Matthew Heywood Campbell Broun

• Heywood Broun
• Born: December 7, 1888
• Died: December 18, 1939

Journalist and trade union leader, was born in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest son of Heywood Cox Broun and Henriette (Brose) Broun. He had two brothers and a younger sister. Broun’s father had emigrated from Scotland with his parents; his mother, a Brooklyn native, was the well-educated and strong-minded child of a German immigrant who became a prosperous broker. Heywood Cox Broun’s printing and stationery company provided the family with upper-middle-class status. Matthew Broun attended Harvard for four years but left without a degree in 1910, his lifelong penchant for socializing, theater, and sports leaving insufficient time for study.

During the next two years he was a reporter for The New York Morning Telegraph. In 1912 he traveled to Japan and China, then joined the staff of The New-York Tribune as a feature writer as well as sports reporter. In 1915 Broun became the Tribune’s drama critic; he fell in love with Lydia Lopokova, a star of the Russian ballet, who broke their engagement and later married John Maynard Keynes, the economist.

While covering a baseball game in 1914, Broun met Ruth Hale, a theatrical agent from Tennessee who had been a reporter for The Washington Star at the age of eighteen, drama critic for The Philadelphia Ledger, and a reporter for The New York Times. They were married on June 6, 1917. Ruth Hale, an ardent feminist and president of the Lucy Stone League, made retaining her maiden name a condition of the marriage. Soon after the wedding the couple left for France, Broun as war correspondent for The New-York Tribune and Hale as reporter for the overseas version of the Chicago Tribune. She became pregnant but continued working, sometimes with assignments at the front. She returned to New York that winter, later followed by Broun, and gave birth to Heywood Hale Broun, their only child, who became a writer, broadcaster, and actor.

In 1919 Matthew Broun became, in addition to theater critic, literary editor of the Tribune and began a daily book feature that became widely read. He went to the New York World in 1921, for which he wrote “It Seems To Me,” a column of personal commentary, amusing and serious, on events of the day. He began to speak for the underprivileged as well as for social justice, condemned the Ku Klux Klan and fought for the cause of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had been convicted of murder in Massachusetts.

Broun’s dedicated involvement in the Sacco-Vanzetti case brought his column national fame. Governor Alvan T. Fuller of Massachusetts had appointed a commission, headed by Harvard University’s President A. Lawrence Lowell, to study the murder convictions of the two men and decide whether they deserved stays of execution. When, in 1927, the commission decided against them, the World, in an editorial by Walter Lippmann, favored a new trial but expressed satisfaction with the commission’s efforts. Broun was outraged. He believed that the label “foreign-born anarchist” had turned public opinion against the two immigrants and had sealed their fate.

Broun had just arrived in Boston, where his wife was a volunteer propagandist at the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee headquarters. From there he sent back two blistering columns, which appeared in the World on August 5 and 6,1927. The first one began: “When at last Judge [Webster] Thayer in a tiny voice passed sentence upon Sacco and Vanzetti, a woman in the courtroom said with terror: ‘It is death condemning life!’ The men in Charlestown prison are shining spirits and Vanzetti has spoken with an eloquence not known elsewhere within our times. They are too bright, we shield our eyes and kill them.”

In the second column, Broun questioned Judge Thayer’s objectivity toward Sacco and Vanzetti, revealing that the judge had told a friend he was going to “get them good and proper.” Of the conviction, Broun said, “Clearly it depends upon no careful examination of the evidence. Mostly the feeling rests upon the fact that Sacco and Vanzetti are radicals and that they are foreigners.” Attacking President Lowell, he wrote: “What more can the immigrant of Italy expect? It is not every person who has a president of Harvard University throw the switch for him.” And he ended with: “Shall the institution of learning in Cambridge, which we once called Harvard, be known as Hangman’s House?”

Amid the uproar the World refused to publish any more of Broun’s columns on the Sacco-Vanzetti controversy, and he quit. Because of a provision in his contract, he could not work for another newspaper for three years.

After joining the Socialist party in 1930, Broun ran unsuccessfully for Congress on that ticket in the Seventeenth District of Manhattan. He next wrote for the The New York Telegram, a Scripps-Howard paper; and in 1931, when the World merged with the Telegram to become The New York World-Telegram, Broun’s column was syndicated for the Scripps-Howard chain until 1939. He also wrote regularly for The Nation and briefly for The New Republic. In 1938 he started Connecticut Nutmeg (renamed Broun’s Nutmeg), a witty and literary periodical in New Canaan. Late in 1939 Broun joined The New York Post, writing just one piece for it before he died.

