Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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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