Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling

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      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