On Monday, November 27, 1899, Mark Sullivan, a 25 year old senior at Harvard College, presented himself for examination at the Philadelphia office of John L. Capen, M.D. Capen's examination was brief. The young man presented no significant organic problems beyond certain neurasthenic symptoms common among those of the Celtic race, predispositions no doubt aggravated by the strain of upcoming winter examinations and his forthcoming midyear graduation. Capen gave particular attention to the head, the shape and size of its various lobes, in accordance with the specialized principles in which he had been trained. Gently probing with word and eye, squinting at the subtlest movements of the eyes and lips, the doctor allowed his intuition to work freely as he prepared to apply his two hundred year old diagnostic method to this early and significant specimen of 20th century man.
The subject of Capen's examination was the youngest of seven sons born of Irish immigrant parents who had settled some years before on a 50-acre farm in Pennsylvania Quaker country. Though his subject seemed urbane and even sophisticated, Capen correctly perceived that this appearance was a facade only recently acquired. Sullivan's early life had been that of a pre-modern peasant; the family planted potatoes and tended cattle in the manner of their western Irish ancestors. Later in his middle age when his Harvard world collapsed and he began, as men are inclined to do, to seek comfort and wisdom by plowing back into his origins, Sullivan reminisce over those boyhood evenings when his aging father, Cornelius fiddled through his repertoire of Irish folk songs. The memory of one of them could still wrench Sullivan's heart:
Shool, shool, shool a grah,
Both of the elder Sullivans were shy rural creatures. Their forbearers had been Irish tenant farmers for seven generations in the village of Banteer, a few miles north of Cork City. Back in Ireland Cornelius Sullivan had been a kind of schoolteacher, unaccredited but respected for his knowledge of that traditional sort of knowledge respected in the Irish countryside. The strain of famine and emigration had permanently affected the nerves of his mother, Julia Gleason Sullivan. Or so her son speculated. She was subject to fits of worry over money. She henpecked her sons to get education, whatever the expense. Sullivan once noted that his mother was afflicted with a peculiarly Celtic perversity and waywardness, traits which appeared sporadically in his own character as bouts of whimsical unconventionality; ordinarily rather Victorian in his manner, Sullivan once shocked company by lighting up a corncob pipe while visiting the White House. Once again he was seen wearing a pair of indian mocassins at the opera.
In 1895, when he was twenty-two, this ruddy-faced young Irish-American had, like most neighboring boys and each of his brothers before him, left the family farm. Of the sons Mark was the bookish one. That distinctive blend of curiosity and reclusiveness frequently found in journalists drew him to the nearby town of West Chester and then to Phoenixville where he made a promising start by purchasing and a small local newspaper, the Phoenixville Republican. The town steel company provided a loan for the purchase.
In those days young engineers came from distant cities to work at the Phoenixville ironworks, a rising young enterprise destined in the coming decades to provide steel sinews for America's age of industrialization. Like young Sullivan these young engineers took up residence in boardinghouses. Sullivan was impressed by their sophistication and urbanity, their Whitmanesque identification with American muscle and enterprise. One evening the fiancee of one of these technocrats visited the boardinghouse. Hope Cox was her name; she was the daughter of a prominent Cincinnati justice and law school dean, and much above Sullivan's station in life. He watched her as she played "On the Road to Mandalay" on the boardinghouse piano. She was as beautiful as a queen, he thought. She loaned him a novel, "The Damnation of Theron Ware" which he would treasure for the rest of his life. Hope Cox made a project of the dazzled young man. Even forty years later Sullivan's otherwise subdued emotions would flicker to life when he remembered the moving guidance that issued from the lips of Hope Cox. "She did not bother with any correction of my gaucheries, she went to the heart of the matter. She told me that I must go to college, I must go at once, the coming fall, and I must go to Harvard -- no other would do." <$FAmong Sullivan's papers I found a draft of the section of his memoirs describing Hope Cox. In a typical first draft, Sullivan writes: "With Miss Cox personality and cultivation went elevation of background." This awkward sentence was naturally deleted by Sullivan's editor. This was written in the 1930s, after Sullivan had been writing professionally for forty years. Sullivan was not a "natural" writer. Nor was he a good student later at Harvard. Typical grades: History 13, D; Economics 3, D-; English 2, C-.>
Sullivan wrote of this urgent aspiration to his brother, no doubt borrowing phrases from Hope Cox herself. "There is no discounting the value of an education, and the acquaintances and associations formed at a big university. It simply transforms a man. After those four years are over, he looks at things from a different attitude. He is no longer the same man...." Hope Cox had triggered the process of transformation. Almost at once Sullivan found himself ashamed of his simple country manners, his primitive Catholic religion. Her command that he become "no longer the same man" exiled him from the Quaker country of eastern Pennsylvania to the "enlarged and elevated world" of Harvard University. And now, four years later and a few months before his graduation, his spiritual journey had brought him to the office of Doctor John Capen practitioner of the Moral and Intellectual Science of Phrenology.
