their children the city’s best education on the public dime, right in the neighborhood where their business colleagues lived.77 The school’s first principal noted the Burris School also aided a group of poor rural families living in “Pigeon Roost,” an undeveloped area beyond the college, and characterized the sons and daughters of Muncie’s professional class as “average” and “typical” students; and, moreover, all would benefit from his strict discipline.78
The Gravity of Capital
When Burris attracted upper-middle-class families to the district, they wanted homes and neighborhoods as good or better than the ones they had left. Many came from the East End, the desirable enclave near the city’s downtown that business elites had established before the turn of the century. The community was not so deeply rooted, however, that it could not be transplanted according to the Ball family’s designs. The Lynds commented on the shifting geography of real estate in their 1937 follow-up study of Muncie, Middletown in Transition, asserting that the Ball family had “moved the residential heart of the city.”79 Where the elite section had been on the city’s east side, later, “the aristocratic old East End, the fine residential section in the pre-motor period when it was an asset to live ‘close in’ and even in the early 1920s, runs a lame second to the two new [Ball] subdivisions in the West End, to which ambitious matrons of the city are removing their families.” The Lynds, who had been friendly with the Balls during their stay in Muncie, connected the growth of the new subdivisions to the family’s involvement with BTC and the college’s transformation “into a cluster of beautiful buildings” as well as “the new million-and-a-half-dollar hospital, an outright gift to the city by the [Ball] family.”80
Figure 7. E. A. Ball House, Westwood. A second-generation Ball family member developed two exclusive subdivisions at the edge of Ball Teachers College. His own home was among the finest and helped draw the Muncie business class to live in the northwestern area of the city rather than in the East End, which had been the traditional businessmen’s enclave. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
The two new West End subdivisions were the work of Edmund Arthur Ball, Frank Ball’s son. He bought a large tract of agricultural land north of the college campus in 1923.81 Ball and a partner, Charles V. Bender, platted out a residential subdivision called Westwood. Ball built his own home there, where he lived with his wife and two young daughters. The subdivision followed enduring principles of suburban exclusion. Restrictive covenants on the property deeds explicitly forbade ownership or residence by minorities except as domestic servants, reserving Westwood for “the pure white race.”82 They also governed nearly every aspect of home building in the subdivision in ways that raised barriers to all members of the working class, including a minimum lot size of 7,500 square feet; property setbacks of 7 feet from each lot line and farther from the front line; and required review of architectural plans for any proposed structures.83 Industrial workers would be hard pressed to buy the homes. Even apartment builders would be foiled (Figure 7).
The real-estate company drew upon the cachet of BTC in Westwood advertising. Education stood in as a class signifier, and the college’s investments in planning and design provided value to the surrounding area.84 Prospective buyers might consider college students unruly or politically charged and therefore undesirable neighbors. The college had social control over students in the dormitories, and the system of house inspections eliminated this threat from the local properties.85 Following his success with Westwood, Ball established another subdivision, Westwood Park, right next door in 1939, with the same exclusionary laws.86
Muncie had a race problem that was especially pronounced in the 1920s. The Ku Klux Klan experienced a resurgence after World War I that corresponded to a flood of international immigration and increasing mobility for African Americans. Klan politics drew on a mix of racism, xenophobia, right-wing populism, and working-class insecurity amid dramatic social and economic change. The Klan was particularly prominent in Indiana, menacing black families in the region and influencing Muncie politics.87 In one instance, white rioters assembled to intimidate a black Muncie mortician who was caring for the bodies of two lynching victims from nearby Marion. The city’s black population and a handful of police officers prevented violence at the mortuary, but the Klan maintained significant power in the city in the 1920s.88
Muncie’s Jewish population suffered at the same time. Affluent Jewish residents were shut out of home ownership in the city’s elite neighborhoods, and their children battled anti-Semitism in the schoolyard.89 Sherman Zeigler, a scrap dealer, grew up in Normal City and attended Burris, the campus laboratory school. As a child, he suffered harassment from Protestant children. In his teens, one of the city newspapers denied him a paper route “because they didn’t want any Jews working on their paper,” prompting Jewish retailers to withhold advertising in response. As an adult, restrictive covenants kept Zeigler out of a northwestern Muncie development immediately north of Westwood.90
Municipal zoning reinforced the privately created system of exclusion and institutionalized white supremacy on the landscape.91 Zoning emerged as a means of protecting property values from the urban consequences of mass industrialization. It arose along with the city planning profession in the 1920s. The 1926 Supreme Court decision Euclid v. Ambler affirmed the rights of municipal governments to limit industrial development by real estate companies and generally ratified zoning as a form of the police power of the state—in this case, as a means of protecting high-class residential areas from the chemical and noise pollution of industry.92 At the turn of the century, designers like Frederick Law Olmsted and his sons worked with cities to create rules that would support the bourgeois vision of suburban community design. Later, private real-estate investors such as J. C. Nichols in Kansas City and local entrepreneurs like Edmund A. Ball led the way, working hand in glove with municipal authorities to formalize such practices.93
Muncie’s newly formed City Plan Commission administered a master plan that had divided the city into land-use districts, separating industry from business from residential areas. The town’s code set its own minimum densities and lot sizes for some districts, reinforcing the intentions of the developers and serving as an economic barrier to keep minority and lower-middle-class aspirants from relocating to wealthy neighborhoods.94 The resulting segregation along racial, class, and ethnic lines translated to social segregation. Muncie was renowned for high participation in community clubs, recreational organizations, and religious congregations, but the spatial concentration by class and race in a handful of more exclusive clubs reduced possibilities for class mixing and community influence by the industrial working class.95 Higher education was becoming a means of social mobility, but the spatial logic of colleges and universities undermined that equalizing potential.
Founding a Hospital
Universities turned to medicine in the twentieth century, and the Balls followed the trend, creating a hospital to pair with the college. The 1910 publication of Abraham Flexner’s Medical Education in America and Canada prompted educational reforms that would make medical training less plentiful and more exclusionary, but would also make education and treatment more scientifically based, advancing the transition of medicine from trade to profession and demanding facilities with up-to-date tools.96 Lucius Ball, the eldest of the five Ball brothers, was a physician who joined the family business as the company doctor. He had helped found the Muncie Home Hospital, a modest, community-run institution, in 1905. Later, he and his brother Edmund B. Ball promoted the idea of a new, more modern facility rather than an expansion of the aging Muncie Home Hospital.97
Members of the Ball family provided the capital to
