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Оглавление1 The Gravity of Capital
On a Friday morning in September 1917, George Ball, manufacturer of the popular Ball glass jars, picked up the telephone to talk to his attorney. He approved his lawyer’s bid on the property of a failed private teaching school at auction. Three bids trickled in over the morning at the courthouse: $35,000 … $35,100 … and $36,000. Only one bid came with the guarantee of a cash payment for half the amount that day—Carl Robe White’s, offered on behalf of Ball. When the noon bidding deadline passed, the judge reaffirmed his condition and accepted George Ball’s $35,100 offer for the property.1 Later at lunch, Ball offhandedly remarked to his brothers in the family business, “[I] just bought a college.”2 The sale began the process that would establish the foundation of a major Midwestern university and shift the ground beneath the economy of Muncie, Indiana.
A few months later, state representative Charles McGonagle approached one of George Ball’s brothers at a Rotary Club meeting. He offered to broker a donation of the college campus between the Ball family and the Indiana state government. The Balls agreed; the state created a new public institution on the site; and by June 1918, eight months after the auction, the Muncie campus of the Indiana State Normal School held its first classes.3
The Balls did not set out to remake Muncie, but the founding of the Normal School helped bring about powerful and wide-ranging shifts in the patterns of urban growth and economic development. Mass industrialization had formed the bedrock of the city’s economy and culture. Having achieved industrial wealth, Muncie business and education leaders used the new school and its surrounding developments to set the city on a new path of century-long urban transformation. The creation of a postindustrial economic and physical landscape in Muncie was an attempt to boost the city to a leadership position in eastern Indiana, surpassing its local rivals with better education, greater cultural experiences, better health, and better jobs.
The founding of the Muncie branch of the Indiana State Normal School rendered spatial the logic of twentieth-century economic transformation. Investments in the college established a pattern of greenfield development and urban reorganization that helped redirect economic, residential, and civic investment from around the city to Muncie’s northwestern quadrant. The Ball family created a new educational and health care institution adjoining it, the Ball Memorial Hospital, while Muncie’s professional class slowly moved from their homes in the East End neighborhood to exclusive suburban subdivisions near the college’s campus. With these changes under way, the city’s political and economic leaders created civic institutions such as a laboratory school, an art museum, and public sculpture destined for northwestern Muncie. The city had been transformed into a consumer pleasure center. The college became a vehicle enabling a loose coalition of city elites to create a new urban vision characterized by a landscape of cultural production and affluent consumption. Higher education segregated the economic future of the city, separating the business class from the working class, whites from blacks, and the knowledge economy from the industrial economy.
Urban boosters and education leaders worked together in Muncie in a way we have rarely seen in the Progressive Era.4 Yet George Ball’s purchase of the college married the Progressive desire for urban order with the ambition for knowledge-based social improvement, setting off a series of spatial, technological, economic, and social changes that altered the logic of metropolitan life. This may not have been the most dramatic example of the founding of a college through a public-private partnership, but investments by the Ball family and other Muncie leaders were nonetheless emblematic of a larger pattern of educational growth, philanthropy, and urban boosterism across the country. Early in the century, Tempe, Arizona; Los Angeles; and San Jose, California, were all home to “normal schools”—two-year teacher’s colleges. Those three became the institutions of Arizona State University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and San Jose State University, and are now major economic forces in their regions.5 The founding and expansion of institutions like Ball State during the Progressive Era were the first steps in a new spatial political economy in the twentieth century that changed the face of urban America.
