Editor’s note: This is the third article in a 10-part series examining significant events and the climate of the campus at Iowa State in each of this century’s decades. The stories are based on articles from the Daily during those time periods. Today’s article will look at the years 1920-1929.

The 1920s at Iowa State were definitely a time of drastic change. As the country enjoyed the high times of the roaring ’20s, Iowa State kept growing, and its students began to break away from the constraints of the administration to take on their own endeavors.

Raymond A. Pearson held the office of president at the beginning of the decade, presiding over ISU until 1926, when he left to take the president’s post at University of Maryland. He was replaced by Raymond M. Hughes, ISU’s first Iowa-born president.

Hughes put the same high demand on academics that Pearson had, and as a result, the 1920s saw a tremendous number of structures built.

In addition to the building of two more residence halls, Birch Hall in 1923 and Welch Hall in 1929, Physics Hall, Davidson Hall, MacKay Hall, Sweeney Hall, the Insectary building, the library and the Armory were all built during the decade.

Student enrollment, which was about 3,000 students at the beginning of the 1920s, rose to more than 3,700 by 1924 and topped 4,000 by the end of the decade.

With the increasing student population came even more desire for student input into the workings of the school, a trend that continued from the previous decade.

In perhaps one of the most ambitious student-run projects in Iowa State history, the Memorial Union was built in 1928. The money to pay for the construction of the nearly $1 million facility came almost exclusively from student fund-raising efforts.

After a student referendum in May of 1920 found a vast majority of students in favor of building a student union as a memorial to the 103 Iowa State alumni who died in service during World War I, students conducted funding drives and sold lifetime memberships to the MU for more than six years to pay for the facility.

Another example of student independence and enterprise was the creation of Veishea in 1922. Designed as a spring carnival to attract high school seniors to the school, Veishea grew in popularity at an astronomical rate during the 1920s.

By the end of the decade, classes were canceled during the celebration, and it was already attracting thousands of visitors each year.

Students also were charged with the task of deciding if Iowa State College had reached the point where it was truly a university. In April 1927, after the Iowa Board of Education (predecessor to the Board of Regents, State of Iowa) granted ISC students the right to decide whether the name of the school should change, students overwhelming approved a referendum giving the school the new name Iowa State University.

The student vote also reclassified what used to be referred to as academic “divisions” to colleges, such as the College of Agriculture and the College of Engineering.

The Cardinal Guild, the student government body, also took several issues of the time to task. They passed a resolution in the early 1920s forbidding students to dance “cheek to cheek” at the campuswide weekend dances.

Student leaders sitting on the Guild were instrumental in pushing the Board of Education to allow the university to charge students a “blanket tax,” a predecessor to student fees that was to be used to fund lectures, athletics and other student activities.

Of course, athletics remained important to students during the 1920s. In 1925, the campus paper, the Iowa State Student, often ran small boxes to the left and right of its banner in the weeks leading up to important football games reminding students it was, “Five days until we beat Drake,” or “Tomorrow we beat Drake.”

But much of the major athletic success during the decade did not come on the gridiron; it came on the track. In 1925, Cyclone runners broke a world track record at the Rice Relays in Houston, when the medley team bested the previous record set by a University of Texas team by a margin of six-tenths of a second.

But not all athletic events were cheerful during the 1920s. On Oct. 8, 1923, a relatively unknown football player by the name of Jack Trice died in the university hospital from internal injuries suffered two days earlier in a game against University of Minnesota.

Students mourned the death of Trice, whose name now adorns ISU’s football stadium, by holding a vigil at the Campanile on Oct. 9, where Trice’s now-famous letter to his wife was read to a captive, spellbound audience.

Despite ISU’s conservative Midwest atmosphere, some students were caught up in the spirit of the roaring ’20s. Mere months after the Student reported in the spring of 1927 that no ISU student had been arrested in the last year for any alcohol-related offense, three members of the Sigma Chi fraternity were tried in a well-publicized liquor-manufacturing trial.

But the freewheeling times of the 1920s would soon give way to one of the lowest points in American history — the Great Depression — and Iowa State students would be affected nearly as much as the rest of the country.