Sullivan does not discuss his years at Harvard in his autobiography, "The Education of an American". It is a peculiar gap considering that Harvard was a central experience in his life. For thirty years, until much of his world collapsed around him and he returned once again to the gentle simplicity of the family farm, Sullivan attempted to be everything a Harvard man should be. Perhaps it was because he felt himself so improved by Harvard that he was unable to discuss the matter directly in his memoir, as if for fear of stirring up envy or a sense of loss among those of us who have never attended Harvard. Sullivan was a kindly man; it was always his custom to give cash gifts to his servants and employees in early December, so that they might buy small things for their families.
We can understand that the acquisition of twentieth century urbanity in such a massive dose as to later create national status must have been something of a shock to this peasant farmer's son. The wrenching psychic dislocation is described in a short story which Sullivan wrote in his English class the first winter at Harvard. The story is titled "An Apostate Coward". Its central character is a 26 year old doctor who opens a practice in the small town of Shellyville (for which we may read Phoenixville.) The doctor has been raised as a Catholic but having decided to start a new life abandons his religion. Seeking company, he begins to attend a weekly meeting of a Christian Evangelical group. There he meets a young woman of progressive character -- not unlike Hope Cox, we assume. He proposes marriage to her. One afternoon a man abruptly knocks on the door of the doctor's office while he is daydreaming and looking out the window; the doctor quickly picks up and pretends to read a medical journal so as not to caught at this idle, solitary, and shameful activity.
@QUOTA = The visitor opened the door and stood very straight and erect in the doorway. If one should judge by his plain black suit, one would take him for a professional man or man engaged in almost any business in which brain rather than brawn was active. Judging by his cadaverous figure, his thin lips, his sunken sallow cheeks and large restless eyes, one would take him for an ascetic student or priest.
@QUOTA = There was the suspicion of a sneer on his face as he stood in the doorway watching the doctors back. Had he been able to read the doctor's mind he could not have judged any better the precise moment when the doctor would cease his affectation and turn round to greet him. The visitor anticipated that moment by just a few seconds.
@QUOTA = "Ah Jamie, you're nicely fixed here," he said as he stepped toward the center of the room. "That's a very good copy of Raphael you have there," he resumed hastily as he turned toward a painting on the wall and pretended to scrutinize it long enough to allow his host to recover from the excitement which had caused him, at the sound of his visitor's voice, to jump half out of his chair and then sink helplessly back again.
@QUOTA = "You here!" exclaimed the doctor.
@QUOTA = The visitor turned and for the first time looked directly at the young man's face. It was a searching look and the young man turned his eyes toward the window to escape it.
The visitor turns is a Jesuit priest from the doctor's home town. The priest is angry. Does the doctor thinks that he can simply throw aside his religion? He must go back at once to the sacraments. The priest himself has taken over the local parish and will from this day on make a point of monitoring the doctor's religious observances. The young doctor, terrified, begins to cross the street when he sees the priest in town. But it is no good. He cannot live with his fear of the past; he pusillanimously cancels his engagement to the Protestant girl and leaves town. Sullivan might have added, "for Cambridge."
Sullivan's Harvard English instructor annotated the story with heavy criticism. Sullivan's theme, the price of rising above primitive religious fear, seemed to have escaped the instructor. "Though there were dramatic possibilities in the irreconcilable differences in creed", the instructor noted, the fear was inexplicable, unconvincing. "After all, he was not in danger of his life if he left the Church." The story was graded a C.
Sullivan wrote "An Apostate Coward" while living in a Cambridge boardinghouse. His admission to Harvard being conditional, he was not granted the privilege of living in student dormitories. His mediocre grades, mainly C's and D's, were minimally acceptable. Much as he profited from his experience at Harvard, the University did nothing to provide him with a specific plan for action. There is the suggestion of growing melancholy. What was the identity of this new Mark Sullivan, "no longer the same man"? That sort of guidance he now sought, on the eve of the new century, from the less orthodox wisdom of Doctor Capen.
