Archibald Alphonso Alexander

In the early 1900s, Archibald A. “Archie” Alexander (Figure 1), while still a young man, broke through two deeply entrenched barriers. He then went on to become one the most successful American engineers and builders in the first half of the twentieth century. His legendary exploits and lifelong achievements exemplified the classic Horatio Alger rags-to-riches success story.

The two barriers he broke in his early years? He was the first African American football player at the University of Iowa (UI), a highly respected three-year starting tackle (1909 to 1911), and he was the first of his race to receive a civil engineering degree from that institution (in 1912). Archie earned his degree in four years like most students, even though he had to work at numerous part-time jobs to support himself, pay his own tuition, and deal with the time demands of playing football.

When Archie first enrolled in UI’s college of engineering—and often times after—his engineering professors tried to dissuade him, saying they had never heard of a black engineer let alone one that was successful in the profession. They suggested he select another major. Alexander, however, was steadfast in his choice of a profession, determined that even if others did not believe a black person could find success as an engineer in the early twentieth century, he would prove them wrong. And that is exactly what he went on to do.

Alexander’s illustrious $46\text{-}\text{year}$ engineering career, which was bracketed by World Wars I and II and spanned the Great Depression, began immediately upon earning his degree from UI in 1912. After working briefly for another engineering firm, he boldly started his own company when he was only 26. After that, in sequence, he established two engineering partnerships, both with engineers who were white. All of his companies were headquartered in Des Moines.

The projects in Alexander’s vast portfolio of work were located in nearly every state in the Union, plus several places in the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Included were noteworthy bridges, freeways, tunnels, railroad trestles, airfields, power plants, apartments, and other buildings.

Alexander didn’t confine his talents to developing and running engineering companies and constructing interesting projects. He also took on significant leadership roles in his community, and in the politics of Iowa and the nation. A lifelong and active Republican, Alexander served as vice-chairman of the Iowa GOP in 1932 and again in 1940. He aggressively campaigned for and backed Dwight (Ike) Eisenhower in his successful bid for the White House in 1952. Two years later, in his first term as president, Eisenhower appointed Alexander as governor of the Virgin Islands, a group of more than 50 small islands or cays in the Caribbean Sea. Alexander began his governorship in April of 1954, one month before his 66th birthday.

Although he personally moved freely in the white world throughout his career, Alexander was well aware of America’s racial problems and prejudices in his day. To help address pressing issues, he served as head of the Des Moines chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (charter member and 1944 president) and the local Inter-Racial Commission. He was also president of the Negro Community Center Board, Des Moines, 1945–1947, and a trustee at both Howard University and Tuskegee Institute, two of the nation’s most prestigious black centers of higher education.

Having succeeded so well as an engineer, Alexander frequently shared his life experiences with young people looking to make definitive career choices and seriously thinking about their future. In doing so, he discredited claims that his color had in any way impeded his progress, and he articulated several personality traits that are essential for success as an entrepreneur. In a 1946 Opportunity article, he stated, “To succeed and be successful as an engineer or constructor, one needs to be willing to be venturesome, friendly, diligent, and honest.”

With regard to honesty, Alexander often told would-be engineers, “There is the simple virtue of plain, everyday honesty—honesty with your employer, honesty with your clients, honesty in your business, and honesty in yourself. My guiding star has been a quotation emblazoned in gold-leaf letters on the main entrance door of the Engineering Hall at the University of Iowa. I saw the quotation every morning for four long years, and it was indelibly stamped upon my memory. It read, ‘The best asset the engineering profession has is its reputation for honesty. It is the duty of every engineer to preserve that reputation unsullied.’”

Some of the “challenges confronting every citizen, young and old, in this country,” were articulated by Alexander: “The individual economy must be constantly expanded, with more opportunities for individual initiative and satisfaction. Therefore, we need to develop responsible leaders capable of exercising sound judgment in the face of unprecedented situations. Citizens must learn to spend their leisure time constructively, and make mature personal adjustments to the highly complex and divided world. Barriers to equality of opportunity within the community must be eliminated.”

Archie was born on May 14, 1888, in Ottumwa, Iowa, the oldest son of Price and Mary (Hamilton) Alexander. At the time, Price was a janitor who also worked as a coachman. Rumor has it that the eight boys and girls in the Alexander family often played in the creek behind their home, constructing mud and stick buildings, dams, bridges, and the like (perhaps Archie’s first engineering experience?). At the time, Ottumwa’s 14,000 residents included fewer than 500 blacks, and many of its residents, both black and white, were poverty-level poor.

