(6 of 7)
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."