Today we are inclined to think of the "Moral and Intellectual Science" of phrenology -- the cover sheet of Dr. Capen's typed report on Mark Sullivan describes it thus -- as a comical and faintly dangerous 19th century fad, a geography of the head. And yet a serious presentation of the axioms and techniques of the practice may be found in seven pages of as recent edition as the 1895 Brittanica. Of course even a sympathetic reading of this scholarly essay would show that the phrenology's founder, Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall, was scientifically naive by current standards of laboratory protocol. Gall's furtive teatime mensuration of the bodies of clergymen's daughters, his midnight experimentations with violent criminals -- many carried out in the shadows of disreputable taverns where the doctor employed drink to experimentally fan the rage of psychopathic subjects whom he thought displayed novel skull shapes -- these now strike us as the sort of merry Boswellian adventures that passed dubiously for science in the latter 18th century. Even in those ribald times Gall's theories aroused outrage and criticism among those who preferred moral to naturalistic argument. And yet too strident censure of Gall's theories, then and now, seems curiously weak.
Disregarding, as in all fairness we must, the primitive aspects of Gall's observational technique, or the doubtful reproducibilty of the particular correlations and taxonomies which he advanced, we are faced with the fact the doctor offered the world a concept both novel and durable: that thoughts and feelings can be associated with particular parts of the brain, that they are grounded in the physical world rather than that world of the spirit. The concept, inconceivable before the 18th century, is as up-to-date as this week's Science magazine, in which one will more likely than not find reference to "neurotransmitters" and "receptors" which are said to "cause" neuroanatomical or behavioral changes in man and animals. If we accept the literal truth of these contemporary metaphors we find ourselves admitting that it is only an adjusted chemical version of Dr. Gall's phrenological science that has triumphed in the end.
We can then understand that here in the last days of the nineteenth century this young Harvard graduate, in entering Dr. Capen's office, in seeking solace from a man of science rather than a man of God (that consultation, or rather confrontation, having evidently already occurred in Phoenixville) was departing the world of his parents, a world populated by saints and fairies, and entering the portals of a new domain, a world of physics and chemistry, in which the world of spirit invariably manifested itself in the physical. But this is a world for which there is a price for admission. Depending on one's metaphor, that price may be measured in terms of the timeless pains of a burning hell or in a never-forgotten sequence of secretions within the noradrenergic forebrain projections. It is a new world in which redemption is sought not through intercession of saints and virgins, but through the physical world of Henry Adams' dynamo, or its walnut-sized contemporary equivalent, the benzodiazapine/GABA receptor ionophore complex. Sullivan, in those saturnine late days of November, 1899, was stepping out of the dark cave of archaic understanding, a region where the heart still had its reasons, into the modern world.
But I do not wish to undermine credibility by too strenuously insisting that the reader accept literally the principles of phrenology. Whatever one may now make of phrenology's scientific robustness or fear in the "racist" dangers of its intellectual foundations, Doctor Capen's report, based as it was on a single office visit, was undeniably a shrewd and prophetic piece of counseling to this young man -- or let me now suggest -- to many other Sullivans. Mark Sullivan always kept the report among his most valued possessions.
In accordance with phrenological method, the doctor's examination began with observations of Sullivan's cranium, progressing thereafter to other portions and proportions of the body. Capen's typewritten report, which now may be found in the archives of the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto California, presents findings:
@QUOTA=Craniology
@QUOTA=Your head is a little larger than the average but you have a much greater advantage over the masses in the quality of your brain than you have in its quantity. It is probable that the cortical portion is relatively great and this is what gives the thoughtful tendency.
@QUOTA=Constitution
@QUOTA=It is not one that would commonly be called very strong, and it is sensitive to abuse, but this sensitiviteness may be a means of preserving health and prolonging life. You can apply to practice what you know of hygiene better than if you had a more insensible organization.
@QUOTA=Your head must care for the body and is inclined to do so and this is an indication of reliability in health as well as in other things.
@QUOTA=You are able to do much mental work provided it be agreeable, but you could not well endure the strain of contention or the liability to mortification from failure. Your life should be an active one, but it should be peacable and agreeable.
@QUOTA=If your brain were a little better nourished you would have greater confidence and if "Your nerves were not so bare" you would not suffer os much from little annoyances.
@QUOTA=You will profit greatly by a good selection of a diet that is nourishing and not too difficult of digestion.
@QUOTA=Your life work is to be of the head, but if you can have some regular excercise in the open air it will be of great advantage to your health, but if you add hard muscular labor to a full day's work of the brain it would be "Burning the candle at both ends."
We find little in what we know of Sullivan to dispute these of Dr. Capen's observations directed at his physiology. The noted sensitivity bordered for Sullivan on a condition of lifelong pain, though we shall see that he progressively succeeded in transforming what might have been a phsiological handicap into a strength. Later in life Sullivan would be known as a man needing a good night's sleep. Whereever possible he avoided clocks and alarms because they suggested the necessity for scheduled arising. The one overtly angry memory that he allows himself to express about his parents is of being awakened in the frigid dawn to bring in the cows. It is as if any sudden crash of the physical world into his tender morning consciousness was difficult for him to bear. He hated telephones and traffic. He favored quiet rooms and he was known to carry out the daily composition of his newspaper column in a deep meditative trance. His relations with others were carefully buffered by Victorian formality and manners. He seemed a gentle, considerate man. His secretary and companion for many years said he never once saw him become angry.
