and the city’s boosters would not let that happen again. They also consulted retired postal clerk Dudley Woodard about the black community’s likely response to the bond issue. Woodard estimated that 95 percent of black voters would go along with the property-tax increase if they received infrastructure improvements from the program.42 East Austin desperately needed road improvements. Only three streets east of East Avenue were paved, and the rest were packed dirt and gravel. East Avenue itself, the main thoroughfare on the eastern side of the city, was hardly paved and had no paving at all north of 19th Street.43 Boggy Creek, a small tributary to the Colorado River, ran across roads and through backyards to make a swampy mess of impassable streets and marshy lots.44
Everett Givens also prodded city leaders to devote some of the bond-funded infrastructure to East Austin, to which they agreed. An activist recalled some decades later that Givens “got where he could get…. He believed in not stirring up things. Keeping people quiet. ‘Let me take care of it.’”45 Addressing a crowd of his friends and neighbors at a public outreach meeting in April 1928, Givens said, “We believe in the bonds, and all that we ask is that we get a dollar’s worth of value for every dollar spent.”46 Woodard also held promotional events for the bond election, convincing black voters to approve the measure.47 The bond program particularly appealed to the property-owning class of Austin African Americans who could pay the poll tax: the improvements would make their land more valuable.48 Austin’s African American wards supported the bonds overwhelmingly, which passed strongly all across the city.49
The dual-track infrastructure of Austin would not have been possible without capital from financial markets drawing investment from outside Texas. The city marketed the bonds in New York, and notices ran in the financial papers.50 Thus, the financialization of public infrastructure and the implementation of an openly segregationist plan spread north. Violence in the form of lynchings, house bombings, and race riots were clear and localized ways that whites maintained the color line in communities.51 Financial instruments disguised culpability for the color line. Government bonds spread responsibility for Jim Crow—and profit from it—to investors around the country.
By 1929, Austin had millions to spend, and the infrastructure plan began to work. The black community got its paved roads in East Austin, a public library branch, and a public school.52 The city’s black elites already lived in East Austin, and with each passing year after 1928, more African Americans moved to East Austin from their enduring neighborhoods of Wheatsville northwest of the UT campus, Clarksville west of downtown, and South Congress across the river. Ada Simonds, whose family moved from Clarksville to East Austin early in the century, remembered the segregation worked “because people are going to go live where the facilities are. The family needs recreational resources, the family needs educational resources, they need a place for a church…. You’d be closer to the church. You’d be closer to this and to that and to the other.”53 The racial geography became even more segregated under the Koch and Fowler plan, making the city’s white sections whiter and black neighborhoods blacker.54 Segregationist city planning first redrew the color line on city maps, then slowly on the city landscape, house by house and block by block (Figures 16 and 17).
Figure 16, 17. Census maps of Austin, 1930 and 1950. At the turn of the twentieth century, the African American population was distributed in neighborhoods throughout Austin, including Wheatsville and Clarksville. A city plan in 1928 and infrastructure program sought to segregate African Americans in East Austin, draining them from the mix of traditional neighborhoods throughout Austin. Maps created by the author. Census data from University of Minnesota Population Studies Center, www.nhgis.org.
Rivers of Oil
Back on campus in 1930, the university was ready to build. Texas A&M and the University of Texas had waged an institutional feud from 1923 to 1930 over royalty payments for the oil. The state legislature required drillers to pay one-eighth the value of the oil to the university, to be deposited in a fund for investing in the university’s buildings and grounds. Texas A&M had appealed for a portion of the oil proceeds because they were technically a branch institution of the University of Texas.55 After much negotiation, in January 1930, the UT Regents settled the dispute with the directors of A&M, agreeing to give A&M one-third of the royalties and freeing the funds from litigation and negotiation. The Texas state legislature institutionalized this agreement in 1931.56
William Battle knew the value of architectural symbols and concrete buildings. He had played politics effectively when he served as an acting UT president from 1914 to 1916, overseeing the creation of UT’s architecture building, Sutton Hall, designed by Beaux-Arts architect Cass Gilbert. Battle was a professor of Greek and Latin, was familiar with classical forms, and was a key go-between to the city’s business class through the Town and Gown social club, a collection of the city’s leading citizens. He was one of ten UT presidents and numerous university officers who were members of Town and Gown at some point in the organization’s first fifty years.57
University development policy was often debated and negotiated in civic groups and alumni organizations, keeping college life and city life in synch. Battle maintained relations with commercial, legal, and political leaders like Walter Long, of the city’s chamber of commerce, on behalf of the university.58 Long served for decades as the public face of Austin’s business interests and credited the campus building program as a key bulwark against the Depression. The chamber promoted the idea of UT investing its oil money in higher-yield securities so that more revenue would lead to a larger building program. Enabling amendments to the state constitution passed handily, and UT construction proceeded apace.59 Among academics and civic boosters, there was little doubt that the interests of the city and the university were one.
Tom Miller, Austin’s long-serving mayor throughout the midcentury decades, made the university-city nexus a metropolitan political issue in his first run for office. He wrote in a full-page newspaper advertisement in 1933, “I will further cordial relations between the city government and State and University authorities. I am also conscious of the great asset in material and cultural value of all the other great schools of Austin.”60 To a broad phalanx of political, business, and social organizations, the effects of the university on the city were clear, and there was a consensus that the two should work together: the growth of one should spur the other.
In 1930, university officials expected UT would prosper despite the nation’s deepening economic depression. The university’s oil lands had produced about $3 million in revenue, and Texas was poised to build with its share.61 Like the city, the University of Texas sought a new master plan to accommodate its future growth. This expansion would encompass more than a dozen new buildings and facilities. Battle led the university’s committee on campus grounds, and he recommended Philadelphia architect Paul Cret for the campus plan, a marker of UT’s ambition to rank among the nation’s top universities.62 Cret was a Frenchman who headed the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture school. Through his private firm, he designed buildings and monuments across the United States and Europe. The architect was born in France and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He brought the aesthetics of European architectural refinement to Texas. Battle termed him “a man of great ability, the highest training, and notable taste.”63 All of his work for UT would be cloaked in the style and ornament of the Spanish Renaissance Revival.
Cret
