University of San Francisco - USF Don Yearbook (San Francisco, CA)

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Literature was an even stronger social force. The Victorian novels, behind their facade of seemingly tacit confirmation of Her Majesty’s benevolent rule, were powerful documents of social criticism and judgment. With the French novelists — Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal — the novel was a great weapon for a stinging denunciation of corrupt society. Poetry of the romantic age. as far back as Shelley, was a continuous cry for freedom. Then, too, poets such as Foe and Baudelaire were telling society of emotions of which it preferred to pretend ignorance. Religion was torn by modernism, rationalism. Its only answer to all of these objections seemed to be a reaffirmation of conservatism and reaction, which answers failed to crush the ever-mounting tide of question and doubt. Hegel. Marx, and soon Darwin, in their analysis of man in all of his ramifications, bewildered the European by their deft and complete revision of early notions, of everything which in former times had been accepted as correct. This was the age of revolution in Europe. Man was not content to purchase bread at the price of freedom. It was an age of questions which demanded answers, of answers whose application frightened the mind. On the other side of the world lay America, still swathed in the comfortable provinciality which was as yet untroubled by great revolutions. In New England, the country’s only intellectual area, there were great minds who were aware of the revolutions in Europe. Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott all knew of German transcendentalism, and were heavily influenced by it. The curious Utopian experiment at Brooke Farm saw the New England intellectuals milking cows in the morning and reading Aristotle at night. And then there was the unique genius of Thoreau: at Walden Pond he pondered on the individual and his relation to society. But, save for these intellectual islands, the rest of America cared little for Europe and its new ideas of revolution. Vet America itself was in the throes of great movement. The discovery of gold in California forced that long-dormant region into a lusty and bustling life. Its past Spanish glory was only a dim memory. The missions of the Franciscans and the Jesuits, the glamorous California of the Spanish haciendas, had disappeared with the political dissolution from Spain. The secularization of many of the. missions had precipitated the state into a soporific coma from which only the coming of the lively Americans could raise it. But in 1855, life had roared back into California. Life was disordered, in great part purposeless, and had only the most flimsy of motives: but it was nevertheless life. The hunger for gold was only the cause by which California began to grow. For the few who found it, their search was a cause for rejoicing; for the many who failed, it was imperative, for the sake of survival, to chart a new life in a new land. Of the needs faced by these people, education was one of the most pressing. And it is in this that the Jesuits and the embryonic University of San Francisco enter history. 16

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the city of San Francisco 105 years after the founding of St. Ignatius College.