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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1920s
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Albert Coates joins the law faculty at Chapel Hill
Coates, a university graduate with a Harvard law degree, joined the law faculty in 1923. The schools he ran for police officers and sheriffs grew into the Institute of Government.
- 1930s
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Albert Coates establishes the Institute of Government
UNC law professor Albert Coates began building the Institute of Government in 1931, with police schools that September and a Carolina Inn planning meeting in December, and the Institute was formally organized and named in May 1932. Working with his wife, Gladys Hall Coates, he ran it as a private enterprise until it became part of the University in 1942; it is now the UNC School of Government.
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Officials at the Carolina Inn back Coates's plan for schools of public officers
Forty-five judges, lawyers and lawmen invited by Judge W. A. Devin heard Coates propose an association of government officers served by a staff that would write guidebooks and train officials. They told him to go ahead, and Coates later called this the first meeting of the Institute of Government.
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About two hundred officials organize and name the Institute of Government
Mayors, legislators, judges and county commissioners met at the new Graham Memorial, endorsed Coates's plan for an association of government officials and formally adopted the name Institute of Government. Junius G. Adams chaired, with Coates as secretary, and a larger meeting was set for September.
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Albert Coates convenes the Institute of Government's first statewide school for public officials
About six hundred officials and citizens from nearly every county came to Chapel Hill for a two-day meeting Coates had promoted all summer. Frank Graham opened the Friday evening session in Gerrard Hall and Harvard law dean Roscoe Pound gave the closing address on Saturday, when the organizing committee approved hiring Coates as director with a staff.
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The Institute of Government stages a statewide radio swearing-in of new county officers
Working with Raleigh station WPTF, Coates had a five-station network carry the oath-taking of incoming sheriffs, commissioners and other county officers, with speeches by governor-elect J. C. B. Ehringhaus and his Republican opponent Clifford Frazier. People gathered in courthouses across the state to watch and listen, and Coates billed the night as the Institute's formal launch.
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Ben Cone pledges $5,000 a year for three years to the Institute of Government
After a $1,500 gift at the end of 1932, the Greensboro textile executive pledged $5,000 a year for three years and his brother Ceasar Cone II promised $5,000 more. The Cone money paid for the first staff, and by late 1933 it was more than three-quarters of all the Institute had deposited at the Bank of Chapel Hill.
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Henry P. Brandis Jr. becomes the Institute of Government's first associate director
Paid from the Cone pledges at $50 a week, Brandis, a Salisbury native with a Columbia law degree, left a New York firm and went straight to Raleigh to follow the General Assembly and digest its new laws. He was later dean of the UNC law school.
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More than a thousand people attend the Institute of Government's second statewide conference
Officials and citizens met in Chapel Hill to hear the state's congressional delegation, led by Senator Josiah Bailey, explain the first New Deal recovery laws, and President Roosevelt sent a letter urging other states to copy the Institute. The organizing committee then gave Coates new work, among it a report on proposed constitutional amendments and a guidebook for election officials.
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The Institute of Government publishes its digest of the 1933 laws and its first guidebook, for clerks of court
Henry Brandis's summary of the laws passed by the 1933 General Assembly came out as an issue of Popular Government, followed by a guidebook written for clerks of court. Covington treats them as the Institute's first substantial publications that local officials could use in their daily work.
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Popular Government becomes a monthly magazine
With new gifts from Winston-Salem backers and Ceasar Cone and some subscription income, Coates moved the Institute's journal from quarterly to monthly, with advertising to help pay for it. Each monthly issue sold for ten cents and carried a courthouse or other government building on its cover.
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Institute of Government staff begin daily bulletins on the General Assembly
From rented offices in the Raleigh Building, Brandis, Dillard Gardner and T. N. Grice followed every bill of the 1935 session from the gallery and put a bulletin of the day's action on each member's desk by the next morning. A weekly digest of statewide bills went to every newspaper in the state, so local officials learned of bills before they became law.
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Popular Government launches a campaign for an Institute of Government building
The April 1935 issue spread across its center pages a drawing of a three-story 'governmental laboratory building' by the university's architects, Atwood and Weeks, and opened a public drive for funds. Coates told Roscoe Pound that building-supply dealers would donate the materials.
