Occasional Papers 
 on the History of 
 Boston College 
 
 FULTON 
 
 OF FULTON HALL 
 
 Rev. Charles F. Donovan, S.J. 
 University Historian 
 February 1 995 
 
https://archive.org/details/fultonoffultonhaOOdono 
 
Foreword by Dean Neuhauser 
 
 It is very appropriate to have this profile of Father Fulton appear 
 just as we return to a new and expanded building which bears his 
 name. This man who did so much for this University in its early days 
 is made better known to us through this brief sketch, just as we are 
 coming to know the full possibilities of a wonderful edifice. He 
 understood well the ability of architectural structures to inspire, 
 perhaps particularly in places of learning, and at the same time 
 understood how work itself can be ennobling. In his building we will 
 strive to keep this course so that were he to return, he would 
 immediately recognize his namesake. We who work in his building 
 are glad that now we know him and know what motivated him 
 through his long and productive life. 
 
 John J. Neuhauser, Dean 
 Carroll School of Management 
 
Father Fulton in the garb that was traditional for Jesuits until the 
 mid-twentieth century: buttonless cassock secured by a cincture 
 to which rosary beads are attached. On his head he wears the 
 Jesuit biretta. 
 
Father Robert Fulton, twice president of Boston College (1870-1880 
 and 1888-1891), is one of the outstanding leaders in the Uni- 
 versity’s history, and the Carroll School of Management is privileged 
 to be housed in a building bearing his name. The magnificently re- 
 constructed Fulton Hall is, in fact, a far worthier memorial to the 
 great nineteenth century president than the original building, which 
 was erected just after World War II when Boston College’s finances 
 were in an emaciated state. Its reopening in new splendor happily 
 provides the occasion for a profile of the man so deservedly com- 
 memorated. 
 
 Robert Fulton was born in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1826. His 
 father died when Robert was seven years old. As a teenager, the boy 
 had the rare experience of serving as a page in the United States 
 Senate, where he heard the oratory of men such as Webster, Clay, 
 and Calhoun. When he reached sixteen, the age limit for Senate 
 pages, he ambitioned entrance into the Military Academy at West 
 Point. But first he entered Georgetown College, and there contact 
 with the Jesuits shifted his thoughts from a military to a religious 
 vocation. When he told his widowed mother of his plan to apply for 
 admission to the Society of Jesus, she confided to him her intention 
 to enter the convent of the Visitation at Georgetown, which she 
 subsequently did. 
 
 These decisions were made in 1843. It comes as a shock some 
 hundred and fifty years later to realize that one of the matters Mrs. 
 Fulton had to settle as she and her son prepared to begin lives 
 without personal possessions was to free the family’s slaves. To that 
 end, she and Robert served a dinner for the slaves, with freedom 
 papers beside each guest’s plate. 
 
 During his period of training for ordination, Fulton spent six 
 years as a teacher of rhetoric and classical and English literature in 
 several Jesuit colleges on the East Coast. After ordination in 1857 he 
 devoted three more years to teaching the same subjects and one year 
 
to teaching theology. He was a brilliant success as a teacher at the 
 college level — erudite, eloquent, and enthusiastic. In the course of 
 those ten years in the classroom he formed the lofty academic 
 standards that he set before teachers and students at Boston College 
 during his nineteen years as dean in the college’s infancy. 
 
 When Boston College opened in September 1864, the rector 
 (president) was a gentle and fatherly Swiss, John Bapst, who was 
 undertaking his first administrative post and was preoccupied with 
 reducing the considerable debt outstanding on the college building, 
 the Jesuit residence, and the Church of the Immaculate Conception 
 (all recently completed in 1859). Father Fulton was the first prefect 
 of studies, an office we know today as dean. 
 
 When Boston College’s first dean welcomed the first students, 
 most of them were quite young, because like all Jesuit colleges in the 
 United States in the nineteenth century, it embraced a secondary or 
 high school as well as a college. The high school and college shared 
 the same building until the college division moved to Chestnut Hill 
 in 1913. Some of Fulton’s admonitions to the first teachers should 
 be read in the light of the immaturity of most of the students. Here 
 are a few “rules” he gave the early faculty: 
 
 ... If not in the teacher, in no one else will the scholar have 
 a constant and easy opportunity of viewing the exemplar of 
 virtue. 
 
 Exactness and high standards are commended. Yet a teacher 
 whose insistence on exactness discourages lacks an essential 
 quality of the good teacher. 
 
 When a fault is committed and should be animadverted on, 
 let punishment be the last resort. He is an unsuccessful teacher 
 who knows of no resource but punishment. General 
 punishments imposed on a whole class are never to be given. 
 Punishments given in moments of anger are likely to be 
 excessive. 
 