@QUOTA=Temperament
@QUOTA=The Vital motive and the Mental apparatus are in good proportion and the temperament is not badly balanced, though there is a real predominance of the thoughtful over the others. This will therefore be the power by which you will live, though it should not be allowed to greatly outgrow other conditions. You may profit by keeping in mind that Horace Greely said, "The mind wants a body more than the body wants a mind."
@QUOTA=Intellect
@QUOTA=The intellectual lobe of the brain is large. You think about all that you do. That which some persons would do from impulse you think about. You plan and calculate everything. In this respect you are cool and some who think that they know you will call you "Cold" on that account, but your deliberation does not come so much from a want of earnestness as from a greater degree of thought.
@QUOTA= .... You criticize yourself and always wish that your work were better done. You may not be strong enough in your style to make an impression, and it may be necessary to cultivate positiveness. It is not in your nature to say as did the Irishman: "I've lost a knife and you stole it; there now is a broad hint for you." But when you are sure of a thing you should teach yourself to say so in a manner that cannot give offence to any honest person and yet in a manner to be understood....
@QUOTA=When you are telling a prosy story you will do well to tell it directly and you may make up for it by making your verses particularly sweet...You have a better command of your pen than of your tongue...
@QUOTA=Some Personalities
@QUOTA=Your great sensitiveness causes you to suffer more from imperfections than you ordinarily enjoy when success is only moderate...
Evidently Sullivan showed those qualities that Thackery, an English student of Irish ways, once attributed specifically to the native Irish: "shrewd and delicate of perception, observant of society, entering into the feelings of others, and anxious to set them at ease or gratify them". Stock in trade for the good journalist. But like all virtues they have their darker side, for they can be as well described as an excessive tendency toward deference (worrying about the rules too much) an inclination to be too readily affected and intimidated by others and prone to excessive self-criticism.
With respect to humor Dr. Capen continues with a curious observation:
@QUOTA=You have a serious, earnest mind, even your large mirthfulness makes you serious by causing you to be on your guard against doing anything that would be ridiculous. You have a great dislike of being laughed at except when you are sure that you are right.
Capen delicately enters a particularly sensitive zone of the Irish psyche:
@QUOTA=You have a fair degree of intellectual independence. It seems as though you had been cultivating independence and you have made a fair degree of success, but your self-confidence and self-satisfaction come along much more slowly.
@QUOTA=If you had greater confidence you would be better adapted to debate for your own interests. You are ashamed of being too selfish and you will sometimes suffer considerably rather than quarrel, but when you are insulted you have no further sensitiveness and do not lack spirit.
@QUOTA=If you had more "brass" it would be easier for you to succeed, but the variety of success that would be brought about in that manner is not what would now give you satisfaction.
@QUOTA=You are not so likely to have full credit for what you do for others as you would be if you were both more proud and selfish, for then you would give with a flourish that would attract attention, if you gave at all....
@QUOTA=You may not make friends fast, but you keep your good friends well and the few -- more or less -- who love you are not likely to desert you in time of need, partly because you do not call on them when you can avoid doing so....
***At the first of the year, 1900 Sullivan returned to Harvard to study for the midyear examinations. Knowing as I do so well the geography, both physical and emotional, of Harvard Square, I find it easy to put myself in the place of Mark Sullivan in that winter of 1899, the evening gas lamps catching the first falling flakes of snow on Brattle Street, Sullivan scurrying over the crackling sidewalks back to his room, muffled Christmas songs and the musical laughter of a woman behind brass-knockered doors on the greens and in the brick alleys off Harvard square. Mark Sullivan had achieved his objective, he was no longer the same man that he had been when he left Phoenixville four years before. It should have been an easy spring:
@QUOTA = January 1. Snow in forenoon. First of winter. Read Thackery. Argued Anglo-American alliance with V. Custis.
@QUOTA = January 10. Loafed. In evening made trip to Hyde Park to see Miss K.
@QUOTA = January 15. Went to Hamlet. Weighed 147. Stopped in gym. Bruno came, 2nd bottle Sunset claret borrowed.
@QUOTA = February 10. Kant exam. Sat for photos. Bought shoes. Dinner at Victoria in evening. Carried umbrella down Summer St.
@QUOTA = April 8. Visited Miss Rawson at Bryn Mawr.
@QUOTA = June 25. Paddling at Riverside. Miss J. and Miss Y. Lunch. Card tricks.