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The Institute prints 250,000 copies of a highway safety issue of Popular Government
The September 1935 issue was given over to traffic safety, using fatality figures gathered by law student Harry McGalliard at a time when North Carolina had the most deaths per mile driven. Standard Oil helped pay for a pocket-size 32-page edition sent to high schools, police departments and civic groups.
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Trustees offer land and the PWA approves a grant for an Institute of Government building
University trustees agreed to give the Institute a site valued at $15,000 on the western edge of the campus south of the Carolina Inn, the building to go to the university if the Institute ended. The Public Works Administration approved $55,498 for labor, one of 52 grants from 300 applications in the state, toward a building then estimated at $123,000.
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Dillard Gardner sells Institute of Government memberships to cities and counties
Taking a city manager's suggestion, Coates offered local governments yearly 'unit memberships' priced by population, from $413 for Charlotte to $7.50 for the smallest towns, covering guidebooks, the magazine, legislative bulletins and staff help. Gardner set out in the winter of 1936 and enrolled more than a hundred cities, towns and counties; memberships brought in over $10,000 in 1937.
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The PWA withdraws its grant for the Institute of Government building
Coates won two thirty-day extensions, the first from President Roosevelt at Senator Josiah Bailey's request, and in February 1936 was allowed to let a contract on his word that the money was in hand. The promised materials and cash never fully came through, and in the summer of 1936 PWA administrator H. G. Baity rescinded the grant; a brief revival by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes in 1937 also failed.
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The Institute of Government opens its first ten-day school for police officers
Sixty-one lawmen, about a quarter of them police chiefs, attended, taught in part by instructors lent by the FBI's new National Police Academy. J. Edgar Hoover then gave agent Edward Scheidt, a former Coates student, a year's paid leave to write Institute guidebooks on arrest, search and seizure, and crime detection.
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With its money gone, the Institute's first staff leave for state jobs
By 1938 the Cone gifts were spent and the staff had gone weeks without pay. Brandis became research director of the State Tax Commission, Dillard Gardner joined the state supreme court staff and Grice the state auditor's office, while two young assistants stayed on at reduced pay; the last regular monthly Popular Government went out in January 1938.
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Construction begins on the Institute of Government building on Franklin Street
A $10,000 gift from Will Reynolds, given after Congressman William Umstead won an IRS ruling that the Institute was a charity, paid for the land. Gifts from Gordon and Bowman Gray covered half of the $50,000 cost and Julian Price's Jefferson Standard Life lent the rest on Coates's signature, against more than half his salary, for a scaled-down Federal-style building of three floors over a raised basement.
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Law students Terry Sanford and William Cochrane join the Institute's legislative team
Elmer Oettinger led the Institute's daily coverage of the 1939 General Assembly, mailing bulletins to a list that had grown to 7,000 names. Late in the session Cochrane recruited first-year law student Sanford, later governor, who came back to the Institute as an assistant director after the war.
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House Speaker William Bankhead dedicates the Institute of Government building
On the eve of Thanksgiving a standing-room crowd in Hill Music Hall heard Bankhead, Governor Clyde Hoey and President Frank Graham praise Coates, with eight of the state's eleven congressmen and former governor O. Max Gardner on hand. A reception followed in Graham Memorial, and guests stayed for the Virginia football game the next day.
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Albert Coates completes the Institute of Government's Franklin Street building
Albert Coates built the Institute's Franklin Street headquarters with private gifts and a Jefferson Standard Life loan, and it opened in November 1939. The University took title only on June 30, 1945, after the legislature paid off the mortgage. The building later carried the Coates name.
- 1940s
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Henry P. Brandis Jr. joins the UNC law faculty
After two state tax posts, Brandis, the Institute of Government's first full-time staff member, joined the university's law school faculty in 1940. He became its dean in 1949 and a Graham Kenan Professor of Law in 1965, and retired in 1972.
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Coates trains as a civil defense instructor and Popular Government issues a defense number
Called to a War Department school in Texas in the summer of 1942, Coates returned to run civil defense training through the Institute, and that fall Popular Government published a 'Defense Issue' on espionage, water system protection, gas attacks and air raid warnings. In 1945 an Army Service Forces colonel credited the Institute with the plan for joining local and state forces with federal ones to defend the state.
