BROUN'S CONTRIBUTION
Coleman, Mcalister
Broun's Contribution HEYWOOD BROUN, by Dak Kramer. A. A. Wyn. 316 pp.'$3.50. Reviewed by McAlister Coleman AN AUTHOR is not responsible for what the blurb writer puts on the jacket of his book,...
...But these were rare and quite natural lapses...
...He talked with a great number of people who did know and love Heywood, and from those talks he draws his own conclusions and makes his own evaluations of Broun's place in history...
...I don't agree with some of Kramer's findings, but in my judgment he has written a book of compelling interest about one of the most interesting and lovable men of our times...
...The performance of the individual reporter was still an important factor in the making of a good newspaper...
...Dale Kramer didn't know Broun, didn't know him well at any rate, and perhaps that is one reason why he has done such a good job in this biography...
...They would hear him talk in awed tones about the newspaper business as though the reporting of the event were more important than the event itself, or as though what a New York columnist wrote or didn't write really affected the thinking of great cross-sections of the democracy...
...Heywood was just not in a class with such top men of those days as Lindsay Denison, Charles Somerville, Frank Ward O'Malley, Edwin C. Hill...
...Broun served his apprenticeship in the tense decade just before the ineffable Frank Munsey decided to apply his successful chain grocery store techniques to the newspapers he was buying and merging overnight...
...I stress this not to detract in any way from Broun's real stature, which was magnificent, but to suggest that his lack of training in the fundamentals of reporting and his too sudden promotion to a by-line as a sports writer gave him and his devoted young army of readers a cock-eyed version of the reporter's role in the making of public opinion...
...He isn't confused with conflicting memories of a most complex personality...
...At times Broun's real friends were worried as they watched him ramble from one Manhattan night spot to another, trailing hordes of kibitzers in his bacchantic wake...
...Heywood had "the root of the matter" in him...
...Sports writer, dramatic writer, war correspondent, columnist—this stunning success story seemed to Hey-wood, among others, too good to be true...
...Reviewed by McAlister Coleman AN AUTHOR is not responsible for what the blurb writer puts on the jacket of his book, and I'm sure that Dale Kramer doesn't ber lieve that Heywood Broun was "one of the greatest newspapermen of all times...
...Through no fault of his own, but because of his exceptional ability to infuse printer's ink with the warmth of his outgoing personality, Broun became first a local and then a national celebrity the easy way...
...generally boresome, and often back-breaking experience—which Broun never had...
...If by "newspaperman" is meant a reporter who can go out on an assignment, cover all angles of it with speed and competence and come back and write it with clarity and accuracy, there were a score of men working in New York at the time Broun was a reporter on the old New York Tribune in 1912 who could do a far better job than Heywood...
...Roy Dur-stine, Thoreau Cronyn, or Herbert Bayard Swope...
...Nowadays, when "newspaperman" is applied to ex-speakeasy proprietors such as Billy Rose or current character assassins such as Westbrook Pegler, the term has no meaning, but when Broun first ambled onto the scene it meant a man with specified skills won after long...
...He came to full stature in the Sacco and Van-zetti crisis -that lost him his job on the World and from then on, through his Socialist days, his CIO work, and his pioneer job in organizing the Newspaper Guild to his untimely death in 1939 at the age of 51, he was a real force for democracy in the days when democracy had need of every genuine believer...
Vol. 14 • February 1950 • No. 2