He did not want to leave Harvard to go back to Pennsylvania. Riffling through the Harvard catalogue, he thought how he might remain on in Boston. There were two hundred courses offered at Harvard in 1900 -- one entirely devoted to the Bagdad Caliphate! Sullivan possessed a full measure of Veblen's primitive virtues -- curiosity and craftmanship. If his academic capacity had been up to it, he could have become a professor. A pleasant fantasy flooded his mind; imagine just staying on at Cambridge, taking every course in the catalogue! The project would take the 50 years. But of course this was silly. He must move on into life. But how? He procrastinated. He was 26 years old. He rationalized his timidity: "If hesitancy about going out into life came to me, who had already had contact with the world, how much more must it come to those younger and less experienced than I."
Boston had marked his character. The city lolled in the melancholy autumn of its golden years, with its tradition of learning and literary excellence, founded on steady enterprise, Puritan thrift, tenacity, qualities that Sullivan admired. Sullivan was drawn to the city, he felt his character was the right match for New England, and he studied its spareness, its understated grace. On Brimmer Street and Beacon Hill and the Back Bay Sullivan sensed the undying vigor and aggressiveness of the Puritan tradition, that "strenuous dominating spirit" that had always strangled doctrines not in agreement with their own. "The Puritan went to church with a bible in one hand, and in the other a musket for hostile Indians," he wrote. He thought about the milder less aggressive spirit of his own Pennsylvania, Quaker mildness and docile immigrants like his father and mother. He began to make notes on the subject. Mildness -- it was stamped on his character. He worked to graft Puritan virtues onto his Irish peasant root. The effort of synthesizing Irish passivity and fatalism and Puritan aggresiveness was evident in the details of his life, in his developing literary taste. He announced that Sarah Orne Jewetts Country of the Pointed Firs and Somerville and Ross' stories of ancestral western Cork All on the Irish Shore were the books he would take with him to a desert island.
Harvard had been his salvation. Harvard, in his view, empowered the individual through knowledge. Sullivan illustrated what he thought of as the superior Harvard style in an article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly. He contrasted imaginary letters of introduction as they might be written for young men from Philadelphia, New York and Boston. The Philadelphia letter described the applicants' genealogy and social connections, the New York letter the applicant's track record as a business hustler. The Boston letter represented Sullivans' ideal: "Permit me to introduce Mr. Jones," it begins, "who graduated with highest honors in classics and political economy at Harvard; he speaks and writes French and German, and if you employ him I am sure that his learning will make his services extremely valuable to you."
Sullivan worked to combine what he was and what he admired in the context of the emerging America of the twentieth century. "America Finding Herself", the title described both his country, and clearly himself. America's new century offered men like himslef an opportunity to become figures notable in history. In the nineteenth century a secure and dignified life of the type he wanted would have been beyond reach of a farmer's son. In his father's day in Ireland with hard work and the right connections a man of Sullivan's temper might at most hope to become a clerk in a great house, a librarian or dancing master or tutor to some distinguished family's son. But Sullivan believed that the twentieth century offered a new social fluidity, a chance for a young man to leap upward in society in a single generation, breaking through class boundaries. To achieve this while maintaining dignity Sullivan saw from the examples of successful businessmen that he had to develop a national marketplace for his own particular palette of talents and inclinations. He set out as best he could to consider his career rationally, in that industrial planning mode that was beginning to capture the early twentieth century American imagination and seemed to be the foundation for and mark of its phenomenal success. He considered his operating assets: his modest analytical and expressive talents; his Harvard degree; geographic mobility; an intense curiosity, an instinct for craftmanship. His consulted his phrenological profile. These were his raw materials.
What of going to some new area in the West, say a romantic cattle town such as Cheyenne, Wyoming? Perhaps starting a newspaper there? For much of his life Sullivan was subject to an urge to become a publisher; in later years he described these urges as "recurring fits of disquieting ambition for the wrong thing." Now it seemed to him that a place like Cheyenne might grow spectacularly over the years, become a Philadelphia and Boston of the future. He undertook a methodical research program. He sent for copies of small town newspapers. He used his press credentials to secure a free railroad pass. In the summer of 1900 he travelled with the surging tide of a hundred thousand migrants to the end of the B&O line in Fargo, North Dakota. But the west seemed crude, raw, disappointing. His autobiography makes light of the whole venture, remarking in his light self-deprecating way that it was a good thing he hadnt carried out the Cheyenne newspaper plan, because nothing ever came of the town anyway.
So he returned east. He filed his notes and his feelings. They'd be of use some day. But for now, he had to get on with his life. Indecisive and troubled, he returned to the farm, that "refuge and sanctuary in times of indecision or other disturbance of spirit."
