Canisius College - Azuwur Yearbook (Buffalo, NY)

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J a 27 St. Peter Canisius memories stretch back to the quarter century from 1920 to the end of World War ll, remember it as the site of the College's vanished outdoor football stadium. The scholastic regimen was a Spartan one with each hour of the academic day parcelled out between eight a.m. and five p.m., and twen- ty-one hours of outside preparation demanded. lThe Harvard average, during these German years, was thirteen.l lt was an education weighted heavily on the classical side according to the historic Jesuit theory codified in the Ratio Studiorum, a set of methods that by 1920 had already begun to be honored as much in the breach as the observance, and one that eroded rapidly in the decades following. Greek and Latin poetry in the vernacular, plus the rhetoric of Demosthenes and Cicero also in the vernacular, the whole structure crowned by the great Periclean dramatists and leavened by his- tory with a post-Reformation bias, enjoyed the kind of primacy they had known in eighteenth century England. lf, judged by contemporary standards, the methods were pedantic, the stu- dents worked hard: and they read the right books. The Canisius Centennial History, a bit brash- ly perhaps, describes the German period as VaIhalla on Washington Street, situated in cultural time half way between the Nibelun- genlied and the Adventures of Hans and Fritz. It was much more than that: its musical culture, pun., M. Saint Ignatius sends Canisius to Germany especially, was extraordinarily rich. Under the Swiss composer-conductor, Professor Ludwig Bonvin, S.J., the music department maintained, in addition to a band, three full orchestras, one of these a symphony orchestra numbering, at its high point, fifty-two members. Bonvin's predecessor, W. Wallrath, S.J., had actually produced-it would seem in pirated form- Wagner's last opera, Parsifal, on April 27, 1887, five years after its Bayreuth premiere and better than sixteen years before its controversial Met- ropolitan Opera production. The text, however, described as a medieval melodrama, was by the Canisius polymath, Anthony Guggenberger, S.J. The German Province's final connection with its Buffalo offshoot was also Wagnerian, though the closing key was the key of Gotter- diinmerung, not Parsifal. After the formal dis- solution of their American province, which took place on September 9, 1907, the Fathers of the Buffalo Mission carried back to Germany the original records, in crabbed German script, of their long connection with the College, the High School, St. Michael's, and the Mission generally, leaving meticulous copies in their place. ln midsummer of 1944 the bomb at- tempt on Hitler's life, on the part of the Graf von Stauffenberg and his fellow officers, mis- carried. Because the Graf had been Jesuit edu- cated, the headquarters of the South German Province were put to the torch. In the ensuing holocaust, the original Canisius documents for 1870-1907 went roaring to the sky. As elsewhere on American college campuses, it was World War I which proved the catalyst of rapid and far-reaching change, beginning with the overnight conversion of the Main Street campus into a short-lived military establishment for nearly two hundred Canisius members of the Student Army Training Corps. Since the Armistice took place less than six weeks after October 1, 1918's induction day, it was the Canisius old boys who did the fighting in the War that became for American participants their myth-in-action. Letters, redolent of a curiously touching romanticism and now pre- served in the College archives, came from them in trenches, airdromes, base h0SDif3lS- Of The three hundred Canisians who saw service, twelve died, four of them in action. To cele- brate the demobilization of the Canisius S.A. T.C., on December 30, 1918, the alumni hon- ored the student soldiers at the first major social function involving the student body on what might be described as an adult level. lt was a portent of the many changes in collegiate life-style that would now mark the 1920's. One of the earliest manifestations of World War l's huge displacement of social gravity was an unprecedented expansion of college enroll- ment destined to be halted only briefly by the Depression and World War ll. An early reflex of the trend in question was the initiation, on July

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new school which would bear the name of a famous post-Reformation Dutch Jesuit, St. Peter Canisius, whose name also survives in several European Jesuit institutions of higher learning. So-as had been true of Harvard, too, in its beginnings-there was a religious intention be- hind Canisius' foundation, one summed up in the Jesuit motto: Ad maiorem Dei gloriam. To the greater glory of God. Hn Christi Gloriam had appeared on Harvard's seal in 1650.l The new college was part of a Buffalo-sited Mission to the Catholic German-Americans of the Unit- ed States, and one that, initially, had been accepted with reluctance. To tell the truth, the whole prospect of a Mission itself had daunted these expatriate German Fathers at first. When they balked at the magnitude of the enterprise unfolding before them, Durthaller prodded the then Father General, Peter John Beckx, S.J., into ordering them to accept the assignment. On July 4, 1869, Father Peter Spicher arrived in Buffalo to take