re: Its Happening..

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The contest became the extension of the bitter political debate that took place in the Alabama State Legislature regarding the location of the new land-grant college under the state's application under the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 during the Civil War Reconstruction Era. The state legislature, influenced by a heavy contingent of representatives who were University of Alabama alumni, pushed to sell the land scripts of 240,000 acres acquired from the Morrill Act or have any new land holdings held in conjunction with the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The debate lasted over four years, until Lee County and the City of Auburn won the location of the new university in 1872, after donating more than 100 acres and the remaining buildings and property of the East Alabama Male College. At the time of the Auburn decision the state legislature and governorship was controlled by Radical Republicans such as "Scalawag" Southern Republicans and Freedman African-Americans. By 1874, former Confederate and Redeemer forces from the Democratic Party gradually overturned the Radicals' control of the legislature.

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During the 1907 state legislature session, a debate surfaced to move the land-grant college from Auburn to Birmingham. Then later in that same session, the legislature approved the first appropriation to Auburn some 35 years after it first opened its doors, for a promised $800,000. The college only received a third of that appropriation, while the University of Alabama remained fully funded through the State Board of Education. The state legislature, still controlled by University of Alabama alumni, still appeared intent on letting Auburn "dry out".

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In 1915, appropriations to Auburn were withheld, which continued at times through the 1930s. In exchange, Auburn was allotted a percentage of the revenue generated by state taxes on fertilizer and farming equipment sales. Nonetheless, Auburn faculty and staff perceived the withholding of funds to be another attack on the university's existence by the state legislature. During a 1945 legislative session, "The University of Alabama's report to the commission argued that the Tuscaloosa school had well-established and broad responsibilities for higher education in the state. Four times in Alabama history, higher education responsibilities had been delegated to other institutions. In three of the four cases, this occurred under a state government established during the Reconstruction period: creation of the normal schools, higher education for blacks, and establishment of the land-grant college at Auburn. The fourth case was the state women's college at Montevallo. In each case, this had resulted from "the illogic inherent in the evolution of a democratic government." While it was indeed true that American higher education was relatively democratized, with the consequent scattering of resources, the Alabama report drew a sharp response from President Luther Duncan (then Auburn President), who said that he had never seen "a bolder, more deliberate, more vicious, or more deceptive document." He predicted that if the friends of Auburn and Montevallo did not rise up to combat "this evil monster," it would consume them "just like the doctrine of Hitler." Duncan also remarked that according to Alabama, "Auburn is the illegitimate children…born out of the misery of the reconstruction period." With the end of World War II, "The GI Bill had inundated Auburn (then officially named the Alabama Polytechnic Institute), with students—doubling enrollment twice between 1944 and 1948." Auburn could not be ignored at this point or at least choked "until such time as it should become so weak that......it could be absorbed" by the University of Alabama.

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