History of Georgia Tech/to Do - World War I

World War I

Includes the administration of Kenneth G. Matheson (1906–1922)

Upon his hiring in 1904, John Heisman (for whom the Heisman Trophy is named) insisted that the school acquire its own football field. Previously, the team had used area parks, especially the playing fields of Piedmont Park. Georgia Tech took out a seven-year lease on what is now the southern end of Grant Field, although the land was not adequate for sports, due to its unleveled, rocky nature. In 1905, Heisman had 300 convict laborers clear rocks, remove tree stumps, and level out the field for play; Tech students then built a grandstand on the property. The land was purchased by 1913, and John W. Grant donated $15,000 ($352,700 today) towards the construction of the field's first permanent stands. The field was named Grant Field in honor of the donor's deceased son, Hugh Inman Grant.

Attempts at forming an alumni association had been made since 1896; a charter was applied for by J. B. McCrary and William H. Glenn on June 28, 1906 and was approved by Fulton County on June 20, 1908. The Georgia Tech Alumni Association published its first annual report in 1908, but the group was largely dormant during World War I. The organization played an important role in the 1920s Greater Georgia Tech Campaign, which consolidated all existing alumni clubs and funded a significant expansion of Georgia Tech's campus.

Georgia Tech's Evening School of Commerce began holding classes in 1912. The school admitted its first female student in 1917, although the state legislature did not officially authorize attendance by women until 1920. Anna Teitelbaum Wise became the first female graduate in 1919 and went on to become Georgia Tech's first female faculty member the following year.

World War I caused several changes at the school. During the conflict and for some time afterwards, Georgia Tech hosted a school for cadet aviators, supply officers, and army technicians. Tech also started a Reserve Officer Training Corps unit; the first in the Southern United States, it became a permanent addition to the school. World War I affected the school academically as well: the United States government asked for and financed an automotive school for army officers, a rehabilitation program for disabled soldiers, and a geology department. Federal aid also helped to establish Tech's Industrial Education Department, courtesy of the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. The war also placed on hold extensive fundraising efforts for a new power plant, and made it difficult to find engineers willing to teach at the school; Matheson toured Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and MIT in 1919 but failed to secure a single hire, as none of the students wished to work for such low wages.

The bitter rivalry between Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia flared up in 1919, when UGA mocked Tech's continuation of football during the United States' involvement in World War I. Because Tech was a military training ground, it had a complete assembly of male students. Many schools, such as UGA, lost all of their able-bodied male students to the war effort, forcing them to temporarily suspend football during the war. In fact, UGA did not play a game from 1917 to 1918.

When UGA renewed its program in 1919, their student body staged a parade which mocked Tech's continuation of football during times of war. The parade featured a tank-shaped float marked "Argonne" with a sign "Georgia in France 1917" followed by an automobile with three people in Tech sweaters and caps bearing a sign "Tech in Atlanta". A printed program was subsequently distributed in the stands with a similar point. While the Tech faculty was able to prevent a riot, no apology was made, and this act led directly to Tech cutting athletic ties with UGA and canceling several of UGA's home football games at Grant Field (UGA commonly used Grant Field as its home field). Tech and UGA did not compete in athletics until the 1921 Southern Conference basketball tournament. Despite intense pressure on Tech to make amends, Matheson stated that he would never change his mind unless "due apologies" were offered, and if he was overruled, he would resign. Regular season competition did not renew until after Matheson's retirement, in a 1925 agreement between the two institutions negotiated by athletic directors J. B. Crenshaw and S. V. Sanford.

In 1916 Georgia Tech's football team, still coached by John Heisman, defeated Cumberland 222-0, the largest margin of victory in college football history. Cumberland's total net yardage was -28 (minus 28), and it had only one play for positive yards. Cumberland beat Georgia Tech's baseball team 22 to 0 the previous year, reportedly with the help of professional players Cumberland had hired as "ringers", an act which infuriated Heisman. Heisman amassed 104 wins over 16 seasons and led Tech to its first national title in 1917. After divorcing from his wife, Heisman moved to Pennsylvania in 1919, leaving Tech's Yellow Jackets in the hands of William Alexander.

In its first decades, Georgia Tech slowly grew from a trade school into a university. The state and federal governments provided little initiative for the school to grow significantly until 1919. That year, the Georgia General Assembly passed an act entitled "Establishing State Engineering Experiment Station at the Georgia School of Technology". This change coincided with federal debate about the establishment of Engineering Experiment Stations in a move similar to the Hatch Act of 1887's establishment of agricultural experiment stations; each Engineering Experiment Station would be a consultant group dedicated to assisting a region's industrial efforts. The EES at Georgia Tech was established with the goal of the "encouragement of industries and commerce" within the state. The coinciding federal effort failed, however, and the state did not finance Georgia Tech's EES, so the new organization existed only on paper.

The latter years of Matheson's presidency were troubled by a chronic shortage of funds. In 1919–1920, facilities designed for 700 students had to serve 1,365 students, and the school received the same $100,000 appropriation ($1,340,500 today) that it had received since 1915, made worse by inflation which nearly halved its value in that time. Matheson was able to acquire a $25,000 increase from the General Assembly that year. In 1920–1921, though, an increase of $125,000 (to $250,000) was passed but subsequently tabled due to differences between the House and Senate version of the bill unrelated to Tech. To continue running the school, a frantic scramble for funds was undertaken, resulting in $40,000 from the General Education Board, $30,000 from a loan fund organized by the Georgia Rotary Club, and a grant from the Atlanta City Council. The University of Georgia, in a similar financial condition, was forced to cut its faculty's salary. After this drama, the situation still did not improve: in 1922–1923, only $112,500 of the requested $250,000 had been appropriated, leading Matheson to reluctantly start charging in-state students for tuition. The rates were $100 for in-state students ($1,400 today) and $175 for out-of-state students ($2,400 today). Georgia Tech still needed a $125,000 line of credit against its first professional fund-raising effort, the "Greater Georgia Tech Campaign".

As Matheson was leaving for the presidency of Drexel Institute in late 1921, he wrote in The Atlanta Constitution that while Georgia Tech was "my first love" he found it a "humiliating burden" to get enough money from the state legislature to run and enlarge the school. The Board of Trustees offered him a substantial pay increase, but his issue was with the politics of the time, and not with his financial situation.

It was our hope and belief that by developing an efficient technological school, the legislators would amply support it. In spite of many handicaps and discouragements, we gave to the state what competent critics declare to be the second engineering college of the nation–the first, by the way, having recently spent $28,000,000 in its development. Notwithstanding ... enrollment, donated equipment totaling many thousands of dollars in value, $1,500,000 in subscriptions from friends and other evidences of growth, the legislatures of the past two summers have appropriated only half of the amount actually needed for the operation of the school. In 1920, upon the failure to appropriate the additional $100,000 necessary to keep Tech's doors open, I again became a modern Lazarus and successfully begged from Atlanta to New York the crumbs from the rich men's tables which a rich mother had denied ... Again we have met the emergency at a disruptive and destructive cost which cannot be continued. —Kenneth G. Matheson, 1921