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The Institute of Government becomes part of the university
The Institute of Government, begun as a separate body, was made part of the university in 1942.
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The General Assembly passes a resolution commending the Institute of Government
Peyton Abbott, a Winston-Salem lawyer who moved into the Institute building on December 1, 1942, led its coverage of the 1943 session, winning a seat at the press table and a copy of every bill. Before adjourning, the legislature passed a joint resolution praising the Institute's service to it.
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Reader's Digest profiles Albert Coates and the Institute of Government
Roving editor J. P. McEvoy visited Chapel Hill that summer, and his article, titled 'Don't Shoot Your Sheriff: Teach Him,' ran in the October issue. It brought Coates speaking invitations from several states and an offer from founder DeWitt Wallace to pay him to tour the country, which Coates declined.
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Coates publishes his first history of the Institute of Government, paid for by DeWitt Wallace
In place of a speaking tour, Coates wrote a 76-page account of how the Institute grew out of his law classroom, issued under the Popular Government name in the National University Extension Association's studies series. Wallace paid for 30,000 copies for national distribution, and on the advice of Louis R. Wilson and W. T. Couch, Coates took out the profanity before it went to press.
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Governor Broughton asks the Institute of Government to help towns plan for after the war
As Allied armies advanced across Europe, Broughton called on the short-staffed Institute to help plan for life in North Carolina's towns and cities once the war ended. State payments for this work and for civil defense training steadied the Institute's budget.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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The Saturday Evening Post profiles Coates as 'The Ugly Duckling at Chapel Hill'
Warner Olivier's article cast Coates as the law school's misfit who had overcome objections to build an Institute admired around the country. It opened with a photograph of Albert and Gladys Coates in front of the Institute building.
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Coates deeds the Institute of Government building to the university
After the legislature appropriated $44,000 to pay off the rest of the mortgage, Coates transferred title to the Institute property to the University of North Carolina. This completed the 1941 merger plan, under which the university would take the building once it was clear of debt.
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Henry W. Lewis joins the Institute of Government faculty
After his discharge from the Army, Lewis joined the small faculty of the Institute of Government at Chapel Hill, where he worked mainly on election law and the property tax.
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Terry Sanford serves as assistant director of UNC's Institute of Government
After the Second World War Sanford returned to Chapel Hill, completed a law degree in 1946 and served two years as assistant director of the Institute of Government before opening a law practice in Fayetteville.
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Popular Government resumes regular publication under William Cochrane
After a three-year gap and a single issue in 1945, the Institute's magazine came out nine times a year from January 1946, edited by Cochrane. He also managed the Institute's daily business until he left in 1955 for Senator Kerr Scott's staff.
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The Institute of Government's first State Highway Patrol school opens in Chapel Hill
With money from the legislature to bring the Patrol back to its prewar strength, Governor Gregg Cherry's administration turned to the Institute, which offered an eight-week course for about a hundred recruits chosen from 1,300 applicants. Classes began on October 13, with instructors from the FBI, the State Bureau of Investigation, Northwestern University and New York University.
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Political scientist Donald Hayman joins the Institute of Government staff
Recommended by political science chair Charles B. Robson when Coates wanted help screening Patrol recruits, Hayman was hired on the spot as an assistant director, the first non-lawyer on the staff since accountant T. N. Grice. He took the place of Terry Sanford, who had left to practice law in Fayetteville.
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George Esser and Alexander McMahon join the Institute of Government
Recruited by Coates at Harvard Law School that spring, Esser and McMahon started the same day, joining new Carolina law graduates Donald McCoy and Dickson Phillips; Philip Green came a few months later. It was the largest group of assistant directors Coates had yet employed, and he put them to work on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg study.
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The Institute of Government delivers its Charlotte-Mecklenburg consolidation study
Asked in 1946 by Charlotte and Mecklenburg County leaders after a Charlotte News series, the Institute spent nearly three years inventorying every city and county department. Coates gave the first public report on November 1, 1949, staff members presented eight more over four months, and the study took no side on merger; the city and county schools were combined about a decade later.
