reorganizing the use of American resources, it was recruiting a wide array of institutions to more directly and intensely create, exploit, and provide these resources, from education to housing to infrastructure to financial instruments. Colleges and universities came to constitute a “parastate,” an intermediate means through which the federal government could mold students into citizens and provide them services, while remaining at arm’s length.78 The New Deal became less visible, and, while federal aid became more important to higher education, this support was often masked and not recognized as such. These two features, the investment in capacity and the use of nonfederal means, combined to lay the foundation for a new economy after World War II, led by an increasingly educated workforce that was, ironically, less committed to the pillars of New Deal liberalism, including collective bargaining in the industrial sector, as time went on.
The spatial nature of these investments could boost or burden local communities as the federal government worked with local partners and channeled aid to a chosen set of institutions. Congress created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934 to help stabilize and expand housing markets across the country. The agency wrote a manual for mortgage underwriters in order to standardize procedures for receiving a federal mortgage guarantee. The FHA favored stable, white, middle-class neighborhoods for committing its funds and incentives. In the manual, FHA experts specifically invoked the beneficial effects of colleges, which worked to protect and buffer desirable areas. The manual noted that “a college campus often protects locations in its vicinity” and compared it to other protective measures and natural features that would “prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences … includ[ing] the infiltration of business and industrial uses, lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.”79 Through the FHA, the Roosevelt administration made this protective feature of higher education an operational feature of its housing policy. Investments in universities like the University of Texas were acknowledged to increase urban segregation by protect neighboring white homeowners. Each new building at UT advanced the cause of segregation in higher education and in Austin.
Federal funds and oil revenue allowed the university to become the “university of the first class” the Texas constitution had promised. Between 1930 and 1940, UT built fourteen structures designed by Paul Cret. Oil royalties were deposited in the Permanent University Fund and could be dispersed from the Available University Fund. In 1929, the latter fund held $800,000 for construction and would accrue millions of dollars a year by the end of the 1930s.80 The PWA required local matching contributions for most projects, and UT could easily make these contributions.81 The PWA provided grants and loans for seven UT buildings, including the signature Main Library building, five dormitories, and a laboratory building. PWA aid totaled more than $2.7 million, making the University of Texas one of the largest recipients of building aid in the country. The Main Library and administration tower was the second-largest allotment for a single building in the country.82 The University of Texas tower reached twenty-eight stories and 307 feet in height, nearly the equal of Austin’s state capitol building (Figure 20).83 The ultimate consequence of federal aid to higher education in this era was to create more capacity at colleges and universities like the University of Texas. PWA and WPA funds made it easier and more democratic to pursue higher education—largely for whites—and provided investment in new research endeavors and professional schools.
Figure 20. Library Building Tower. The Library Tower and Main Building at the University of Texas was financed with a combination of oil revenue and New Deal aid. It was the second largest Public Works Administration grant for a university building in the country, with Hunter College in Manhattan receiving the largest. Walter Barnes Studio, Prints and Photographs Collection, di_04018, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
The New Deal helped the University of Texas and other institutions like it indirectly as well, by boosting Lyndon Baines Johnson’s career. Perhaps more than any other Austinite, Johnson recognized how the Roosevelt administration could help the city bring about a new metropolitan order. He built his congressional career on his ability to work Washington connections and bring federal resources to the Texas Tenth District, especially as part of an urban development agenda for Austin. Johnson brought federal slum clearance funds to East Austin, plowed into three segregated public housing projects. Rosewood Court was built for black residents, Chalmers Court was for white residents, and Santa Rita was for Latino residents. Johnson arranged for loans and grants to the Lower Colorado River Authority for dam construction, electrification, and flood control, putting people to work and bringing electricity to the hill country outside Austin. The congressman also coordinated the development and exchange of military assets, as with the land that became Bergstrom Air Force Base and then Bergstrom International Airport.
For politicians like Johnson, investments in higher education were one part of an urban development strategy. The land and plans and brick and mortar that went into construction had the same kind of employment impact on a college campus as they would in building a public housing complex. Austin leaders arrayed those investments within the city, whether public housing or college dormitories, to harden the spatial and social system of racial segregation. Thus, the city’s African Americans might benefit from federal slum clearance, but white college students at segregated universities like Texas received the education subsidies of relief jobs and affordable dormitories that would allow them to become middle-class professionals. Slum clearance projects like Rosewood Court continued the system of geographic segregation; so even when Austin’s black population gained from the New Deal, those gains were bounded in ways that continued to limit their prospects.
Changes in World War II
Roosevelt’s reform impetus took a different turn as the administration mobilized to prepare for war in Europe. “Dr. New Deal” became “Dr. Win-the-War,” in Roosevelt’s phrase, as mobilization for World War II brought the military to campus.84 The federal government had grown in unprecedented ways in the course of the New Deal, but the Roosevelt administration pivoted from economic recovery to military mobilization. These often haphazard experiments in statecraft nonetheless evolved during the war as the federal government increased its control over society. They changed the nature of the federal government and its relationship to the American people through rationing, taxation, and new levels of spending, to name just a few areas. The American military’s struggle to scale up training of personnel after the bombing of Pearl Harbor led to the creation of numerous education programs in partnership with colleges and universities. Higher education had struggled to rebound from diminished enrollment during the Depression and faced a loss of students again. Colleges sought ways both to support the war effort and to keep their enrollments up. President Roosevelt requested that the secretaries of war and of the navy “have an immediate study made as to the highest utilization of the American colleges,” and the U.S. Navy stood out for creating several wartime programs to train its officers, including the V programs involving thousands of students.85
Research funding brought the war into the campus laboratory, a war of the minds waged on campuses against the Axis powers. In Washington, Roosevelt advisor Vannevar Bush counseled the president on the creation of the National Defense Research Committee and its successor, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, to “correlate and support scientific research on the mechanisms and devices of warfare.”86 The varied types of military research amounted to a war of the minds waged on college campuses against the Axis powers. The Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb is the most prominent in public memory, but research projects led to military applications large and small and built up the American war machine. At UT, the physics department established the War Research Laboratory in 1942 to coordinate contracts with the Office of Scientific Research and Development and home to projects that calculated ordinance trajectories and improved gunsights for B-29 bombers.87 Charles Boner,