 At the end of Boston College’s first year in June 1865, Father 
 Fulton wrote in the Register: “Closed the First Year with Forty- 
 Eight (48) Students. Sixty-two entered.”^ Apparently the dean was 
 not dismayed by the departure (forced or voluntary) of 23 percent of 
 the original students, since he made no comment on the fact. He 
 proved to be stoical in other years when numbers of students 
 declined. He had confidence in the College’s direction and held the 
 course with equanimity. 
 
 In July 1865 Father Fulton’s local superior. Father Bapst, sent a 
 report on the College’s first year to the Provincial, Father Angelo 
 Paresce. After praising the performance of the Jesuit faculty, Bapst 
 
wrote: “But above all my thanks and gratitude are due to the Prefect 
 of Schools [Father Fulton], who has taken a great interest in them 
 and made extraordinary exertions to put the college on such a 
 footing as to insure its successful working. Without him Boston 
 College would not get along. Fie is the man for Boston College.” 
 Father Bapst’s encomium on his dean was echoed years later by 
 one who was a student at Boston College under Fulton. J. Fiavens 
 Richards attended Boston College for three years, from 1869 to 
 1872; he became a Jesuit and eventually served as president of 
 Georgetown. In a 1913 biography of his father, who was a devoted 
 friend of Fulton’s, he wrote of the early days of Boston College: 
 “In charge of the College, with the title of Prefect of Studies, 
 but virtually in supreme control, was Father Robert Fulton, a 
 Virginian, a genius, an infatuated lover of the classics, a witty and 
 brilliant conversationalist, and yet an energetic and powerful ad- 
 ministrator.” 
 
 In 1868, when the College had admitted its fifth class. Father 
 Fulton decided there were enough mature students to form a 
 debating society. He showed his concern for the new organization 
 by personally becoming its “moderator,” as faculty members 
 heading student activities in Jesuit colleges were called in those days. 
 He conferred instant prestige upon the debating society by assigning 
 it a special room barred to other students — a privilege granted to no 
 other student activity. Fulton’s emphasis on good speech is illu- 
 strated by an incident reported in an account of his life shortly after 
 his death in 1895:^ 
 
 When asked by a young man what he should do to become a 
 good speaker. Father Fulton replied, “Avoid slang, keep good 
 company, read good books, write carefully, speak carefully at 
 all times and in all places. Why bless you,” he continued, good 
 naturedly tapping his snuff box, “from my eleventh year I have 
 formulated every sentence previous to utterance, and as a boy 
 was more scrupulous about grammar than about the com- 
 mandments.” 
 
 The last sentence was a good example of Fulton’s tongue-in-cheek 
 humor, often at his own expense. 
 
 In 1869, when the sixth entering class had been admitted, there 
 was some pressure to allow the oldest class to graduate. Father 
 Fulton would not hear of it, saying that as yet the body was too 
 weak to sustain a head. In fact the College was in its fourteenth year 
 of operation before the exacting dean allowed philosophy — the 
 crowning discipline of Jesuit education in those days — to be taught 
 to the top class. Some students dropped out or transferred to other 
 
colleges rather than wait for Father Fulton to declare Boston College 
 full-grown and capable of granting academic degrees. The first 
 graduation was held in 1877. 
 
 In 1870 Father Fulton was elevated to the position of rector of 
 Boston College, which meant he was president of the College and 
 religious superior of the Jesuits assigned to the College and the busy 
 collegiate church. He retained the deanship. It was an awkward time 
 to assume the highest office. In 1869 the Maryland Province of the 
 Jesuits, embracing eastern states from Maryland to Canada, opened 
 a school of theology in Woodstock, Maryland, and to fill the 
 classroom, many young unordained Jesuits were taken from their 
 teaching assignments around the province. Boston College lost 
 several teachers, and a greater burden fell on the dean. As a contem- 
 porary Jesuit wrote: 
 
 Father Fulton was the heart and soul of everything. His 
 animating spirit was everywhere felt. At no time was his zeal 
 for the college shown to more advantage than when the 
 opening of Woodstock necessitated the recall of so many of 
 our scholastics. Father Fulton’s presence was well nigh 
 ubiquitous. Every class seemed to be taught by him; the usual 
 weekly report was distributed by his own hand to each student, 
 with a lively running commentary. 
 
 Four days after being installed as president, Fulton wrote a forceful 
 appeal to the provincial for replacements, but in vain, so two lay 
 teachers were employed. 
 
 One of Father Fulton’s first initiatives as president was to 
 establish military drill as a requirement for all students. During the 
 nineteenth century many colleges — and, indeed, many male social 
 clubs — had military units. College athletics had not become a major 
 factor of campus life in the country, and at Boston College there was 
 no playing field for recreation. Consequently, Father Fulton 
 probably saw military drill, which took place on the streets around 
 the College, as a good form of disciplined physical activity. The 
 military body was named the Foster Cadets after Major General 
 John Gray Foster, a popular hero of the Mexican and Civil wars, 
 who in 1870 was engaged in a major engineering project for the 
 Army in Boston harbor. It turned out that the militia venture 
 became something of a test of Father Fulton’s resolve and 
 leadership. 
 