A Company Town
A natural gas strike in the 1880s fueled industrialization in Muncie. Entrepreneurs and immigrant laborers flocked to take advantage of the abundant natural resource that helped power the industrial transformation of the American economy in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Muncie’s population quadrupled from 5,200 in 1880 to 20,900 in 1900.6 Before the turn of the century, business interests were diverse and relatively small scale. One could find as many coopers and bootmakers working by hand on Muncie’s Main Street as heavy manufacturers like carriage makers and castings companies, but the gas boom changed that.7
Natural gas brought Muncie its most successful industrial concern. Two brothers, Frank and Edmund Ball, had founded Ball Brothers Manufacturing Company in Buffalo, New York. They made glass jars that rural and small-town families used to preserve fruits and vegetables throughout the winter. When their Buffalo factory burned down in 1886, the brothers searched for a new location where the business would be less costly to run. Indiana presented such an opportunity. Gas for their glassblowing furnaces was plentiful and cheap. Muncie’s business leaders offered the Ball Company free gas for five years and free land if the brothers moved their business west. The company, now under the management of all five brothers, struck a deal and set out for Indiana.8
The Balls manufactured lids and seals along with their jars. The matching components were more reliable than nearly any other product on the market. By the turn of the century, the company was part of a growing move in Muncie toward heavy industry and larger firms serving larger markets. Ball Brothers produced more than a third of the nation’s canning jars, and the brothers were among the richest men in the state.9 The brothers were renowned in the company’s early years for peeling down to shirtsleeves, especially Frank Ball, and taking their turns at machines on the shop floor. Their unassuming manner won them admiration among workers, and the company came to be identified with the city as both grew in tandem. The Ball factories dominated Muncie’s south side and poured smoke into the sky from the corner of 9th and Macedonia Streets (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Ball Brothers factory. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ball Brothers glass jar company had become one of the top employers in Muncie and made the brothers among the richest men in the state. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
In this era, Muncie’s development followed the enduring pattern of the walking city.10 It was a replicable grid of streets, and only a few dozen blocks were accessible from the center of the city—those that could be reached on foot, with a horse-drawn vehicle, or those along the two main railroad lines connecting Muncie to the rest of the state and region. The Fort Wayne, Muncie, and Cincinnati Railroad ran north and south through Muncie with a jog in the middle of town. The Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis (CCC&I) rail line slashed from the northeast to the southwest across the city. Development clustered between the CCC&I lines and the White River to the north, although a few developments followed along the railroads and trailed the north–south line beyond the southern edge of town.
The mass industrialization of Muncie led to a population boom, growing levels of wealth and leisure, and ambition on the part of city boosters to rank as a leading Indiana city. Industrial development over the thirty-year period following the gas strike grew south of the city’s rail lines. Working-class housing on the city’s new south side accompanied this growth. It doubled the geographical size of Muncie in the first decade of the century, matching the growing population, which roughly doubled in the same period.
The business class leading the new manufacturing companies established their homes in the East End, a neighborhood just outside the central business district. This residential area offered easy access to Muncie’s downtown, where residents could visit the city’s leading banks, newspapers, and civic institutions, or could board trains at the station to take them to Indianapolis or Chicago.11 The East End also kept business leaders near the city’s south side, where they could supervise the operations of their factories. Journalist Emily Kimbrough was born in 1899 and grew up on East Washington Street in Muncie’s elite section. At midcentury she wrote for the New Yorker and coauthored a best-selling memoir, but as a child she was part of a wealthy industrial family. Her book about her childhood recounts the appearance of automobiles in the city shortly after 1900 and her joyride around town in the city’s first car. The trip included the rural outskirts of the city but never went as far south as Industry, the city’s main working-class neighborhood.12 Much of that farmland surrounding Muncie would be built up in the next few decades, not least owing to the success of companies like the Indiana Bridge Company, run by Kimbrough’s father. By Indiana standards, the city was becoming an industrial juggernaut.
Philanthropic Interest in Education
In investing in the Normal School, the Ball brothers were following a trend established by the country’s leading industrialists and philanthropists. Business leaders and Progressive Era reformers promoted education amid industrial growth, investing some of their surplus capital for the broader social good and working to mitigate class strife in labor relations. Higher education, especially, built upon new natural and social scientific knowledge and incorporated it into emerging fields of public and business administration. Andrew Carnegie created the Carnegie Technical Schools in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University) to provide immigrants and working-class residents with engineering and mechanical training. John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to help found the University of Chicago. Leland Stanford of the Southern Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads commemorated his late son by founding the Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto, California. Carnegie made a broader appeal to his wealthy counterparts on behalf of higher education in his essays “The Gospel of Wealth” and “The Best Fields for Philanthropy.” In these widely read pieces, he suggested that the founding of a university stands “apart by itself” as the highest end of a lifetime of work and wealth accumulation.13
Real-estate profits were part and parcel to the development of educational opportunity, even from the founding of many institutions. Retail magnate Marshall Field joined John D. Rockefeller in donating to the University of Chicago, giving ten acres of Hyde Park land to it in 1890. He sold the university additional land a year later and then profited by selling more land holdings to the faculty, staff, and others attracted to living near a well-endowed institution on a picturesque campus.14 Real-estate entrepreneurs Harold and Edwin Janss made a similar calculus in Los Angeles in 1924, selling the University of California hundreds of acres at bargain prices, thereby increasing the value of their nearby residential real-estate developments. The University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the University of California’s original Berkeley campus all benefited from similar donations.15
The Ball brothers, in a sense, made good on an older real-estate gambit that brought higher education to Muncie. A group of local businessmen calling themselves the Eastern Indiana Normal University Association (EINUA) had optioned a tract of agricultural land beyond the northwestern borders of Muncie in 1898. The EINUA included, among others, George McCulloch, the city’s leading transportation entrepreneur, and Frank Haimbaugh, publisher of the Muncie Herald. The growth coalition subdivided the land into three hundred lots and platted a development they called Normal City.16 At the edge of this land, they founded the normal school to train young men and women to be teachers in rural schools. Their plan called for the sale of the residential lots to pay for development of the school’s campus, based on an expected student body of 250. The EINUA projected the school to bring $75,000 of student and institutional spending to Muncie annually, a meaningful spur to the city’s economy.17 The Muncie Citizen’s Street Railway Company, led by McCulloch, extended a streetcar line out to the new school, connecting Normal City to Muncie’s downtown.18 The Eastern Indiana Normal University was thus a mechanism for both rural and urban development. By training teachers to educate children in rural districts, the school would provide for the enrichment of rural life. By expanding the city’s reach to outlying agricultural lands and increasing economic activity, the school would help the city grow, provide jobs, and improve human welfare.
