Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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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