 Without the prospect of graduating because of the dean’s refusal 
 to add the philosophy year, students of the rhetoric and poetry 
 classes, which would be the junior and sophomore classes today. 
 
were reluctant to invest the equivalent of a year’s tuition in uniforms 
 they would use only one or two years. Some students dropped out of 
 school or transferred to other colleges, but this did not deflect Father 
 Fulton from his plan. The following year he obtained the services of 
 a noted drill master, Captain George Mullins of the Montgomery 
 Light Guard (Company I, 9th regiment, U.S. Army). The new drill 
 master’s enthusiasm, plus the delivery of guns, belts, knapsacks, and 
 bayonet scabbards from the armory in Springfield to complement 
 the smart uniforms, quashed any further rebellion. The Foster 
 Cadets proved to be a colorful part of student life until 1884, when 
 under new presidential leadership and upon the sudden death of a 
 young new drillmaster, military drill was made optional, and soon 
 was dropped. One who served as the highest ranking officer of the 
 Foster Cadets, Patrick H. Callanan, writing his reminiscences for 
 The Stylus twenty years later, said he thought the defection of a few 
 students in the early years of the Foster Cadets “pleased Father 
 Fulton rather than otherwise.” He did not expand on his 
 observation, but he seemed to imply that Father Fulton was com- 
 fortable and firm in his decisions. 
 
 We must consider Father Fulton’s public image as a factor in 
 winning attention and esteem for the infant Boston College. A Jesuit 
 who taught at the College under Fulton remembered that it was 
 natural that for some time the College lived in the shadow of the 
 church, “The Immaculate,” as it was then and still is called. The 
 student enrollment in the first twenty years was small and the 
 majority of the students were in their young teens; it was hard for 
 the College to command attention. With the church it was a 
 different matter: The beautiful edifice attracted people, including 
 non-Catholics, and a goodly supply of Jesuit preachers proved 
 another advantage. In his 1943 autobiography, George Santayana 
 devoted an entire chapter to the Church of the Immaculate 
 Conception, describing his visits from Cambridge as a boy when 
 Father Fulton was in the pulpit. The architecture fascinated the boy 
 more than the preaching, but he did have a positive remembrance of 
 Fulton. The two preachers he mentioned were Father Jeremiah 
 O’Connor, whom he called an oratorical Irishman, and Father 
 Fulton. Twenty years younger than Fulton, O’Connor was his 
 immediate successor as president (1880 to 1884). Of Father Fulton, 
 Santayana wrote: “Father Fulton, of whom I have said something as 
 confessor to my sister, was not eloquent; he was not warm; but he 
 could explore the dialectics not only of doctrine but of sentiment; 
 and it was in unraveling the complexities of our divided allegiance 
 that I found him an instructive guide.” 
 
[ 6 ] 
 
Father John Buckley, a colleague of Fulton’s at the College^ gave a 
 judgment on his friend’s pulpit style not unlike Santayana’s: 
 
 His sermons, which were usually on the argumentative plan, 
 soon began to attract wide attention even among those not of 
 the faith. Men of refinement and education were pleased with 
 his logical, terse, original, classic expression, judiciously 
 flavored with a dash of grim humor to facilitate the digestion 
 of a hard doctrine that, now and then, had to be swallowed. 
 
 To one who confounds oratory with loud declamation, 
 animated gesture, and the tearing of a passion to tatters. Father 
 Fulton’s calm, deliberate style would, indeed, prove tame and 
 uninteresting. 
 
 A measure of the esteem in which Father Fulton was held as a 
 preacher is the fact that although he was not a Bostonian and had 
 been in the city barely fifteen years, in 1877 he was called upon to 
 give the sermon at the funeral of one of the giants of the diocese. 
 Father Manasses Dougherty. Father Dougherty had started several 
 parishes and built four major churches in Cambridge and Arlington. 
 He was called “the builder” by the priests of the diocese. His funeral 
 was attended by 85 priests and 2,000 mourners inside and outside 
 one of the churches he had built, St. Peter’s in Cambridge. Though 
 Santayana and Buckley thought Father Fulton not overly emotional. 
 The Pilot's account of the funeral noted: “During the delivery of the 
 sermon many of the congregation were affected to tears, and at one 
 time the sobs were so loud and audible as to render the words of the 
 speaker inaudible.” In his sermon. The Pilot reported. Father 
 Fulton revealed that a few years earlier Father Dougherty came to 
 his office and handed him a sealed envelope with, he said, a slight 
 donation to support Fulton’s work at the College. The gift was a 
 thousand dollars, a considerable gift in the 1870s. Father Dougherty 
 
 At left, Father Monan, the spiritual architect of the new Fulton Hall, kneels 
 beside the seal Father Fulton created and had installed in 1889 in the old 
 Boston College building in the South End. The seal is interesting as the 
 first step in the evolution of the Boston College seal as we know it today. 
 Father Fulton introduced a shield in the center of the seal for the first time, 
 with the three hills of Boston at the bottom and an open book, though 
 without the Greek motto that was added in 1914. Two of the three crowns 
 of the city of Botolph in England were introduced at the top, with the 
 simple cross and IHS instead of the full seal of the Society of Jesus, 
 which was also added in 1914. It is fitting that Father Fulton’s primitive 
 seal is now located in the building bearing his name. 
 
also made one of the early major gifts to the College library, a large 
 collection of books on Irish history. 
 
