Journal of Mississippi History Journal of Mississippi History
Volume 81 Number 3 Article 4
2019
Ole Miss's New Deal: Building White Democracy at the University Ole Miss's New Deal: Building White Democracy at the University
of Mississippi, 1933-1941 of Mississippi, 1933-1941
Jack Carey
University of Alabama
Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/jmh
Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Carey, Jack (2019) "Ole Miss's New Deal: Building White Democracy at the University of Mississippi,
1933-1941,"
Journal of Mississippi History
: Vol. 81: No. 3, Article 4.
Available at: https://aquila.usm.edu/jmh/vol81/iss3/4
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for
inclusion in Journal of Mississippi History by an authorized editor of The Aquila Digital Community. For more
information, please contact [email protected].
Journal of Mississippi History
Ole Miss's New Deal: Building White Democracy at the University
of Mississippi, 1933-1941
Recommended Citation
Journal of Mississippi History
Volume 81 Number 3 Article 4
2019
Ole Miss's New Deal: Building White Democracy at the University
of Mississippi, 1933-1941
Jack Carey
University of Alabama
Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/jmh
Recommended Citation
Carey, Jack (2019) "Ole Miss's New Deal: Building White Democracy at the University of Mississippi,
1933-1941,"
Journal of Mississippi History
: Vol. 81: No. 3, Article 4.
Available at: https://aquila.usm.edu/jmh/vol81/iss3/4
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for
inclusion in Journal of Mississippi History by an authorized editor of The Aquila Digital Community. For more
information, please contact [email protected].
185 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
Ole Miss’s New Deal: Building White
Democracy at the University of Mississippi,
1933-1941
by Jack Carey
On the afternoon of September 19, 1936, three thousand spectators
sat in the “sulky humidity” of a beaming sun” and watched the Univer-
sity of Mississippi’s football team defeat the visiting team from Union
University in Jackson, Tennessee, 45-0.
1
The game was the rst that the
football team at the University of Mississippi played as the “Ole Miss
Rebels.” Commentators at the university were unable to resist the play
of words made possible by a game that saw the Rebels maul a squad from
Union; one account described the game as a reenactment of the Battle of
Bull Run.
2
On New Year’s Day of 1936, the team played against Catholic
University in the prestigious Orange Bowl in Miami.
3
The decade prior
to World War II when the university’s football team became the Ole
Miss Rebels was one of success and increasing prominence.
On November 29, 1941, twenty-eight thousand spectators packed the
university’s Hemingway Stadium to watch Ole Miss play a “brilliantly
bitter game” against Mississippi State for the Southeastern Conference
championship.
4
Although that day ended with a loss to the rivals from
Starkville, the university community would remember the pre-World
War II years as a “ ‘Golden Era’ of Ole Miss football.”
5
While Ole Miss was becoming the Rebels, the University of Mis-
sissippi was beneting from the largesse of the federal government.
Through President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the university
received well over $1.25 million in direct aid between 1933 and 1941.
Federal money paid for the football stadium that fans packed to watch
1
Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 20, 1936, section II, p. 1.
2
Ole Miss, Volume XLI, 1937, 194.
3
Lawrence Wells, Ole Miss Football (Oxford, MS: Sports Yearbook Company, 1980), 50-51.
4
Memphis Commercial Appeal, November 30, 1941, section I, p. 1.
5
Ole Miss, Volume LI, 1947, 283.
JACK CAREY is an instructor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama.
He received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Georgia. At the University of
Mississippi, he earned an M.A. and Ph.D., with a specialization in the intellectual and cultural
history of the South.
185
186 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
the Rebels play. It also paid for a swimming pool, a student union, an
astronomical observatory, dormitories, faculty cottages, and over a dozen
fraternity and sorority houses. In other ways, federal money remade
the university’s campus by funding maintenance projects, providing
for landscaping, and paving roads and walkways. Beyond these and
additional construction projects, the New Deal employed students whose
poverty otherwise would have forced them to suspend their studies and
expanded the university’s clerical and research staffs.
6
This article treats Ole Miss’s New Deal benets as a case study in
the ways white southerners strengthened Jim Crow by using federal
money and programs to design a future that combined the expansion
of white democracy with the exclusion of African Americans. Ole Miss’s
use of the New Deal is one example of what historian Jason Morgan
Ward has called the “long segregationist movement.” Ward has argued
that the white supremacists who defended “white democracy” against
challenges to segregation were doing more than resorting to “knee-jerk
insurgency”; instead, they were engaging in a “carefully constructed
political project” to protect “a racial worldview and a political order.”
7
Though this article responds to Ward’s call for a “new periodization that
complicates the linear narrative of scholarship that dates organized
segregationist opposition from the 1950s,” it breaks with two compo-
nents of Ward’s argument.
8
First, in describing the worldview of white
supremacists, Ward writes of “longstanding anxieties” and “intertwined
fears of social equality and political parity.”
9
In other words, his thesis
is a narrative of defensive white supremacists imagining the future
through their fears, not their aspirations—a story of politicians and
policymakers who sought to use the Democratic Party to take “refuge,”
6
According to Davis Douglas Buchanan, Jr., federal money used in the construction project
alone at the University under the New Deal surpassed $1,250,000. Buchanan’s calculations do not
include aid that students at the University received through FERA and NYA programs. Buchanan’s
study of federal spending at the University under the New Deal based its numbers on a combination
of local reports and university records; Davis Douglas Buchanan, Jr., “A Million Dollars in Concrete
and Steel: Federal Aid to the University of Mississippi in the New Deal Era,” (Master’s thesis,
University of Mississippi, 1997), 25-75. For the years 1935-1940 alone, David Sansing cites “more
than a million dollars” in federal money coming to the university; David G. Sansing, The University
of Mississippi: A Sesquicentennial History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 252.
7
Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist
Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2011), 2.
8
Ibid, 5-6.
9
Ibid, 4, 7.
187 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
and to make use of “resistance politics” in their “struggle to defend the
color line” and the “segregated status quo.”
10
Second, Ward portrays
the New Deal as a period of “racially charged confrontations” between
southern and national Democrats that called into question the “mythical
permanency” of white supremacy and “fueled southern unease with the
changes, rumored and real, taking place around them.”
11
Ward’s anal-
ysis of the meaning of the New Deal for white supremacists adheres to
ones made in other inuential works. Glenda Gilmore, for example, has
argued that the New Deal represented a pivot when white supremacists
who had attempted to extend and export segregation in the 1910s and
1920s retreated and “circled their wagons to defend Jim Crow.”
12
This article, however, tells the story of white supremacists’ en-
thusiastic embrace of the New Deal as a mechanism to build up white
democracy; it is not a story about anxiety, defensiveness, or preserva-
tion. Instead of trying to shelter or protect segregation against external
threats, students and administrators at the University of Mississippi
sought to build a greater university that served a broader white com-
munity and moved beyond the problems of exclusivity and class tension
of the institution’s past. In this vision, white supremacists condently
harnessed the New Deal for what it made possible, as opposed to fear-
ing it for what it threatened to challenge. This article thus follows Ira
Katznelson in thinking of the New Deal as an era when southerners
“did more than defend the racial status quo” and, indeed, “fortied Jim
Crow.”
13
Operating from a position of security and safety, Katznelson
argues that southern New Dealers seized “a golden opportunity” and
“almost giddily propelled the New Deal’s radical economic policies, a
program that offered the South the chance to escape its colonized sta-
10
Ibid, 2, 4, 6.
11
Ibid, 28.
12
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 6. Other key works that have emphasized the extent
to which the New Deal represented an early threat to Jim Crow include: Patricia Sullivan, Days
of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996), chapter 2; Harvard Sitko, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as
a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), chapter 5; John Egerton, Speak Now
against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf,
1994), 104-120; and Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-
1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chapter 1.
13
Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York:
Liveright, 2013), 163.
188 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
tus while keeping its racial order safe.”
14
As the position of southerners
in Congress became increasingly signicant strategically, the region
“became the self-conscious arbiter of what could, and what could not,
become law.”
15
If, as Ward suggests, some forward-thinking white
supremacists looked with concern at the possible racial implications
of some New Deal policies, Katznelson’s work demonstrates that the
political realities of the era offered countervailing evidence that white
southerners were the masters of their own futures when it came to the
making of federal policy on race and economics. By enabling southerners
to build up opportunities for whites, the New Deal strengthened white
democracy and put further socio-economic distance between white and
black southerners.
This article uses the interpretive lens developed by Jason Scott
Smith to connect the physical development of the university to the
emergence of a new set of ideas about funding the institution and to the
alteration and expansion of the university’s identity. Smith has argued
that the public works programs of the New Deal “revolutionized the
priorities of the American state” by “radically transforming the physical
landscape, political system, and economy of the United States.” The
benets of the new physical nation that the New Deal built enabled
reformers to construct “the intellectual scaffolding to justify the federal
government’s investment in public works.” The “far-reaching federal
efforts” necessary to fund public works and “the long-term impact of the
infrastructure itself” legitimized, both “intellectually and physically,”
a new kind of state and a new form of economic development.
16
In the
South, a region that lagged behind the rest of the nation in indexes of
economic development such as mileage of paved roads, public health,
and the availability of electricity, the kind of revolution that Smith de-
scribes on a national scale was particularly impactful. As Gavin Wright
has noted, New Deal programs that built up the South not only carried
“immediate effects,” but they also “set the stage” for the region’s “rapid
economic growth during and after World War II.”
17
As much as the
14
Ibid, 158.
15
Ibid, 192.
16
Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works,
1933-1956
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), quotations from 1, 136, 3.
