bounding and connecting rectilinear campus zones consistent with Beaux-Arts principles. He adapted it to the local conditions by creating multilevel terracing to accommodate the sloping Austin landscape. He developed schemes for new buildings, and, when selected as the architect for individual buildings, Cret provided designs and ornamentation that alluded to and, in some cases, rivaled palacios in sixteenth-century Spain (Figures 18 and 19).64
Cret’s master plan for the University of Texas was urban planning ideology writ small. The Beaux-Arts tradition and City Beautiful movement emphasized urban order by creating grand boulevards, using visual symbolism, and harmonizing the chaos of large and growing cities. Cret’s plan reinforced gender and racial segregation on campus and in the city by creating campus zones that prescribed areas of activity and reinforced geographic concentrations. It called for UT’s white female students to live and study as far on campus as possible from segregated, black East Austin.65 The zone in the northwestern corner of campus included women’s dormitories, the women’s gymnasium, and a building for home economics. Cret located the zone near two existing dormitories created for women in the 1920s, the Scottish Rite Dormitory and Littlefield Dormitory. A Masonic organization had built Scottish Rite just off the northern edge of campus to provide housing for the daughters of masons at UT. The Littlefield family had donated funds for a dormitory for first-year female students, built at the corner of Twenty-Sixth (now Dean Keeton) and Whitis, and it was the northwestern anchor for the women’s zone. To the southeast of campus, Cret’s plan also used the existing Texas Memorial Stadium, along with new parking, men’s housing, athletic fields, and open space, as a buffer between East Austin and campus.
Figure 18. Paul Cret campus plan perspective. Paul Cret, a leading Philadelphia architect, created a Beaux-Arts master plan for the University of Texas campus. Flush with revenue from leases on the oil lands, the university commissioned Cret to design more than a dozen buildings between 1930 and 1945. In this era, the university fulfilled its ambition to become a “university of the first class.” University of Texas Buildings Collection, Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin, Paul Philippe Cret Collection, Project # 241.
Figure 19. An overhead view of Cret’s design. University of Texas Buildings Collection, Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin, Paul Philippe Cret Collection, Project # 241.
Cret’s plan followed leading planning practice. The top guide on college design, Charles Klauder’s College Architecture in America, indicated, “Girls especially like to carry on all the activities of home life under their own roof.” Klauder recommended closed, “homelike” dormitories with as many amenities as possible provided on the premises. This would preempt “the inconvenience, loss of time and exposure of making an outdoor journey” for women.66 Thus, the design called for dormitory groups with house mothers and deans of women supervising them. Students also lived in nearby female rooming houses in respectable neighborhoods like West Austin. Claudia Taylor, the future Lady Bird Johnson, while an undergraduate in the 1920s and 1930s, lived in a women’s rooming house on West 21st Street near the western edge of campus.67 Formerly the home of a prominent family in one of the more desirable neighborhoods in nineteenth-century Austin, the building was inspected by university administrators to “enforce certain standards relative to sanitation, health and social environments.”68
These designs and policies enabled the college to regulate the behavior of its female students and had the progressive effect of making parents and administrators comfortable permitting women to seek higher education. Predominating mores often precluded women from pursuing degrees at all. At the end of the nineteenth century, women’s attendance at American institutions of higher education was rare, radical, and highly constrained.69 Bureaucratic controls such as deans of women, housing inspections, and house mothers, as at Ball Teachers College in Indiana, maintained campus discipline and standards for chaste and nurturing environments, encouraging conservative communities to send their daughters to university. Cret even recommended the university build a wall or fence around the women’s dormitory group, which would mimic Ivy League institutions.70 UT did not build the wall, but the administration recognized that growth in higher education could exacerbate social tensions and sought designers who brought physical solutions to these problems.
A New Deal for Austin
The national economic crisis raised the stakes for UT expansion. Across the country, the contagion of the economic crisis had spread from finance to higher education. College and university enrollment declined nationwide nearly 10 percent from 1931 to 1933, back to its 1925 level.71 That enrollment drop seemed even more dramatic since it followed a decade of continual growth. Admissions officials across the country flipped from seeing rising numbers of more than 50,000 new students per year in the late 1920s to confronting drops of about 50,000 students per year in the early 1930s.
The construction industry had collapsed and found no help on college campuses. Nationally, construction spending dropped from $11 billion in 1928 to $3 billion in 1933. Employment fell from 2.9 million in the summer of 1929 to 1 million in 1933, and, according to one assessment, nearly three-quarters of the construction workforce was out of a job.72 At the end of the Roosevelt administration’s first hundred days, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, more popularly known as the Public Works Administration, or PWA. It stepped into the breach with grants and loans to public institutions, putting architects, engineers, surveyors, and construction workers back to work.73
Franklin Roosevelt laid out his approach for spending billions of dollars for public works in his first inaugural address. He proposed “to put people to work … but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources,” balancing and developing rural and urban markets for agricultural and industrial production and consumption.74 The university construction subsidies of the PWA not only put unemployed architects and building contractors to work; it also helped expand institutions that were becoming central to the future of American intellectual, scientific, and economic development.75 Roosevelt trumpeted the federal investments in higher education, saying in 1936, “I am proud to be the head of a Government … that has sought and is seeking to make a substantial contribution to the cause of education, even in a period of economic distress.” He noted the central role of “bricks and mortar and labor and loans.”76
New Deal funding for higher education helped achieve two key goals: reorganization of the nation’s political economy and development of new means to achieve federal ends. PWA funds for universities and National Youth Administration jobs for students were investments in middle-class institutions and in the future of new white-collar workers. These college students were business people and industrial engineers in the making, budding members of the medical and legal professions, and workers who would staff the administrations and bureaucracies of public and private institutions, using the skills and ideas learned in their college days. The New Deal helped keep students in college courses during the Depression, but it also made more and bigger classrooms to hold them, helping expand the capacity of higher education in the 1930s by approximately one-third.77
At the same time, New Dealers worked through nonfederal channels as much as possible to provide this aid. The PWA supported private enterprise with grants for hiring workers and firms rather than employing laborers directly.