 Father Fulton’s star status in the pulpit was again demonstrated in 
 1890. Although in poor health, he accepted the call to preach at the 
 funeral mass of John Boyle O’Reilly, poet, novelist, and editor of 
 The Pilot, which then was a Catholic but not diocesan paper, and 
 perhaps the most respected Catholic paper in the country. O’Reilly 
 may have been Boston’s leading Catholic lay figure of his time, but 
 he was admired by many of other faiths. The Boston Transcript 
 asked, “Was there one man or woman in all the city whose death 
 would have brought personal grief to so many.^” Surely the public 
 acclaim for Father Fulton as greater Boston’s premier Catholic 
 preacher brought favorable attention to his college. 
 
 Obviously at this period of his life, from 1864 to 1880, Fulton 
 was blessed with extraordinary health and energy. It is not easy to 
 recount all his initiatives, some of which were peripheral to the 
 College. One was a Sunday afternoon gathering of Catholic 
 intellectuals. Father J. Havens Richards wrote: “In Father Fulton’s 
 room, some of the Catholic gentlemen of Boston were accustomed 
 to gather on Sunday afternoons or evenings to enjoy his talk, 
 sparkling with wit, epigram and literary allusion, yet permeated 
 with a kindly humor and a sincere though informal piety.” 
 
 It may have been at one of these sessions that the host made a 
 remark cited by Father Richards: “Father Fulton used to say that the 
 advent of Boston College was marked, in many of the Catholic 
 families of the city, by a line as visible as a geological stratum. The 
 boys who were too old to enter the new institution were in many 
 cases comparatively rude and uncultured and engaged in more or 
 less menial occupations, while their younger brothers were polished 
 and ambitious of professional education and success,” It was, 
 perhaps. Father Fulton’s democratic instinct to do something for the 
 non-college boys of Boston that led him to establish in 1875 the 
 Young Men’s Catholic Association of Boston College. The purpose 
 of the organization was declared to be to offer its members 
 opportunities for physical training, intellectual development, social 
 culture, innocent pleasure, and moral preservation. Its scope 
 embraced a gymnasium with instruction in calisthenics, a library, a 
 reading room, a hall for plays, courses of lectures on literary and 
 economic topics, social and forensic gatherings, and an annual 
 retreat. Father Fulton became president of the society, though its 
 elected vice-president ran the programs. Fulton generously provided 
 space in the College building (which would largely be empty when 
 the YMCA activities occurred, in the evening). When, in his second 
 
presidency, Fulton enlarged the College building, the YMCA was 
 given a wing of its own. And when the growth of the College 
 population necessitated the reclaiming of the wing, the working 
 young men were give quarters in a building on Newton Street owned 
 by the Jesuits. Some of the College men were not happy about the 
 attachment of the name Boston College to a non-collegiate group. 
 But Father Fulton knew that the name gave prestige to his new 
 society and he refused to compromise. In fact, the annual “College 
 Ball” was an important event that did not even involve Boston 
 College students. Rather it was an inner-city outreach by Father 
 Fulton, demonstrating to the student body that Boston College was 
 the opposite of elitist or snobbish. The Young Men’s Catholic 
 Association lasted some 65 years, though in the twentieth century it 
 became largely educational as an evening school preparing young 
 men for civil service examinations. It petered out with the drafting 
 of young men for World War II. 
 
 In 1875 Father Fulton undertook an expansion of the College 
 building, extending it 60 feet toward James Street. The renovation 
 included a new auditorium capable of seating a thousand people. 
 The great hall was inaugurated on March 30, 1875, with a 
 presentation of the play “Richelieu” to an overflow audience. So in 
 this first — and, as will be seen shortly, in his second — term as 
 president. Father Fulton was a building renovator, which seems 
 appropriate for the man whose name is a blessing for the Carroll 
 School of Management. 
 
 Toward the end of Father Fulton’s first term of office, a nineteen- 
 year-old lad wishing to transfer from St. Charles’ College in 
 Maryland to Boston College arrived at the dean’s office. The young 
 man was William Henry O’Connell, future archbishop and cardinal 
 of the Boston archdiocese. O’Connell wrote details of the interview 
 to a friend: 
 
 [Father Fulton] took down some books from a shelf — Ovid, 
 Virgil and Cicero. One after another he handed them to me. 
 
