"An Average American"

(See front cover)

In 1905 New England Congregational ministers entered solemn protest against accepting for foreign missions $100,000 of tainted "Trust" money from John D. Rockefeller. Throughout the U. S. husbands were joking about the super-hatpins which their wives were using to hold on monstrous sailor hats. Among best-selling books of the year were George Barr McCutcheon's Beverly of Graustark and Thomas Dixon's The Clansman. In Manhattan, George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession was closed by police, while audiences wept nightly at dainty Maude Adams in The Little Minister. Also in Manhattan, a crusading young journalist, who was one clay to record these events and many another of the Century's first quarter, was on his way to recognition as one of the outstanding liberal journalists of the decade. His name was Mark Sullivan.

In 1935 Mark Sullivan, now famed as a political pundit, is the Jeremiah of the (J. S. Press. Thrice weekly in the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune and 92 other newspapers, and on Sunday in the Herald Tribune and 72 others, he croaks fearfully against the New Deal. He is an able analyst and expositor, well grounded in orthodox economics, a diligent, honest newsgatherer. But not even his great & good friend Herbert Hoover outdoes him in bemoaning the evil days on which the land has fallen, in prophesying worse days to come unless citizens return to the tried & true ways of their fathers. Last fortnight he characteristically gloomed: "So much of what is being done to America is tragic. . . ."

Whether they applaud or snort at his political outpourings, most U. S. citizens were grateful to Mark Sullivan last week for a tremendous twelve-year job of historical research and reminiscence which he had just brought to completion. In the six fat volumes and 3,740 pages of Our Times, of which Volume VI ("The Twenties") was published last week,* Author Sullivan has presented a superb newsreel of the U. S. from 1900 to 1925--its heroes, its villains, its ideas, its sensations, its fun, fads & fancies. "The purpose of this narrative," wrote he in the first sentence of Volume I, "is to follow an average American through this quarter-century of his country's history, to recreate the flow of the days as he saw them. . . ." Mark Sullivan proceeded, necessarily, to recreate those days as he had seen them, achieved his purpose so well that to his contemporaries Our Times is genuine and nostalgic as a family album. The natural conclusion is that Mark Sullivan, as nearly as any individual can be, is "an average American" of his generation. Hence an investigation of his life explains how a 1905 liberal can be a 1935 reactionary, and why many & many a U. S. oldster hates & fears the New Deal with more than partisan passion.

Pride & Past. Mark Sullivan at 61 is a dignified, kindly, white-thatched gentleman who takes obvious pleasure in his worldly success. He looks like a Massachusetts small town's leading banker-- middling in height and bulk, big-eared, with pale blue eyes set in a red and honest Irish face. He dresses winter & summer in dark suit, stiff, high collar, derby. He is proud that he is one of the nation's best-paid and most-quoted political commentators, that his history has been a scholarly as well as a popular success, that a university and a college (Brown and Dartmouth) have given him honorary degrees, that Harvard has made him one of its overseers. He is proud that he has been married for 28 years to the beauteous and charming daughter of an aristocratic Baltimore family, mother of his two daughters, one son. He is proud that he lives in a fine, big house on a fine Washington street surrounded by famed neighbors --Mrs. William Howard Taft, Assistant Secretary of State Wilbur J. Carr, Associate Supreme Court Justice Harlan F. Stone. He is proud that he has been accepted as a valued friend or acquaintance by most of the bigwigs of his time, the favored young disciple of one U. S. President and the crony of another. He is, perhaps, proudest of all that he has achieved all these things by his own efforts.

Cornelius and Julia Gleason Sullivan, Mark Sullivan's parents, were poor, unschooled youngsters who in mid-19th Century fled from the poverty and oppression of southern Ireland to the U. S. They settled in the orderly, Quaker farming country outlying Philadelphia in Chester County. Son Mark, last of seven boys, was born in a tiny, frame farmhouse near Avondale on Sept. 10, 1874. Father Sullivan never saw $500 cash from one year's end to the next, but between his farm and his job as rural mail carrier he kept his big family well-fed, well-clothed, contented. Mark worked hard at his chores, got his three R's in the neighboring one-room schoolhouse, went to village high school for two years, and on to normal school in placid, old West Chester. At 17 he started working for the West Chester Morning Republican.

Within two years he and that newspaper's young bookkeeper, having saved some $300 between them and borrowed that much more, bought the decrepit daily Republican in nearby Phoenixville. There young Editor Sullivan got the habit of collecting his news, not second-hand but with his own eyes & ears. He attended auctions, sheriff sales, socials, town meetings, got acquainted with everybody and everything that was going on. Because sturdy Chester County was anti-Quay, he campaigned against Pennsylvania's Republican Boss Matthew C. ("Matt") Quay. The Phoenixville Republican flourished. After two years Mark Sullivan sold out to his partner for $5,500, payable in installments, and at 22 took his first plunge into the outside world, at Harvard.

