Fordham University - Maroon Yearbook (New York, NY)

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Statue of Archbishop John Hughes, Founder of Fordham; gift of the Alumni on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of the College. 7

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workmen on the new building, filled with heady draughts of Reverend Professor Cunningham’s oratory, and fortified by a visit to Duffy’s tavern, had left to join die Fenian raid on Canada. Discipline. . . . “Where is that letter again . . .? He fumbled the documents on his desk, reports, letters, archival material of the first twenty-five years of St. John’s College. He had been going through them the past few days to find anecdotes for a Silver Jubilee oration in June. Where had he seen that comment on discipline? It was in a letter from Father John Larkin, the second rector of St. John’s, to his former pupil and lifelong friend, William Gockeln. April i ], 1852 —“We had something of an outbreak, the Sunday before St. Patrick’s Day. A new cook had miscalculated and had not prepared meat enough for the students. The first prefect had also dispensed the other prefects from attendance that day.” “And that was a sorry mistake, I’ll wager,” Father Shea said to himself, anticipating companionship in misery. He continued reading. When the prefect came to Father Larkin to see what could be done about multiplying the food supply, one youth let a potato fly across the refectory at another youth’s head. “This was the signal,” wrote Father Larkin. They began their pranks, throwing potatoes and bread at each other, shouting, etc. I'he larger students tried to stop the disorder. Such among the larger boys who had joined in it, stopped. But all the smaller fry were caught, and punished by being deprived of butter. They got angry. ... It was marble time. They therefore broke a number of panes of glass with their marbles during evening recreation. As almost all had misbehaved on Sunday, I deprived them of St. Patrick’s Day. The middle-sized boys revenged themselves by breaking some more windows. All this, however, without any noise or confusion. So, Father Larkin, the great teacher and administrator, the founder of St. Francis Xavier’s had his troubles. His prelects “were rather bothered and committed blunders loo,” and had to be persuaded that their ideas of “being insulted, or “my authority is despised’ were anti |ualed. Father Shea found much in the voluminous correspondence to support his own view that discipline was largely a matter of understanding; that an excess of inspection, supervision and recrimination was, to say the least, “imprudent.” The struggle of his predecessor to uplift the heterogeneous student body of an earlier day seemed, in the correspondence, herculean. Not only were there academics, debates, philosophical disputations in Latin, prize contests, all excellent pedagogical devices of the Ratio Studiorum, but individual professors lived laborious days curbing and correcting exuberant youth. Father Larkin was accustomed to give lectures to the college at large two or three times a week explaining everything that tended “to correct their foolish notions, their vulgar or ungentlernanly ways.” By laying a solid base of natural virtues he intended to elevate their minds and feelings to the point where matters of piety could be appropriately introduced. Father Larkin had no mercy on the vulgar man, and no hesitation in specifying the fault. “As I tell them,” he wrote, “ ‘It is very hard to make gentlemen of you. You have so long a time kept your thoughts and inclinations in the lowest atmosphere of society that you cannot rise to anything dignified and polished. But I thank God that He has given me the virtue of hope to a high degree, so that your apathy does not dishearten me.’ . . .” Again, after praising the progress of certain departments, the former President had written, “Oh! if I had a proper set of teachers and a few men of tact! Quod possumus, f acini us.” Father Shea shook his head. The more he read of the first days at Fordham the more he felt that their work had been heroic. True the scale was small; the difficulties to be overcome were human obstinacy, the tack of a tradition, faulty preparation, often ignorance. But he would have liked to argue a point or two with Father Larkin. Had they shared a long recreation together he would have said . . . “Now look here father. You wrere in the midst of things and you didn’t quite see what was going on. Those prefects, now, weren’t they attending classes in theology while they were supposed to be watching not only college boys, but little shavers down in the elements? And wasn’t it a miracle indeed that you sur-

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Tower on the University Chapel. vived at all, with discipline as strict as a seminary and the studies as stiff as the oldest schools in Europe?” Yes he would like to ask him that and many other questions, for Father Shea thought that Father Larkin was a greal man but a hard one. He turned to the old catalogues, several of them written out by hand. As he read the student register lie recognized names which now were well-known in the new world. There was young Denman, son of Lhe first Catholic, editor in New York, Peter Hargous of the merchant family, three of the LaFarge boys, several Binsses. John R. G. Hassard, the celebrated journalist and author, the McMahon brothers, Martin, Philip and John, all of them distinguished, the first one a famous Union general in the Civil War. He spied the names of Fathers Merrick and Dealy, both now highly esteemed Jesuits, of Judge Dodge of Ohio and General O’Beirne of New York, of Mexicans and South Americans who were high officials in their own country, of Thomas Connery who was on his way to eminence as a diplomat and journalist. When you checked the names of the ten or twelve men who were graduated yearly, you could I eel proud of St. John’s. I he alumni had done remarkably well on the whole, as doctors and lawyers and priests. Their lives were rarely wasted; society absorbed them faster than St. John’s could turn them out. He copied down the names of those who had risen to distinction, Arthur Francis, Martin McMahon and John R. G. Hassard, the three inseparables of the class of ’54 were perhaps the best known of all. He knew of Mr. Hassard’s work, as who did not, on Mr. Greeley’s New York Tribune, and General McMahon was already a character not only in New York but throughout the East. Father Shea chuckled as he recalled the story of McMahon's adventure in Paraguay. Immediately after the Civil War, the American Minister, Goodwin, had been scared from his post by the spectacular dictator Lopez. Goodwin gasped out the story that the country was in the hands of bandits who had threatened his life. There was something about the report that made Secretary Seward doubt its veracity, so he proposed that General Me Mahon be sent to Paraguay to investigate. McMahon, bored by peaceful inactivity after years in the saddle, accepted immediately. It did not take him very long to overcome the 28