Where New Deal Raises A ‘Little Soviet’

These are views of the former Paradise Corners, near Hightstown, N.J., where Dr. Rexford G. Tugwell, Resettlement Administrator and chief Brain Truster, is using $1,800,000 of the taxpayers’ money to build Jersey Homesteads, a co-operative town patterned after a Russian Commune. At the top is one of the 200 modernistic houses the Government is building for a selected group of settlers. To the lower left are red, tin experiment stations where a $223,000 worthless experiment in pre-fabricated houses was made and discarded when it was decided to build the houses of concrete blocks. To the lower right is the modern factory which Uncle Sam built for the co-operative community at a cost of $113,000.

Tugwell Hands Out $1,800,000 For N.J. “Commune”

Soviet-Inspired Project Near Hightstown to Have Co-operative Needlework Factory; Director-in-Chief Is Russian Born

By Dorothy D. Bartlett

The American taxpayer is putting up $1,800,000 to erect a model of a Russian Soviet Commune half way between New York and Philadelphia.

Dr. Rexford Guy Tugwell, President Roosevelt’s favorite Brain Truster, is the power behind this scheme which looks like little more than a muddle five miles outside of Hightstown, in Mercer county, N.J. 

But by fall the muddy streets of “Paradise Corners,” as Jersey Homesteads near Hightstown used to be called before the New Deal discovered its rich farmland, will be paved. And 200 carefully selected families, headed by a Russian-born little Stalin, will be running their “co-operative” full blast not 50 miles…