possession of the newly cre- ated Missio Germanica Americae Septentriona- lis, i.e., the North American Mission of the German Province. Within two years the Mis- sion's jurisdiction extended over a positively imperial range of territory: the American shores of the Great Lakes excluding the dioceses of Chicago and Milwaukee, but including those of Buffalo, Flochester, Erie, Cleveland, Marquette, Detroit, St. Paul, La Crosse, and Green Bay. Soon after, a vast expanse of Indian mission land-a parallel with Dartmouth's original Indi- an mission springs to mind-was added: first among the Arapaho of the Wyoming Territory: then, more enduringly, among the BrUle and Ogallala Sioux of South Dakota. ln the end, it was the College which turned out to be the sole surviving creation of the German Mission's far-flung empire. Their uni- cum collegium Germanicum in Civitatibus Foederatis they fondly called it-the single German college in the United States. Before the end of Canisius' first year, the student body had swelled from an entering twenty-five to thirty-four. Except for one manifestly Gallic name, one Irish, and two Welsh, the other thir- ty names were clearly either German or Alsa- tian, a circumstance which made the founding year a nightmare for the College's first Dean of Men-he was called Prefect of Discipline in those days. On the street and in the classroom German boy warred against Alsatian all during the Prussian siege of Paris, and after, too. On a comparative scale, Canisius' student unrest was actually greater in 1870 than in 1970. Until 1912's dedication of Old Main, the building which, in its present extended form, still remains the focal point of the present Main Street campus, Canisius College and Canisius High School had been a single continuum, both spatially and academically, within the old Wash- ington Street campus. President Theodore Van Flossum, S.J., 1883-1888, whose term of office had witnessed the first baccalaureate degrees, also presided over the College's first Master's degree in 1887. A second was granted in 1890: and, after that, from time to time. It was not until the 1930's, however, that this particular post-baccalaureate degree began to play a systematic part in aca- demic planning. If the contrast between the early period's rigorous qualifications for the B.A. and the M.A.'s much looser requirements affronts the contemporary sense of fitness, it is important to remember that this was the nine- teenth century when an Oxford Master's hood depended upon a prescribed number of dinners in hall and a specified tally of tankards of beer: and when, as the saying went, all a Harvard man needed to secure his Master's credential was to pay five dollars and keep out of jail. Although not notably successful as an ad- ministrator, Van Ftossum made two other im- prints on the evolving institution, both of these growing out of a Newmanesque theory of edu- cation with an almost exclusive accent on the liberal arts. He established Philosophy as a com- pulsory part of the classical curriculum: and he downgraded the complementary commercial curriculum which had been an original compo- nent of the school in its foundations. This rela- tive disparagement of the commercial side con- tinued during the term in office of Van Rossum's successor, Ulric Heinzle, S.J., 1888-1891. After the academic year of 1893-1894, the third year in office of President John I. Zahm, S.J., 1891-1896, the commercial curriculum was abandoned, not to be revived until 1926 when an accounting major was of- fered for the first time, an innovation coincid- ing with America's burgeoning business ethos after World War I. However explicable as a short-run policy, in the long run the jettisoning of the commercial course proved an unfortunate move, economi- cally speaking. The restoration in 1926 was a long step forward in a journey that, quickening its pace in the 1930's and accelerating still further during the 195O's, reached its current culmination in the inauguration, in February, 1969, of a Master in Business Administration program. It must be understood, of course, that until 1926, the Canisius involvement in business courses had been basically on the high school side of the college-cum-preparatory school con- tinuum. All told, during the thirty-seven years of German control, there were eleven presidents counting Swiss-born, Dutch-educated Augustine A. Miller, S.J., 1905-1912, who bridged the last German and first American administrations. Of these eleven presidents, the first six were Ger- man-born, the eighth English-born, the eleventh a German-speaking Swiss, and the three Ameri- can-born were all of German extraction. Henry Behrens, S.J., 1872-1876, stands out among them for both color and strength of personali- ty. Born six months after Waterloo, Behrens had enjoyed a European career, military as well as pedagogical, that calls for a sagaman to do it justice. The fourth president, Swabian Martin Port, S.J., 1877-1883, had been a classmate of Lord Acton's: the eighth, Englishman James A. Rockliff, S.J., 1897-1898, a classmate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's. Though his term as pres- ident was a short one, Rockliff continued to exert an effect on the College's destinies after he became head of the Buffalo Mission. The European provenance of these Founding Fathers was at once a strength and a weakness. While their erudition and culture were formida- ble, the language barrier, as