The association created EINU as a for-profit enterprise. This proved an unorthodox choice that presaged nearly twenty years of fiscal tumult. For-profit institutions were part of the broad range of higher-education opportunities in the era, but they largely did not share the social responsibility and ambitions of nonprofit private and public colleges.19 EINU began to offer classes in 1899 in an impressive neoclassical building (Figure 3). The handsome brick structure could not guarantee its success, however. The school paired suburban development with educational growth, but the institution foundered, lacking students and prestige. The institution failed and was resurrected three times in the next eighteen years. In one unsuccessful scheme to reorganize the institution, representatives of the EINUA tried to convince leaders of nearby Taylor University to relocate to Muncie.20 Taylor administrators demurred, and after its third bankruptcy, the Muncie school could find no new backers.21
Figure 3. Eastern Indiana Normal University Administration Building. A real-estate scheme financed the founding of Eastern Indiana Normal University, including construction of its administration building. The building still serves as the administration headquarters for Ball State University. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
After the institution failed for the last time in 1917, an Indiana court ordered liquidation to repay the school’s creditors. The assets were worth more than $400,000 and included the administration building, a wood-frame dormitory for women, and about seventy acres of land. The creditors sought to recoup their investment with a plan to break up the properties and sell the land as individual parcels to the highest bidders.22
By that point, hundreds of residents lived in the suburban settlements of Normal City and Riverside. Alva Kitselman, the city’s second leading industrialist, was the most prominent resident of the area. He moved from a house near downtown and built a twenty-six-acre estate the size of a city block in 1915, just three blocks from the east edge of the campus. Around his estate, an array of industrial and white-collar workers, from foremen to physicians to carpenters to salesmen, lived scattered throughout Normal City, but there was plenty of room for additional growth.23
The Ball Family Takes Over
The Ball brothers had created a neighborhood of architect-designed homes on the White River less than a mile east of the college, starting in the 1890s.24 Years before, Lucina, one of two sisters to the five Ball brothers, had written them extensive advice about building homes. “It is risky building a good house in any place that may be made undesirable by some one putting up a poor class of buildings,” she wrote. “Can’t you get up a ‘syndicate’ to buy a whole square and build it all equally good, and so make your own surroundings. Houses moderately expensive, with neighborhoods fine and insured, would be a good thing.”25 Her counsel drew on models of classic suburban development schemes across the country and in Europe.26
The Balls faced the prospect of a Wild West of boom and bust and scattershot building in their neighborhood. Lucina’s worry about a “poor class of buildings” nearby was an increasing possibility. The auction would open the normal school’s land to individual development, lot by lot, if the creditors won and sold the land to clear their debts. Further, the municipality and plan commission would not be able to restrain new development because the area was unincorporated and lay outside the boundaries of the city of Muncie. Frank Ball set his lawyer, Carl Robe White, to acquiring the land, and on the day of the auction, George Ball took the phone call closing the deal.27 However, the slighted creditors sued the Balls to recoup their investments and promised to hold up any development plans for years through lengthy litigation.28
Charles McGonagle saw a way out of the mess. McGonagle was a longtime Muncie politician and chair of the state’s Ways and Means Committee, powerful enough to move policy through the legislature and enough of a Muncie booster to promote the city as an arm of government. In 1917 he led passage of a law empowering the state to accept land donations on behalf of colleges and universities.29 McGonagle broached the subject to George Ball at a Muncie Rotary meeting in early 1918. The Muncie Rotary Club comprised the civic and business leadership of the community. George and Frank C. Ball were members and Frank’s sons, Edmund A. and Frank E. Ball, would later become members.30 McGonagle suggested that the governor and state legislature would be willing to accept a donation of the campus property and operate a branch campus of the Indiana State Normal School (ISNS, now Indiana State University) based in Terre Haute. The representative contacted Governor James Goodrich and found him receptive to the idea of state-sponsored higher education in east central Indiana.31 Goodrich and George Ball were both rising figures in the Republican Party; Ball would become a member of the Republican National Committee, while Goodrich would serve in the administrations of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.32 Establishment of a new public institution would serve the area’s business and political interests, while strengthening the politicians’ individual influence in their home region and their broader goal of collaboration between private enterprise and the state. Indeed, when state education administrators arrived in Muncie to inspect the property, the Muncie Commercial Club led a crowd of two hundred strong to celebrate the state officials.33