17
Gavin Wright, “The New Deal and the Modernization of the South,” Federal History, 2
(January 2010), 72.
189 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
public works revolution pointed toward a new future of development
and building, New Deal programs adhered to and even strengthened
existing “gendered and racial boundaries.” Thus as public works projects
built up a new nation physically and the New Deal opened new worlds
of possibility for millions of white, male Americans, some traditional
hierarchies remained intact or became more rmly established.
18
On a smaller scale, Ole Miss’s New Deal provides an example of
an institution building itself into one that was more modern and more
democratic in its appeal and service to a larger percentage of the white
population, but also more rmly connected and committed to white
supremacy. Nearly twenty years ago, Charles W. Eagles commented on
the “asymmetry” and “imbalance” of civil rights scholarship which has
“assumed that little remains to be learned about the segregationists
or that they are simply too unattractive or unimportant to warrant
examination.”
19
This article is an attempt to provide one example of
how segregationists built worlds they deemed worth protecting. Only
by taking seriously the future that the building of segregationist insti-
tutions like the University of Mississippi seemed to make possible can
scholars understand the intensity of white opposition to the dismantling
of Jim Crow.
In 1928, Governor Theodore G. “The Man” Bilbo announced an am-
bitious plan to remove the University of Mississippi from its decaying
campus in Oxford and to build a
greater institution in Jackson. Bilbo’s plan failed and eventually led
to a damaging imbroglio between The Man and the university’s faculty,
but the controversy made plain the need for the modernization of the
state university.
20
One salutary effect of the affair was a special legisla-
tive appropriation of $1.6 million that the institution received in 1928.
Within a year, the university had begun planning and constructing a
hospital, a gravel well, a new building for the law school, an enlarged
cafeteria, a gymnasium, a dormitory for women, and six dormitories for
18
Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, 15.
19
Charles W. Eagles, “Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era,” Journal of Southern
History, 66 (November 2000), 842.
20
For the best discussion of Bilbo’s plan and the controversies involved in it, see Hardy
Poindexter Graham, “Bilbo and the University of Mississippi, 1928-1932,” (M.A. thesis, University
of Mississippi, 1965). Of the voluminous and often sensational commentary that the controversy
generated at the time, the best analysis is Clarence E. Cason, “The Mississippi Imbroglio,” Virginia
Quarterly Review, VII (Spring 1931), 229-240.
190 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
male students.
21
While the boom in building that followed the special
appropriation allowed for the expansion and improvement of the physical
plant at Oxford, the necessity of such projects demonstrated how severe-
ly the state had neglected its university over the years. Even after the
new construction of 1928 and 1929, the university lacked buildings for
the departments of engineering, physics, biology, geology, music, jour-
nalism, commerce, pharmacy, and art. The new dormitories still could
not accommodate all of the university’s students, and faculty requests
for housing frequently went unmet.
22
In a 1929 report to the state leg-
islature, Chancellor Alfred Hume wrote that the difculty of securing
reliable funding from the state had created a physical plant that was
both practically insufcient and aesthetically unappealing. Decades of
meager legislative appropriations had prevented the university from
acquiring “the physical equipment commensurate with the growth and
development of the institution.” Irregular funding led to the planning,
suspension, and resumption of construction and landscaping projects
over a number of years and under different architects and builders. The
result was a campus that Hume gingerly described as “lacking some-
what in complete harmony and a thoroughly orderly and satisfactory
arrangement.”
23
The onset of the Great Depression did not threaten to close the
University of Mississippi. It ensured there would be no more special
appropriations from the state legislature, though, and led to dramatic
reductions in annual funding. For the scal year beginning on July 1,
1932, for example, legislative appropriations to Mississippi’s institutions
of higher learning declined by forty-two percent from the previous term.
At the university, these cutbacks cost two faculty members their jobs
and led to a twenty-ve percent decrease in salaries for employees of the
institution. Faculty took on heavier teaching loads as unlled positions
stayed vacant, and the university was only able to continue offering
certain courses by enlarging their size and by hiring inexperienced and
low-paid instructors and graduate students to teach the classes. Some
courses and programs did not survive the cuts in funding.
24
21
Biennial Report of the University of Mississippi to the Legislature of the State and to the
Board of Trustees of the State University and Colleges, July 1, 1927 to July 1, 1929 (July, 1929), 10;
hereinafter cited as Biennial Report.
22
Ibid, 54-55.
23
Ibid, 10-11.
24
Biennial Report, 1933, pp. 6, 9, 49.
191 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
Broad patterns of underfunding and inefciency in Mississippi’s
system of higher education added to the negative effects of dramatic
reductions in state appropriations. In
1933, the state’s Board of Trustees for State Institutions of Higher
Learning remarked with alarm that some buildings on Mississippi’s
public campuses had “stood for twenty years without a coat of outside
paint and thousands of dollars will be necessary to restore property that
could have been preserved with a few hundred dollars if applied where
rst needed.” Given that earlier deciencies in funding and maintenance
had led to such a situation, the reduced Depression-era appropriations
were plainly insufcient “to take care of any appreciable part of badly
needed repairs and renovations.” The trustees also remarked with re-
gret upon “all the confusion caused by the present method” of allocating
funds and noted that inconsistencies in how the state legislature used
scal and calendar years had created a system by which, technically,
all state-supported institutions of learning would either have to close
on New Year’s Day of each year or “violate the law daily until the Leg-
islature makes the new biennial appropriation.”
25
These patterns in the history and character of state funding for the
University of Mississippi provide an essential context for understanding
the signicance of the New Deal specically and federal money more
generally to the institution. By the onset of the Great Depression, the
university was an institution whose campus displayed physical evidence
of the negative effects of chronic underfunding and irregular patterns of
appropriations. Money from the federal government would mean several
important things for the university. First, it provided immediate funding
for a university in need of basic maintenance and construction. Second,
it brought relief for a population of students whose poverty threatened
to suspend their education. Third, because New Deal programs required
matching funds, the promise of federal money spurred an often reluctant
state legislature to allocate money to an institution it had insufciently
and irregularly funded in the past.
New Deal money rst came to the University of Mississippi through
the Civil Works Administration (CWA). In November 1933, Chancellor
Alfred Hume presented the Board of Trustees with a plan composed by
John L. Gainey, the university’s business manager, to acquire and use
CWA funds on campus. Though Gainey’s plan brought a relatively small
25
Ibid, 14.
192 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
initial allotment to the university, it established important patterns in
how the university sought federal money and primed trustees and the
state legislature to allocate more funds to the institution. Hume used
Gainey’s plan, which included a detailed accounting of how the univer-
sity would spend the money to make repairs to the physical plant and
to beautify the campus, to ensure the institution received its “proper
share” of federal money. Importantly, this established a pattern that
tied the pursuit of funding to planning for the future of the institution
and used the promise of federal money to compel the state to make ap-
propriations. The strategy worked, and the university received $16,000.
Half of that sum came directly from the CWA; half of it came from a
matching allocation by the state.
Between December 1933 and February 1934, the CWA employed
approximately seventy-ve men on the university’s grounds. Some
$12,000 of the total $16,000 went directly to hiring workers.
26
Wages
for laborers began at forty cents an hour, and workers could not work
more than thirty hours per week.
27
The workers were a mixed group
of students from the university, unemployed people from surrounding
Lafayette County, and unemployed veterans of the U.S. armed forces.
28
The crews of unskilled workers accomplished a variety of basic but
badly-needed projects. One such task involved the painting of a large
number of buildings. From the Lyceum, the university’s antebellum
administration building, down to its laundry facility, structures across
campus received their rst coatings of paint in “many years.”
29
Workers
used thirty-six gallons of paint on the columns of the Lyceum alone.
30
26
University (Miss.) Mississippian, December 16, 1933, p. 1.; Buchanan, “A Million Dollars
in Concrete and Steel,” 27.
27
University (Miss.) Mississippian, January 13, 1934, p. 1.
28
The precise composition of the laborers is unclear. Various articles in the Mississippian
identied veterans, students, and the unemployed population of Lafayette County as preferred
groups in the hiring of workers. Enough veterans worked on the project that the American Legion
post of Lafayette County passed a resolution honoring the local supervisors of the program for
giving veterans “rst choice” in the hiring process. For that reference to the American Legion
resolution, see: “Many Improvements Are Made on Campus by CWA Workmen,” University (Miss.)
Mississippian, January 13, 1934, p. 1. For a reference to the unemployed of Lafayette County as
a preferred group in hiring, see: University (Miss.) Mississippian, December 9, 1933, p. 1. For a
reference to students as a preferred group in hiring, see: University (Miss.) Mississippian, December
16, 1933, p. 1.
29
University (Miss.) Mississippian, December 9, 1933, p. 1.; Quotation from University
(Miss.) Mississippian, January 13, 1934, p. 1.
30
University (Miss.) Mississippian, February 3, 1934.
193 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
Basic repairs brought a number of neglected buildings into service-
able condition.
31
Work on the laundry included adding oor space that
increased the facility’s capacity and erecting separate rooms for dry
cleaning and pressing. The expansion of this particular facility led the
Mississippian, the university’s student newspaper, to boast that the
campus now housed “one of the most modern and best equipped laundries
of any school in the South.” The removal of two decrepit structures, an
abandoned kitchen and pump house, eliminated two unsightly buildings
from the campus and opened space for new construction projects.
32
The most visible effect of CWA work at the university was the beau-
tication of the campus. The planting of 1,800 shrubs fundamentally
altered the appearance and atmosphere of the university. Much of this
beautication occurred in the areas in front of the hospital, the build-
ing for the graduate school, the cafeteria, the gymnasium, and the new
dormitories that the university had built with the 1928 special appropri-
ation. Planting this new area of the campus made it more aesthetically
pleasing and more effectively integrated it with the older sections around
the Lyceum. When CWA projects at the university concluded in Febru-
ary 1934, the Mississippian remarked that the workers had produced
“a very different and much more scenic campus.”
