Building Louisiana: The Legacy of the Public Works Administration

7. Universities

C H A P T E R 7 UNIVERSITIES In the early 1930s Louisianans’ interest in higher education was growing rapidly. The state’s colleges and universities, most less than a decade old, were housed in makeshift quarters. Few had permanent buildings. Louisiana State University (LSU), the flagship in Baton Rouge of this newly carpentered fleet, was making progress toward adequate facilities on its new suburban campus when the Depression began. The institution had moved from its original downtown site and was settling into new Italian Renaissance–style buildings and grounds designed by Theodore C. Link, the architect of St. Louis’s grand Romanesque revival Union Station.1 But momentum was not lost during the national economic crisis, because in 1930 Governor Huey Long took an interest in LSU. Only two years into his term, Long saw the university as a venue for political theatrics that might propel him to higher office. He tripled the size of the marching band and marched at its head in parades. He cheered for the football team and, to the growing irritation of its coach, tried to design new plays for it to run. Most important, he engineered a scheme for new construction.2 Long wanted to build a new capitol on land recently vacated by the university, so he had the university sell it to the state for a handsome, some said inflated, price. The questionable legality of one branch of the government selling land to another was brushed aside, and LSU was able to continue building. One of the products of this windfall was a field house named after Long and sporting a swimming pool that he made certain was the longest in the country. Another was a music and drama building, designed, like the field house, by the state’s premier architects: Weiss, 92 UNIVERSITIES 93 Dreyfous, and Seiferth. This facility would provide an inspiration to the regional colleges that, with the help of the Public Works Administration (PWA), would soon be able to construct their own performing arts centers. The other institutions of higher education in the state, not enjoying Long’s personal attention, were in much poorer shape. The science building at Hammond Junior College (later Southeastern Louisiana University)3 was a former barn with a leaking roof, termites, and a rotting foundation.4 When asked whether he had inspected the engineering building at the Louisiana Polytechnic Institute in Ruston, State Superintendent of Education T. H. Harris replied: ‘‘I went in that building once before and I was lucky to get out alive.’’5 Despite the obvious need for new facilities, the regional institutions were slow to take advantage of the opportunity posed by the PWA. But LSU was not reticent. It launched a proposal in 1934 for four women’s dormitories, a classroom building, and an addition to the student store in the field house. The total cost of the project was over $1 million. Approval, however, was not soon in coming. The PWA’s Finance Division had doubts about the university’s ability to cover the loan it was seeking . The initial concern was the university’s authority to issue bonds. That question was rendered moot by Long’s state legislation requiring the state’s approval for any borrowing or any spending of federal money and by the PWA’s responding freeze of all Louisiana projects. While LSU’s proposal was in limbo, the university took advantage of the Civil Works Administration (CWA), which, with its emphasis on labor-intensive activities, was a natural for a project that involved taking a building apart, moving it, and reassembling it in another location. LSU was moving to its new campus. Most of the downtown buildings were left behind, but there was one, Alumni Hall, that university officials wanted to take with them. Workers hired by the CWA moved it, bit by bit, to the bluff west of the quad and next to the gym/armory. It is now home to the School of Journalism. The reason the state’s institutions of higher education moved slowly to use the PWA to expand their facilities might be found in popular opinion that elementary and secondary education had more pressing needs. An August 23, 1934, editorial in the New Orleans States denounced LSU’s collaboration in Long’s financial extravagances and his ‘‘exploitation of higher education at the expense of community institutions, the kindergarten, pri- 94 CULTURAL...