When Archie was $11\text{years}$ old, his family moved from Ottumwa to live on a small farm located on the outskirts of Des Moines. Once his father became head custodian at the Des Moines National Bank—then a prestigious post for a person with his background—the Alexander family had a little more money available, and Archie and his siblings were able to regularly attend school at the Oak Park Grammar School in Des Moines, which was open to both white and black students.

In 1905, at the age of 17, Archie graduated from Des Moines’s Oak Park High School, where he had been a good student and outstanding athlete. Although Alexander’s parents could not afford to send him to college to study further—they and others in the community thought a high school diploma to be a major achievement—the strong-willed Archie had his mind made up. He was going to college, he was going to become a great engineer who built grand edifices, and he would do whatever it took, including raising the necessary monies himself.

Shortly after high school, Archie attended Highland Park College, then Cummins Art School in Des Moines. Then in 1908, with some money saved and part-time jobs lined up, the $20\text{-}\text{year}$ -old enrolled in the college of engineering at UI, and moved to Iowa City $100\text{miles}$ from his family.

During his successful Iowa college years, the hardworking Alexander endeared himself to classmates, professors, and football fans. He was a big, strong competitor who often played injured and was subjected to hateful taunts from opponents. Archie rose above it all. Considered a giant of a man at $6\text{feet}$ $2\text{inches}$ and $180\text{pounds}$ , at a time when the average college football player was $5\text{feet}$ $7\text{inches}$ and weighed $135\text{pounds}$ , Archie was popular with both fans and teammates who nicknamed him “Alexander the Great,” both for his size and his athletic prowess.

In his junior year, Archie joined the predominantly black fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi (a fraternity founded on January 5, 1911, at Indiana University). Years later, Alexander would be elected as the group’s Grand Polemarch (president of the national fraternity), a position he held from 1927 to 1930.

After graduating from UI at age 24, Alexander went to work for Marsh Engineering Company (MEC), based in De Moines, Iowa. By the time he joined the Marsh firm, its energetic, dynamic founder James B. Marsh (1856–1936)—a native of Wisconsin and an engineering graduate of Iowa State University—had already been bankrupt once. But in 1912, his reorganized company was doing well and the future looked very promising. The ever-optimistic Marsh, a consummate salesman, had recently obtained a patent for a new type of bridge construction and was aggressively marketing its use.

Marsh’s innovative bridge design, called the “Rainbow Arch Bridge,” basically consisted of arched structural-steel trusses encased in concrete. Its design would quickly earn Marsh and his firm a national reputation. From the early 1910s through the late 1930s, several hundred “Marsh Rainbow Arch” bridges—and copied variations of Marsh’s design—were constructed nationwide. Today, many Marsh Rainbow Arch bridges, like the Cotter Bridge in Arkansas (which has been designated an ASCE National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark), are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Being at MEC early on while the basic arch bridge details were being developed, no doubt allowed Alexander to work on—or intermingle with those who were working on—many early Rainbow Arch bridges, including the only multispan Marsh Rainbow Arch bridge left standing in Iowa, the three-span, $240\text{-}\text{foot}$ -long Lake City Bridge over the Raccoon River in Calhoun County, which was opened to traffic in 1914.

In 1913, Alexander married Audra A. Linzy in Denver, Colorado. The couple would have one child, Archibald Alphonso, Jr., who died as a very young child. His sudden passing presented an extremely difficult time for the young couple, especially Archie.

In a speech to Howard University engineering graduates in June of 1955, an elderly Alexander shared his pain: “One of the greatest adjustments I have ever had to make was necessary after I lost my son, an only child. It was not until I had made a trip to far-off Jerusalem, where I took the same journey that Christ had taken via Dolorasa; not until I stood on the spot at Golgotha; not until I fully realized that this young carpenter of Galilee gave the world a philosophy that has lived nearly two thousand years, was I able to adopt a religious philosophy that assuaged my grief.” Throughout his life, Alexander believed that “no momentous problems of the world have ever been solved without interjection of some religious philosophy.”

The stoic, focused, hardworking, and relentless Alexander was never one to give up easily when encountering difficulties—and he was extraordinarily ambitious. In 1914, only a couple of years out of college and with less than two years of experience as a bridge engineer with Marsh, a daring Alexander struck out on his own, founding his own engineering firm, A. A. Alexander, Inc. His initial goal was only to do bridge design and construction.

At first, few would willingly give a major engineering contract to a firm run by an African American if there were other firms able to do the work. As a consequence, Alexander’s company initially landed jobs for which no other firm competed, often times not bridges and often times very small in scope. Once the high quality of his work became known, however, things changed. Then three years after Alexander’s company was in existence, George F. Higbee, an engineer who had worked with Alexander while at MEC, joined him as a partner. The unlikely pair for the time—a white man and a black man—founded Alexander and Higbee (A&H), an interracial general contracting and consulting engineering business. Although they started out by specializing in the design and construction of steel and concrete bridges, A&H took on a wide array of projects, eventually getting involved in significant construction projects throughout the United States.