33
This early stage of
New Deal activity at the school represented a key phase in the process
of transforming the University of Mississippi from a place where even
the chancellor worried about the aesthetic qualities of its campus to a
place whose scenic landscaping would become a dening feature of its
self-image and national reputation.
A parting benet from the CWA came early in the spring of 1934
when the Mississippi legislature matched $200,000 in CWA funding in
a package to repair public buildings across the state. The State Repair
Commission allocated $100,000 of that money to Mississippi’s institu-
tions of higher learning. Later that spring, the legislature matched a
Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) grant of $65,000 for
repairs to the buildings of the state’s colleges and university. All told,
the Board of Trustees for State Institutions of Higher Learning was
able to allocate $230,000 for building repairs at Mississippi’s colleges
31
University (Miss.) Mississippian, December 9, 1933, p. 1; University (Miss.) Mississippian,
February 3, 1934, p. 1.
32
University (Miss.) Mississippian, January 13, 1934, p. 1; University (Miss.) Mississippian,
September 22, 1934, p. 8.
33
University (Miss.) Mississippian, February 3, 1934.
194 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
and university during the spring and summer of 1934 alone.
34
Over the
summer of 1934, the University of Mississippi beneted tremendously
from its share of this round of funding. Buildings that earlier CWA work
had left untouched or only minimally improved now received thorough
overhauls. The renovation of Ricks Hall, the women’s dormitory, includ-
ed the painting of oors, the re-plastering of walls, and the addition of
closets to individual rooms. The Mississippian made particular note
of this nal component of the renovations; the absence of closets had
apparently made life “extremely inconvenient” for its past inhabitants.
Workers renovated one male dormitory “from top to bottom.” A number
of classroom buildings received new oors and fresh coats of paint, and
workers converted several structures into living quarters for faculty and
staff. By the beginning of classes in the fall of 1934, the Mississippian
could note that “at the present time every building on the campus is in
an excellent state of repairs.”
35
Beyond its role in funding repairs and stimulating spending by
the legislature, FERA enabled students in need of nancial assistance
to remain at the university and helped to build up the institution’s
workforce. Beginning in February 1934, FERA grants made part-time
employment available to students at the university. FERA wages paid
thirty cents per hour, and an eligible student could earn up to $20 in
an individual month and up to $15 on a monthly average.
36
By October
1934, FERA monthly grants of $1,965 funded the employment of 153
students at the university. The 116 male and 37 female students em-
ployed under FERA grants were engaged in a wide range of activities.
37
Under Lee Baggett, the university’s supervisor of buildings and grounds,
FERA students worked “as carpenters, masons and general handy men.”
Others performed clerical work in various departments and ofces and
assisted faculty in grading and research. In the university’s dining halls,
students served as “cashiers, clerks, and waiters.”
38
Although both the CWA and FERA operated on campus for relatively
brief periods, the two programs had signicant effects for the University
of Mississippi. On one level, CWA and FERA projects began the process
of turning a dilapidated campus into a picturesque one. On another
34
Biennial Report, 1935, p. 9.
35
University (Miss.) Mississippian, September 22, 1934, p. 1.
36
Ibid, February 17, 1934, p. 1.
37
Ibid, October 6, 1934, p. 5.
38
Ibid, September 29, 1934, p. 3.
195 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
level, the process through which ofcials at the university sought and
acquired federal money established important patterns that enabled
the institution to use the promise of matching funds to prime the state
legislature and the board of trustees to allocate higher and more regular
levels of support. Perhaps most importantly, by taking advantage of fed-
eral programs to put students to work, the university was able both to
maintain enrollment numbers and to bind students and the institution
together in projects that mutually beneted both the student workers
and the university.
Beginning in the fall term of 1935, the university used funding from
the National Youth Administration (NYA) to expand its work-study
programs. Dr. William Lee Kennon, chairman of the Faculty Commit-
tee for Student Employment and the local administrator for the NYA,
reported that the university received 1,800 initial applications for 175
positions when the NYA began operations on campus. That applications
(1,800) far exceeded the number of students enrolled at the university
(roughly 1,300) suggested the dire economic circumstances of the time
as well as the strong desire for opportunities in higher education among
the communities surrounding the Oxford campus. NYA funding not only
presented students with a chance to work their way through college,
but it also offered Chancellor Alfred Benjamin Butts (1935-1946) an
opportunity to continue to use federal funds, as Chancellor Alfred Hume
had, to put students to work “doing things which the University has
needed for some time but has been unable to afford.”
39
The NYA, which
operated continuously at the institution until the program folded in 1943,
beneted countless students and every department at the university.
In the 1936-1937 school year, for example, 175 undergraduate students
and ve graduate students held NYA positions. NYA wages were thirty
cents an hour; monthly earnings ranged from $10 to $20 and had an
average of $12.50. Twenty of the students employed that year worked
at the university’s YMCA; another fteen worked at the library. The
schools of medicine, law, pharmacy, education, engineering, and music
each employed between six and ten students; each department within
the college of liberal arts employed between three and six students.
40
For the 1940-1941 school year, over $20,000 in NYA allocations provided
employment for 16 percent of the university’s 1,449 students. Those
39
Ibid, October 5, 1935, p. 1
40
Ibid, September 19, 1936, p. 12.
196 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
238 students came from sixty of Mississippi’s counties, nine states,
and Puerto Rico. Men and women received NYA employment in equal
proportions; 159 of the university’s 1,024 male students, or 15.5 percent,
and 69 of its 425 female students, or 16.2 percent, worked NYA jobs. In
addition to serving in every academic and administrative department
at the university, that year’s NYA workers assisted the band and the
baseball and basketball teams; performed maintenance work on the
grounds; prepared and served food in the cafeterias; and helped write
and edit the law journal, yearbook, and campus newspaper. All told, NYA
funds provided for student workers in fty divisions and sub-divisions
at the university.
41
NYA funding positively affected every department at the university,
and it was essential for the students who received it. In many cases,
students employed through the program applied their paychecks directly
to tuition and fees.
42
Of the 238 students receiving NYA employment
in the 1940-1941 school year, eighty-nine percent came from families
with combined annual incomes of less than $2,000; 131 of those students
came from families with annual incomes below $1,000. Thirteen NYA
students, none of whom was over twenty-four-years old, came from
families unable to offer any nancial support for their educations. Only
twenty-ve students receiving NYA funding came from households with
annual incomes exceeding $2,500; those students received funding only
after securing special approval from an NYA ofcial by satisfactorily
demonstrating that they could not remain at the university without
federal aid. Several of these cases involved students who came from
large families or from households enduring severe economic hardships
due to illnesses or unexpected nancial reverses. The thirty-nine stu-
dents from Lafayette County who received NYA funding represented
27 percent of the university’s enrollment from its home county.
43
For
these students, many of whom came from families who had moved
to the county while they put multiple children through college, NYA
employment meant a chance to endure through the Depression while
securing an education that could provide for a more prosperous future.
These statistics suggest that NYA funding kept students at the uni-
41
William Lee Kennon, Preliminary Report on the National Youth Administration in the
University of Mississippi for the Session 1940-1941 (University, MS: National Youth Administration,
1941), 3-9.
42
University (Miss.) Mississippian, January 9, 1937, p. 1.
43
Kennon, Preliminary Report on the National Youth Administration, 3-5.
197 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
versity who otherwise would have faced great difculties in continuing
their educations. What was more, the students who worked NYA jobs
for one of the various departments at the university represented a very
different socio-economic prole from the one traditionally associated
with the University of Mississippi.
The university beneted from NYA students beyond the work they
performed for the institution. Students receiving NYA funds consis-
tently outperformed the overall student body academically. In the fall
of 1940, for example, the grade-point average for NYA students was a
full 40 percent higher than the grade-point average for the university
as a whole. Close to 40 percent of NYA students that semester amassed
grade-point averages that earned them the status of distinction, honor
roll, or special distinction. NYA students accounted for a quarter of the
perfect grade-point averages earned at the university that semester.
Four of the eight Taylor Medals the university awarded in 1941 for
excellence in special elds went to NYA students. The President of the
Associated Student Body was an NYA student, and students receiving
NYA aid were members of both of the university’s literary societies, its
band, chorus, glee club, and numerous other campus organizations.
44
NYA workers who organized a tutoring program for struggling freshmen
literally kept other students in the university while working their own
way through the institution.
45
In short, these programs embodied the
promise of the New Deal for students. Through the NYA, the Mississip-
pian wrote, “the strong arm of the government has taken a progressive
step in its administrative affairs and has thrown the doors of learning
open to striving youth.”
46
Plainly, the NYA not only kept students in school who otherwise
would have had to suspend their studies; it employed and assisted stu-
dents who made positive contributions to the institution and earned
strong marks academically. This invaluable program was truly an
experiment in “cooperative undertaking” that taught quite different
lessons about “service” than membership in a Greek-letter society or a
course of study designed to cultivate character in the sons of the state’s
elite.
47
The NYA was a program, then, with key implications regarding
whom the university educated and how it served the state. Federal
44
Ibid, 5, 10.
45
University (Miss.) Mississippian, November 16, 1935, p. 2.
46
Ibid, November 9, 1935, p. 2
47
Ibid, October 5, 1935, p. 1.
198 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
support for students whose families would have been unable to pay
their way through college democratized who could come to and remain
at the university, and the work that NYA students did at the university
pointed toward new ideas about the meaning of service, leadership, and
higher education.
