Celebrating America

When the Jesuits arrived at Fordham in 1846, they learned that Rose Hill Manor was a historic landmark. Built by the Corsa family in 1751, it was described as “General Washington’s Headquarters.” Washington likely inspected troops in Corsa’s orchard in fall 1776 and returned in July 1781, when he and General Rochambeau planned a potential assault on British-held Manhattan. Andrew Corsa recalled being awakened before sunrise one Sunday because “General Washington wanted me that day for a general reconnaissance at Fordham.” Collins Auditorium, built in 1905, now stands on the manor site.

The United States is often called a nation of immigrants, but it rarely rolls out the red carpet to them. Fordham’s founder, John Hughes, felt that tension acutely. The first Catholic archbishop of New York, “Dagger John” fiercely championed the million Irish immigrants who fled famine for New York City in the 1840s and ’50s. Through Fordham and other institutions he established, Hughes helped to connect an overlooked community to education, jobs, and upward mobility.

Valedictorian of Fordham’s class of 1853, James R. O’Beirne served in the 37th New York Regiment, the 
famed “Irish Rifles.” He received the Medal of Honor in 1891 for having “gallantly maintained the line of battle until ordered to fall back” at Fair Oaks, Virginia, in 1862. After being seriously wounded at Chancellorsville, Virginia, he was made provost marshal of Washington, D.C., and in 1865 was involved in the pursuit that led to the capture of John Wilkes Booth, President Lincoln’s assassin. After the war, he became U.S. commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York, where his duties included administration of the Ellis Island Immigration Examination Station.

After completing his studies at Fordham in 1862, Edwin M. Neville enlisted in the Union army. He was soon discharged due to an unspecified disability, but reenlisted in 1864 and rose to captain. He earned the Medal of Honor for capturing a Confederate flag at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek on April 6, 1865. Three days later, he was among those who escorted Union general Ulysses S. Grant to Appomattox Court House, where Grant accepted the surrender of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Neville died in 1886 at the age of 43. An obituary writer praised him as “a man of great generosity, good address … and excellent business tact. And these qualities made him successful in almost anything he undertook.”

Martin T. McMahon graduated from Fordham in 1855 and was drawn into the Civil War. In 1891, he received the Medal of Honor for bravery in the fighting near White Oaks Swamp, Virginia, on June 30, 1862. “Under fire of the enemy,” his citation reads, he “destroyed a valuable train that had been abandoned and prevented it from falling into the hands of the enemy.” After the war, he served as corporation counsel for New York City and was elected judge of the Court of General Sessions. Upon his death in 1906, "The New York Times" described him as a “noted soldier and judge” and “one of the conspicuous figures of the Civil War.”

By 1861, Fordham had only about 100 graduates, yet 23 alumni served in the Union Army, 12 fought for the Confederacy, and three Jesuit professors were military chaplains. Most famously, former student Robert Gould Shaw commanded the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the country’s first unit of free Black soldiers. Their bravery was immortalized in the 1989 film "Glory," featuring Fordham’s own Denzel Washington ’77 in an Oscar-winning performance.

Fordham’s baseball lore began on November 3, 1859, when the Rose Hill Base-Ball Club won the first college game played under “New York rules” (nine men per side), beating Xavier 33-11. It was the first of Fordham’s 4,600-plus wins—the most in NCAA Division I history. Fordham went on to produce pioneers like Esteban Bellán, the sport’s first Latin American major leaguer; Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch; and the late, legendary broadcaster Vin Scully ’49, long regarded as the “voice of summer.”

In June 1943, the gym and much of campus were given over to the U.S. War Department, which selected Fordham to host two units of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). For nearly a year, Fordham Jesuits and lay professors taught upward of 800 troops pre-engineering and languages. The goal of the program was to meet the wartime need for technically trained junior officers and soldiers. The troops in training slept in the gym, and at the program’s height, cafeteria workers were dishing out more than 2,750 meals from 4 a.m. to midnight every day.

As a U.S. Army medic during World War II, Brooklyn native Thomas J. Kelly saved 17 lives on April 5, 1945, receiving the Medal of Honor seven months later. Soon after the war, he enrolled at Fordham, working his way through the Undergraduate School of Education over 10 years. After earning a Fordham law degree in 1962, he worked for the Veterans Administration for 36 years; co-founded the Congressional Medal of Honor Society and served as its president; set up a fund to help widows and orphans of medal recipients; and organized events to raise money for veterans’ benefit. He died in 1988 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Father Vincent Capodanno, who took evening classes at Fordham and received the Medal of Honor posthumously in January 1969, was a military chaplain and a Vietnam War hero in the truest sense. When he heard the North Vietnamese had ambushed his Marines, he rushed to the scene of the September 1967 battle in the Que Son Valley. A mortar shell shredded his right arm, yet the chaplain braved the heavy artillery to drag a hurt sergeant to safety. He quickly moved among the wounded and the dead, praying with the men and giving last rites to his fallen brothers, before he made the ultimate sacrifice. He was 38 years old.

Robert Murray was one of six children in
 a devout Catholic family, Murray attended Fordham and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1968. On June 7, 1970, as an Army squad leader in Vietnam, he was searching for enemy mortar near the village of Hiep Duc when a soldier tripped an enemy grenade. “Instantly assessing the danger to the men of his squad,” his Medal of Honor citation reads, “Staff Sgt. Murray unhesitatingly and with complete disregard for his own safety, threw himself on the grenade, absorbing the full and fatal impact of the explosion. By his gallant action and self-sacrifice, he prevented the death or injury of the other members of his squad.”

In 1984, Fordham and U.S. history rhymed on the national stage when Geraldine Ferraro, a 1960 Fordham Law graduate, became the first woman nominated by a major party for vice president. “By choosing a woman to run for our nation’s second-highest office, you sent a powerful signal to all Americans,” she said. “There are no doors we cannot unlock.”