In 1921, Alexander took a sabbatical and traveled to England to study advanced bridge design and engineering at the University of London, leaving Higbee in charge of A&H’s day-to-day operations. When he returned with his increased expertise in the design and construction of bridges, A&H was able to compete for increasingly more difficult bridge projects. Then suddenly, eight years into their partnership, Higbee was tragically killed in a construction accident and Alexander was left on his own again.

For four years, Alexander ran the company as a single-owner operation, gaining a reputation as a talented construction engineer of bridges, viaducts, tunnels, and industrial facilities. Among his noteworthy projects were UI’s central heating plant, its power plant, and a major steam tunnel beneath the Iowa River to serve UI’s growing west campus, which included a new university-operated hospital facility.

Then in 1929, he took on a new partner, Maurice A Repass, a white man and a former classmate and football teammate at UI. He renamed his firm Alexander and Repass (A&R). Repass was one year behind Archie at UI and prior to joining Alexander’s firm was an instructor at UI’s College of Engineering in Iowa City. Thus began a long, successful association between the two that would survive until Alexander’s death.

A&R’s first big project was a multimillion dollar, $52\text{-}\text{acre}$ sewage treatment plant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1929. Many other projects across the nation followed. Among them were:

So successful was Alexander’s firm in the mid-1900s during and following WWII, Ebony magazine designated it “the nation’s most successful interracial business” in 1949.

Along with running A&R, Alexander was the president (from 1950 to 1958) of the American Caribbean Contracting Company in Des Moines, and the president (from 1952 to 1958) of the Cedar Hill Construction Corporation in Washington, D.C. In addition, he held several key community positions including: charter member and member of the board (1919–1958), Crocker Street Branch of the YMCA, Des Moines; director (1927–1958), Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, Chicago, Illinois; and secretary-treasurer (1952–1958), Douglas Glen Gardens Corp., Washington DC.

In 1934, he was a member of the investigative team that, at the request of the Haitian president, looked into the economic development possibilities for Haiti. Alexander and his wife frequently vacationed in the Caribbean and were very familiar with the cultures of its many islands.

Unlike many African Americans who abandoned the party of Lincoln (the GOP) during the Great Depression to join the Democratic party led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt with his New Deal, Alexander remained a committed Republican. Because of his loyalty to the GOP and backing of Eisenhower during his first presidential campaign, as well as his lifelong accomplishments, can-do attitude, and knowledge of the Caribbean, Alexander was named governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1954.

It was a short-lived assignment. Even with all his business savvy and leadership skills, Alexander proved ill suited for the Virgin Island post. His overly aggressive efforts to “help those people get on their feet” were a disaster and put him at odds with the local citizens, mostly blacks. One historian labeled Governor Alexander “Dogmatic, paternalistic, undemocratic, and with an openly stated contempt for the easygoing Virgin Islanders.” Alexander’s period as governor lasted only $16\text{months}$ before he was forced to resign. It was a sad episode, which some felt brought on his failing health and almost certainly hastened his death.

During the course of his career Alexander received a number of important awards. At UI’s centennial celebration in 1947, he received an Outstanding Alumni Award for being “one of the 100 most outstanding graduates” in the university’s history. Many historic documents report he also received an honorary master’s degree in engineering from UI in 1925 and an honorary doctorate in engineering from Howard University in 1946.

Alexander was the fourth recipient of the Laurel Wreath Award, Kappa Alpha Psi’s highest award to a member (1926), for lifetime achievement. That same year, he also received the prestigious W. E. Harmon Award from the Harmon Foundation in New York City. It was the first year the annual awards were presented.

The Harmon Foundation was established in 1922 by William E. Harmon (1862–1928), a wealthy Caucasian financier who made his fortune in real estate development in Boston, Cincinnati, and New York. The Foundation began presenting its Harmon Awards to African Americans in 1926, mostly for high achievement in the fine arts, which was Harmon’s special focus. His other interests, however, included recognizing the distinguished achievements of black Americans, not only in the fine arts but also, in business, education, farming, literature, music, and science. Alexander’s 1926 Harmon Award was for his outstanding engineering and business deeds.

Once back in Des Moines after his term as governor of the Virgin Islands, Alexander continued to struggle with his health. He died of a heart attack on January 4, 1958, at age 70. In his will, he left a sizeable trust fund for his wife of $45\text{years}$ . Upon her death in 1973, its remaining $315,000 (approximately $1.5 million in 2009 dollars) was divided equally among the University of Iowa, Howard University, and Tuskegee Institute (University) for endowed engineering scholarships.