All Things Common

When spiritual enthusiasts beat the material world at its own game, is it unfair competition? That is the question laid before South Dakota's Circuit Court for decision last week. The more than 1,500 Hutterites of South Dakota, living on 15 booming communal farms in the fertile valleys of the James and Missouri Rivers, are fighting a law that prohibits them from buying more land. Without more land the Hutterite communities in South Dakota are doomed.

No Kickshaws. Jacob Hutter was a 16th century hatter. In 1533, in Moravia, he organized a group of Christians dedicated to following their conception of New Testament Christianity. They lived in what they called Bruderhof, possessing all property in common, withdrawn as far as possible from the world and all its earthly practices and vanities--neither voting, nor holding office, nor bearing arms, nor wearing gaudy clothing. As with so many severely odd Christian offshoots, the Hutterites soon found themselves hounded and on the move. In the 18th century they emigrated to Russia, in the 19th to the U.S. In 1918 their antiwar sentiments got them chased out of South Dakota to Canada, but in the early 1930s drought hit South Dakota; South Dakota farmers left the state in droves, and the Hutterites were invited back.

They came, and as Hutterites do, with their austere habits and considerable talents, they prospered. But Hutterite prosperity does not mean prosperity for non-Hutterite neighbors; they spend no money on hardtops, television sets and such kickshaws, spend it instead to get more land and make what they have more productive. They buy supplies and equipment in large lots at wholesale prices, and make their own furniture, clothes, etc. And they reproduce faster than any other group in the world, with ten children to the average family.

To check the Hutterite expansion, the South Dakota legislature put into effect last July 1 a new law which makes it illegal for Hutterite communes to buy more land in the state. Six weeks later a Hutterite colony near Redfield completed negotiations to buy 80 acres of land. The state went to court to void the deal, and the last legal briefs were submitted to the Circuit Court last week.

Plenty of Warning. Former State Senator Arthur L. Coleman of Redfield, who introduced a bill aimed at curbing the Hutterites in 1951, summed up the anti-Hutterite position for a visitor last week. "I'm not opposed to them as people," he said. "But their people work without pay, and the land is in the hands of the church. The people are nothing more or less than a Communist setup. The children grow up without anything but a communal attitude. It isn't the American way, certainly. They take over large areas. It's equivalent to what happens in the city when Negroes move into a neighborhood. Others move out and the prices drop. Of course they're less prone to psychotic or neurotic troubles because they stay away from efforts to improve our way of life."

Such reactions trouble the Hutterite brethren, but neither surprise nor intimidate them. The Bible, they feel, has given them plenty of warning of how it will be: "They shall put you out of the synagogues : yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service [John 16:2]." And as for their way of life, they ask how could they presume to change it from that of the first Christians: "And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need . . . And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved [Acts 2:44-45, 47].

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