The Ball donation to the state was especially important to the family’s interests because state ownership relieved the family of liabilities that came along with the school. Several creditors were irate about debts redeemed at less than ten cents on the dollar. They brought lawsuits to mitigate their losses, but under the agreement with the state, any lawsuits would have to be directed at, and defended by, the state of Indiana.34 The ISNS board of trustees ratified the governor’s bargain on the condition that Frank Ball serve as a trustee for the school. Ball agreed and sealed the political deal.
Muncie Politics
Rollin “Doc” Bunch, Muncie’s mayor, was no fool. The leader of the city’s Democratic machine realized he had to act when the development of desirable northwestern Muncie became an issue in his 1917 campaign for reelection. Normal City and Riverside were next to the Normal School, just outside the urban boundaries of Muncie. These neighborhoods escaped municipal taxation but contracted with the city for services such as water and sewer. In 1909 Muncie had annexed much of the industrial south side into the city. Thus, working-class homeowners in Industry paid more in property taxes than residents in the more expensive subdivision of Normal City.35 Bunch benefited electorally from the annexation of Democratic south-side industrial workers. By keeping the Republican-voting, professional-class suburbanites out of the city’s electorate, the mayor had consolidated political power in the midst of metropolitan growth.
The 1917 mayoral campaign was a classic contest pitting a progressive Republican challenger against a Democratic machine politician. Charles Grafton, the Republican, made taxation and metropolitan equity one of the centerpieces of his run. Bunch drew support from the northeastern and southeastern areas of the city populated by working-class residents, both black and white. He also presided over a city payroll tens of thousands of dollars larger than any of his predecessors.36 Grafton was an officer of a clay-pot manufacturer and lived in the city’s East End. He attacked Bunch from different directions. He ran on a populist line in order to drive a wedge between the machine mayor and his working-class constituents. Grafton pledged that he would not allow the new educated and professional class of the northwestern suburbs to enjoy Muncie’s urban amenities without contributing their fair share of taxes.37 Then his campaign invoked the classic Progressive Era bogeyman of a saloonkeeper politician. Billy Finan was an Irish barkeeper who loomed large in the mind of Muncie Republicans. The longtime politician was a cog in the Indiana Democratic machine who had worked his way up to serving as a state nominating delegate, a position he held for several decades in the first half of the century.38 A full-page newspaper advertisement in the city’s Republican-leaning Star asked about annexation: “Why didn’t Dr. Bunch and his council use this power? Because the residents of these suburbs were overwhelmingly ‘dry’ and Billy Finan and the crowd back of Dr. Bunch would sooner cut off their right hands than allow these people a vote on the ‘wet’ or ‘dry’ issue.”39
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 lives of manual labor. “A boy without an education today just ain’t anywhere!” lamented one Muncie man, but this realization alone could not get a man or woman through college.61 The normal school had served obliquely as an instrument for the enrichment and protection of the business elites in the northwestern part of the city—the anchor to a real-estate endeavor—and directly as a means of class mobility and professional training unevenly shared by the business-class and working-class segments of the population living in their neighborhoods around the city.
BTC was growing, and an expanding institution needed a campus plan. The student body grew more than 450 percent over its first six years as a public institution, from 155 during the 1918–1919 school year to 833 in the fall of 1924.62 College enrollment boomed nationwide, and annual college enrollments rose about 10 percent a year; but BTC grew faster than its counterparts elsewhere.63 When the institution became Ball Teachers College in 1922, it began offering four-year degrees.64 The state of Indiana approved new education programs, which brought more faculty, staff, and students to the campus.