 He asked me to open anywhere and read. I did so from each of 
 them and then translated and construed. He asked me various 
 questions, not to embarrass me, but to try my intelligence, I 
 think, more than my memory .... We came to Greek. I read 
 some Anabasis and some Homer .... After that, more as a 
 conversation than critically, he took me over a fairly large field 
 of history, and physics. After a full forty minutes of this, he 
 stood up and putting on his biretta turned to me and said, “I 
 will bring you to your class and present you to your 
 professor.” 
 
The class was poetry, the equivalent of our sophomore year. We are 
 fortunate that the future cardinal saved this letter, since it gives a 
 view of the style and standards of Father Fulton, a thorough and 
 exacting academician. 
 
 Young O’Connell graduated in 1881. Fifty years later, to cele- 
 brate the golden anniversary of his graduation. Cardinal O’Connell 
 purchased the Liggett Estate, our upper campus, for Boston College. 
 The original building on the Liggett Estate, now O’Connell Flouse, 
 was the first on-campus home of the College of Business Admin- 
 istration, the early name of The School of Management. 
 
 Father Fulton was rector as well as president and dean. The usual 
 practice in the Catholic Church is for the rector of a religious 
 community to serve no more than six years. To avoid frequent 
 replacement of Jesuits who head Jesuit universities, some 25 years 
 ago it became the custom that the Jesuit president would no longer 
 be burdened with the office of rector of the Jesuit community. 
 Father Monan is the first president of Boston College without a 
 limitation of tenure because of the rectorship. But in Fulton’s day it 
 was unusual to have him rector-president beyond six years, and we 
 know from his diary that several times he requested superiors to 
 assign him to another office. The fact that superiors in the United 
 States and Rome kept him in office was unusual and complimentary, 
 but he finally was informed in 1880 that he would be replaced. 
 
 When word spread through the city of the impending departure of 
 Father Fulton, several banquets and testimonials were attended by a 
 cross-section of citizens. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a friend of 
 Fulton’s, remarked that he hated to see Massachusetts lose one of its 
 brightest men. The mayor of Boston said he felt the city had been 
 robbed of half its sunlight. Probably the feelings of many Bostonians 
 were best expressed in a Pilot editorial by the editor, John Boyle 
 O’Reilly;'® 
 
 The removal of the Rev. Robert Fulton, S.J., President of 
 Boston College and Rector of the Immaculate Comception 
 Church, creates a common feeling of sorrow among Boston 
 Catholics. His name and his person were everywhere respected 
 and beloved. The remarkable influence he possessed, as a 
 spiritual guide and as a friend, is rarely equaled. Under his wise 
 and temperate direction, Boston College has grown into 
 splendid promise, and the influence of his Order has become 
 respected throughout the city and state. He is necessarily a 
 large figure, socially and intellectually. It seems strange that 
 such a man should ever be removed from a position so well 
 controlled. But the system of his great Order is greater than the 
 
personality of its members .... Wherever he may go, Father 
 Fulton carries with him the love and respect of Boston; and 
 whatever may be his future, we say that he has built himself 
 into our wall, we shall claim our share of his honors; and in his 
 own heart we believe he must ever feel that he belongs 
 particularly to Boston. 
 
 Father Fulton’s departure involved an incident that revealed a 
 tender side of his personality that people usually did not see, as 
 recorded by his contemporary. Father John Buckley:^^ 
 
 Shortly before leaving Boston, Father Fulton started to make 
 the round of classes with Father Jeremiah O’Connor, the 
 incoming rector, for the twofold purpose of bidding adieu to 
 the students and of introducing his successor. He did not go 
 very far however. The strain was too much for him. After a 
 few pleasant remarks to the philosophers [that is, the senior 
 class], his eyes filled up, and finding himself unable to proceed 
 further, he retreated with hasty steps to his room. Someone 
 asked him what was the matter. “Everything is the matter,” he 
 answered. “These rascally boys will never know how much I 
 think of them. Why, I am just after making a great baby of 
 myself.” 
 
 From the foregoing we know that Father Fulton’s great body con- 
 tained a great heart. 
 
 With all the heartfelt tributes to the departing president of Boston 
 College and his sad farewell, neither Father Fulton nor his friends 
 and admirers could dream that in eight years he would be back in 
 Boston, once again the College’s president. Those intervening eight 
 years were to bring new responsibilities and burdens, including the 
 top administrative post among eastern Jesuits, provincial of the 
 Maryland-New York province. But before we treat briefly of those 
 busy years, it will be well to examine facets of Father Fulton’s 
 personality as revealed in his correspondence as well as in a Jesuit 
 account of his life written after his death. The Boston College 
 Archives contain 85 letters in Fulton’s hand. In them we see an avid 
 bookman with strong literary opinions, a Virginian who had fallen 
 in love with Boston and its people, a person with a ready sense of 
 humor and ready opinions. 
 
