2014 Meeting Information 
17 
achieving the most prestige. The 1909 team adopted a Pit Bull Terrier 
(“Jack”), and he proved to be the inspiration for a permanent mascot. 
In spite of all this progress and the wide respect he earned in national higher 
education circles, Snyder was able make little headway in strengthening 
Wofford’s endowment, which was valued at less than $1 million. The college 
was painfully dependent on its annual support from the Methodist Church, 
which amounted to about one-fourth of the operating budget. This financial 
weakness became obvious when Southern farms prices collapsed in the 
1920s and hard times intensified after the stock market crash of 1929. At the 
height of the Great Depression, some of the faculty worked without pay for 
seven months. Emergency economies and a special appeal to South 
Carolina Methodists were necessary, but by the end of the Snyder 
administration, the college was debt-free and its academic reputation was 
untarnished. 
The return of financial 
stability made it possible for 
Wofford to claim a chapter 
of Phi Beta Kappa in 1941, 
the first time such 
recognition had been 
extended to an independent 
college in South Carolina. 
Soon after this happy 
occasion, however, the 
nation plunged into World 
War II. Wofford graduates 
served in the military in 
large numbers, many as junior combat officers or aviators. At least 75 alumni 
were killed. Wofford’s enrollment was so drastically reduced that the Army 
took over the campus on February 22, 1943, to offer accelerated academic 
instruction for Air Corps officers. The faculty and 96 remaining Wofford 
students did their work at Spartanburg Junior College or at Converse. 
After the war, under the stimulus of the G.l. Bill of Rights, enrollment 
suddenly shot up to 720 during 1947-48. This figure was almost twice the 
reasonable capacity of Wofford’s facilities, already taxed by two decades of 
postponed maintenance. Surplus Army buildings from nearby Camp Croft 
had to be towed in. Compounding the challenge was the fact that South 
Carolina Methodists deferred any capital projects or strategic planning into 
the mid-1950s while they tried to decide if they should unify their colleges on 
a new, rural campus at the foot of the Blue Ridge. While the state’s Baptists 
approved such a plan at Furman University, the Methodist institutions 
ultimately retained their historic identities and campuses. 
