Mark Sullivan

Mark Sullivan (September 10, 1874 – August 13, 1952) was an American journalist and syndicated political columnist. Author of the six-volume, 3,740-page Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925 (1926–1935), he was described as a "giant of American journalism" and the "Jeremiah of the United States Press".

Early life and education Sullivan was born the last of 10 children, including seven boys, to Julia Gleason Sullivan and Cornelius Sullivan, who had moved to the United States from Ireland and bought a farm in London Grove Township, near Avondale in southern Chester County, Pennsylvania.

In 1896 he went to Harvard University, obtaining an A.B. in 1900 and a law degree three years later; when he graduated, he sold his shares in the Phoenixville Republican.

Sullivan practiced law in New York City for a short time, a career which he later described "as brief as it was briefless", The first was a series of 14 investigative articles by Georgine Milmine on Mary Baker Eddy, later published in a book. In his autobiography, The Education of an American, Sullivan described how he spent time fact-checking in New Hampshire. Afterwards he went to Montana to check a manuscript by Christopher P. Connolly on feuding copper miners there, and finally to Louisville, Kentucky to assist in Lincoln Steffens' work on municipal corruption, The Shame of the Cities. He noted that many citizens of the various cities covered by Steffens work took a "morbid pleasure in being included", sending letters with briefs or fragmentary manuscripts to McClure's asking the magazine to "Expose us next!"

After McClure's, Sullivan moved to Collier's Weekly, where he became an associate editor, then editor in 1912. While living in Washington, on Wyoming Avenue, he and his wife became friends with Herbert Hoover, who lived nearby on S Street; the close relationship continued when Hoover became president in 1929, to the point where Sullivan was viewed as one of Hoover's spokespersons.

New York Herald-Tribune

In the early 1920s Sullivan joined the New York Herald (later named the New York Herald-Tribune) and became a syndicated political columnist.

Sullivan said in 1935 that he was a liberal ("Teddy Roosevelt was my only political god") and that consistent with liberalism he sought to "take power away from the state". In 1937, after the Social Security Act was signed into law, he made his secretary of 17 years, Mabel Shea, famous by asking why she should be forced to pay 35 cents social security out of her weekly paycheck of $35 (equivalent to $ in ). This led Time magazine to publish that Sullivan had an annual income of $23,417 (over $408,000 in 2018). During a press briefing, Roosevelt said Sullivan was arguing that Shea had the "absolute freedom, as an American citizen, to starve to death when she got to be sixty-five if she wanted to".

Personal life Sullivan and his wife, Marie McMechan Buchanan Sullivan, married in 1907.

Death Sullivan became the owner of his parents' farm in London Grove and continued to regard it as his home. When he died, aged 77, of a heart attack in 1952, he was taken to hospital from the same bedroom in which he had been born. His estate was valued at $65,000 (over $600,000 in 2018), most of which went to his children, including 200 acres of farmland. He left Mabel Shea $10,000.

Selected works Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925: The Turn of the Century, 1900–1904. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926. Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925: America Finding Herself. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927. Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925: Pre-War America. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930. Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925: The War Begins, 1909–1914. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932. Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925: Over Here, 1914–1918. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933. Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925: The Twenties. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935. online The Education of an American. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1938 (autobiography).