth's drama groups.

The announcement noted that as former assistant to the drama director at Highlander Folk School and a member of the Sharecropper Film Committee which produced America's Disinherited: "Lee brings with him to Commonwealth valuable experience and ability."

While at Commonwealth, Hays and his drama group wrote and produced numerous plays, of which one by Hays, One Bread, One Body, toured with considerable success. He also compiled a 20-page songbook of union organizing songs based on hymns and spirituals. Playwright and fellow student Eli Jaffe, said that Hays "was deeply religious and extremely creative and imaginative and firmly believed in the Brotherhood of Man." Waldemar Hille, the dean of music at Elmhurst College in Chicago, who spent Christmas of 1937 at Commonwealth, thought that Hays was the most talented person at the college and was particularly enchanted with the folk songs and singing he encountered there. But by the next year, however, another observer noted that the "brilliant" and hitherto energetic Hays appeared "disheveled" and was "sick all the time". Doris Willens, his biographer, speculates that Lee's physical and mental states were possibly a response to the ongoing tribulations of his mentor and of Commonwealth College.

Long subject to the virulent hostility of its neighbors and in dire financial straits, the embattled school was riven by internecine struggles between its more radical members and the more moderate socialists on its board. In 1940 the board expelled the avowedly Marxist Claude Williams for allegedly allowing Communist infiltration and for being excessively preoccupied with the issue of racial discrimination, and soon after, the institution was disbanded.