Sullivan slid into a state of mind that "caused me something approaching dismay." We note the cautious "something approaching"; the word "dismay" hangs tenuously, almost off the end of this sentence. Sullivan wishes to be confessional, but he is careful; he does not want to suggest a constitutional melancholy. By the time he wrote his memoirs he had been for years a part of Teddy Roosevelt's robust circle of red-blooded men who believed that one had to overcame shortcomings by vigorous action, least of all by public rumination. But Sullivan, Irish at heart, cannot help but seek relief through expression; plunging on, his memoir leaks more damaging evidence of his weakened mental condition. "During the month or two after graduating I moped on the farm." We discover from chronological examination of the events in the next few pages that "a month or two" was from mid-June to mid-August, that is, a full two months. He is trying to minimize the time. But are we to believe that Mark Sullivan really "moped" for two whole months?
@QUOTA="Moped" is perhaps too strong a word; while it has been my nature to make a thorough job of discouragement when I was in it, the mood has rarely lasted long.
Why all this waffling, this "month or two," this "perhaps," this "rarely"? Sullivan wants to tell us is that he fell into a profound depression for two months after he graduated from Harvard. He wants to reveal this, both as a means of relieving himself of that even heavier melancholy that settled on him and prompted his middle-aged memoir. It is that characteristically Irish, perhaps Irish-Catholic, relief that comes from confessional autobiography. It is more than self indulgent; it has a social value in its narrative of how one at last summoned the elements of character necessary to succeed, to overcome difficulties. Sullivan's later success and achievements might inspire some other young person faced with that pereenial melancholy of the recent college graduate. But the confessional impulse, so strong in middle age, struggles here with the self-protective need for secrecy, important to a vulnerable person like Sullivan.
So that summer of 1900 Sullivan goes home to Pennsylvania, dejected, back to the farm. The poverty of the place is embarrassing to a Harvard man (What would Hope Cox think?). His mother wears those faded rag dresses that show too much of her old woman's skin. She stubbornly refuses to use any of the modern furniture that Mark and his brothers have brought home to improve the place; she perversely has it put in the barn. She protests his attempt at an improvement project, a new window which will improve the barn's "architectural balance." Sullivan's aging father snores away the afternoon by the stove on a dirty cushion, clutching an old horse blanket. Exasperated, Sullivan carries the blanket and cushion, along with a broken-legged table and two chairs that his mother refuses to throw away, out into the orchard and burns them. "That Markie is a destructive boy," his father says to his mother, as the two parents watch their son burn their favorite things. In later years the memory of this will cause Sullivan pain.
What is it like for Sullivan back at the farm, the peasant life from which he so badly wanted to escape? His nervous mother, his aging father, his farmboy older brother. He "mopes". His father rambles repetitiously at dinner of his days as a gang laborer on the railroad, the hard years of work necessary to for the down payment on the farm. At dinnertime his mother nervously shuttles between dining room and kitchen, tending to those artificial emergencies and chores that seem always to keep her in that floating condition of maddening nervousness. Why cant she sit down? And Sullivan, sitting miserably with a plate of simple food -- can it once have been his favorite dish. Must he pretend? His dinner unfinished, he watches the patch of unshaven hair on his father's neck as the old man rambles on, voice getting higher each year. Nervously Sullivan anticipates that moment when his father will stop talking and look at him with those pale watery eyes, old man's eyes that say "I was once more the man than you are" or is it only "what do you have to say about that Mark?" At worst.... And then there is brother, whose acid but unspoken thought will be: "Yes, tell us what they think -- at Harvard -- tell us about that, Markie." And his mother will fly up again and flutter out of the room as the tense understandings grow among the men. Or is it all in his imagination?
Fall was coming now; the rain plastered the sad brown hills, and Sullivan had to do something. Desperate, he took a job as a cub reporter with the Philadelphia North American, a once staid paper that had just been bought by a wealthy democrat who used the paper to hack at Pennsylvania's corrupt Republican political machine. The new owner was eager to adopt the sensationally successful Hearst techniques which included use of phtographs. Sullivan was coached on the art of stealing family photographs from parlor mantles of accident victims and assigned put a stakeout on an aging archbishop; in another loathsome assignment to assist a photographer in obtaining a closeup picture of the mayor's missing right eye socket! The vulgarity of this new style of journalism disgusted him. After a month of it he quit.
Sullivan recognized that his heart was still in Boston, at Harvard. He returned to Cambridge and registered at the Law School.
