“Industry Follows Brainpower”: The Path to Human Capital Intensive Economic Development

In 1963, newly-elected Texas Governor John Connally unveiled his economic development program for the state.  Declaring that “industry follows brainpower,” Connally asked for, and received, quick legislative approval of an ambitious agenda for overhauling the state’s educational system and, in turn, its economy.  By analyzing the human capital legacy of mobilization for World War II, as well as the efforts of the Texas Commission on Higher Education to rationalize public higher education spending in the 1950s, this paper examines how the adequacy of Texas’s “manpower” became a major political issue by the 1960s.