- 1950s
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J. Spencer Love gives the Institute of Government $50,000 to spend as Coates sees fit
Textile executive J. Spencer Love, whose $15,000 in 1942 had carried the Institute until the state budget took over its costs, sent Albert Coates another $50,000 with no conditions on its use.
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Philip Green's guidebook for zoning and planning boards is published
Green, who had learned the field on the Charlotte study, wrote a 430-page guidebook that the Institute published in 1952, the first such work for local zoning and planning boards in North Carolina. He went on to a national reputation in zoning and planning law.
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The Knapp Foundation pledges $500,000 toward a new building for the Institute of Government
University President Gordon Gray secured a commitment from the foundation of the late Joseph Palmer Knapp for a $500,000 grant, to be matched by the same sum from the state, to build the Institute a new home. Coates had wanted the money as an endowment beside a state-built building, but Gray followed the matching plan that Margaret Knapp favored.
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Albert Coates and James C. N. Paul prepare the Institute's report on the Brown decision for Governor Umstead
At Governor William B. Umstead's request, Coates wrote a history of the state's separate schools and Paul, who had clerked for Chief Justice Fred Vinson, examined the ruling and the plans for getting around it, concluding that segregated schools could not be kept. When Umstead named Thomas J. Pearsall's advisory committee on August 11, 1954, the report was the first paper its members received, and Coates then ran a shortened version in Popular Government.
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George Esser launches the Institute's course in municipal management
Assistant director George Esser started a ten-week course in municipal management, taught over a series of three-day weekends, that came to be expected of anyone hoping to run a North Carolina city. It was part of a shift at the Institute from teaching the letter of the law toward public administration and policy.
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Francis Vandeveer Kughler paints history murals for the Knapp Building auditorium
At Margaret Knapp's wish the Institute's new building received fourteen large murals by New York painter Francis Vandeveer Kughler, a commission put at $100,000, showing scenes from North Carolina history with living North Carolinians painted in period dress. Kughler began early in 1956, working part of the time in Person Hall on the campus, and all the panels were hung in the auditorium by the fall of 1960.
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The Institute of Government's East Franklin building becomes Consolidated University offices
After William Friday moved into the President's House in 1956, the University moved the Institute of Government out of its Franklin Street building and used it for the Consolidated University's offices. Those offices went back to campus between 1969 and 1973, and the building passed to other University programs.
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The Joseph Palmer Knapp Building opens for the Institute of Government
The Institute of Government got a new building in Chapel Hill, paid for by the Knapp Foundation and a legislative appropriation and named for Joseph Palmer Knapp, who had died in 1951. His widow, Margaret Rutledge Knapp, saw that the family foundation funded it.
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William Friday becomes acting president of the Consolidated University
Named acting president at 35 while the trustees searched for Gordon Gray's successor, Friday began his duties on March 1, 1956. The board approved him as president on October 26, 1956, and at his first news conference he named moving the administrative offices from South Building on the Chapel Hill campus to the old Institute of Government building on Franklin Street as a first goal.
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The trustees make the Institute's professional staff professors of public law and government
Chancellor William B. Aycock won trustee approval for the Institute's assistant directors to hold the rank of professor of public law and government. The rank carried academic tenure, which strengthened the Institute's place in the University and made recruiting easier.
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Institute of Government staff draft a new state law on municipal annexation
Assistant directors Philip Green Jr., George Esser and Jake Wicker wrote a new North Carolina annexation law for a state study commission. The law, which stayed unchanged for more than forty years and became a model elsewhere, let the state's cities grow without being ringed by small incorporated suburbs.
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The Institute's dormitory lodges sixteen thousand overnight guests in a year
Sixteen thousand people stayed overnight in the Knapp Building's dormitory during the 1959-60 academic year, and attendance at Institute events and instruction had grown about tenfold since the building opened in 1956.
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The law faculty and the Institute staff vote against merging the Institute into the law school
When Albert Coates pressed again to fold the Institute of Government into the UNC law school, both the law faculty and the Institute's own staff voted the idea down. Assistant director John Sanders warned that the Institute's service work would be subordinated to the law school and its identity lost.
