History of the Medical College of Georgia

11. The Early Depression Years

Chapter Eleven The Early Depression Years national average, skidded dramatically after Wall Street's Great Crash. There simply was not enough state money to go around. Following the collapse of the price of cotton and cottonseed after World War I and the disastrous attack of the boll weevil, the Crash that hit the state in 1929 forced many of Georgia's farmers to or below the subsistence level. Between 1929 and 1932, farm prices, which were already dangerously low, fell 60 percent. Gross farm income per person sagged from $206 to $83.! Georgia was still a rural state, and by 1930 its mood bordered on desperation. Into this picture came a young man from Winder by the name of Richard Brevard Russell, elected to the governor's office in 1930. His call during the campaign was for drastic reorganization in order to simplify and economize the functions and services of government. He secured the Reorganization Act of 1931, which cut the number of state agencies in the executive arm of government to nineteen from almost one hundred. His budget of the same year gave the governor more authority on the question of state expenditures, but it was reorganization that was to affect MCG most dramatically. One adjunct of state government that was restructured was the University System. Since Hill's day the System had grown rather like Topsy —and it was just as ungainly. By 1931 there were twenty-eight schools that considered themselves to be institutions of higher learning—or colleges —within the System, each with its own governing board. The Medical College of Georgia was one of these schools. The state, faced with the distinct possibility of bankruptcy but also anxious to support a school 145 Georgia's economic indicators, already well below the G 146 The Medical College of Georgia system that was a credit to its citizens, had to ask itself a series of difficult questions—and face up to a set of even more difficult answers—during this tortuous period. Was it not proper, for example, that the weaker schools in the system be weeded out so the legislature could support the stronger institutions more effectively? Most appropriate for MCG, was it really prudent for Georgia to continue making a substantial financial investment in a school that seemed perpetually on the brink of crisis with one accrediting agency after another? An allied question: should Georgia taxpayers continue to have their money channeled into the Augusta institution when there now was a sound, accredited, centrally located, nationally recognized medical college at Emory in Atlanta? What was the benefit, then, in duplication of services, particularly when there was so little public money to disperse and when the appropriations for MCG might be applied so fruitfully elsewhere? These were issues the state had to ponder seriously during the Depression crisis, and they also dominated the history of the Medical College of Georgia during the decade of the 1930s.2 In its determination to bring order from educational chaos the Georgia legislature created a single board of regents in 1931. This body was given authority over all the member schools in the System whose own boards of directors or trustees were abolished at the time the state board was established . Although created in 1931, the board of regents did not begin functioning until January 1932, and assumed complete control of the schools under it only in the spring of 1933. In spite of the funding difficulties that seemed to strike at the very existence of the school, and in the face of signs and portents in the sky, the MCG faculty quarreled over the makeup of the executive committee. Richard Lamar, who had caused the issue to come to a head by his first resignation from the faculty, brought up the issue again in 1930. Under the control of the local physicians and part-timers, the committee balked at letting the full-time faculty have an equal voice in the formulation of MCG policy. Goodrich himself, although not full-time, agreed with Lamar, but found himself outvoted on the committee by Murphey and Asbury Hull (clinical professor of surgery) and their allies, who retained control of the executive committee. Early in 1931 this group grilled (there is no other word to describe it) two of the most distinguished full-time faculty members on how they spent their working days, whether they were careful in their duties, what [3.137.174.216] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 05:04 GMT...