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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.