A full college generation older than his classmates, ambitious Mark Sullivan stuck close to his books, lost no time on athletics, glee clubs, social life. Earning an A. B. in 1900, he stayed on for three years of law, meantime writing special articles for the Boston Transcript to pad out his dwindling $5,500. After a brief and briefless stab at the law in Manhattan, his Transcript record got him a job with Edward Bok for a spirited, 18-month campaign against quack patent medicines in the Ladies' Home Journal. In 1905 came two milestones in Mark Sullivan's life. He went to work for Collier's and he met President Theodore Roosevelt. He stayed with Collier's for twelve years. He is still, in mind and heart, with the great T. R.

President's Friend. For Collier's, where he succeeded Norman Hapgood as editor in 1912, Journalist Sullivan journeyed often to Washington, wrote a department called "Comment on Congress." For Teddy Roosevelt, of whom he became friend & adviser as well as worshiper, the young journalist hurled his pen into the Progressive fight. He crusaded for Pure Food and for Conservation. He lambasted "Standpattism" and "Cannonism." He fought for low tariffs and direct primaries. In those zestful days young Mark Sullivan was indeed, as old Mark Sullivan has described him in Our Times, "a fierce young eagle of the press."

In 1919 Mark Sullivan settled permanently in Washington as a political correspondent, first for the Democratic, liberal New York Evening Post, after 1924 for the Herald Tribune. Also in 1919 he lost his leader. With the death of Roosevelt I, the crusading fervor went out of the Sullivan dispatches. His reports on the Harding and Coolidge Administrations were conscientious, uncritical, uninspired. Meantime Mr. & Mrs. Sullivan had become fast friends of another poor boy who had made good. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, and his wife. Many a Sunday evening the Sullivans walked around the corner from their Wyoming Avenue home to the Hoovers' house on S Street, helped entertain the Hoover friends. When, in 1929, the Hoovers moved to the big White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, the intimacy continued. Never have President and journalist been closer. Timid and distrustful of newshawks in general. President Hoover put Pundit Sullivan in his "Medicine Ball Cabinet," had him to breakfasts, took him on fishing trips,* called him often to the White House for long, confidential talks. Result was that Mark Sullivan became, to other Washington correspondents' envy and chagrin, an authoritative Administration spokesman in his own right. Pundit Sullivan sometimes differed with the President in private, never in his dispatches. The Hoover Administration gave him, temporarily, an excessive fame and influence, fixed him firmly in the public mind as a biased political observer.

President's Foe. Since March 4, 1933 Mark Sullivan has paid just two social visits to the White House--one for tea, one for Sunday supper. But he never misses Franklin Roosevelt's semiweekly press conferences, standing grim, silent, apart while the bantering President gets a laugh out of his favorites by assigning most Press cracks at the New Deal to "Old Mark." Journalist Sullivan, who was not elected to the Gridiron Club until 1925, has always been a solitary worker, but today he is marked off from his colleagues more than ever. That is partly because of his intimacy with President Hoover, partly because of his age and reserved temperament, partly because of his books. But chiefly it is because he belongs to a sober, fact-grubbing tradition of Washington correspondence of which other famed practitioners like Clinton W. Gilbert. Richard Oulahan, Samuel Blythe. Herman B. Kohsaat, are either dead or permanently retired from the scene. Foreign to him is the new school of gossipy key-hole correspondents like Paul Mallon, Drew Pearson & Robert S. Allen, whose contributions to history are such works as The Washington Merry-Go-Round. From his fellow pundits--Walter Lippmann, David Lawrence, Frank Kent,* who almost never appear at a Presidential press conference --he differs in his lifelong habit of getting the facts for his cerebration at firsthand.

Historian. As a young man Mark Sullivan was vastly impressed by the late Harry Thurston Peck's brilliant history of the contemporary U. S., Twenty Years of the Republic (1885-1905). Years later after seeing many a U. S. political event from the inside, Journalist Sullivan began to read accounts of some of them and say to himself, "That was not the way it happened." History, he concluded, can never be rightly written from documents alone. Too much happens behind the scenes, too much is decided by a passing word or nod of the head, too many varying accounts are put forward by self-justifying participants. In September 1923 Mark Sullivan hired his secretary's brother as assistant, set out to carry on approximately where Twenty Years of the Republic had left off. In the enormous task which he had set himself, Historian Sullivan's first move was to thumb through the newspapers of the time, rake over his own memories and mementoes. Next he consulted available documents--biographies, magazine articles, stenographic reports, the Congressional Record. Photographs, drawings, cartoons he culled from the files of old magazines. When each chapter was finished, he had 50 copies of it printed, sent them around for correction, addition, criticism to surviving participants in the events concerned. Sifting his replies, he used some in revising his text, sprinkled others in a multitude of fascinating footnotes. Author Sullivan estimates the number of his voluntary collaborators at close to 100,000. Portentous is the first of their contributions to appear, on page 40 of Vol. I, published in 1926. It is embodied in a footnote dropped from a sentence beginning: "The American temperament included adaptiveness, a willingness more prompt than among other peoples to dismiss the old and try the new. . . ." The footnote: "Mr. Herbert Hoover thinks this point should be emphasized. . . ." "The Twenties." Like its five best selling predecessors, "The Twenties" is lively, readable, honest, superficial, rich in color, anecdote and detail. Occasionally bumbling in literary style, it lacks coherence, is reflective but not philosophic. No great creative thinker, no intellectual delver into the remote why & wherefore of things, Author Sullivan has laid for future historians of the period an indispensable groundwork of fact and atmosphere. His story of the 1920 Republican NationalConvention, of how Strategist Harry Daugherty prepared the way and Republican elders reluctantly pushed reluctant Warren Harding into the Presidency, is masterly, probably definitive. His account of the Oil Scandals is almost equally thoroughgoing. Though he frankly liked Warren Harding and some of his cronies, Historian Sullivan has pulled no punches in detailing his shortcomings as President and the national disasters to which they led. In passing, Author Sullivan demolishes a few legends. Boss Boise Penrose, he reveals, did not dictate Harding's nomination from his Philadelphia sickbed. It was a newshawk, not Harry Daugherty, who predicted that the Republican nominee would be chosen by "15 men in a smoke-filled room at 2 a. m."