If the NYA student worker seemed to represent a new type at the
University of Mississippi, no gure more neatly embodied traditional
stereotypes about the institution’s student body than the fraternity
man. However large a role fraternities may have played in the ways
Mississippians imagined the university socially and historically, Greek
organizations had a limited physical and spatial presence on its campus
until the New Deal. For a period during the antebellum era, the uni-
versity’s administration had banned fraternities, and the societies had
existed only as sub-rosa organizations with no ofcial houses, lodges, or
meeting spaces on campus. Between 1912 and 1926, state anti-frater-
nity laws again forced the organizations underground. Even before the
legislative action of 1912, only the Delta Psi and Sigma Chi fraternities
had erected meeting houses on the campus. In 1934, Chancellor Alfred
Hume announced a tentative set of regulations that would have per-
mitted the construction of meeting houses under the supervision of the
university. Under this plan, houses could serve as the site for meetings,
initiations, and social functions, but not as living quarters for fraternity
members.
48
As late as September 1935, though, only the Sigma Alpha
Epsilon fraternity had built a lodge under this arrangement.
49
While the
Sigma Chi fraternity had begun the early phases of planning a house,
no plans existed for thirteen other available lots on campus.
50
The availability of New Deal money made the building of fraternity
and sorority houses at the University of Mississippi possible, and the
institution’s need for housing made such construction a necessity. In
March 1936, the university announced that the Public Works Adminis-
tration (PWA) would build campus houses for eight fraternities and two
sororities. Under the arrangement, the houses could not exceed $5,000
48
University (Miss.) Mississippian, October 13, 1934, p. 2; That ve of the sixteen members
of the Interfraternity Council and two of the twenty-one members of the Pan-Hellenic Council for
the 1940-1941 school year were NYA students further complicates the neat dichotomy between
Greeks and non-Greeks at the university and undermines the idea that Greek organizations, at least
by the era of the New Deal, served to reinforce rigid class lines between students and the university.
Kennon, Preliminary Report on the National Youth Administration, 11.
49
University (Miss.) Mississippian, September 21, 1935, p. 1.
50
Ibid, March 16, 1935, p. 8.
199 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
in cost, and each Greek-letter organization had to provide $3,000 of its
own funding before becoming eligible for PWA aid. Each house came with
a twenty-ve year lease on its lot. The construction of this initial group
of houses, which went to the Chi Omega and Phi Mu sororities and the
Sigma Nu, Delta Tau Delta, Kappa Alpha, Sigma Chi, Pi Kappa Alpha,
Kappa Sigma, and Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternities, represented the rst
step in establishing fraternity and sorority “rows” at the university.
51
All of the new houses, the Mississippian assured readers, were “either
English or colonial” in design, and none showed “modernistic strains.”
52
Betting the style and arrangement of the homes, the university named
its new fraternity row “Lamar Road” in honor of L. Q. C. Lamar, “the
greatest of all Mississippians to be identied with the University.”
53
Inside the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house, guests could admire a portrait
of Lamar that his daughter-in-law had painted in 1899.
54
The PWA sorority houses occupied a separate space on campus,
but the structures on “Sorority Circle” largely resembled the stately
fraternity houses—if in a more feminine form. The Kappa Delta house,
colonial in style, featured “slender columns and green shutters.” A
red porch ran along the west and north sides of Delta Delta Delta’s
white-brick early colonial house. The most notable feature of Phi Mu’s
two-story English cottage was a “luxurious sun parlor.” The women of the
Chi Omega sorority could enjoy an “exceptionally high-ceilinged living
room” in their Middle English house. A white picket fence surrounded
the front yard of the Delta Zeta house, and green shutters adorned the
white brick of the colonial structure. The women of the Delta Gamma
sorority worked with contractors to design a home to “follow antebellum
or late colonial lines.”
55
Greek organizations raised their share of the money through a
combination of methods. Some borrowed money from their national or-
ganizations, some received donations from alumni, and some borrowed
substantial amounts directly from the university.
56
The combination of
PWA grants and various forms of Greek funding allowed the university
51
Ibid, March 14, 1936, p. 4.
52
Ibid, September 19, 1936, p. 1.
53
Ibid, October 17, 1936, p. 5.
54
Lamar had been a charter member of the university’s SAE chapter. University (Miss.)
Mississippian, September 21, 1935, p. 1.
55
University (Miss.) Mississippian, May 1, 1937, p. 8.
56
Ibid, April 18, 1936, p. 1.
200 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
to add $100,000 worth of housing in 1936 and 1937 alone.
57
By 1938,
fourteen fraternity houses and six sorority houses stood on the univer-
sity’s campus.
58
“Greeks, Greeks, Greeks,” the Mississippian marveled,
“from every quarter they come, fraternity ‘eds and co-eds.’ ” Taken
together, the newspaper concluded with approval that “the entire unit
on ‘Fraternity Row’ . . . and ‘Sorority Circle’ is a thing of beauty.”
59
As
early as the rst semester of the existence of the Greek houses, campus
organizations announced plans for a decoration contest among the frater-
nities and sororities in advance of the football game against Mississippi
State. Almost before the paint was dry on the houses, students at the
University of Mississippi were celebrating the institution’s “unique set-
ting of fraternity and sorority houses.”
60
Tri Delta’s display, which won
the sorority category, included a cow with the name “State” signed on
it.
61
Old jokes, apparently, accelerated the invention of new traditions.
The construction of fraternity and sorority rows at a university that
had seen intense anti-Greek activity and even banned the organizations
from campus in two separate eras may have seemed an odd use of PWA
funding, but insufcient housing was a problem so longstanding at the
university that it necessitated and justied any number of measures. The
housing shortage had reached a point of crisis in late August 1934 when
a re destroyed Gordon Hall, a three-story, one-hundred-room building
that was the university’s largest dormitory.
62
For the 1934 fall term, the
university lled “every available” room on campus and converted unused
portions of several buildings into living quarters. Forty-four students
in the school of medicine took rooms in the new hospital on campus.
Sixty-two athletes lived in sections of the gymnasium; eight members
of the football team bunked in the eld house next to the playing eld.
Twenty-six undergraduates lived in converted lecture halls and labo-
ratories in the old biology building.
63
Throughout the last year of Chancellor Alfred Hume’s tenure (the
1934-1935 school year) and Chancellor Alfred Butts’s rst year in ofce
(the 1935-1936 school year), the university attempted unsuccessfully to
57
Biennial Report, 1937, p. 27.
58
Oxford (Miss.) Eagle, July 21, 1938.
59
University (Miss.) Mississippian, September 18, 1937, p. 9
60
Ibid, November 12, 1937, p. 1.
61
Ibid, December 4, 1937, p. 1.
62
Biennial Report, 1935, p. 46.
63
University (Miss.) Mississippian, September 29, 1934, p. 4.
201 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
convince the state legislature to replace Gordon Hall and the bed-space
that had burned with it.
64
From the time of his appointment, Butts re-
peatedly identied the lack of housing at the university as the primary
impediment to increasing enrollment at the institution.
65
Relief for the
university’s housing shortage ultimately came through a series of PWA
projects. In addition to the Greek houses constructed between 1936 and
1938, the PWA built six new dormitories at the university in the spring
and summer of 1938.
66
Funding for the dorms came in a PWA package
of $438,181. Of the PWA money, $197,181 was an outright grant, and
$241,000 was a low-interest loan that the university could repay with
housing fees it charged students to occupy the new rooms.
67
Plans
called for the construction of four dormitories for male students with
the capacity to house 288 students and two dormitories for females with
space for 158 students.
68
In September 1938, students moved into the
new dorms, which the Oxford Eagle described as “ultra modern.”
69
The
Mississippian gushed that the living quarters featured “the latest and
most modern in campus room equipment” and made special note of the
maple furniture that adorned the individual rooms and the hardwood
and tile that lined the oors, baths, and showers of the halls.
70
The modern dormitories that the PWA built were part of a larger
project to “add impressiveness” to the university’s campus.
71
In addition
to the new dormitories, PWA money built a student union building that
housed eleven ofces, four guest bedrooms, three auditoriums, a post
ofce, a grill, a dancehall, a game room, a beauty parlor, and a barber
shop. The union’s main lobby and several other rooms contained stone
and marble replaces. The building’s south end opened to a terrace fur-
nished with umbrellas and porch furniture.
72
When the union opened in
the spring of 1939, its total cost exceeded $100,000. A direct PWA grant
provided for at least thirty-ve percent of the funding. The university
64
Biennial Report, 1935, p. 46; Biennial Report, 1937, p. 25.
65
Oxford (Miss.) Eagle, June 24, 1937.
66
University (Miss.) Mississippian, October 17, 1936, p. 1; Ibid, October 24, 1936, p. 12. The
headline in the Mississippian incorrectly identied the PWA as the WPA, but the text of the article
referred to the correct organization.
67
Oxford (Miss.) Eagle, September 2, 1937; Biennial Report, 1939, p. 21.
68
University (Miss.) Mississippian, September 18, 1937, p. 1.
69
Oxford (Miss.) Eagle, September 22, 1938.
70
University (Miss.) Mississippian, July 8, 1938, p. 1.
71
Ibid, October 14, 1939, p. 5.
72
Ibid, May 13, 1939, p. 5.
202 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
also paid some of the costs through the sale of timber from its holdings
in South Mississippi. Some $35,000 in funding came from the estate of
Rush C. Weir, a businessman from Vaiden, Mississippi, who bequeathed
over $100,000 to the university and for whom the trustees named the
union building.
