Alpha Delta Gamma had its beginning with four students at the Lake Shore Campus of Loyola University of Chicago in 1924. Francis Patrick Canary, John Joseph Dwyer, William S. Hallisey and James Collins O'Brien, Jr., first conceived the idea of founding a new unique fraternity during a ride on Chicago's "L" (The elevated railway). The "Founding Four" realized the need for an organization quite different from those existing on their campus.

The "Founding Four" envisioned a new concept in fraternities - one based upon the traditions, ideals of true brotherhood, and missionary zeal of Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier and Issac Jogues. They saw five specific areas of development for students at Catholic colleges- the spiritual, the scholastic, service to college and community, encouragement of school spirit among fellow students, and the social. In effect, they wanted a fraternity founded upon Christian ideals of true manhood, sound learning, and the unity of fraternal brotherhood. These ideals were decreed the purpose of Alpha Delta Gamma when it first came into being. And so the foundation was set, Alpha Delta Gamma was on its way to becoming a city walled!

 

 Alpha Delta Gamma is not the oldest national fraternity and yet, one of the few that traces its roots into the antiquity of the Middle Ages. Strange as it may seem, the history of this American-born fraternity has its beginnings in medieval Europe. For, on December 24, 1491, the year before Columbus discovered the New World and claimed it for Ferdinand and Isabella, a son was born to the Lord of the Great castle of Loyola in Guipuzcoa, in the Basque country of northwest Spain. Thirty years later at the siege of Pamplona a cannon ball shattered the leg of Ignatius Loyola finishing his military career. But his life's work was just about to begin. Within a few years his dynamic new moral spirit swept across the face of Renaissance Europe.

In 1789, as George Washington was being sworn in as President, missionary members of the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola established Georgetown University - the forefather of all Catholic Colleges and Universities in the United States. The country grew and as it did, Catholic colleges spread. Fraternities flourished at a few for a short time, but for the most part The Roaring 20's found few fraternities on Catholic college campuses. There was a need for a dynamic new spirit to bring fraternities to Catholic colleges. A fraternity that would not discriminate on the basis of faith, race or ethnicity, one that would be founded on the ideals of the Society of Jesus