Fordham University - Maroon Yearbook (New York, NY)

Page 32 text:

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

Page 31 text:

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

Page 33 text:

suspicions of Lopez, win his admiration and secure his friendship. General McMahon travelled over most of the country on horseback and sent back a report that Lopez was doing the best he could under difficult circumstances. When the Goodwin cabal challenged his judgment before a House Committee, he had more than held his own. Lopez liked McMahon so well that he made him executor of his will and the guardian of his son. McMahon could turn his hand to anything from writing a poem to winning a war. When he was at 5t. John's with Hassard and Francis, he had surreptitiously published The Goose (hall and distributed the paper to his classmates under Father Larkin’s disapproving nose. Had not the three boys a monopoly on all the medals, the not too secret support of some of the faculty, and the genuine friendship of the stately Father Larkin, they might have been sent home. Father Shea noted with some satisfaction that many who were rebels as students became the most manly and successful men. “I have discipline on the brain,” he said. The president knew his own weakness. During his administration which began in 1868 he had relaxed some of the rules laid down by the founders. He teas conscious of criticism, but he felt that St. John's was entering a new phase of its existence. Until his regime the college had been the home of seminarians, secular and Jesuit, as well as of the college boys. Sharing the same buildings, often the same refectory and recreation grounds, all the students tended to share the same discipline. Now that the diocesan seminary was at Troy and the Jesuit students were in Montreal and in Frederick, Maryland, he felt that it was absurd to hold the young layman to the exacting routine of former years. 2 Father Shea could never understand how his predecessors managed at all. The treasury was often empty in those early days. Sometimes he talked with Father Jouin, who looked like an amiable.philosophic gnome. When he mentioned the 1850’s and the Civil War days, Father Jouin would hold up his hands and say, It was God’s Providence alone that kept us together.” And not always together. In the second year at Fordham Father Thebaud had been called upon to send two priests, one of them the famous Father Durancjuet, to the spiritual relief of the plague-stricken Irish immigrants in Canada. In 1855, harried by debts incurred by the purchase of the seminary and the Church from Bishop Hughes, two indispensable men, Charles Maldonado and Hip polytc de Luynes, went Lo Mexico, Peru and Chile in search of financial support. Others went to France and Italy to solicit funds. When the Civil War started, Fathers Nash, Ouellet and Tissot served with conspicuous gallantry and success as chaplains in the Union Army. Demand followed demand. Although not obliged to assist in diocesan activities the Jesuit Fathers evangelized Westchester from Croton to Kingsbridge, preaching, baptizing, erecting churches. When they came in possession of the College Church of Our Lady of Mercy, they not only cared for a huge parish, but they gave the pioneer laymen’s retreat in the United States. One became tired merely by reading of their work. Father Shea mopped his forehead. Though it was only May and late in the afternoon, it was very warm, lie walked over to the window and looked down the West lawn to the railway tracks. He could hear the shouts of the boys, just liberated from Study Hall, the puffing of a locomotive on its way to Mount Vernon, the moaning of the college cows ready for the evening milking The sun shone on the spring-green lawn and a slight breeze swayed the young elms planted along the path by Father Thebaud ten years ago. ‘‘This is a beautiful place,” said Father .Shea to himself. He pulled the French windows wide open and stood on the sill, breathing in the fresh air and the rich spring fragrance. It was hard to realize that so much had happened here in so short a time; that so many men had come and gone, so many memories had already became deep-rooted like Father Thebaud’s elms. The fathers were already talking of “tradition.” It was a tradition that Washington had slept in the delightful farmhouse now used as an infirmary, that Edgar Allen Poe spent whole days talking with Father Thebaud and Father Doucet, that Fordham already had its saints in Father Legouais and Brother Hennen. The historical society and the debating club were twenty years old;