Frank C. Ball used philanthropy and political clout to help the college in its new growth phase. In 1921 Muncie’s state legislators appropriated funds for a new science building that would dramatically increase the college’s instructional space. Governor Warren McCray, successor to James Goodrich, questioned the necessity of such an expense and worked to have it removed from the budget. Frank Ball caught wind of the proposed cuts and made a personal visit to Indianapolis to lobby the governor. The manufacturer won out as the governor shifted his position on the construction funds and signed on to state appropriations to the college for 1923.65 Ball was not to be trifled with.
There had been a single neoclassical building and wood-frame dormitory on the campus when the Balls bought it. It could not contain the college’s growing agenda. The institution turned to city planning, the progressive marriage of urban reform, scientific expertise, and the arts, to help provide for and manage the growth of the college. At the turn of the century, this urban reform movement joined with the new architectural profession to create the field of city planning, developing urban space and employing civic symbols to promote the uplift of the American metropolis in concert with bourgeois elites.66 Cuno Kibele was Muncie’s leading architect and a member of the civic leadership. He designed commercial buildings downtown such as the Wysor Building and the Commercial Club block; residential buildings throughout the city, including additions to and redesigns of the Ball homes at Minnetrista; and industrial plants, including expansion of the Ball Brothers manufacturing plant.67 Kibele was brought aboard to impose order on the campus. The college had averted the chaos that could have erupted around the bankrupt normal school, and Kibele’s hire ensured the grounds and buildings would have the classic Vitruvian features of firmness, commodity, and delight (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Ball Gymnasium. The Balls’ donation of several hundred thousand dollars helped give the university its first major athletics building. Muncie architect Cuno Kibele designed the gymnasium and continued his signature style that ran through many Ball-financed projects. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
Conservative forms molded BTC campus planning. Kibele provided a plan of development in 1921 featuring a partially enclosed lawn on a north–south axis, surrounded by a symmetrical quadrangle of buildings. The influence of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris dominated American architecture—training that emphasized grand, monumental designs and adaptations of classical and Renaissance architectural and planning principles.68 A generation of Beaux-Arts architects had employed this spatial arrangement in cities and on college campuses. They drew on the Columbian Exposition of 1893 that crystallized and popularized Beaux-Arts planning and design in the United States.69
BTC leaders traveled to Chicago for inspiration. The master planning committee included Frank Ball, administrators W. W. Parsons and Linnaeus Hines, and a pair of other trustees. They visited Northwestern University in Evanston, just north of the city, and the University of Chicago on the South Side, where the Columbian Exposition had been held. The committee was impressed with Chicago and loosely adopted that city’s university as their campus model. The institution was a national leader in research and civic engagement. Kibele’s designs had established an architectural association between the college and the city’s leading manufacturers and businessmen. Ball State leaders also emulated the works of the country’s leading philanthropists, architects, and education institutions, making visible and tactile the alliance among business, civic, and education leaders.
Institutional Growth
After a decade as a public institution, BTC had solidified its position as a branch campus of ISNS, but Muncie boosters and politicos were determined it would be more than that. Lemuel Pittenger was a lawmaker and educator who held a long affiliation with the Ball family, playing an important legislative role in the development of the BTC campus. Pittenger followed Charles McGonagle’s legacy when he became the Muncie state representative in the early 1920s and served as chair of the Ways and Means Committee for the Indiana State House, handling the state budget in the lower chamber. He helped BTC achieve independence from ISNS by developing separate budget appropriations for the Muncie institution, effectively ending Terre Haute’s control over the junior campus.70 When the president of BTC died suddenly in 1927, students led a successful campaign to have Pittenger named his successor.71 With the Ball brothers’ blessing, Pittenger served as president for fifteen years, continuing as an ally to the family.72
By 1925, enrollment at the college had nearly reached a thousand students, only sixty of whom could live on campus in the lone, wood-framed Forest Hall for women.73 The Ball family addressed the problem, donating $300,000 for construction of a women’s dormitory in honor of their late sister.74 Lucina Hall was a Tudor Gothic brick-and-limestone structure designed by Indianapolis architect George Schreiber. Along with the administration building, the new dormitory served as the southern edge of the quadrangle. Housing over eighty students, it doubled the capacity of the college to house women students on campus. The measure, of course, expanded the reach of Grace DeHority and other college administrators to control the social lives of female students (Figure 6).75
Figure 6. Aerial view of the Ball Teachers College campus, ca. 1929. Several buildings begin to give form to the campus quadrangle. Aside from a handful of homes located north of the university, acres of open land extend into the distance. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
In the final phase of building in the 1920s, the college abandoned the formula of private capital and public operational expenses in favor of wholly public expenditures, creating a new laboratory school directed by the college and the Muncie school district. BTC administrators lobbied the state for appropriations for the school, which would provide progressive education for Muncie students from kindergarten through senior high school. It also gave future teachers opportunities for the practice teaching required in the college curriculum. BTC leaders arranged with Muncie school officials to close a nearby grade school and have the new Burris School serve the population of northwestern Muncie, beginning in 1929.76 The lab school, which drew on the ideas of education reformer John Dewey, was located on University Avenue, just across from Lucina Hall at the edge of BTC’s campus. The school soon earned a reputation as the city’s best.
