Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling

Чтение книги онлайн.

      The University of Texas opened in 1883 after the state’s constitution authorized the creation of a “university of the first class.”⁶ The impoverished state could not provide the resources necessary to realize this ambition, and the modest income from the West Texas ranch lands limited the university’s growth. Dirt paths crisscrossed campus as students wore down the grass and their trails became permanent, dusty walks. At the turn of the century, a Victorian-Gothic structure, built wing by wing in the 1880s and 1890s, was the university’s signature building, but after just a few decades, it seemed antiquated and unfashionable.⁷ The need for classroom space was so dire that a set of rickety wooden structures built during World War I remained for more than a decade, stretching in lines across the campus.⁸ Students reviled them as “the shacks,” and campus wags joked that the university featured “shackeresque” architecture. A faculty member called them “hideous and uncomfortable, the shame of Texas.”⁹ The university sought to use oil revenues in the 1920s to begin expanding, bypassing a constitutionally created endowment fund. The state attorney general challenged this action, prompting the state supreme court to acknowledge that “a shackless campus is much to be desired,” even though it ruled in favor of the attorney general (Figure 13).¹⁰

      In 1928 the university constructed a new sculptural gateway on the campus as a monument to the Southern Lost Cause. Statues of George Washington, Jefferson Davis, Woodrow Wilson, Robert E. Lee, James Hogg, John Reagan, and Albert Sidney Johnston lined the main campus walkway from the south. A dispute that began in 1919 had led to their erection, as two regents, George Brackenridge and George Littlefield, battled for control of the campus location and its appearance.¹¹ Brackenridge was a northerner, a Republican, and a longtime UT Regent. He was a banker who had made a fortune evading the Confederate blockade on cotton exports during the Civil War.¹² He donated land along the Colorado River to accommodate a new, larger campus for the university, but Littlefield, a staunch segregationist, Confederate veteran, and native Texan, opposed the move. Littlefield had fought and been wounded in the Civil War and was saved by his slave. After the war, Littlefield moved to Austin along with his wife, Alice, and Nathan Stokes, the slave who remained as a servant for more than fifty years.¹³ The Northern–Southern dynamic of the campus debate set the tone for decades of imagining the future of the UT campus.

      Figure 13. “The Shacks” in Austin. The University of Texas suffered from limited state funding from the time of its creation, relying on the leasing proceeds of ranch lands in West Texas. These buildings were constructed for temporary purposes in World War I but continued to be used for more than a decade. Austin wags dubbed the buildings “the Shacks.” The discovery of oil on the ranch lands gave the university the resources to remake its campus despite the economic crisis of the Great Depression. UT Texas Student Publications, Prints and Photographs Collection, di_06442, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

      George Littlefield donated $250,000 for a fountain and the sculptures that would embellish the approach from the state capitol, symbolize the university’s commitment to the Lost Cause, and keep the main campus in central Austin. Littlefield and Brackenridge both died in 1920, and Texas politicians battled over the plan to relocate the campus to the banks of the Colorado. With the key patron for relocation dead, city business interests rallied to keep the university downtown. The campus remained centered on the original forty acres, just a few blocks north of the state capitol, while the university used the Brackenridge tract as a golf course it leased to the city of Austin until the 1970s.¹⁴

      The sculpture commission conformed to a broader agenda within Texas to emphasize a Confederate identity for the state after Reconstruction.¹⁵ Littlefield had contracted with Pompeo Coppini, an Italian sculptor based in San Antonio. Coppini provided the design, even though his vision did not entirely conform to his patron’s. The sculptor hoped to show how World War I unified the national rift of the Civil War, while Littlefield sought images of Southern heroes.¹⁶ The Southern military and political heroes depicted in the statues (as well as Woodrow Wilson, a Southern segregationist) made a clear statement, visually and symbolically asserting white supremacy to the next generation of Texas leaders. Thus, the Confederate veteran’s gift affirmed Texas as a self-consciously Southern state and implicated the university as a fundamental part of this racially segregated ideological project. Jim Crow, however, would not be limited to symbolic statements, either on campus or in the city of Austin (Figures 14 and 15).

       Segregation in Austin

      Austin in the 1920s was a small capital city perched on the verge of tremendous growth. It was bigger than Muncie, Indiana, but smaller than El Paso and Fort Worth, Texas cities that were double and triple Austin’s population, respectively.¹⁷ Railroads, including the International–Great Northern and the Southern Pacific railways, passed by lumberyards and warehouses along Third and Fourth Streets and crossed the Colorado River west of the Congress Street Bridge. These rail networks connected Austin producers and merchants to regional and national markets for agricultural goods such as animal hides and pecans.¹⁸ The national highway system touched urban Austin in name but hardly connected points within the city, let alone across the state. State institutions besides the university provided employment stability, including the school for the blind in the city proper and military camps in the region. Most of the business economy in Texas, the nation’s fifth most populous state, flowed elsewhere, however. Oil money funneled through Houston and banking through Dallas; Galveston had long served as the state’s chief port. As the Texas capital, Austin’s top commodity was politics. Like the state’s position in the region, it served as both a geographically central point and a metaphorical one where east Texans of the Old South mindset brokered compromises with politicians from the urban centers, the ranching hill country, and the agricultural panhandle.¹⁹

      Figure 14. Littlefield Fountain. Pompeo Coppini sculpted Littlefield Fountain as a gateway from downtown Austin and the state capital to the campus. It was a symbolic statement depicting Columbia aboard a ship representing the American project. Along with a series of statues of Southern and Confederate heroes, the fountain represented the resolution of sectional difficulties but affirmed the university’s commitment to white supremacy. Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/kewing/8702417281/sizes/l.