affirmed the spatial relationship between the Balls and the northwestern quadrant of the city. The college placed the bronze statue on the southern edge of the original Ball State quadrangle, positioned within a semicircle of five Corinthian columns representing the five Ball brothers. Facing out from campus, the winged woman reached out to Normal City and the rest of Muncie in welcome. She held the gift of education in one hand. Located at the edge of the Ball State grounds, the statue symbolized the prodigious philanthropy the family had offered the city and made clear the connection between campus and community in Muncie, with the Ball family the beating heart of every major Muncie institution—public, private, educational, and commercial (Figure 11).
The interdependence between the Ball family and the city’s elite institutions was entrenched as a major feature of civic life and had begun with the teachers college as the key catalyst. The four bodies—the Ball family, the city itself, the Ball Memorial Hospital, and Ball Teachers College—seemed to be joined as they looked to rise from the Great Depression. The future of the college, the hospital, and the city were secure with the continued support of the Ball family, while the Balls’ work and Muncie life were enhanced by the growing influence of the hospital and the college that had started the whole transformation. The Ball family had come to Muncie for natural gas, and they returned some of the wealth gained from manufacturing glass jars to the city that helped enrich them. They had molded Muncie through their support of the college and the hospital and through real estate development. Indiana governor Clifford Townsend, attending the dedication of Beneficence, claimed, “No Hoosier thinks of Muncie without thinking of the Ball family and its influence in the community. Their philanthropy has been both intelligent and generous.”111 One worker, quoted in Middletown in Transition, sarcastically affirmed the Balls’ power, noting that they were such an exceptional group of businessmen they were “about the only people I know of who have managed to augment their fortune through the art of philanthropy.”112
The Balls had turned Muncie from a small industrial town into a small, but real urban center. At the dedication for Beneficence, Glenn Frank, the former president of the University of Wisconsin, enthused, “Through hospitals, they have ministered to the body, through schools, to the mind, through religious agencies, to the spirit, and through the arts, to the senses. And, in all this, they have given of themselves as well as of their means.”113 Just as important, Muncie elites compounded that capital investment with real estate developments that redirected patterns of urban growth and catalyzed a new metropolitan economy for the city. In that sense, the Balls did not dominate Muncie, but their influence was essential. Through charitable and business decisions over a half-century, the Balls, the McGonagles, the Kitselmans, the Pittengers, and other leaders in the region led the Progressive reordering of urban America that was under way in cities large and small. Higher education led the entire process. Muncie was more than Everytown in the minds of Life editors and the Lynds’ readers. It was Everytown in the sense that cities around the country would display similar patterns of real-estate transformation, beginning with a college.
Figure 12. Austin, Texas. Map created by the author.
2 The City Limits
The evening of May 27, 1923, an oil driller’s bit passed the depth of three thousand feet after nearly two years of drilling into arid West Texas land near Odessa. Gas bubbled up into the Santa Rita well, named for the patron saint of impossible causes, and the drillers stopped their rig, realizing they had found oil where investors had been searching since 1919. The drillers hurried to lease more lands nearby before the news broke. The next morning, crude oil erupted from the well and sprayed over the top of the derrick: the drillers’ bet paid off. Oil honeycombed the land, and the strike instantly made the acreage, which belonged to the University of Texas (UT), worth hundreds, even thousands of times more than when the school leased it as ranching land.1
Federal policy and new technology made crude oil an essential commodity in the American economy. Transportation policy shifted early in the twentieth century from emphasizing rail to automobility. Gasoline-powered internal combustion engines moved goods and people from farm to market, from city to city, and from producer to port. American oil consumption increased steadily throughout most of the twentieth century, and the University of Texas sat on a large pile of royalties that grew larger every year.2
That wealth held the potential to lift the University of Texas, and the city of Austin with it, to a new elite rank. However, its Southern, segregationist practices and its national aspirations were in conflict. In the midcentury decades, the university’s northern peers increasingly looked askance at Jim Crow segregation, and national policy chipped away at it until, by the mid-1950s, explicit segregation was no longer viable policy for either a great university or a major city.
Discussions of segregation and the influence of the civil rights movement on higher education often center on legal battles and flash points like the one that erupted over James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi in 1962: famous clashes over enrollment decided in favor of integration.3 George Wallace’s 1963 symbolic blockade of the door of the University of Alabama promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and propelled him to national prominence as a part of the “massive resistance” movement.
Urban development, however, was also a key mechanism of racial segregation—a “passive resistance” counterpart. Robust suburbs at the metropolitan periphery of cities like Atlanta and Detroit were often populated by and usually limited to white, middle-class professionals.4 Universities helped drive this suburban growth at midcentury. On the outskirts of Chicago, the University of Chicago helped build and manage a national research laboratory in DuPage County after World War II that led to growth in the nearby suburbs of Naperville and Downers Grove. Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, created a research park that was central to the development of Silicon Valley far outside the largest Bay Area cities of San Francisco and Oakland.5 The state of New York incorporated the University of Buffalo into its state higher-education system and created a new, second campus in suburban Amherst, exacerbating urban disinvestment and peripheral expansion in Buffalo. In all of these places, suburban growth exacerbated racial segregation, and universities were part and parcel to suburban growth. In Austin, understanding the the relationship among segregation, metropolitan growth, and higher education is essential to understanding the development of the city.
The University of Texas helped pave the way in the 1930s and 1940s to a new kind of sprawling, segregated metropolis, just at the moment Austin was becoming a major American city. In this era, the university drew on federal resources to promote growth in Austin, reinforced Jim Crow in central Austin before the antisegregation Sweatt and Brown cases, and, fueled by oil, helped drive a less explicit metropolitan segregation afterward. Suburbanization, highway building, and metropolitan expansion after World War II provided opportunities to sidestep political opprobrium and seemed to leave behind the legacy of Jim Crow, especially after a losing court battle over segregation. Postwar metropolitan growth allowed UT leaders to partner with Austin’s civic elite and develop sprawling greenfield and automobile-oriented sites that were functionally segregated by race while they advanced a race-neutral ideology of scientific discovery, regional economic growth, and consumer choice in the national interest. University president Theophilus Painter, politicians James “Buck” Buchanan and Lyndon Johnson, mayor Tom Miller, publisher Charles Marsh, and chamber of commerce head Walter Long—all worked together to draw federal funds, to bring economic growth to Austin, and to make it one of the boom cities of the twentieth century. Many large cities during the century lost population, tax base, and civic optimism as they suffered from urban crisis. Austin was one of the winners, with a growing population and a tech economy that made it a model for other cities at the end of the century.