Rockliff often pointed out in letters to the Father General, proved a serious one. Moreover, American youth, in this day of Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story af a Bad Boy and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, did not exactly take kindly to German concepts of discipline as enforced by a seeming- ly limitless pool of Franco-Prussion War veter- ans who kept turning up to fill the post of Prefect of Discipline. Nor did they think either drill or calisthenics acceptable substitutes for the team games that, increasingly, were played in the Yard, as it came to be called, of the red-brick structure at 651 Washington Street which, built during 1871-1872, housed Canisius College until 1912 and Canisius High School until 1948. Gradually the paramilitary mystique that, for one brief interlude, had even extended to uniforms and kelpis gave way to the nascent athletic mystique that had begun to sweep American campuses during the eighties and nineties. Each Thursday-Thursday was the day appointed for communal recreation on the part of the students and boarders alike-the entire student body marched down Main Street to the then semi-rural demesne known as the Villa, at the corner of Jefferson Avenue, which was maintained, among other things, as a kitchen farm for the downtown college. Aside from its triple utilities as provisioner, retiring ground for Jesuit personnel, and grassy playing field, the Villa, bought by Behrens in 1873, at a price his immediate successor, President John B. Less- man, S.J., 1876-1877, considered exorbitant, proved a fateful purchase fraught with enor- mous consequences for Canisius' future. Out of it came the eventual site of the main part of the College today and a geographical determination of the modes any physical expansion was henceforth destined to take. Except for the contiguous areas now occupied by the Physical Education complex, the Delavan Health Science and Computer Center, several departmental of- fices on immediately adjoining streets, Alumni Hall, and two supplementary residence halls on Main Street, where the College structures prop- er now stand, enclosing an inner quadrangle, was once the Villa. Buffalo sports-lovers, whose

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12, 1919, of the Canisius Summer School. That same autumn an Extension School, operating on a regular basis, appeared, the nucleus of what would later become a flourishing Evening Session and a populous Graduate Division. Orig- inally conceived of as a series of service courses for the Catholic teaching religious of the area, the new Schools almost immediately outran this intention. From this point on, Canisius began to supply a surprisingly high percentage of the Niagara Frontier's teachers and adminis- trators on the public school plane, a proportion that kept pace with the College's steady output of lawyers, physicans, dentists, and ecclesias- tics. Along with most other American institu- tions of higher learning, Canisius proved a little tardier in acknowledging its responsibilities for professionalizing business. Nevertheless, 1926 witnessed the initiation of systematic business curricula. Until February 14, 1928, fraternities, tolera- ted but never fostered by the administration, had perforce assumed responsibility for the Col- lege's social life-an ingrained conservatism, where a mingling of the sexes was concerned, had been carried over intact from the German period. Now, through the first annual Junior Prom held in the Statler Ballroom, the College officially entered the Jazz Age in the city where, only two decades before, Scott Fitzger- ald had spent his boyhood. Despite this official relaxation of a long-standing tabu, social ma- chinery, over the nextdecade,remainedlargely in the hands of the fraternities which main- tained clubrooms in such divergent places as the Park Lane and certain Burchfieldian mansarded mansions on Linwood Avenue. By filling this social vacuum, whatever their other shortcom- ings, the Greek Letter societies marked an evo- lutionary stage in the College's progress from an invertebrate social organization. What doomed them in the end, at Canisius as elsewhere, was their being grounded on a principle destructive of true fraternity, that of caste and ethnic Apartheid. By the 1960's the social pendulum had swung full circle, and most of the social affairs were held in campus facilities. lf the College, in that decade had been reluctantly driven to abandon its old in loco parentfs stance, by way of compensation it had become the students' social arbiter. Taken together, the twenties and thirties may be said to have enclosed five symbolic events and one physical thrust into a pattern of future expansion. The events were these: two outdoor Passion Plays on a positively Max Rein- hardtian scale: a gathering momentum in the direction of that period's will-o-the-wisp, big- time football, a policy that eventually was to prove abortivep the College's acknowledgement of the canonization of its patron, St. Peter Canisius, whose earlier beatification had played its due part in the establishment of the Canisius ethos, 1930's public commemoration of the 'vm' l MQW' Canisius in 1870 fern lk. . Nl h 3j,.,.'Z 'n ' -f ff at Q ' sh ui' 1 4 f ,j s H, : ii ..- mtg ll , f I 1 f- ' 4' .U wg H 1 qi. fs' i - A 1 9 ' 3. 1 1 -'i- --. ' '47 Y ' im Canisius in 1872 ?'v fi ig 'uf va- iv' T Canisius in 1876 31 .Petrsirli R53