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A state audit reports irregularities in the Institute of Government's accounts
State Auditor Henry Bridges reported a gap of $5,064.32 in the Institute's books, caused by careless record keeping and slow deposit of room fees and book sales, not by missing money. Coates took the blame and paid $5,100 at once; he was repaid once he documented the spending, but staff who had not been warned in advance were angry.
- 1960s
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Governor Luther Hodges accepts the Knapp Building for the state at its dedication
A four-day dedication of the Institute of Government's headquarters, for which officials were invited by congressional district and the Kughler murals were unveiled, closed with Governor Hodges accepting the million-dollar building on behalf of the state. Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. stayed for the whole program.
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Albert Coates gives Chancellor Aycock a 158-page account of the Institute's past and needs
Using staff tallies of thirty years of Institute publications, training and finances, Coates wrote Chancellor William B. Aycock a long report on how the Institute began and grew and what it would need. It also argued for waiving the retirement rule in his case, and it became the core of his later published history of the Institute.
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Albert Coates retires as director of the Institute of Government
Coates retired as director of the Institute he founded on August 31, 1962, but stayed on the law faculty, teaching full time until about 1967 and a reduced load until a stroke in early 1968.
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Institute of Government delivers its report on Chapel Hill's power to pass a public accommodations law
A report prepared by George Esser at the aldermen's request, gathering cases from all fifty states on a town's power to pass a public accommodations law, was completed and handed to Town Manager Robert Peck for the aldermen days before their vote. Esser said it showed the probable attitude of North Carolina courts toward a town using its general welfare power for that purpose.
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Mayoral and aldermanic candidates answer questions at the Institute of Government
Lee, Giduz and all seven candidates for the Board of Aldermen took questions at an open forum. Sharp exchanges came over a police review board, which Lee said he had never favored, and over whether the town should pay to cover the Mitchell Lane drain, on which Giduz cited county health tests and Steve Bernholz answered that 'the ditch stinks'.
- 1970s
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Henry W. Lewis serves as director of the Institute of Government
Lewis succeeded to the directorship of the Institute of Government in 1973 and held it until he retired from the faculty in 1979.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
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The Institute's former Franklin Street building is dedicated in the names of Albert and Gladys Coates
The building the Coateses had given years and money to put up for the Institute, used after 1956 as the Consolidated University's headquarters and later by other programs, was dedicated in their name. Coates had earlier asked the School of Social Work not to name one of its new buildings for him.
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Paul Johnston endows an Albert Coates professorship at the Institute of Government
Paul Johnston, a former Institute assistant director who made a fortune in business after serving as Governor Luther Hodges's chief administrative officer, endowed a professorship at the Institute in Coates's name. A professorship honoring Gladys Coates followed three years later.
- 1980s
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Albert Coates publishes The Story of the Institute of Government
Coates's history of the Institute, a book he had worked at for half a century, came out fifty years after the meeting that started it. Director Henry Lewis had read the manuscript in the late 1970s and sent page after page of corrections, some of which Coates took.
- 1990s
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Michael R. Smith becomes director of the Institute of Government
Smith, who had found the Institute by chance as a law student in 1978, was named director in 1992, the third after Coates to lead it, following John Sanders and Henry Lewis. He later headed it with the title of dean once it became the UNC School of Government.
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A Knapp Foundation gift funds an addition, renamed the Knapp-Sanders Building
The Knapp Foundation contributed to a large addition to the Institute of Government building, and the name was extended to honor John Lassiter Sanders, the Institute's second director.
- 2000s
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Institute of Government names a Knapp Building courtyard for Gladys Coates
After Gladys Hall Coates died at 100 at her Chapel Hill home on September 25, 2002, the Institute of Government named a garden courtyard and veranda beside the former auditorium in the Knapp Building's east wing in her memory.
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Gladys Coates dies at one hundred
Gladys Coates, partner in the founding of the Institute of Government and a student of the University's history, died at a hundred. After a service at the Chapel of the Cross she was buried beside Albert Coates in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, across the road from the School of Government.
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The Henry W. Lewis classroom is dedicated in the Knapp-Sanders Building
The Institute of Government named a classroom for Lewis in its renovated Knapp-Sanders Building.
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