 The letters are full of references to reading, as shown by the 
 following examples: 
 
 March 1867: “The last book I read was the life of Theodore 
 Parker, and I closed the last volume with the disgust I felt in 
 finishing Margaret Fuller’s. Incomplete characters!” 
 
Father Fulton, an avid bookman, in a pose natural for him. 
 
 August 1867: “I have lately read Longfellow’s Tragedies [The 
 New England Tragedies ^] — very unworthy of his reputation 
 .... a couple of lives of William Pitt and a wretched 
 Southern novel, Patricians and PlebiansT 
 April 1868: “I am reading sermons of various clergymen of the 
 Episcopal persuasion.” 
 
 1881: “Philadelphia is good enough — Quakerish and there 
 seem to be no books, no music — nothing but coal. About 
 books, I was spoiled by Boston facilities.” 
 
 1885: “I am losing all secular friends. The Bostonians are for- 
 getting me at last.” 
 
 June 1886: Have you read Cradock’s Tennessee stories? They 
 are tolerable. Do you notice that some Southerners are 
 beginning to write?” 
 
 [ 12 1 
 
When Fulton was reassigned to the presidency of Boston College, 
 his health was failing, and he seemed to accept the assignment with 
 resignation rather than joy. But he wrote (December 1888): 
 
 Certainly there are two advantages for me [in Boston], books 
 and the kindness of the people .... You ask me what books I 
 have been reading. I have always been neglectful of American 
 books but I found in Ireland [where he spent a year and a half 
 while he was provincial as a representative of Father General] 
 many more conversant with American literature than I was. I 
 am obviating that shameful state. Just read James’s Bostonians 
 and I think it one of the very poorest novels I ever read .... I 
 think the literary superiority of New England is past — and the 
 glory of Ichabod! Where are your Longfellows now, your 
 Prescotts, your Ticknors, etc? Look to the horizon of the South 
 if you would witness the uprising of the star to dominate the 
 future. 
 
 Was Fulton a little ahead of Van Wyck Brooks’ New England: 
 Indian Summer^ 
 
 From Washington, D.C. in October 1892 he wrote: “You ask 
 about books. My chief inconvenience is that we are too poor to 
 supply reading, and there are not such facilities as are found in 
 Boston. I never tire of reading and I have considerable leisure.” 
 
 In a sketch of Father Fulton, his colleague Father John Buckley 
 wrote: 
 
 Father Fulton was always a very busy man, yet despite his 
 numerous social and scholastic employments, he somehow 
 found time to interrupt the solid day to peruse four or five 
 volumes a week. Being asked how he found leisure for so much 
 reading, he replied, “Well, you don’t suppose I read every line 
 in the book, do you? If the book be one of fiction, I skip the 
 sunsets, small parlor-talk, analyze the leading characters, and 
 following the stage directions of my friend, Horace, rush on to 
 the denouement. By practice, you know, one learns the art of 
 gutting the page. When I need more information, I imitate 
 Balmes, who selected the chapters he did not know, and passed 
 over the rest. 
 
 We have seen Father Fulton’s strong literary reaction to places in 
 his description of Philadelphia. Old Albuquerque, N.M. fared worse. 
 Visiting there (no doubt for his health) in February 1892 he wrote: 
 
 It is a strange place. Here I am in the great American desert 
 which I read of as a boy. Want of rain is the trouble. The 
 water, for drink and irrigation, comes from the river .... No 
 timber for building — therefore mud huts. No trees, no grass. 
 
 1 13 1 
 
no house for miles — no animals except the rabbits of the 
 country. Horrible. Most horrible! 
 
 Father Fulton had an active sense of humor, often self- 
 deprecating, as when he met Oliver Wendell Holmes at a dinner 
 party. Holmes was a man of considerable girth, as was Fulton. 
 Holmes greeted the priest: “Why, Father Fulton, are you here too.^” 
 “Yes, all that is left of me,” was the reply. 
 
 A lady had been bothering the Jesuit on what he considered a 
 trivial matter. Wishing him to call on her to discuss the subject, she 
 sent a messenger with a note saying she would be home at four 
 o’clock. Fulton’s laconic reply, “Dear madam, so will I.” 
 
 A Protestant gentleman of some standing who visited him said 
 with what his host felt was an air of condescension, “Father Fulton, 
 I begin to like you Catholics very much.” “Indeed,” said Father 
 Fulton. “Permit me to thank you in the name of the universal 
 church.”"" 
 