College officials battled charges that Burris served only the wealthy business class. The new construction of the school, its excellent reputation, and the geographic district boundaries meant that professional-class families locating in northwestern Muncie could provide their children the city’s best education on the public dime, right in the neighborhood where their business colleagues lived.77 The school’s first principal noted the Burris School also aided a group of poor rural families living in “Pigeon Roost,” an undeveloped area beyond the college, and characterized the sons and daughters of Muncie’s professional class as “average” and “typical” students; and, moreover, all would benefit from his strict discipline.78
The Gravity of Capital
When Burris attracted upper-middle-class families to the district, they wanted homes and neighborhoods as good or better than the ones they had left. Many came from the East End, the desirable enclave near the city’s downtown that business elites had established before the turn of the century. The community was not so deeply rooted, however, that it could not be transplanted according to the Ball family’s designs. The Lynds commented on the shifting geography of real estate in their 1937 follow-up study of Muncie, Middletown in Transition, asserting that the Ball family had “moved the residential heart of the city.”79 Where the elite section had been on the city’s east side, later, “the aristocratic old East End, the fine residential section in the pre-motor period when it was an asset to live ‘close in’ and even in the early 1920s, runs a lame second to the two new [Ball] subdivisions in the West End, to which ambitious matrons of the city are removing their families.” The Lynds, who had been friendly with the Balls during their stay in Muncie, connected the growth of the new subdivisions to the family’s involvement with BTC and the college’s transformation “into a cluster of beautiful buildings” as well as “the new million-and-a-half-dollar hospital, an outright gift to the city by the [Ball] family.”80
Figure 7. E. A. Ball House, Westwood. A second-generation Ball family member developed two exclusive subdivisions at the edge of Ball Teachers College. His own home was among the finest and helped draw the Muncie business class to live in the northwestern area of the city rather than in the East End, which had been the traditional businessmen’s enclave. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
The two new West End subdivisions were the work of Edmund Arthur Ball, Frank Ball’s son. He bought a large tract of agricultural land north of the college campus in 1923.81 Ball and a partner, Charles V. Bender, platted out a residential subdivision called Westwood. Ball built his own home there, where he lived with his wife and two young daughters. The subdivision followed enduring principles of suburban exclusion. Restrictive covenants on the property deeds explicitly forbade ownership or residence by minorities except as domestic servants, reserving Westwood for “the pure white race.”82 They also governed nearly every aspect of home building in the subdivision in ways that raised barriers to all members of the working class, including a minimum lot size of 7,500 square feet; property setbacks of 7 feet from each lot line and farther from the front line; and required review of architectural plans for any proposed structures.83 Industrial workers would be hard pressed to buy the homes. Even apartment builders would be foiled (Figure 7).
