Bunch recognized the political risk he faced in Grafton and moved to outflank his challenger. Pledging to capture taxes from the building going on outside Muncie’s northwestern boundaries, Bunch initiated the annexation of the wealthier areas of the city.40 In doing so, the mayor reaffirmed his populist credentials, declaring that he would not tolerate geographic inequality in metropolitan tax policy. Residents in working-class parts of the city picked up on his rhetoric against northwestern Muncie free riders and returned Bunch to lead the city for another term. After the election, the mayor followed through on annexation for the northwestern suburbs, and the city completed the process in 1919, along with Whitely, the working-class African American neighborhood to the city’s northeast. This helped balance the more affluent voters of Normal City and Riverside.41
This political debate reflected an increasingly segregated city, separated by class, race, and geography. The new educational institution played a significant part in this geographic transformation. The business class, including Kitselman and the Balls, began to cluster around the college and create a leisure class with activities such as foxhunts and horse rides, with the Ball family at its center (Figure 4).42 Few working-class families from south of the tracks could enter this social milieu or send their children to college in the hopes that they might enter that societal stratum or its equivalent. Industry and Whitely contained virtually all of the city’s African American population. Industry was nestled near the Ball Brothers’ manufacturing complex south of downtown and included the city’s red-light district, known as “young Chicago.”43 Whitely, at the city’s northeastern quadrant, had been planned as a white working-class suburb but became a black community when white buyers failed to materialize. African Americans moved north in the Great Migration and were willing customers for Muncie housing in Whitely.44 As in many northern industrial cities, black workers and residents found themselves barred from living in many Muncie neighborhoods and from working jobs across the labor spectrum. Black men toiled in unskilled labor and factory work while black women served as domestic help in white homes. Institutions like the Muncie city directory upheld the color line, noting African American residents with an asterisk, lest an unsuspecting white shopper patronize a black business by accident.45
Figure 4. Muncie fox hunt. The wealthy Ball family anchored high society in Muncie, organizing social events including fox hunts, as depicted in a 1937 Margaret Bourke-White photo essay on Muncie for Life. Margaret Bourke-White/Getty Images. Image from Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Box 65, Folder 514, “Fox Hunt.”
The Normal School
The term “normal school,” common parlance at the time for a school that trained teachers, came from the ecole normale system that instituted teaching standards in France. As EINU and as ISNS, the Muncie schools offered teacher training in a two-year program. They reflected a precarious balance between civic enterprise and the conservative, normative impetus of the project of educating teachers.46 The state renamed the school Ball Teachers College (BTC) in 1922 in recognition of the family’s commitment and the school’s growing curriculum. At older and larger institutions than BTC, small groups of students from a wide variety of backgrounds kept up an intellectual and political churn. At BTC, though, the career-oriented student body largely came from the region and was disengaged from student governance and electoral politics, which slowed development of campus life in the 1910s and 1920s.47 A few years later, Ralph Noyer, the BTC dean, considered a rash of smoking on campus and speculated it came from student dissatisfaction with “the boredom of existence here.”48
The college operated in the colorful context of a growing industrial city with numerous opportunities for indulging in worldly pleasures and vices. Throughout the 1920s, the large majority of students resided off-campus in Muncie, embedded in the urban realm of what was then a moderately sized, largely walkable city.49 In the early years of the normal school, Doc Bunch suffered political storms for allowing some two hundred brothels and speakeasies to operate unfettered in Muncie.50 However, the new urban pattern emerging in Muncie shaped the geography of vice. Normal City had been dry before its annexation, and Prohibition began shortly after its addition to the city, precluding the development of a pub culture near campus. Muncie’s saloons were largely located in the center of downtown or in the working-class sections like Industry near the rail lines: even if they wanted to, students would have found it hard to get a drink before Prohibition in the new neighborhoods and commercial districts of Muncie.51
Higher education operated in loco parentis—“in place of the parent”—in part to protect students from these urban vices. By the 1920s, women’s higher education had been stripped of its nineteenth-century radicalism, and women had been incorporated into the conservative, consumerist realm of collegiate life, in part by bringing women’s housing on campus.52 Women’s dormitories predominated at colleges across the country, and administrators worked to re-create a domestic sphere on campus.53 This was so important to the original Muncie normal school that the first building after teaching and office space at EINU was a women’s dormitory.54 Oversight of women’s dormitories was more extensive and protective than men’s off-campus housing. Women had curfews, for example, requiring them to be back at set times in the evening, where men did not.
Grace DeHority, the dean of women, enforced these restrictions. Deans of women made it possible for women to go to college and join the workforce by maintaining traditional social structures to calm conservative parents and provide a familiar environment. DeHority was a ruralite who made it off the farm because of her education and devoted her life to providing education to others. She came to Muncie in 1922 after she earned a bachelor’s degree at ISNS in Terre Haute and taught junior high in her hometown. In addition to inspecting boardinghouses, DeHority expelled students for offenses from drinking alcohol to loafing. In one incident, the dean learned a student had “rather intimate connections” with a married man. She wrote the girl’s parents to let them know and asked the student to leave school to “prove an unforgettable lesson.”55 DeHority expelled a man but not his girlfriend, both BTC students, when they stayed overnight together in Muncie, causing the woman to miss her curfew. She graduated; he did not.56
The African American experience at BTC mimicked that within Muncie—free from the constraints of Jim Crow but still segregated by state action. The first black student to graduate from BTC, Jesse Nixon, earned her degree in 1925. But African Americans were severely underrepresented at BTC, and the college relegated its black students to the margins of campus life.57 Despite African Americans making up about 6 percent of the Muncie population in 1930, there were only a handful of black students at the college. They were not allowed in the college dormitories, fraternities, or sororities, and most lived in boardinghouses on the east side of the city. They also were shut out of the school’s student social organizations, which were some of the key platforms for economic mobility in higher education.58
Campus Planning
Muncie industrial workers, black and white, read the world around them and realized that education was key to social and economic advancement—a path to the other side of the tracks dividing Muncie into north and south. Nationally, one out of twenty college-age adults attended college by 1920, more than double the rate from the beginning of the century.59 The Muncie working class, however, had difficulty paying for advanced schooling and suffered from low educational expectations.60 A pair of sociologists, Robert and Helen Lynd, studied Muncie in the early 1920s and published a best-selling book on the city called Middletown: A Study in American Culture. According to the Lynds, working-class families believed higher education provided a means of escaping