No less flavorsome than those of preceding volumes are the 192 pictures which brighten the pages of "The Twenties." With the same shrewd, story-telling contrast which he has used throughout the series, Author Sullivan sets sketches from Ladies' Home Journal of 1894. Vogue of 1926 and McCall's of 1935 side by side to show the cycle of women's skirts, sleeves, ornaments, hair. Cartoons from The New Yorker catch the humor of the 20's as expertly as those from Life caught that of the century's turn. In a kaleidoscopic whirl the Sullivan camera catches such phenomena of the times as the H. C. L., the Ku Klux Klan. Sacco & Vanzetti, Leopold &Loeb, Mr. Gallagher & Mr. Shean, the race riots of 1919, the "lost" generation, the "younger'' generation, Floyd Collins, "It," Texas Guinan, Yes, We Have No Bananas, the Charleston, crossword puzzles. He gives cinema, radio and Prohibition scant notice, but provides an encyclopedic treatment of popular songs, a commonsensical U. S. father's view of sex books and other literary highjinks of the 1920's "Jurgen," writes Sullivan, "is an elaborately veiled and long-drawn-out smoking-room story which proves practically nothing save that Cabell had some acquaintance with the works of Anatole France."

National Nostalgia. In one notable respect "The Twenties" differs from the first volumes of Our Times in which Mark Sullivan pictured the U. S. of his youth. Those early pages are pervaded by a warm affection for the scenes and events described, which in the current volume is replaced by a disquieted aversion. For Mark Sullivan, as for many a member of his generation, the U. S. order which he understood and loved, died with the War. His heart warms to the late-19th Century Chester County because it "gave to the eye and spirit satisfying suggestions of a settled order, traditions, crystallized ways of life, comfort, serenity, hereditary attachments to the local soil." Its self-reliant, democratic small farmers and small businessmen made what still seems to him "an ideal state of society." Five years ago Mark Sullivan went back to Chester County, bought the farm where he was born, now spends about half his days there. Underlying all his political comment is a poignant wish that the whole nation could make a similar retreat, with every man becoming once more his own master, responsible for his own destiny. Non-Partisan? Liberal? In the news last week because of his book, Mark Sullivan was taxed by interviewers with his partisanship. Declared he: "Oh, shucks, I'm not a Republican. Teddy Roosevelt was my only political god. I've never gotten excited about anybody else." Taxed with his drift from youthful liberalism to aged Toryism. Mark Sullivan cried: "I haven't changed. I'm still a liberal. The New Dealers have simply changed the definition of liberalism. Since the Magna Charta liberals have fought to take power away from the State, to win more liberty for the individual. That's what I fought for and am still fighting for."

Last week a gleam of cheer crept into Pundit Sullivan's column as, perked up by local election results (see p. 15), he wrote: "We now know, since Tuesday, that the tide has turned, away from the Democrats and in favor of the Republicans." It was one of the first such gleams in months. Along with gloom at New Deal doings, there has lately crept into his dispatches a note of despair at his own inability to make citizens understand their peril. "No amount of explanation seems able to make the country see. . . ." he writes. And: "I am not sure that enough of the public can be brought to see the deeper implications."

To bolster his lonely position Pundit Sullivan on occasion even invokes the verdict of history yet to come, as when he wrote last month: "I suspect historians years hence will say the election of Mr. Roosevelt, and the steps he took, amounted partly to a holding back of recovery. . . ."

If time's verdict is indeed against the New Deal, historians years hence may point to Pundit Sullivan as an authentic prophet. But certainly those future historians, searching the pages of Our Times for the record of a U. S. era, will write Mark Sullivan down as one who knew and loved that time & country well.

*;0n Mark Sullivan's living-room bookcase now stands a foot-high memento of one such trip--an inscribed photograph of President Hoover happily hauling in a whopper (see cut, p. 41). But his relations with Herbert Hocver as President are not yet history to Mark Sullivan, and he will discuss them only casually.

*Pundit Kent's column ("The Great Game of Politics") is carried by 115 newspapers, Pundit Lawrence's ("Today in Washington") by 131, Pundit Lippmann's ("Today & Tomorrow") by 159.

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