A New Deal for Austin
The national economic crisis raised the stakes for UT expansion. Across the country, the contagion of the economic crisis had spread from finance to higher education. College and university enrollment declined nationwide nearly 10 percent from 1931 to 1933, back to its 1925 level.71 That enrollment drop seemed even more dramatic since it followed a decade of continual growth. Admissions officials across the country flipped from seeing rising numbers of more than 50,000 new students per year in the late 1920s to confronting drops of about 50,000 students per year in the early 1930s.
The construction industry had collapsed and found no help on college campuses. Nationally, construction spending dropped from $11 billion in 1928 to $3 billion in 1933. Employment fell from 2.9 million in the summer of 1929 to 1 million in 1933, and, according to one assessment, nearly three-quarters of the construction workforce was out of a job.72 At the end of the Roosevelt administration’s first hundred days, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, more popularly known as the Public Works Administration, or PWA. It stepped into the breach with grants and loans to public institutions, putting architects, engineers, surveyors, and construction workers back to work.73
Franklin Roosevelt laid out his approach for spending billions of dollars for public works in his first inaugural address. He proposed “to put people to work … but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources,” balancing and developing rural and urban markets for agricultural and industrial production and consumption.74 The university construction subsidies of the PWA not only put unemployed architects and building contractors to work; it also helped expand institutions that were becoming central to the future of American intellectual, scientific, and economic development.75 Roosevelt trumpeted the federal investments in higher education, saying in 1936, “I am proud to be the head of a Government … that has sought and is seeking to make a substantial contribution to the cause of education, even in a period of economic distress.” He noted the central role of “bricks and mortar and labor and loans.”76
New Deal funding for higher education helped achieve two key goals: reorganization of the nation’s political economy and development of new means to achieve federal ends. PWA funds for universities and National Youth Administration jobs for students were investments in middle-class institutions and in the future of new white-collar workers. These college students were business people and industrial engineers in the making, budding members of the medical and legal professions, and workers who would staff the administrations and bureaucracies of public and private institutions, using the skills and ideas learned in their college days. The New Deal helped keep students in college courses during the Depression, but it also made more and bigger classrooms to hold them, helping expand the capacity of higher education in the 1930s by approximately one-third.77
At the same time, New Dealers worked through nonfederal channels as much as possible to provide this aid. The PWA supported private enterprise with grants for hiring workers and firms rather than employing laborers directly. While the Roosevelt administration was stimulating and reorganizing the use of American resources, it was recruiting a wide array of institutions to more directly and intensely create, exploit, and provide these resources, from education to housing to infrastructure to financial instruments. Colleges and universities came to constitute a “parastate,” an intermediate means through which the federal government could mold students into citizens and provide them services, while remaining at arm’s length.78 The New Deal became less visible, and, while federal aid became more important to higher education, this support was often masked and not recognized as such. These two features, the investment in capacity and the use of nonfederal means, combined to lay the foundation for a new economy after World War II, led by an increasingly educated workforce that was, ironically, less committed to the pillars of New Deal liberalism, including collective bargaining in the industrial sector, as time went on.
The spatial nature of these investments could boost or burden local communities as the federal government worked with local partners and channeled aid to a chosen set of institutions. Congress created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934 to help stabilize and expand housing markets across the country. The agency wrote a manual for mortgage underwriters in order to standardize procedures for receiving a federal mortgage guarantee. The FHA favored stable, white, middle-class neighborhoods for committing its funds and incentives. In the manual, FHA experts specifically invoked the beneficial effects of colleges, which worked to protect and buffer desirable areas. The manual noted that “a college campus often protects locations in its vicinity” and compared it to other protective measures and natural features that would “prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences … includ[ing] the infiltration of business and industrial uses, lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.”79 Through the FHA, the Roosevelt administration made this protective feature of higher education an operational feature of its housing policy. Investments in universities like the University of Texas were acknowledged to increase urban segregation by protect neighboring white homeowners. Each new building at UT advanced the cause of segregation in higher education and in Austin.
Federal funds and oil revenue allowed the university to become the “university of the first class” the Texas constitution had promised. Between 1930 and 1940, UT built fourteen structures designed by Paul Cret. Oil royalties were deposited in the Permanent University Fund and could be dispersed from the Available University Fund. In 1929, the latter fund held $800,000 for construction and would accrue millions of dollars a year by the end of the 1930s.80 The PWA required local matching contributions for most projects, and UT could easily make these contributions.81 The PWA provided grants and loans for seven UT buildings, including the signature Main Library building, five dormitories, and a laboratory building. PWA aid totaled more than $2.7 million, making the University of Texas one of the largest recipients of building aid in the country. The Main Library and administration tower was the second-largest allotment for a single building in the country.82 The University of Texas tower reached twenty-eight stories and 307 feet in height, nearly the equal of Austin’s state capitol building (Figure 20).83 The ultimate consequence of federal aid to higher education in this era was to create more capacity at colleges and universities like the University of Texas. PWA and WPA funds made it easier and more democratic to pursue higher education—largely for whites—and provided investment in new research endeavors and professional schools.
Figure 20. Library Building Tower. The Library Tower and Main Building at the University of Texas was financed with a combination of oil revenue and New Deal aid. It was the second largest Public Works Administration grant for a university building in the country, with Hunter College in Manhattan receiving the largest. Walter Barnes Studio, Prints and Photographs Collection, di_04018, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
The New Deal helped the University of Texas and