 Fulton liked youngsters and joshed with them. One day a self- 
 confident newsboy offered the priest a copy of Harper’s Illustrated 
 Weekly. “Well, son what do you want.^” Fulton asked. “Buy a 
 paper. Father,” was the reply. “Ah yes, but how do you know I can 
 read?” “Well,” was the retort, “you probably can’t, but I thought 
 you might like to look over the pictures.” Fulton bought the paper 
 and said to the cheeky lad, “See here, if you want to go to schooj^ 
 come to Boston College and I will gladly educate you for nothing.” 
 When he was provincial, after leaving Boston College, Father 
 Fulton had to pay several visits to Rome, and he then was assigned 
 for a year and a half as a special visitor to the Irish province. The 
 young Jesuit students at Woodstock College asked him to write a 
 letter concerning his experiences traveling in Europe for publication 
 in the new journal, Woodstock Letters. The provincial complied 
 with a five-page letter describing items of special interest to Jesuits. 
 As a native American who had not been abroad before, he found 
 
 25 
 
 coping with other languages a problem. On this topic he wrote: 
 
 There is no department of learning in which I regret my 
 deficiency so much as that of modern languages: which I say 
 for the benefit of my dear Woodstockings. [The term of 
 address was a humorous, fatherly play on the name of the 
 theologate, Woodstock, but his message about mastering 
 modern languages was serious. However, he made light of his 
 deficiencies.] I give you a serviceable rule: In France, speak 
 Italian steadily, in Italy hold to French unflinchingly. The 
 reason is obvious. The chances are the hearer will not be able 
 to criticize the speaker. In both countries abuse beggars 
 
soundly in English. It perplexes them, and you may escape in 
 the confusion. 
 
 In England there’s not much difficulty. You can generally 
 understand the English, and then they begin to talk American. 
 
 When he was assigned to Boston College in 1888, Father Fulton 
 had a number of ailments. He complained most of rheumatism, 
 which he made light of in a letter in December 1888: 
 
 What time Cardinal Gibbons laid the foundation of the 
 Catholic University, I laid the foundation of the rheumatism, 
 which apparently is to continue so long as I have limbs to ache. 
 [The reference to Cardinal Gibbons and Catholic University 
 may be significant. As provincial. Father Fulton objected to the 
 proposed charter statement for a national Catholic University 
 that said that such an institution should never be conducted by 
 a religious order. That seemed to Fulton to be a direct attack 
 on the Jesuits, especially with America’s oldest Catholic 
 university, Georgetown, in Washington. He took some 
 criticism from bishops and even some Jesuits for his stand. ] 
 
 So I was sent to Boston, a sort of health resort, the dryness of 
 the atmosphere, the freedom from east winds recommending it, 
 and I was inaugurated as Rector [of Boston College] on the day 
 when we celebrate the exchange of British for Yankee tyranny, 
 July 4th. 
 
 We know that Fulton loved Boston and was glad to be back. He just 
 couldn’t resist questioning the aptness of Boston weather as a cure 
 for rheumatism. 
 
 When Father Fulton left Boston in 1880, after his first presidency, 
 he became rector of the Jesuit parish in New York City, St. 
 Laurence’s (now St. Ignatius). Next he had a short stay in a parish in 
 Philadelphia, followed by another rectorship-presidency at Gonzaga 
 College in Washington, D.C. But in May 1882 he became provincial 
 of the Maryland-New York province, and six years later he was 
 reassigned to the rectorship at Boston College. He confided in a 
 letter to a friend about his return to Boston (December 1888), “I am 
 under instructions to enlarge the building to the tune of $120,000 
 and I begin my beggary in the new year.” His “beggary” must have 
 been successful, because the new construction got under way and 
 had made such progress that when he returned from a brief 
 vacation, he complained (September 1889), “The building is not yet 
 finished, and we are striving to teach amid noise, dust, crowding, 
 carpenters, masons, plasterers, plumbers, etc. . . . but besides all the 
 building and teaching and evangelizing, there’s the money getting, 
 which takes time and, much more, humility.” 
 
If the automobile in front of Fulton Hall fails to date this photo as belonging to the 1950s, the 
 structure to the left of the new building does. It was a war surplus building used for athletics, 
 dramatics, and other functions until it was razed in 1958 to make way for the School of Nursing 
 building, Cushing Hall. 
 
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A south view of a nearly completed Fulton Hall renovation. The pitched roof, dormer windows, the 
 fenestration, and the triple-arch entrance echo a nearby neo-Gothic gem, Lyons Hall. 
 
But seven months later he was able to write a friend (March 1890): 
 
 I think you will be surprised to see my work. Considering my 
 age 164] and sickness and growing infirmities, I really think I 
 have done a good deal. The [Jesuit] house and College are 
 more than double in size. The exterior appearance is not 
 artistic because I had to patch; but the accommodations are 
 ample, and I shall, after spending about $150,000, have a debt 
 of only $50,000. If I were a young man and prospects of many 
 years before me, I think I could get an endowment, so as to 
 make the education free, and if that were done, could 
 revolutionize New England. 
 
 What a vision he had for Boston College in the twilight of his 
 career! And he was feisty to the end. The Church of the Immaculate 
 Conception opened in 1858; the Archdiocese opened the Cathedral 
 of the Holy Cross in 1875 only a half mile or so away. In October 
 1890, reviewing recent months in a letter, Fulton remarked, “Our 
 Easter was as splendid as ever. Hundreds of people, unable to enter 
 the church, had to go to the Cathedral for Mass. There is the 
 advantage of having the Cathedral so near, to receive our overflow 
 — which is an impudent thing to say.” It was impudent, but that was 
 Father Fulton. 
 
