In 1880, Marion McKinley Bovard became USC's first president, after serving as head pastor at the Fort Street Methodist Church in Los Angeles. Bovard presided over seven boom years prior to 1887, and then over five years of fiscal uncertainty and near collapse, until his death in December 1891.
The man who accepted the task of coping with the financial difficulties of the period was Dr. Joseph P. Widney, brother of Robert Maclay Widney and the first dean of the USC medical school (1885-1896). Widney served the university for three years, asking little compensation. In 1895 he left the presidency to resume his medical practice.
During the successive presidencies of George W. White at the turn of the century and George Finley Bovard, brother of USC's first president, the young university struggled to keep up with the demands placed on it by the rapidly expanding Southern California community. The population of Los Angeles had grown from 11,000 in 1880 to 319,000 in 1910. While, elsewhere in the country, the Carnegies, Cornells, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Stanfords were heavily endowing universities during the late 19th century, USC forged ahead largely on the energies of its faculty, deans, presidents and trustees.
During this period, the forerunners to today's schools or departments of education, dentistry, law, music, fine arts, marine biology, sociology, philosophy, journalism, pharmacy, business, religion and engineering were all added to the university.
The years of World War I were difficult, demonstrating, as had the financial panic of the 1890s, that USC was vulnerable to economic cycles, but nevertheless resilient in difficult times. One bright spot of the period was that USC's spirited athletic teams were, in 1912, officially dubbed the "Trojans" by Los Angeles Times sportswriter Owen R. Bird.
In 1919, the School of Architecture was established; in 1924, von KleinSmid established the nation's first school of international relations; in 1929, the nation's second school of public administration was established; and in 1929, the nation's first program in cinematography was initiated. The first Ph.D. degree conferred in Southern California was given at USC in 1923.
The first priority of von KleinSmid's administration was to expand professional training programs; however, the Great Depression had arrived at decade's end, and once again, USC was forced to retrench. Army barracks were constructed on campus to supplement the nine major buildings von KleinSmid had built prior to the Depression years, and the curriculum was adjusted to a wartime emphasis in international relations, history, geography, languages, aerospace science and the like. Crowded conditions were exacerbated by some 2,000 military trainees on campus by 1943.
After the war, the lack of space at USC actually grew worse, as the G.I. Bill brought former servicemen to the university for study. Enrollments soared from 8,500 in 1945 to over 24,000 in 1947. In 1946 von KleinSmid, then 70 years old, elected to step down and became chancellor of the university for life.
Produced by the USC Division of Student Affairs, Office of University Publications, May 1, 1995