73
Another result of the university’s courting of federal money was
an outdoor swimming pool. Nearly $15,000 from the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) went to the construction of the $23,000 pool,
which reached depths ranging from three to ten feet and was capable
of accommodating 750 swimmers at a time. A boardwalk surrounded
the pool, and construction included a refreshment stand and extensive
landscaping of the area between the gymnasium and the pool. The WPA
initially put up $13,000 for the project, with the university contributing
$7,000 of its own money. The pool was open to students, faculty, and staff
at the university, as well as white members of the public who paid a small
fee. Supervision and maintenance of the facility fell to the university’s
athletic department.
74
Poor weather conditions delayed construction
of the pool through March and April of 1936.
75
When the pool nally
opened in the summer of 1936, its total cost had risen to $23,296.40, with
the university paying $8,442.01 for the project and the WPA’s portion
coming to 14,854.39.
76
Two hundred sixteen feet long and ninety feet
wide, equipped with steel diving boards and a chlorination and ltration
system, the pool was “one of the most modern in the state.”
77
At rst glance, clear differences separated the erection of badly-need-
ed campus housing from the construction of expensive luxuries like a
modern swimming pool and an ample student union building. All of
these projects, though, were part of a larger plan to boost enrollment at
the University of Mississippi through the promotion of the institution.
Enrollment at the university declined, improved, and then plateaued
in the era of the Depression and the New Deal. During the 1928-1929
school year, 1,162 students attended the university’s regular sessions.
78
Between 1929 and 1933, the combined effects of the Depression and an
accreditation crisis that followed the Bilbo imbroglio caused enrollment
73
Ibid, October 14, 1939, p. 1.
74
Ibid, January 11, 1936, p. 1; Biennial Report, 1937, p. 27.
75
Ibid, April 18, 1936, p. 1.
76
Biennial Report, 1937, p. 27.
77
University (Miss.) Mississippian, September 19, 1936, p. 10.
78
Biennial Report, 1929, p. 9.
203 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
to plummet below 800 students. Beginning with the 1933-1934 session,
which coincided with the increased availability of federal money to as-
sist students whose families could not afford their tuition and the early
stages of the restoration of the university’s reputation, enrollment began
to climb until it settled around 1,400 for the duration of the 1930s.
79
From the time he became chancellor on July 1, 1935, Alfred Butts
identied increased enrollment as the key index of the health of the
institution and the best way to guarantee that the university served the
people of Mississippi. Butts repeatedly pleaded with trustees to pressure
the state legislature to allocate more money for campus housing. In
1937, he urged the state to give “earnest attention” to the inadequate
housing at the university and called the lack of dormitories “one of the
outstanding needs” of the institution.
80
Once the PWA dormitories en-
abled the university to house its existing students, Butts warned the
trustees that annual allocations from the State Building Commission
were “far from adequate” and that the university was having difculty
keeping older dormitories “in a state of preservation and in a livable
condition.”
81
Even when arrangements with the PWA permitted the
building of enough dormitories to solve the immediate housing short-
age, Butts expressed frustration that the state would not fund building
projects capable of increasing the university’s enrollment capacity.
Before a meeting of the Oxford Junior Chamber of Commerce in June
1937, Butts encouraged attendees to prod the state to make allocations
during the 1938 legislative session that would allow the university to
build for a greater future. “Give us the facilities,” the chancellor urged,
“and we’ll have 1700 students at the University within a year; 2000
students within ve years.”
82
Butts’s frustration with the refusal of the state legislature to replace
Gordon Hall or to make allocations that went beyond the matching funds
required by PWA grants was a product of a basic reality: the university
could not enroll more students if it could not physically house them. In
this way, constructing housing was about building up the university’s
future, not merely ensuring it could function in the present. Projects
79
For annual enrollment gures and general trends in these years, see the annual University
of Mississippi, Bulletin of the University of Mississippi, for 1928-1941, Special Collections, J. D.
Williams Library, University of Mississippi.
80
Biennial Report, 1937, p. 25.
81
Biennial Report, 1941, p. 30.
82
Oxford (Miss.) Eagle, June 24, 1937.
204 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
like the student union and the swimming pool did not literally produce
spaces to house students, but their construction was part of an active
campaign to “sell” the university and to make it more appealing to pro-
spective students.
83
In the spring of 1938, the university formed a faculty
committee on high school publicity and launched an aggressive plan to
increase enrollment by reaching out to towns and schools throughout
Mississippi. More than 7,000 white graduating high school seniors
received bulletins outlining the advantages of the university and high-
lighting its recent expansion and upgrades. Campus organizations sent
speakers to schools throughout the state, and the Omicron Delta Kappa
society produced a short publicity lm, “Ole Miss,” to be shown in every
town throughout the state. Fifty newspapers in the state received weekly
copies of a bulletin titled, “Your University,” which provided updates on
various developments on campus. The Mississippian challenged every
student at the university to “boost the school to your neighbors and
friends at home” and to encourage ve graduating high school seniors
in their hometown to come to Ole Miss.
84
On November 12, 1938, the university held its rst “high school
day.” The event brought 2,500 high school students from across Mis-
sissippi and from several counties in Tennessee and Arkansas to the
Oxford campus on the day of the football game between Ole Miss and
Sewanee. The day began with an assembly that featured addresses
from Chancellor Butts, the head coach of the football team, the captain
of the football team, and the president of the Associated Student Body.
Following the football game, interested students could attend open
houses on Fraternity Row or a tea hosted by the Pan-Hellenic society. A
theatrical performance and a dance provided evening entertainment.
85
The Mississippian pronounced the event a “big success” and reported
that all attendees “went away with a smile and a good word for the
University of Mississippi.”
86
It was, after all, an opportunity to show
that Ole Miss was “the friendliest school in the country.”
87
High school day and the campaign that led up to it were the cre-
ations of an institution in the process of developing modern techniques
for marketing and publicity. The selling of the University of Mississippi
83
University (Miss.) Mississippian, October 8, 1938, p. 3.
84
Ibid, March 5, 1938, p. 1; Ibid, April 9, 1938, p. 3; Ibid, May 21, 1938, p. 1
85
Ibid, November 12, 1938, p. 1.
86
Ibid, November 19, 1938, p. 3.
87
Ibid, November 12, 1938, p. 3.
205 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
to prospective students marked an important shift in the history of the
institution. Reaching out directly to towns and schools throughout the
state inverted the old process whereby local communities sent off their
young people to an unfamiliar and remote campus with which they
had limited direct contact and about which they had only vague ideas.
Now the university, in the form of touring speakers or various forms of
media, brought itself to the people of the state, or invited students to
make themselves at home on the Oxford campus. This program enabled
the university to promote itself by pointing—literally—to the concrete
buildings and material benets it could offer to prospective students,
not the spiritual or abstract atmosphere of an exclusive and mysterious
campus. Increasingly, Ole Miss was opening its doors to a larger number
of white Mississippians.
While recruitment programs brought larger numbers of high school
students to campus each year, and publicity campaigns kept interested
citizens all over the state informed about developments in Oxford, the
Ole Miss Rebels were becoming the embodiment of the institution for
many Mississippians—and for a growing number of people outside the
state. The name “Rebels” had emerged from a process with the explicit
purpose of increasing publicity for the university’s football team. During
the spring of 1936, the Mississippian acknowledged that “the Flood” and
“the Red and Blue” had failed to gain wide usage among journalists,
lamented that that the university’s football team “has no real nickname
with which to be properly identied,” and announced a contest for a new
nickname. In remarking upon the high expectations for the university’s
football squad in the fall of 1936, the paper emphasized the urgency of
efforts to “publicize the team” and noted that the selection of a “name
to catch the public eye and fancy” had become “essential.”
88
After two
weeks of “insufcient interest” in the contest, the Mississippian issued
a second call for submissions. In addition to re-issuing its call for nick-
names, the paper announced the formation of a “South-wide” selection
committee. The committee included three members of the university’s
alumni association; the outgoing and incoming presidents of the student
government; Ed Walker, the head coach of the football team; C. R. “Tex”
Nelson, the captain of 1935 football team; William Hemingway, the
chairman of the university’s athletic committee; and sportswriters from
newspapers in Jackson, Meridian, Memphis, New Orleans, Nashville,
88
Ibid, May 2, 1936, p. 5.
206 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
and Atlanta.
89
In this second round of solicitation, Ben Guider, an alumnus of the
university from Vicksburg, suggested “Rebels” as the nickname for the
school’s football team. In addition to its “short, musical, inspiring, [and]
simple” style, Guider wrote, the name carried the effect of calling “to
mind the glories of the Old South and that historic struggle of the Civil
War in which the State of Mississippi took so noble and outstanding
part, and for which every Mississippian should feel proud.” Sportswriters
from across the South apparently shared Guider’s logic; an overwhelming
majority of those who responded to a questionnaire from the university
chose the name from a list of possibilities that included “Raiders,” “Stone-
walls,” and “Confederates.” After approval by the university’s athletic
committee and its chancellor, “Rebels” became the ofcial nickname
for the school’s athletic teams in July 1936.
90
In announcing the new
nickname, the Mississippian pointed to its “news value” and predicted
that Rebels would “prove a valuable whip” in attracting attention to the
university’s football team. It was a name “suggestive of a spirit native
to the old south and particularly to Mississippi,” one which “not only
catches the sportswriters’ [sic] eye but also the eye of every sport fan.”
Because Rebels possessed “local color,” it would “enhance national in-
terest” in the institution.
91
Just as the Congressional realities of the era
made southern Democrats a much-watched group within the Democratic
Party and the New Deal coalition, an athletic team from the Deep South
held special appeal to sports fans across the nation. The following spring,
a goateed cartoon of an antebellum gentleman called “Colonel Rebel”
made his debut on the cover of the university’s yearbook.