Broun became legendary as a crusading liberal and pioneered what later became a newspaper staple: syndicated, signed features expressing personal views, independent of a paper’s editorial stance. Broun wrote a dozen books, including three collections of his columns and reportage— Seeing Things at Night (1921), Pieces of Hate and Other Enthusiasms (1922), and Sitting on the World (1924); a novel dealing with his life, The Boy Grew Older (1922); Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (1927), a discussion of censorship coauthored by Margaret Leech; and Christians Only: A Study in Prejudice (1931), written with George Britt.

Humorous and warm, an enormous, disheveled, convivial man, Broun always tried to help ordinary working people. In 1930 he was jailed for marching without a permit with 15,000 striking garment workers. The next year he produced, took part in, and was the main financier of Shoot the Works, a musical to help unemployed theater professionals. His concern about the increasing unemployment, long hours, and low pay experienced by journalists inspired him to propose a union to protect newspaper writers and further their professional as well as financial interests.

Broun opened his campaign on August 7, 1933, with a column entitled “A Union of Reporters.” Stating that the average journalist worked an eight-hour day and a six-day week, he argued: “Obviously the publishers, by patting their fathead employees on the head and calling them ‘professionals,’ hope to maintain this working week scale. And they’ll succeed, for the men who make up the editorial staffs of the country are peculiarly susceptible to such soothing classifications as ‘professionals,’ ‘journalists,’ ‘members of the fourth estate,’ ‘gentlemen of the press’ and other terms which have completely entranced them by falsely dignifying and glorifying them and their work.” After that scolding, he concluded: “There should be [a union]. … I am going to do the best I can to help in getting one.... I think I could die happy on the opening day of the general strike if I had the privilege of watching Walter Lippmann heave half a brick through a Tribune window at a non-union operative who had been called in to write the current Today and Tomorrow column on the gold standard.”

The realization of what was to be the American Newspaper Guild became Broun’s passionate commitment, one that brought him no material gain; Broun, with a contract and a large salary, had no need of a union. However, he considered the formation of a newspaper guild as the culmination of his career and the achievement for which he would be remembered. His Fifty-eighth Street penthouse was headquarters for guild planning. Basic demands were a five-day, forty-hour week; a minimum wage scale; and collective bargaining. On December 15, 1933, delegates from fifty-three cities met in Washington, D.C., and organized the guild. Broun was chosen first national president and reelected each year until his death.

The early years of the American Newspaper Guild were insecure and Broun traveled throughout the country speaking at mass meetings. He was a rousing orator who worked tirelessly to prevent the association from splitting into ideological factions.

On November 17,1933, Broun and Ruth Hale were divorced after five years of separation; she died in September 1934. On January 9, 1935, he married Constantina Fruscella Dooley, widow of vaudevillian Johnny Dooley, a singer and dancer of Spanish descent. (Her stage name was Connie Madison.) Broun adopted Patricia Dooley, her child. On May 23, 1939, he was baptized a Catholic by the Rt. Rev. Fulton J. Sheen.

That year, in November, Broun became ill with a respiratory infection at his residence in Stamford, Connecticut, and developed pneumonia. He died, aged fifty-one, at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City and was buried at the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York.

A few of Broun’s papers can be found at the Library of Congress. He wrote, aside from the aforementioned works, Our Army at the Front (1918); Gandle Follows His Nose (1926); and It Seems to Me (1935), mostly a collection of his newspaper columns—especially those in The New York World-Telegram. See also H. H. Broun (his son), comp., Collected Edition of Heywood Broun (1941) as well as Whose Little Boy Are You?: A Memoir of the Broun Family (1983). Biographies include R. O’Connor, Heywood Broun (1975)—comprehensive and well-written; and D. Kramer, Heywood Broun: A Biographical Portrait (1949). In addition see J. Lewis et al., Heywood Broun As He Seemed to Us (1940); K. Stewart and J. Tebbel, Makers of Modern Journalism (1952); and B. Minton and J. Stuart, Men Who Lead Labor (1937). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, and The New York World-Telegram, December 19, 1939.