Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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the interaction between elites and the grassroots, illustrating the role of both institutions and individual actors in shaping higher-education legislation and policy, as well as specific development projects, combining both a “top-down” and “bottom-up” perspective in addressing this history.
Universities held an essential and growing role in the reproduction of American society and the development of human resources in the twentieth century. Their work in space, the campuses and buildings where scholars and students meet to research and learn, gave them motive to alter their local environments. The increasing resources devoted to higher education gave them the power to do so. However, the national and global mandates that provided and guided these resources meant that universities were decreasingly sensitive and responsive to the values and priorities of their surrounding communities. In effect, they were national and global institutions trapped in local places. This tension between the local and the global played out in creative ways for education but ones that could be harmful to the local communities. Architects and planners gave physical and symbolic form to these educational values and local tensions. To protect and expand their missions and resources, universities could create and exacerbate poverty, blight, racial segregation, inequality, and isolation in urban settings. Thus, these institutions reproduced American society—the problems and the promise—as they sought to create it anew. Universities were the classic American institution of the twentieth century. As they imposed their spatial ideologies on their local settings, they became the prime movers of urban development in the second half of the twentieth century.
Figure 1. Muncie, Indiana. Map created by the author.
1 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).
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