92
Selecting a catchier nickname was one way to use athletics to boost
the university’s prole, but an ambitious national schedule represented
a more aggressive attempt at attracting publicity through the football
squad. Between 1933 and 1938, the university’s football team played
three times in Washington, DC, three times in Milwaukee, three times
in New Orleans, twice in Philadelphia, twice in St. Louis, and twice in
Miami. The 1936 season alone took the Rebels to six states and the Dis-
trict of Columbia. Nine off-campus engagements, including road games
89
Ibid, May 19, 1936, p. 1.
90
Ibid, September 19, 1936, p. 7; Ibid, October 24, 1936, p. 1; Sorrels and Cavagnaro, Ole
Miss Rebels, 107-109.
91
University (Miss.) Mississippian, September 26, 1936, p. 3.
92
Ole Miss, Volume XLI, 1937.
207 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
at Tulane, Temple, George Washington, Marquette, and the University
of Miami, contributed heavily to the 11,000 miles of train travel the
team logged that season.
93
On September 30, 1937, two planes carried
thirty-three players, coaches, and trainers from Memphis to Philadelphia
for a game with Temple, making the Ole Miss Rebels among the rst
college football teams to travel by air to a contest.
94
George Boehler, the
assistant coach and trainer who arranged the ights, calculated that
ying the squad out on a Thursday and back on a Sunday was more
efcient than traveling by train and paying for meals and lodging over
the course of a week. “Travel by air,” Boehler commented, “is denitely
a thing of the future for football teams.”
95
In a playful blend of new ideas
and old animosities, the Mississippian praised its Rebels and called air
travel a “tting entrance for a progressive team, returning to seek victory
and prestige among the doubtful Yankees.”
96
There were several reasons
that the University of Mississippi arranged for 11,000-mile seasons on
the road, week-long train trips, and airline ights for its football teams.
The most basic was that the schedules made the school money. Billy
Gates, the sports editor for the Mississippian, explained the team’s heavy
road schedule for 1936 by noting that the share of gate receipts from
games played as the visitor in front of crowds numbering in the tens of
thousands would bring in more money than hosting games in front of
small groups in Oxford. Ole Miss, Gates wrote, needed “all the money a
terric alien card can bring.”
97
In response to comments from students
at Mississippi State that ofcials at the University of Mississippi were
“losing the real point of the game in an effort to ll their athletic coffer,”
the Mississippian wrote, “[c]ollege football is a business proposition as
well as an entertaining feature of university life.” The university, the
paper concluded, would “prot in more ways than one” from such an
ambitious schedule.”
98
A national schedule also allowed alumni who had
moved out of Mississippi or surrounding sections of the Deep South to
reconnect with their university and former classmates. During the foot-
ball team’s trip to play Marquette during the 1935 season, for example,
alumni living in Chicago; Iowa City; Evanston, Illinois; and Madison,
93
University (Miss.) Mississippian, September 19, 1936, p. 7.
94
Ibid, September 18, 1937, p. 5.
95
Ibid, October 2, 1937, p. 6.
96
Ibid, October 2, 1937, p. 3.
97
Ibid, September 26, 1936, p. 6.
98
Ibid, October 3, 1936, p. 3.
208 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
Wisconsin met in Milwaukee, gathered behind the Ole Miss bench, and
shouted for the alma mater to “Give ‘em Hell.”
99
Beyond the direct monetary benets of gate receipts or the connec-
tions with far-ung alumni that a national schedule offered, sending the
football team on the road to play established powers brought publicity
and name recognition to the university. When the athletic committee
secured an invitation for the 1935 squad to play Catholic University in
the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day of 1936, the Mississippian wrote
with pride that the team had assumed a position as the “cynosure of the
football eyes of America.”
100
An appearance on such a prominent stage
promised to “mean more to the school than any appropriation ever could”
by providing “favorable advertisement” for the university.
101
Even when
Ole Miss lost games, as it did in that Orange Bowl and in many of its
intersectional contests between 1933 and 1938, it won when it traveled
by moving the university “into the national spotlight of sport fans.”
102
By squaring off the Rebels with national opponents, in other words, the
University of Mississippi was afrming its ties to the rest of the nation,
not engaging in another act of civil war with feared or hated outsiders.
To play more favorable schedules and to host more games in Ox-
ford, the university had to expand and upgrade its athletic facilities.
Beginning in the fall of 1934, New Deal money played a direct role in
the promotion and building up of Ole Miss’s football team. That October,
William Hemingway, chairman of the university’s athletics commit-
tee, secured funds from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration
(FERA) to begin the process of converting a dusty campus football eld
into a modern stadium. First, the construction of “a heavy wire fence . .
. of the most modern type” made it “impossible for one to enter the eld
other than through the gates.” Second, FERA workers built walkways
to and from the football eld and the bleachers that alleviated the prob-
lems of “dust or mud” making playing conditions difcult and negatively
affecting the experience of fans. FERA workers also erected a press box
made of pine, tin, and brick above the bleachers that surrounded the
eld. This was a “most needed addition,” as visiting reporters had found
it “especially distasteful . . . to write up games without shelter or nec-
essary materials.” What was more, a modern press box, equipped with
99
Ibid, November 2, 1935, p. 4.
100
Ibid, December 14, 1935, p. 1.
101
Ibid, December 4, 1935, p. 3.
102
Ibid, October 2, 1937, p. 3.
209 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
“wires direct to Western Union,” ensured “that no time will be lost in
dispatching details of games.”
103
Fred Glass, the editor of the Mississippi-
an, called the construction of the press box “one of the wisest moves that
could be made in the interest of the University.” According to Glass, Ole
Miss received “less publicity than perhaps any university in the South.”
The student editor attributed the “near hostility on the part of various
newspapermen” to the lack of appropriate facilities at the institution.
A press box that would make covering games at the university more
convenient for regional dailies, Glass assured the administration, “will
more than repay the cost of its construction in additional publicity for
the University.”
104
The early allotment of FERA funds for upgrades to the football eld
was only an opening sequence in a larger series of federal aid to the
Rebel athletic program. In November 1936, Congressman Wall Doxey
assisted Chancellor Butts in securing funds from the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) to build a planned $54,000 concrete football stadi-
um at the university.
105
Delays in approval at the state level meant that
construction on Hemingway Stadium did not begin until the following
summer. Work continued throughout the 1937 football season.
106
The
WPA provided $37,500 for the stadium, and the university’s athletic
committee contributed an additional $12,500 to the project. The initial
phase of construction involved the clearing of ground, the removal of
2,400 existing bleachers, and building concrete grandstands capable of
seating 9,500 spectators.
107
By Thanksgiving of 1937, workers had com-
pleted two concrete sections with a seating capacity of 2,400 and erected
wooden bleachers capable of holding an additional 19,600 spectators.
108
On May 11, 1938, the university received an additional grant of $28,348
from the WPA.
109
Before workers had completed the new concrete stands
on the stadium’s west side, a third grant in January of 1939 provided
funds necessary to build identical stands on the stadium’s east side. This
grant brought the total sum of WPA aid for the stadium to $72,908. WPA
103
Ibid, October 27, 1934, p. 1; Ibid, November 3, 1934, p. 6.
104
Ibid, October 6, 1934, p. 2.
105
Ibid, November 21, 1936, p. 1.
106
Ibid, October 23, 1937, p. 6.
107
Oxford Eagle, July 22, 1937; Chancellor Butts and the university’s athletic committee
began working in October 1936 to secure WPA funding for the stadium project. University (Miss.)
Mississippian, October 24, 1936, p. 12.
108
University (Miss.) Mississippian, October 30, 1937, p. 4.
109
Ibid, May 21, 1938, p. 1.
210 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
aid also provided for the construction of a sprinkler system underneath
the football eld, a new practice eld for the football team, a baseball
diamond, and several tennis courts. When workers completed the east
side stands in 1941, Hemingway Stadium had a permanent seating
capacity of over 19,000 and temporary room for several thousand more
spectators.
110
Thus when 28,000 spectators overowed Hemingway
Stadium a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor to watch Ole Miss
and Mississippi State square off for the Southeastern Conference cham-
pionship, they were occupying a monument to the benets derived from
the federal government.
No person who walked the University of Mississippi’s campus during
the era of the New Deal could have ignored the material benets and
physical changes that federal programs brought to the institution. But
the university underwent a transformation of expectations and ideas
during this era that extended beyond the overhaul and expansion of
its physical plant. As early as September 1933, leading students at the
university spoke of “our ‘New Deal’ here on the campus” and called for
the “undivided support and enthusiastic cooperation of the student body”
in the pursuit of a “University of Mississippi like we have dreamed of
and desired—a competent and sympathetic administration, the ofcial
respect of the state and South, a beautiful and well-equipped institu-
tion, a growing student body, and above all a cheerful spirit of optimism
and determination that will overcome any obstacles.”
111
A year later,
Fred Glass of the Mississippian described the campus as “imbued with
a new spirit of optimism and self-condence unequal in the history of
the institution.”
112
Throughout the era, students watched their campus
transform so rapidly as to make it possible “to look ahead and see a real
change.”
113
The continuous development of campus and the stacking of
projects had the effect of producing tangible evidence that the university
had “reached a new era of progress” and entered the “topmost point in its
existence.” More importantly, the New Deal created an expectation that
more programs and more building were coming—that the university, in
other words, was “still marching forward to even higher standards.”
114
New Deal projects made the development of the University of Missis-
110
Ibid, February 11, 1939, p. 1; Ibid, May 9, 1941.
