The Press: Exit an Old Roman

Dean of U.S. political columnists for two decades, Mark Sullivan of the New York Herald Tribune was a durable fixture, weathering all upheavals. Austere, pink-faced in high Hooveresque collar and pinch-nose glasses, he looked as staunchly conservative as his columns sounded. Since Sullivan had won his first fame as a muckraking, trust-walloping liberal, friends sometimes chided him for changing his views. “I haven’t changed,” Sullivan would reply with gentle dignity. “The world changed.”

The Vanishing Buffalo. The world did indeed change in Mark Sullivan’s lifetime. The tenth child of Irish Catholics who fled the Great Potato Famine of 1847, he was born in 1874 on their farm in Avondale, Pa. At 17 he marched into a daily newspaper office in nearby West Chester and landed a job as a reporter. In two years he had saved $150, bought a half-interest in a nearby daily, and prospered. He decided that he needed more education, and sold out his share for $5,500 to pay his way through Harvard College and Law School. On the side he wrote for the Boston Transcript. He had such a passion for accuracy that, before writing an article on the vanishing buffalo, he spent three months finding out exactly how many buffalo then survived (his finding: 1,024).

Sullivan forsook the law in 1904 when, outraged at the quackeries of patent medicines, he wrote a Collier’s article that helped create a national furore, and along with a mighty push from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, forced Congress to pass the

Pure Food & Drug Act. Collier’s, then a leading muckraking magazine, hired Sullivan as a regular contributor and sent him to Washington, where he became such a crony of Teddy Roosevelt’s that the President used to let him use his Virginia retreat during the summer. Soon Sullivan was editor of Collier’s.

The Curious Druggist. At World War I’s end, the New York Times’s Washington pundit, Arthur Krock, persuaded his friend Sullivan that the time was ripe for a Washington political column. Sullivan tried the New York Evening Post before he finally settled down with the Herald Tribune (then the Tribune).

Gradually his writings grew more conservative, but three qualities remained constant: lucidity, fairness, and logical argument. To a young cub admirer, Sullivan explained his aim: “I write my columns with a mythical drugstore owner in Oklahoma in mind. I imagine that I have stopped in to get a soda and that I am sitting at the counter talking to the proprietor. He is interested in national events and so am I. And it is up to me to make things clear so that my friend across the counter cannot possibly misunderstand.”

When Herbert Hoover became President, he made Sullivan a member of his “medicine-ball Cabinet.” often took him fishing at his Rapidan Camp, and gave him many exclusive stories. To colleagues who suggested that this intimacy might undermine his objectivity, Sullivan replied: “I don’t drop a man just because he becomes President.” Neither did he take a man up for that reason. Sullivan could find little in Roosevelt’s New Deal to please him. When potato planting was restricted in 1935, Sullivan announced that he would ignore the law and plant all the potatoes he wanted on his Avondale farm. At his next press conference, F.D.R. smiled: “Mark Sullivan needn’t be afraid . . . I’ll write out a pardon and ‘sign it, and keep it right here in this desk.” Sullivan liked nothing better than to talk with fellow newsmen who disagreed with him. If they made what he thought a telling point, he gave them their due by crying: “First rate! First rate!”

Between columns, he wrote Our Times, a six-volume history of the U.S. from 1900 to 1925 that became an inexhaustible source book for historians. “The purpose of this narrative,” he wrote in the history, “is to follow an average American through this quarter-century of his country’s history.” As careful a historian, as he was a scrupulous reporter, he demanded 50 galley proofs of each section of the book, sent one to everybody he had mentioned for comments and criticisms.

Parable of the Skunk. He liked to explain his own political views in a parable: “The skunk is. in a fine sense, the most gentlemanly of animals . . . He interferes with no one, and only demands that no one interfere with him . . . A nation made up of skunks would be an ideal society. Every individual would have absolute respect, because each would be able to enforce respect for himself . . . No one would claim to be underprivileged, and woe to anyone who would assert under-privilege. Woe likewise to any group that would try to set up a controlling caste . . .”

Five years ago ailing Mark Sullivan retired to his Avondale farm. Doctors told him to take it easy. He drank quarts of carrot juice in the hope of improving his failing sight, had his secretary read newspapers to him, and listened to radio news day & night. Twice a week he dictated his Herald Tribune column, which was syndicated in papers all over the U.S. Last week he wrote his last column, expressing the belief that both Eisenhower and Stevenson would pass up the temptation for “class appeal” and “give priority to the national interest.” Three days later, at 77, death came to Mark Sullivan. The liberal Washington Post, which seldom saw eye to eye with him, saluted him thus: “He had countless friends in both major parties and throughout the Washington press corps . . . He will long be remembered as one of the great reporters of a fascinating age.”