The Society Of Brothers

Enlarge Image Image Gallery FAR ABOVE: The Society of Brothers commune appears far from the maddening crowd . . . although located on the edge of U.S. 40 near New Meadow Run, Pennsylvania. The Society maintains two other locations in the United States. ABOVE: The whole world, beginning with the community's front lawn, is a classroom for the Society's children.

Folks keep asking us if we know of a commune that has endured for any length of time . . . and we keep answering that the only communes which seem to conquer time are those organized around [1] a very strong and dynamic leader or [2] a heavy religious trip. THE GROUP (reported on in MOTHER NO. 10) is an example of the first . . . and here's a sample of the second.

The guys in the Hawaiian shirts who come to rubberneck the tourist spots on Pennsylvania's Route 40 usually go right on by the Society of Brothers' toy-making commune at New Meadow Run. Maybe that's because nobody stands outside hawking souvenir salt shakers and painted porcelain plates with pictures of George Washington on them.

But the tourist profiteers and the national battlefields really have nothing on the Society . . . because behind their humble sign on Route 40, the brothers are quietly proving that a well-operated commune can go just about as far as its members want to take it. Through determination and years of hard work, the brothers have created a burgeoning toy business that today—along with a publishing enterprise—makes the commune completely self-sufficient.

Nor does the success of the New Meadow Run community mark the upper limit of the brothers' accomplishment. The Society also collectively owns two other prosperous settlements at Rifton, N.Y. and Norfolk, Conn. At all three communes, the brothers practice what they believe to be the most harmonious mode of existence possible to man.

"What we want to demonstrate," one of the brothers told us as we walked through the 140 sprawling acres at New Meadow Run, "is that people can live together in real unity. That's the primary need in life today. It's our feeling that people can be united without giving up their conscience. Man was made to.live the way we're living."

At times in its history, though, it appeared that the brothers would not be permitted to live in this or any other way.

The Society was formed when, amid the disillusionment that spread across Europe at the end of World War I, a small group gathered together near the village of Sannerz, Germany (northeast of Frankfurt-on-Main) in search of a positive alternative to the life they saw around them. The people who assembled were especially disturbed by remnants of the war time spirit, which glorified loyalty to the Fatherland above the dictates of one's own conscience.

They were Christians and they sought, in their own words, "to live out the Sermon on the Mount" in all facets of their life.

By 1926 the Society had moved to a large nearby farm, which they called Rhoen Bruderhog (place of the brothers), and the commune slowly began to grow.

With the coming of Hitler in 1933, however, things changed. The Society was forbidden to have guests or to sell its publications. When the Reich finally attempted to impose a Nazi teacher on the commune children, the brothers quickly sent their young to Lichtenstein . . . and the men of draft age followed shortly before the advent of conscription.