111
Ibid, September 23, 1933, p. 2.
112
Ibid, October 27, 1934, p. 2.
113
Ibid, May 18, 1935, p. 2.
114
Ibid, July 8, 1938, p. 1.
211 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
sippi material and tangible; the future of the institution was becoming
something to see, touch, and experience.
Students at the University of Mississippi were loyal Democrats and
enthusiastic New Dealers. Beyond championing funding that directly
beneted their institution, several editors of the Mississippian promot-
ed New Deal programs “foreign to [the university’s] local interests.”
115
Following the 1934 midterm elections, the Mississippian cheered the
Democratic landslide as “the most convincing display of condence
that has as yet been evidenced by the American people in Roosevelt
and the New Deal.” The paper attributed the poor performance of the
Republicans “to the fact that they have not issued a constructive idea or
plan during the past two years.” In contrast, the Democrats had “gone
forward” and responded to the nation’s desire for “aggressive, inspired
leadership.”
116
In advance of the 1936 presidential election, a poll found
that 82 percent of students at the university favored President Franklin
D. Roosevelt over his challengers.
117
The Mississippian explained the
wide support that Roosevelt enjoyed at the university and among college
students nationally by stating that “the youth of today is liberal in its
thinking.” The experience of living through the Depression and observing
the benets of aggressive public assistance and development, the paper
concluded, had convinced young white Americans of the necessity of “a
government that will be able to take care of the needs of its people.”
118
The embrace of the New Deal and the championing of ambitious
and innovative expansions of government programs kept students at
the University of Mississippi in step with the political leaders of their
state. In 1934, Theodore G. Bilbo won election to the U.S. Senate by
pledging to support Roosevelt and the New Deal. Once in Washington,
Bilbo, in the words of Chester M. Morgan, “backed the president faith-
fully” and “marched on with enthusiasm” “as a loyal soldier in the New
Deal army.” Bilbo’s voting record on relief spending, labor legislation,
public housing, and additional programs of social and economic welfare
made him one of the strongest and most reliable supporters of the New
Deal.
119
His support for the New Deal may have been notable for its
115
Ibid, October 20, 1934, p. 3.
116
Ibid, November 10, 1934, p. 2.
117
Ibid, October 24, 1936, p. 1.
118
Ibid, November 7, 1936, p. 3.
119
Chester M. Morgan, Redneck Liberal: Theodore G. Bilbo and the New Deal (Baton Rouge:
LSU Press, 1985), 57-77; 161-185; quotations from 161 and 185.
212 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
tenacity and endurance, but Mississippi’s congressional delegation as a
whole offered reliable and prominent support for Roosevelt’s programs.
A 1937 biographical sketch described Pat Harrison, the state’s senior
U.S. Senator, as the “right hand man of President Franklin D. Roos-
evelt” and boasted of Harrison’s role in the creation of the Agricultural
Adjustment Administration, the passage of the Social Security Act, and
the winning of appropriations for secondary education and a number of
public works programs.
120
Congressman John Elliot Rankin of Tupelo
and the state’s rst district was likewise “a rm administration man.”
121
In 1936, a staggering 97 percent of voters in Mississippi voiced their
support for the New Deal by backing Roosevelt.
122
At the state level, politicians experimented with New Deal-style
programs. Under the rst administration of Governor Hugh L. White
(1936-1940), Mississippi enacted an aggressive plan of economic devel-
opment known as Balance Agriculture With Industry (BAWI). Under
BAWI, a state industrial commission oversaw the public nancing of
manufacturing plants throughout Mississippi with the intent of devel-
oping the state’s local communities through outside investment. Twelve
rms ultimately came to Mississippi under BAWI. Though only two of the
new plants—the Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula and the Armstrong Tire
and Rubber Company in Natchez—brought high-wage, heavy-industry
jobs to the state, BAWI improved the economic prospects for depressed
local communities and enhanced rates of consumption and tax reve-
nues throughout the state. Connie L. Lester has referred to BAWI as a
“home-grown New Deal” and notes that the program “mimicked New
Deal initiatives” by creating a two-tiered system of state sponsorship and
local operation. More broadly, the ambitious plan adhered to the spirit
of the New Deal by moving Mississippi towards state-sponsored devel-
opment and central planning. BAWI reected a “breathtaking change
in attitude,” as “ [f]or the rst time in the state’s history, Mississippi
actively sought and accepted responsibility for economic growth and the
general welfare of its citizens.”
123
120
W. H. Grayson, “Pat Harrison,” The New Mississippi: A Magazine Dedicated to the
Achievements of the New Administration (Jackson, MS: Bedford F. Pace, 1937), 16.
121
“John Elliot Rankin,” The New Mississippi: A Magazine Dedicated to the Achievements of
the New Administration (Jackson, MS: Bedford F. Pace, 1937), 81.
122
Katznelson, Fear Itself, 165.
123
Connie L. Lester, “Balancing Agriculture with Industry: Capital, Labor, and the Public
Good in Mississippi’s Home-Grown New Deal,” Journal of Mississippi History, LVII, no. 3 (Fall
2008), 235-263; quotations from 235, 237, 247, and 262.
213 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
During White’s administration, communities across Mississippi
attempted to sell and market themselves in ways that resembled the
publicity project at the state university in Oxford. The unifying theme
of municipal promotion was the modernity of the state’s local places and
their potential for future development. The city of Gulfport pointed to
its brand new $1.5 million pier, forty-mile seawall, $350,000 recreation
center, and $885,000 yarn mill in explaining why its citizens were “highly
optimistic over the future development” of the city.
124
Boosters for Lau-
rel advertised their community as one that had made the “transition
from a primitive wilderness into a thriving city of 25,000 people in a
comparatively few short years” and assured potential investors that
“Laurel is looking just as far down the future’s path as possible.”
125
In
Brookhaven, “a thriving and wide-awake industrial center,” citizens
believed in “doing things now, instead of trying to live up to their past
reputation.”
126
Meridian, which advertised itself as “the commercial hub
of eastern Mississippi and western Alabama,” boasted that it had “made
more industrial, agricultural and commercial growth in the years of 1934,
1935, and 1936 than during the entire preceding quarter of a century!”
127
The expansion of natural gas and electric services and the recent con-
struction of “schools, academies, churches, paved thoroughfares, new
sand beaches, and seawalls” ensured that Biloxi, “a city of progress,”
was “truly up-to-date in every respect.”
128
In Hattiesburg, where the
population had increased from 8,000 to 21,000 between 1900 and 1937,
the chamber of commerce conceded that “[t]here may be somewhere in
these United States a more desirable place to live,” but concluded, “if
that be true, then a benecent providence has thoughtfully hidden such
a place from the ken of man!”
129
As Mississippi’s congressional delegation enthusiastically supported
124
M. P. Smith, “Port of Gulfport: Mississippi’s ‘Gateway to the Seven Seas,’” The New
Mississippi: A Magazine Dedicated to the Achievements of the New Administration (Jackson, MS:
Bedford F. Pace, 1937), 48.
125
“Laurel and Jones County,” The New Mississippi: A Magazine Dedicated to the
Achievements of the New Administration (Jackson, MS: Bedford F. Pace, 1937), 58-59.
126
“Brookhaven,” The New Mississippi: A Magazine Dedicated to the Achievements of the
New Administration (Jackson, MS: Bedford F. Pace, 1937), 61.
127
“City of Meridian, An Ably Managed Municipality,” The New Mississippi: A Magazine
Dedicated to the Achievements of the New Administration (Jackson, MS: Bedford F. Pace, 1937), 66.
128
“Biloxi—City of Paradise and Progress,” The New Mississippi: A Magazine Dedicated to
the Achievements of the New Administration (Jackson, MS: Bedford F. Pace, 1937), 73-74.
129
“Hattiesburg and Progress Are Synonymous,” The New Mississippi: A Magazine Dedicated
to the Achievements of the New Administration (Jackson, MS: Bedford F. Pace, 1937), 77.
214 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
an expansive federal program with dramatic implications for the nation’s
physical landscape, political system, and economy; its state government
embraced a new role in the planning of the economy and the promotion
of public welfare; and its local communities imagined unlimited eco-
nomic development and growth, one old idea remained safely protected
from challenge or alteration: that Mississippi was and would remain a
white man’s country.
130
At the state level, BAWI ofcials blocked black
Mississippians from the overwhelming majority of new industrial jobs.
Advertisements from local communities and promotional materials
from chambers of commerce did not count African Americans when
they compiled statistics of available laborers. When Armstrong Tire and
Rubber Company hired a small number of black workers at its Natchez
plant, the industrial commission sought assurances from the rm that it
would set wages for African Americans well below the wages for white
workers. As Connie Lester has noted, BAWI regulations “intended to
sustain . . . Mississippi’s nely crafted racial” arrangements. Even in
communities where BAWI plants modernized the local economy, black
Mississippians “would continue to provide cheap agricultural labor in
a sharecropping system built on white supremacy.”
131
Experiments in
economic development were safe—desirable, in fact—so long as they
elevated white Mississippians while keeping African Americans in their
special place in the state.
On the national level, the support that Bilbo and other Democrats
from the South offered to the New Deal granted tremendous leverage to
proponents of white supremacy. As Ira Katznelson has demonstrated,
southern Democrats held votes that Roosevelt (and later Harry Truman)
simply could not lose if they wanted to pass domestic or international
legislation. “The Jim Crow South,” in Katznelson’s words, “was the
one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without.”