The real-estate company drew upon the cachet of BTC in Westwood advertising. Education stood in as a class signifier, and the college’s investments in planning and design provided value to the surrounding area.84 Prospective buyers might consider college students unruly or politically charged and therefore undesirable neighbors. The college had social control over students in the dormitories, and the system of house inspections eliminated this threat from the local properties.85 Following his success with Westwood, Ball established another subdivision, Westwood Park, right next door in 1939, with the same exclusionary laws.86
Muncie had a race problem that was especially pronounced in the 1920s. The Ku Klux Klan experienced a resurgence after World War I that corresponded to a flood of international immigration and increasing mobility for African Americans. Klan politics drew on a mix of racism, xenophobia, right-wing populism, and working-class insecurity amid dramatic social and economic change. The Klan was particularly prominent in Indiana, menacing black families in the region and influencing Muncie politics.87 In one instance, white rioters assembled to intimidate a black Muncie mortician who was caring for the bodies of two lynching victims from nearby Marion. The city’s black population and a handful of police officers prevented violence at the mortuary, but the Klan maintained significant power in the city in the 1920s.88
Muncie’s Jewish population suffered at the same time. Affluent Jewish residents were shut out of home ownership in the city’s elite neighborhoods, and their children battled anti-Semitism in the schoolyard.89 Sherman Zeigler, a scrap dealer, grew up in Normal City and attended Burris, the campus laboratory school. As a child, he suffered harassment from Protestant children. In his teens, one of the city newspapers denied him a paper route “because they didn’t want any Jews working on their paper,” prompting Jewish retailers to withhold advertising in response. As an adult, restrictive covenants kept Zeigler out of a northwestern Muncie development immediately north of Westwood.90
Municipal zoning reinforced the privately created system of exclusion and institutionalized white supremacy on the landscape.91 Zoning emerged as a means of protecting property values from the urban consequences of mass industrialization. It arose along with the city planning profession in the 1920s. The 1926 Supreme Court decision Euclid v. Ambler affirmed the rights of municipal governments to limit industrial development by real estate companies and generally ratified zoning as a form of the police power of the state—in this case, as a means of protecting high-class residential areas from the chemical and noise pollution of industry.92 At the turn of the century, designers like Frederick Law Olmsted and his sons worked with cities to create rules that would support the bourgeois vision of suburban community design. Later, private real-estate investors such as J. C. Nichols in Kansas City and local entrepreneurs like Edmund A. Ball led the way, working hand in glove with municipal authorities to formalize such practices.93
Muncie’s newly formed City Plan Commission administered a master plan that had divided the city into land-use districts, separating industry from business from residential areas. The town’s code set its own minimum densities and lot sizes for some districts, reinforcing the intentions of the developers and serving as an economic barrier to keep minority and lower-middle-class aspirants from relocating to wealthy neighborhoods.94 The resulting segregation along racial, class, and ethnic lines translated to social segregation. Muncie was renowned for high participation in community clubs, recreational organizations, and religious congregations, but the spatial concentration by class and race in a handful of more exclusive clubs reduced possibilities for class mixing and community influence by the industrial working class.95 Higher education was becoming a means of social mobility, but the spatial logic of colleges and universities undermined that equalizing potential.
Founding a Hospital
Universities turned to medicine in the twentieth century, and the Balls followed the trend, creating a hospital to pair with the college. The 1910 publication of Abraham Flexner’s Medical Education in America and Canada prompted educational reforms that would make medical training less plentiful and more exclusionary, but would also make education and treatment more scientifically based, advancing the transition of medicine from trade to profession and demanding facilities with up-to-date tools.96 Lucius Ball, the eldest of the five Ball brothers, was a physician who joined the family business as the company doctor. He had helped found the Muncie Home Hospital, a modest, community-run institution, in 1905. Later, he and his brother Edmund B. Ball promoted the idea of a new, more modern facility rather than an expansion of the aging Muncie Home Hospital.97
Members of the Ball family provided the capital to create the hospital as part of an agreement that a government unit would take over and operate it once it was built. Edmund B. Ball negotiated with members of the state assembly to authorize the project. He died in 1925, but his will established a charitable foundation—now the Ball Brothers Foundation—to continue his philanthropic activities in Muncie, chief among them funding for the coming hospital. His surviving brothers, along with other medically minded civic leaders, formed an organization to create the hospital he had envisioned, the Ball Memorial Hospital Association.98
Frank C. Ball, one of the directors of the association, convinced the board to locate the hospital adjacent to the BTC, arguing that each institution would benefit from proximity to the other.99 The college was not using the land south and west of the college quadrangle because the terms of the land gift to the state restricted it for educational purposes. The Ball hospital could use these dozens of undeveloped acres, however, because it would have a nurses’ training program.100 The college and hospital were like divisions of the same corporation, both under the direction of the Balls.101
Ball Memorial Hospital opened in August 1929 and intensified the economic transformation of northwestern Muncie. Cuno Kibele designed the buildings. In keeping with his preferred idiom, Kibele designed the façade in the Tudor Gothic style, symbolically lending the new institution maturity and authority, while it contributed to the modernization of health care, higher education, and the economy in Muncie. After funding the hospital’s creation, the Balls provided funds for a women’s dormitory for nurses in training—Maria Bingham Hall, built in 1930 and named after their mother. In sum, the complex cost $2 million to build, paid for by the foundation and the manufacturing company.102 The hospital employed numerous physicians and trained scores of nurses annually in the course of its operations, concentrating knowledge and capital in northwestern Muncie when the staff helped populate the city’s residential subdivisions around the campus.103 The developments were mutually reinforcing, providing comfortable residential opportunities to a growing professional class in a move that put the housing market in concert with the job market (Figure 8).