Sullivan now faced three years of expenses, and he had no money. As as an undergraduate he had come to enjoy reading Boston's staid Transcript the articles in which were "so well written and of such elevated standards that almost they might have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly." Accordingly he now put himself to the task of devising a plan to write freelance articles for the newspaper. Sullivan thought long and hard about what might interest the Transcript -- he was keenly aware that an article, to be published, first had to be sold to an editor, and herefore needed a fresh angle pleasing to the reader. The rest of the plan followed logically. Sullivan was able to follow up his original ideas with patient research -- he likened it to detective work. His first Transcript submittal, written in his senior year, 1900, smoothly combined Sullivan's own strongest and freshest feelings with the prejudices of many of the Transcript's most influential Boston readers. Thoroughly researching the Harvard roots of New York's popular governor, Theodore Roosevelt, Sullivan developed a point of view flattering to both Harvard and Roosevelt. Harvard's style had long been maligned in Sullivan's view. The misconception centered on the character of the "true" Harvard man; he was supposed to be rich, bored, indifferent toward achievement or progress, cynical, and above all never to be caught exhibiting any sort of enthusiasm.. In Sullivan's view the character of Theodore Roosevelt demolished this false stereotype. Here was a man who could not be described without exclamation marks! A man who as an undergraduate had lept from a second-story window in his nightshirt to control a team of stampeding horses! Who had gone on as New York police commissioner to deal a tough hand with Tammany ruffians! Who had taken San Juan Hill with his "Rough Riders"! Who amused himself on long train trips by reading Lady Gregory's translation of that great Irish hero epic, the Cuchulain! Here among the sons of Harvard was the dynamic Roosevelt, the brilliant "steam engine in trousers," now vice-president to a president whom he had once boldly described as having the backbone of a chocolate eclair!
The article serves as an example of one of the great creative powers of journalism, its capacity to promote a warm relationship between a rough-edged democratic leader and a suspicious but powerful aristocracy.
Other Transcript articles followed this popular opener. Sullivan translated his dislike of the west and his sensitive appreciation for nature into a conservationist defense of the endangered Western buffalo, then being casually slaughtered by the the "wanton ruffians" whom Sullivan had seen -- and disliked -- on his recent exploratory trip. Sullivan had little enthusiasm for the new pioneers: "Your true westerner reverences nothing but utility; he would use his grandmother's tombstone as a doorstep," he wrote.
The success of this conservation theme prompted Sullivan to write other articles calling for the salvation of birds, the protection of whales, the careful nurturing of all the "famished forest folk." Sullivan's whimsical, pointy, first-person travel pieces became a regular fixture in the Transcript, and payments from the paper supported him in Law School and paid expenses for travel.
Sullivan's writing was a chronicle of his own search for a moral order, his conversion from what he now saw as the moral spinelessness of his Irish-Quaker background to the vigor of the urban East. For the Atlantic Monthly under a pseudonym he wrote an article attacking the culture and politics of his home state ("The Ills of Pennsylvania") pointing out the failings of Quaker meekness in contrast to Puritan sternness. "When the Quaker caused the Puritan commonwealth to spread a doctrine which the Puritans didn't like, the Puritan beat him and drove him out; and when the Quaker came meekly back to turn the other cheek, the Puritan hanged him." The article was anonymously written. No doubt Bostonians would have been amused to find such a vigorous defense of New England Puritanism from a young man with the same name as that hero of the Boston Irish working classes, John L Sullivan. The Atlantic Monthly editor accepted the article, but ran it in October, 1901 under a pseudonym, explaining to Sullivan that the "force of the article would be lost" if readers knew that it had been written by a student. Sullivan was able to repeat this explanation decades later without ever seeing its condescending suggestion. Sullivan was always proud of the article and years later would claim that it was "the first article of political muckraking."
Sullivan went on to finish law school. His subsequent attempt at practicing law in New York were "brief and briefless." But the age of muck-racking journalism had arrived, and Sullivan was able to continue the successful pattern he had established while working his way through law school. In 1904 he was hired by Edward Bok, crusading editor of the Ladies Home Journal, to develop some evidence favoring Bok's defense in a massive retaliatory lawsuit against his magazine brought by the makers of a patent medicine known as Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription, following Bok's mistaken claim that the popular remedy was laced with morphine.
Newspaper work was a world where hard drinking and personality quirks shortened the careers of many good journalists. Sullivan's sober and balanced ways soon propelled him to the top of magazine journalism. By trial and error, seemingly almost by accident, he had established his pattern. It was a pattern that agreed with his basic temper; "To find a career to which you are adapted by nature, and then to work hard at it, is about as near to a formula for success and happiness as the world provides," he would later write. By nature both gentle and shy, he was nonetheless fascinated by the exercise of power, and he was able to use his native talents -- a gentle but tenacious curiosity, an instinct for story-telling, a steady sense of craftmanship -- to establish a kind of symbiotic relationship with those rough chieftains who held power in the early twentieth century. From 1904 to the First World War Sullivan rose through a series of editorships in the principle crusading magazines of the day -- The Ladies Home Journal, McClure's, and Collier's, positions which provided him with access and made him useful to men like Teddy Roosevelt and later Herbert Hoover, both of whom would become his friends and idols.
By the late 1930s Sullivan had achieved the trappings of American success; his Washington neighbors were supreme court justices, his wife a Virginia aristocrat, he held honorary degrees from Brown and Dartmouth, he went fishing -- in starched collar and tie -- with the former president. With less urgent matters on his hands, he put his energy into writing self descriptions which he would have send to students who might enquire after biographical information:
@QUOTA=To say that Dr. Sullivan is America's foremost commentator on national politics, is but to repeat the opinion universally held by newspaper men themselves, who feel that he has brought dignity and conscientiousness to their profession, and by the large segment of the American people, running into the millions, who have been reading his Washington letters for years. In the field of political analysis and comment, there is Mark Sullivan -- and the rest.
But this is moving ahead too quickly toward certain problems and crises of Sullivan's middle age, toward the diminished opinion of the man that one feels compelled to render in the end. For by then, in the midst of the Depression, a time when many of his assumptions and attitudes were severely challenged and replaced by New Deal concepts that have held sway since the 1930s, Sullivan, like his friend Herbert Hoover, had fallen into a cranky personal depression marked by attempts at self-justification that are today painful to read. It is the kind of language that has made this type of public figure such an easy target for New Deal critics. "Provocative in its style, Jeffersonian in its principles, factual though anecdotal in its argument, superficial in its analysis, and moralistic in its conclusions," writes historian David Kennedy of Sullivan's early political journalism, which he considers "rooted in an outdated individualism derived from a yearning for an irretrievable past".
But just now, sitting this rainy afternoon in the archives, reading through the flaked pages of Mark Sullivan's personal notebooks from the months after his phrenological examination, I am disinclined to criticize and able to slide backwards into what sounds like a enviably pleasant life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aa time when the past seemed inspired and the future hopeful beyond any past dreams. January 1, 1900. He reads Thackery. Loafs. Trolley to Hyde Park to see Miss K. Talks religion. Whist. Weighs himself, 145. Sees Hamlet and goes on long walks with Bert. Spends money on carfare, shoes, beer.
He is off again, expenses paid by the Transcript In Nova Scotia he walks on late summer afternoons, his sweater on his shoulder, his few belongings on his back, jotting notes in his little book.
@QUOTA=Bet on Yale
@QUOTA=Jews who change their names
@QUOTA=Story based on the fact that woman wants to be loved not for her goodness, nor for gratititude, but because she is beautiful.
@QUOTA=Knife sharpened.
@QUOTA=Write Miss Whitaker.
@QUOTA=I am the slave of thy servant.
@QUOTA=Spat vigorously.
@QUOTA=What has become of the sons of famous men.
@QUOTA=Miss Lydia West.
@QUOTA=Tennis shoes.
@QUOTA=By what devious path I arrived at meeting Marie.
@QUOTA=There was a young man from the west, Who courted a maiden with zest; So hard did he press her, To make her say Yessir, That he broke two cigars in his vest.
@QUOTA=Boston people educated beyond their intellects.
@QUOTA=If an Indian wants a thing, its intrinsic value is a matter quite important to him.
@QUOTA=Molasses and cream sentiment.
@QUOTA=Roosevelt is like Tiberius.
Within the month, his Pennsylvania article will appear on the newsstands. Evenings he stops at hotels, listens to eccentric stories of the locals. The Nova Scotians are notoriously anti-Catholic and a man tells him that Irish house builders leave little compartments next to the chimneys for priests to spy on the common folk. One afternoon he rents a horse and trap and rides out to the summer home of the great inventor, Alexander Graham Bell.
From the village of Baddock and the point of Mr. Bell's peninsula it is eight miles to drive around the head of the bay or a mile and a half to ride across. For the pleasant September afternoon the glimpse of the road, winding among the basalms on the water's edge and up the mountain side, were tempting, and I drove. As i hitched my horse in front of the laboratory I saw three elderly men busy with apparatus just within the door.
Alexander Bell and his distinguished scientist guests are amusing themselves by photographing a kitten dropped onto a pillow to determine how it lands on its feet. The twinkly-eyed inventor receives his unannounced guest cordially, suggesting a dozen plans for his entertainment. That evening after dinner there is the kind of rich conversation of forgotten days. Bell shows his visitor the private telegraph station at which the inventor receives news from the outer world. They listen, and Sullivan hears some news that is very important indeed. President McKinley has been shot, life is fast ebbing, and a messenger has been sent to upper state New York, where the vice-president is on a hiking and hunting trip. Within the week, Theodore Roosevelt will be president of the United States.