132
The
Democratic South used this position to great effect—not merely in pro-
tecting white supremacy, but in strengthening its structural basis. For
Roosevelt’s rst term and into the early years of his second, southern
130
This phrase, of course, borrows from Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Central Theme of Southern
History,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Oct. 1928), 31. As Katznelson notes, it is
not insignicant that Phillips wrote his famous essay late in the 1920s and that his thesis “expressed
the era’s common sense across the ideological and racial spectrum.” Katznelson, Fear Itself, 136-
138.
131
Lester, “Balancing Agriculture with Industry,” 238, 258.
132
Katznelson, Fear Itself, 95.
215 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
Democrats felt condent that “economic policies crafted in Washington
might transform [the South]’s desperate plight without endangering
Jim Crow.” In other words, for a time it was possible to support the
New Deal fully, bring home federal money to states and congressional
districts, and not worry that federal policies would alter the region’s
racial arrangements. Even after the second half of the 1930s, when
anxieties increased regarding the potential effects of labor legislation
and other programs on racial hierarchies, southern Democrats used
“strategic voting behavior” and temporary “coalitions” to block or alter
laws that might have undermined white supremacy.
133
Whether sup-
porting or blocking federal legislation, segregationists took an active
and commanding role in securing the rigidity of the color line.
Because state policies barred African Americans from holding BAWI
positions and congressional voting behavior blocked federal legislation
from undermining Jim Crow, it became possible for Mississippians to
imagine that economic development and aggressively forward-thinking
planning could proceed without altering existing racial arrangements.
On a smaller scale, a similar pattern emerged at the University of Missis-
sippi. During the course of Ole Miss’s New Deal, administrators worked
with federal and state ofcials to nd innovative means of funding and
building up the university, and students at the institution heralded the
coming of a new era and celebrated all forms of material progress on
campus. In various ways, the university community embraced new ideas
for the future during this era. Ideas about white supremacy, however,
underwent no such alteration.
A telling example of the strengthening of the old racial ways came
in September 1936, when the university responded to a crisis involving
a cherished gure named James E. Ivy. Known on the campus as “Blind
Jim,” Ivy was a black man who had been born in Alabama in 1872 and
had come to north Mississippi in the 1890s. He lost his sight permanently
after an accident while painting a bridge over the Tallahatchie River in
1894. Beginning in 1896, Ivy made a living by selling candy and peanuts
to students on the university’s campus. His booming voice made him
famous for his cheers and yells at sporting events, and Ivy became a
133
Ibid, 156-194; quotations on 161 and 194.
216 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
beloved gure at the university.
134
On September 26, 1936, the Missis-
sippian announced that the “loveable old Negro,” a “vital part of this
institution for many years,” was in danger of losing his home through
foreclosure and called on students and alumni to raise money to assist
Ivy.
135
Subsequent notes in the paper explained that “the old ‘darkey’”
was $450 behind on a two-year-old loan that he had used to build “a one-
room shanty” on the outskirts of Oxford. The Mississippian reminded
students and alumni that “Jim is an integral part of the university.”
136
Aid to Ivy came from a variety of sources. Fifty-ve black cafeteria
workers, the employees with whom Ivy ate lunch each day, pooled money
from their paychecks for him.
137
Students contributed a small sum as
well. The overwhelming majority of the money came from alumni of the
university. In announcing that the university community had paid off
Ivy’s debt, the Mississippian described Ivy as a “faithful negro,” free of
“troubles,” and now holding “in his trembling hands for the rst in over
three years” the “deed of trust on his humble dwelling.”
138
The Jackson
Daily News described Ivy as a “harmless, inoffensive, lovable old darkey,
loyal unto death to the team, and always the most enthusiastic rooter
for any form of sport, whether the home boys were winning or losing.”
The paper explained that, while Ivy had “borrowed beyond his ability”
and possessed “no way to pay” his mortgage, he “didn’t worry much,”
as he “felt sure white folks would come to his rescue.” For the Jackson
Daily News, the saving of Ivy’s home was evidence of a basic truth that
“while folks who dwell above the Mason and Dixon line” would never
understand: “Down here we love our Negroes and our Negroes love us.
We are willing and ready to go to the limit for them and they are ready
and willing to do the same thing for us.”
139
On one level, the language and images in the coverage of the Ivy
affair were notable for the cartoonish and paternalistic tropes that
newspapers used to discuss Ivy and his white saviors. More signicantly,
134
For discussions of Ivy, his background, and his signicance at the university, see: Anthony
James, “Paternalism’s Demise: Blind Jim Ivy and Ole Miss, 1896-1955,” Mississippi Folklife,
Volume 28, No. 1 (Winter/Spring 1995), 17-24; Charles W. Eagles, The Price of Deance: James
Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
2009), 43-48; Sansing, The University of Mississippi, 275-276.
135
University (Miss.) Mississippian, September 26, 1936, p. 3.
136
University (Miss.) Mississippian, October 17, 1936, p. 6; Ibid, October 24, 1936, p. 3.
137
Ibid, October 24, 1936, p. 1.
138
Ibid, November 21, 1936, p. 3.
139
Jackson Daily News, November 17, 1936, p. 6.
217 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
though, the affair revealed that the New Deal had actually strengthened
the old racial ways by putting further distance between white and black
southerners. Consider, for example, the different living conditions that
distinguished students at the University of Mississippi from Jim Ivy
or the other African American employees with whom he took his noon
meal each day. Thanks to the New Deal, students walked a scenic and
beautied campus, one undergoing continuous expansion and lled with
newly built and freshly renovated buildings and classrooms. Some lived
in PWA-built dormitories that featured maple furniture, hardwood oors,
and tiled showers; others occupied PWA-built fraternity and sorority
houses that included such amenities as sun parlors. For entertainment,
students could swim in a brand-new, two-hundred-foot pool or play in
the game room of the new student union. Ivy, by contrast, occupied a
small lot on the outskirts of town and lived in what the Mississippian
referred to variously as a “shack” or a “one-room shanty.”
140
For enter-
tainment, none of these new facilities would have been available to Ivy
or any African Americans who worked at the university. Throughout the
state, bowling alleys, roller rinks, and tennis courts were for whites only.
Until World War II, not a single swimming pool existed in Mississippi
that was open to blacks.
141
In April 1937, a feature in the Mississippian reported on the summer
destinations of students at the university. Some planned to vacation in
England, Scotland, Mexico, Pasadena, California, and Chautauqua, New
York. Others had accepted scholarships for summer study at institu-
tions including the University of Virginia. The feature concluded with
a description of the summer plans of an African American woman who
worked in one of the campus’s dormitories: “And Isom Hall’s Jetty said,
punctuating her remarks with gum as she made a bed,” the passage
began, “‘I’s gwine work, But Ah hopes to git a month off and ef Ah do den
Ah’s gwine play ‘round a little. Ah’s gwine pick cotton an’ wuk my garden
an’ raise chickens an’ enjoy mysef. Ah’s gwine com’ back to wuk.’”
142
Ivy,
Jetty, and other black presences at the university may have played, as
students and alumni put it, “an integral part” in life on the campus,
but it was a circumscribed and limited part. Although “an entirely new
student body passed through the portals of this institution every four
140
University (Miss.) Mississippian, October 17, 1936, p. 6; Ibid, October 24, 1936, p. 1.
141
Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1989), 10-11.
142
University (Miss.) Mississippian, April 24, 1937, p. 5.
218 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
years,” the Mississippian noted, gures like Ivy and Jetty remained
“here all the time.”
143
As the university modernized, built itself up, and
opened its doors to a wider community of white Mississippians—in other
words, as it became a laboratory for white democracy—stories about
Blind Jim Ivy’s shanty or Jetty’s chickens indexed white progress against
black immobility. Ambitious programs for expansion and experimental
forms of development threatened nothing so long as white supremacy
appeared secure. In the halls of Congress, white Mississippians could
observe southern politicians who had achieved mastery and control of
federal policy regarding race. At home, an ambitious plan for diversi-
fying the state’s economy was underway and had secured guarantees
that outside investors would do nothing to upset or alter Mississippi’s
racial ways in hiring or compensation. And at the university in Oxford,
white students occupied sparkling new dormitories and attended class
on a growing campus, black men who depended on the charity of white
folks peddled peanuts and candies and shared witticisms with fresh-
men, and black maids chewed gum while they contentedly changed
linens. The New Deal had opened new possibilities for the University
of Mississippi and made possible the building of a more democratic and
more economically prosperous future. It had not, however, imperiled
the state’s most important and most cherished founding myth. If expe-
rience was any lesson, no reasonable observer of life at the University
of Mississippi would have imagined that more federal money and more
ambitious expansion would endanger the white democracy that had
become integral to the institution’s identity and future.
In revealing the future that segregation seemed to make possible
for one community of white southerners, this article suggests two areas
that historians might explore throughout the larger Jim Crow South.
First, scholars might investigate what southern universities developed,
not just what they represented. Even institutions like the University of
Mississippi, one which as a cultural symbol has seemed to embody the
past-obsessed and tradition-bound South, have served as mechanisms
for social mobility and sites for the production of knowledge. Second,
given that the segregationists who built institutions like the University
of Mississippi did so with their eyes and minds on the future, scholars
might investigate the interior dynamics of Jim Crow by examining
what it seemed to make possible, not by explaining how it responded to
143
“Help Blind Jim,” Mississippian, September 26, 1936, p. 3.
219 OLE MISS’S NEW DEAL
external threats. Invented traditions and violent acts of reaction may
not have prevented the desegregation of the South, but they apparently
have succeeded in presenting Jim Crow as a xed order to be defended,
not an expansive project in development. If white supremacists and
segregationists built a world designed to fulll their aspirations, perhaps
contemporary historians can tell fuller stories about the southern past
by recovering the futures that the region’s planners envisioned.
220 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY
