The Press: Exit an Old Roman

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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."