take over and operate it once it was built. Edmund B. Ball negotiated with members of the state assembly to authorize the project. He died in 1925, but his will established a charitable foundation—now the Ball Brothers Foundation—to continue his philanthropic activities in Muncie, chief among them funding for the coming hospital. His surviving brothers, along with other medically minded civic leaders, formed an organization to create the hospital he had envisioned, the Ball Memorial Hospital Association.98
Frank C. Ball, one of the directors of the association, convinced the board to locate the hospital adjacent to the BTC, arguing that each institution would benefit from proximity to the other.99 The college was not using the land south and west of the college quadrangle because the terms of the land gift to the state restricted it for educational purposes. The Ball hospital could use these dozens of undeveloped acres, however, because it would have a nurses’ training program.100 The college and hospital were like divisions of the same corporation, both under the direction of the Balls.101
Ball Memorial Hospital opened in August 1929 and intensified the economic transformation of northwestern Muncie. Cuno Kibele designed the buildings. In keeping with his preferred idiom, Kibele designed the façade in the Tudor Gothic style, symbolically lending the new institution maturity and authority, while it contributed to the modernization of health care, higher education, and the economy in Muncie. After funding the hospital’s creation, the Balls provided funds for a women’s dormitory for nurses in training—Maria Bingham Hall, built in 1930 and named after their mother. In sum, the complex cost $2 million to build, paid for by the foundation and the manufacturing company.102 The hospital employed numerous physicians and trained scores of nurses annually in the course of its operations, concentrating knowledge and capital in northwestern Muncie when the staff helped populate the city’s residential subdivisions around the campus.103 The developments were mutually reinforcing, providing comfortable residential opportunities to a growing professional class in a move that put the housing market in concert with the job market (Figure 8).
Muncie in Transition
The opening of the hospital came at the end of more than a decade of dramatic economic growth and development. The Great Depression shifted the politics of Muncie and higher education, but did not divert the Balls from the overall strategy they had developed over their several decades in the city. The economic collapse provided opportunities for the Balls. They took over the main downtown department store and rescued three of the city’s five banks from failure.104 Like the wealthy Henry Potter in Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life, the Balls had the means to save enterprises destabilized by panic or suffering from insolvency and illiquidity. When everyone else panicked, the Balls did not.105 In numerous sectors—retailing, finance, and agriculture, as well as real estate and transportation—the Ball family scooped up enterprises overextended with debt or suffering from the economic downturn of the 1930s and accelerated the corporate consolidation of small-town life transforming the nation. The Lynds lauded the Ball brothers’ “hard-headed ethos of Protestant capitalism,” which lifted them to a status in the city “amount[ing] to a reigning royal family.”106
Figure 8. Ball Memorial Hospital. The hospital brought modern health care to Muncie and symbolized the aesthetic, political, and economic association among the city, college, and Ball family. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
The Balls and BTC’s President Pittenger incorporated New Deal aid into their support plans for the institution. They jointly funded cultural development with an arts building that included studio instruction and a gallery that housed part of the Balls’ art collection. Located on the BTC quadrangle, the Arts Building helped make the northwestern sector the cultural capital of the city and the region in addition to the economic engine of Muncie. In Middletown in Transition, the Lynds illustrated how dominant the Balls had become by quoting a Muncie man speaking for the population dependent on the Ball family:
If I’m out of work I go to the Ball plant; if I need money I go to the Ball bank, and if they don’t like me I don’t get it; my children go to the Ball college; when I get sick I go to the Ball hospital; I buy a building lot or house in a Ball subdivision; my wife goes downtown to buy clothes at the Ball department store; if my dog stays away he is put in the Ball pound; I buy Ball milk; I drink Ball beer, vote for Ball political parties, and get help from Ball charities; my boy goes to the Ball Y.M.C.A. and my girl to their Y.W.C.A.; I listen to the word of God in Ball-subsidized churches; if I’m a Mason I go to the Ball Masonic Temple; I read the news from the Ball morning newspaper; and, if I am rich enough, I travel via the Ball airport.107
The account echoes the aggrieved workers of the company town of Pullman, Illinois, two generations earlier, who claimed George Pullman’s control over their lives was so exploitative and total they predicted “when we die, we shall go to Pullman hell.”108
In May 1937, Life ran a photo essay by Margaret Bourke-White to coincide with the publication of Middletown in Transition. Her work depicting Depression-era poverty had established Bourke-White as a central photographic interpreter of the American experience. Her photo essay emphasized Muncie’s class divide by running striking images of the poverty of south-side workers opposite photos of an opulent Ball mansion at Minnetrista. The grim, deteriorating peeled-away stucco and bare lath on worker housing “far across town from the college” emphasized the city’s geographic disparities.109 Readers saw the manicured lawns of BTC and brick-and-stone administration and teaching buildings in northwestern Muncie just a stone’s throw from Minnetrista. The Life feature proved exceedingly popular. Together, the photo essay and the two Middletown books created Muncie’s image as Everytown, U.S.A. (Figures 9 and 10).
In September of the same year, the Muncie Chamber of Commerce installed a sculpture on the college grounds to honor the Balls. The statue, Beneficence, by Daniel Chester French, conspicuously recognized the family’s philanthropy and tied it to their foremost community endeavors. In French, Muncie business leaders selected an artist whose work embodied the grandest of civic and national statements. Responsible for The Republic, the main sculpture at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, and the seated Lincoln sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial, French had been among the foremost American sculptors for nearly half a century.110
Figures 9 and 10. Muncie, Indiana. Life published a photo essay by Margaret Bourke-White in 1937 to coincide with the publication of Middletown in Transition. Bourke-White captured the economic disparities in the city; her depictions of opulence, greenery, and open space in northwestern Muncie (above) were starkly contrasted with the crowding and deterioration of working-class southern Muncie (below). Margaret Bourke-White/Getty Images.
Figure 11. Beneficence. Business leaders in Muncie commissioned a sculpture by Daniel Chester French to symbolize the relationship among the Ball family, the college, and the city. The sculpture, at the southern edge of campus, faces the city of Muncie. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
Beneficence
