(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.