Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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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, a physicist with expertise in acoustics, worked on sonar technology at Harvard University and at UT directed a naval ordinance research project, then the Defense Research Laboratory after the war’s end.88
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