Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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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.