Muncie in Transition
The opening of the hospital came at the end of more than a decade of dramatic economic growth and development. The Great Depression shifted the politics of Muncie and higher education, but did not divert the Balls from the overall strategy they had developed over their several decades in the city. The economic collapse provided opportunities for the Balls. They took over the main downtown department store and rescued three of the city’s five banks from failure.104 Like the wealthy Henry Potter in Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life, the Balls had the means to save enterprises destabilized by panic or suffering from insolvency and illiquidity. When everyone else panicked, the Balls did not.105 In numerous sectors—retailing, finance, and agriculture, as well as real estate and transportation—the Ball family scooped up enterprises overextended with debt or suffering from the economic downturn of the 1930s and accelerated the corporate consolidation of small-town life transforming the nation. The Lynds lauded the Ball brothers’ “hard-headed ethos of Protestant capitalism,” which lifted them to a status in the city “amount[ing] to a reigning royal family.”106
Figure 8. Ball Memorial Hospital. The hospital brought modern health care to Muncie and symbolized the aesthetic, political, and economic association among the city, college, and Ball family. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
The Balls and BTC’s President Pittenger incorporated New Deal aid into their support plans for the institution. They jointly funded cultural development with an arts building that included studio instruction and a gallery that housed part of the Balls’ art collection. Located on the BTC quadrangle, the Arts Building helped make the northwestern sector the cultural capital of the city and the region in addition to the economic engine of Muncie. In Middletown in Transition, the Lynds illustrated how dominant the Balls had become by quoting a Muncie man speaking for the population dependent on the Ball family:
If I’m out of work I go to the Ball plant; if I need money I go to the Ball bank, and if they don’t like me I don’t get it; my children go to the Ball college; when I get sick I go to the Ball hospital; I buy a building lot or house in a Ball subdivision; my wife goes downtown to buy clothes at the Ball department store; if my dog stays away he is put in the Ball pound; I buy Ball milk; I drink Ball beer, vote for Ball political parties, and get help from Ball charities; my boy goes to the Ball Y.M.C.A. and my girl to their Y.W.C.A.; I listen to the word of God in Ball-subsidized churches; if I’m a Mason I go to the Ball Masonic Temple; I read the news from the Ball morning newspaper; and, if I am rich enough, I travel via the Ball airport.107
The account echoes the aggrieved workers of the company town of Pullman, Illinois, two generations earlier, who claimed George Pullman’s control over their lives was so exploitative and total they predicted “when we die, we shall go to Pullman hell.”108
In May 1937, Life ran a photo essay by Margaret Bourke-White to coincide with the publication of Middletown in Transition. Her work depicting Depression-era poverty had established Bourke-White as a central photographic interpreter of the American experience. Her photo essay emphasized Muncie’s class divide by running striking images of the poverty of south-side workers opposite photos of an opulent Ball mansion at Minnetrista. The grim, deteriorating peeled-away stucco and bare lath on worker housing “far across town from the college” emphasized the city’s geographic disparities.109 Readers saw the manicured lawns of BTC and brick-and-stone administration and teaching buildings in northwestern Muncie just a stone’s throw from Minnetrista. The Life feature proved exceedingly popular. Together, the photo essay and the two Middletown books created Muncie’s image as Everytown, U.S.A. (Figures 9 and 10).
In September of the same year, the Muncie Chamber of Commerce installed a sculpture on the college grounds to honor the Balls. The statue, Beneficence, by Daniel Chester French, conspicuously recognized the family’s philanthropy and tied it to their foremost community endeavors. In French, Muncie business leaders selected an artist whose work embodied the grandest of civic and national statements. Responsible for The Republic, the main sculpture at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, and the seated Lincoln sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial, French had been among the foremost American sculptors for nearly half a century.110
Figures 9 and 10. Muncie, Indiana. Life published a photo essay by Margaret Bourke-White in 1937 to coincide with the publication of Middletown in Transition. Bourke-White captured the economic disparities in the city; her depictions of opulence, greenery, and open space in northwestern Muncie (above) were starkly contrasted with the crowding and deterioration of working-class southern Muncie (below). Margaret Bourke-White/Getty Images.
Figure 11. Beneficence. Business leaders in Muncie commissioned a sculpture by Daniel Chester French to symbolize the relationship among the Ball family, the college, and the city. The sculpture, at the southern edge of campus, faces the city of Muncie. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
Beneficence 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.
