Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition

8 Gannon Takes Charge

8. Gannon Takes Charge In 1957, as young Jesuits at the novitiate at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, right next to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate, many of us heard Fr. Robert I. Gannon’s voice long before we ever saw his face. Gannon, former president of Fordham (1936–49), was one of our novice master’s heroes, and one of Fr. Martin Neylon’s ways of teaching virtue during the daily conference was to tell little anecdotes about the fathers he revered. Fr. Gannon, he said, as rector of the Regis High School and of the parish of St. Ignatius Loyola at Park Avenue and 83rd Street, would always join the community for coffee or recreation, mingling with his fellow Jesuits even though he was out night after night socializing with wealthy and prestigious people. Then the master would play a tape of Gannon’s latest speech, usually at the Jesuit Mission Dinner or the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. His was a rich, plummy voice, with a clipped, cultivated English accent, similar to that of a few Jesuits who were not English but had somehow acquired the accent in the course of their educations. I’m afraid that I disliked him instantly. He was witty, yes, but his wit was often at the expense of ideas and persons I had admired all my life, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our novitiate neighbor, whose grave I would visit on long walks. With the years, I am told by those who heard him, Gannon’s after-dinner speeches became increasingly 157 16950-04_Fordham_132-180 6/4/08 11:44 AM Page 157 bitter as he turned his wit against the Kennedys and the younger generation of Jesuits, who were seen as agents of change. Gannon was a Republican, a conservative, a traditionalist, and one of the more successful after-dinner speakers in New York. Perhaps it is understandable that in his political rhetorical excursions, he saw himself as matching wits not just with the most eloquent of American presidents but with a whole host of ideological opponents who stood between himself and the religious, educational, and political values to which he had dedicated his life. In an address at the annual banquet of the State of New York Chamber of Commerce, November 14, 1940, he said: What, for example, is the prevailing philosophy of education in America today? . . . First, Exaggerated Experimentalism, second, Pragmatism, third, Socialism—and of the three the first is easily the most dangerous. For the whole tendency of this particular experimentalism is towards cutting off the past, ignoring the accumulated experience of the human race, starting anew, as if no one had lived before us. . . . What we need are things that are old, things that have stood the test of a hundred generations, things that are immutable. His perennial villains were communists—beginning with the Spanish Civil War—and liberals. Liberals, he told the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick on March 16, 1940, are the greatest little slave drivers in the world. They are not as crude or as simple as the ward heelers with the big cigars. What they want is not so much our money as our children. They want our schools and colleges. They want the key positions in civil service. They want control of relief and all the social agencies, and they are getting what they want. Later, they hope, when they have the youth of the nation in their power, to eliminate all religions and all morality that does not conform to their peculiar ideology. The antidote to liberalism, of course, would be the traditional virtues of the Irish, personified in his metaphorical Mrs. Kelly, who took in washing to support her lazy husband and large family and 158 F O R D H A M 16950-04_Fordham_132-180 6/4/08 11:44 AM Page 158 “kept her head unbowed amid sorrows that would have broken common clay.” It may seem incongruous, as Peter McDonough argues in Men Astutely Trained: A History of the Jesuits in the American Century, that the president of what was then one of America’s most prestigious Catholic universities would consistently lace his utterances with antiintellectualism , but Catholic colleges had consistently emphasized character formation over knowledge for its own sake. Gannon, however , was essentially a communicator. In McDonough’s words, “He understood education to be one of the performing arts.” He was, paradoxically...