 Ill health cut short Father Fulton’s second presidency. He retired 
 in January 1891. Although he had several further responsible 
 appointments, he spent a good part of the next four years trying to 
 regain health. His last abode was at sunny Santa Clara College in 
 California, where he died in 1895. 
 
 A fitting close to this profile of Father Fulton is an observation in 
 Father Buckley’s 1896 sketch in Woodstock Letters — a tribute from 
 an alumnus: 
 
 “We still remember,” writes one of his old boys, “how 
 unsparingly he execrated the golden mean, so extolled by the 
 Roman poet. ‘I would have you aim, young gentlemen,’ was 
 his daily strain, ‘at the highest in everything, in gentlemanly 
 deportment, in splendid scholarship. I love the young man 
 whose banner bore that strange device Excelsior, Oh, that it 
 be said of each and every one of you, that though the world 
 should fall, you will never descend one jot or tittle from the 
 highest perfection attainable. Truth, duty, consummate 
 scholarship, by these shall all men know you are students of 
 Boston College.’” 
 
 What an inspiring maxim for all Boston College students forever: 
 Truth, duty, consummate scholarship. Fulton’s charge for the ages. 
 
 [ 19 ] 
 
How right it is that an imposing new building on the Boston 
 College campus bears the name of Father Robert Fulton — a great 
 blustery, versatile, good-natured, noble person who played such a 
 significant role in the development of the University. 
 
 Endnotes 
 
 1. For much of the biographical data in the paper the author is indebted 
 to a 23-page article that appeared in the Woodstock Letters, vol. 25, 1896, 
 titled “Father Robert Fulton: A Sketch.” No author’s name was given, but 
 the Woodstock Letters later identified the author as Father John A. 
 Buckley. Father Buckley taught at Boston College during the last three 
 years of Father Fulton’s first presidency and during the last two years of 
 Fulton’s second presidency, so he had the opportunity to observe the great 
 Virginian during the peak of his presidential prowess in the College and in 
 the Boston area as well as his still dynamic leadership in his waning years. 
 Father Buckley died in 1898, three years after Fulton. The Buckley article 
 will hereafter be noted simply as Buckley, with a page reference. 
 
 2. Boston College Archives. 
 
 3. Boston College Archives. 
 
 4. Bapst to Paresce, July 7, 1865, Maryland S.J. Provincial Archives, 
 Georgetown University. 
 
 5. Joseph Havens Richards, S.J., A Loyal Life, A Biography of Henry 
 Livingston Richards (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1913), p. 304. 
 
 6. Buckley, p. 92. 
 
 7. Buckley, p. 103. 
 
 8. Rev. Patrick H. Callanan, “Reminiscences,” The Stylus, 11, 12 
 (1897, 1898). 
 
 9. George Santayana, Persofts and Places: Fragments of Autobiography 
 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), p. 162. 
 
 10. Buckley, p. 96. 
 
 11. The Pilot, August 4, 1877. 
 
 12. Cited in Robert H. Lord, John E. Sexton, and Edward T. 
 Harrington, History of the Archdiocese of Boston (Boston: The Pilot 
 Publishing Company, 1945), vol. iii, p. 396. 
 
 13. Richards, A Loyal Life, p. 305. 
 
 14. Ibid. 
 
 15. “The Young Men’s Catholic Association of Boston College,” Wood- 
 stock Letters, vol. 19, 1890, pp. 388-391. 
 
 16. Letter of W.H. O’Connell to “Carl,” dated Boston, March 3, 1879 
 from The Letters of His Eminence William Cardinal O'Connell, Arch- 
 bishop of Boston (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1915, vol. I, pp. 34-35. 
 
 17. “Diary of Father Fulton” (manuscript) located in the archives of 
 Georgetown University. 
 
18. The Pilot, January 24, 1880. 
 
 19. Buckley, p. 109. 
 
 20. Buckley, pp. 101-102. 
 
 21. Buckley, p. 91. 
 
 22. Buckley, p. 103. 
 
 23. Buckley, p. 105. 
 
 24. Buckley, p. 106. 
 
 25. Woodstock Letters, vol. xvi, p. 160. 
 
 26. See John Tracy Ellis, The Pormative Years of the Catholic University 
 of America (Washington, D.C., American Catholic Historical Association, 
 1946), pp. 103-109. 
 
 27. Buckley, p. 98. 
 
 Father Fulton’s sketch on the cover was drawn by Dermott O’Toole 
 for the Sub Turn of his class, 1959. The photos of Father Fulton and 
 of Fulton Hall in the 1950s were provided by the Boston College 
 Archives. Contennporary photos were made by Gary Gilbert. 
 
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