Heywood C. Broun

Decades ago, Heywood Campbell Broun gave journalists a motto to remember as they work in the marketplace of ideas: "For the truth, there is no deadline."

Broun, a prominent newspaper columnist during the 1920s and 1930s, showed perpetual concern for the underdog. Today, the Heywood Broun Award is given to select journalists who have helped right a wrong or correct an injustice.

Broun began writing for newspapers in 1908 and did not stop until his death in 1939. He wrote novels, political tracts, and pieces about sports and drama. He invented the newspaper column in which writers expressed opinions that could differ from those of the owners. His six columns a week rooted out injustices, and they were read by thousands of people who felt that he was their friend.

Broun was educated at Harvard University. From 1912 to 1920 he was a drama critic and then literary editor for the New York Tribune. He and his wife, Ruth Hale, whom he married in 1917, also spent time in Europe, he as a war correspondent and she as editor of a Paris-based edition of the Chicago Tribune.

In 1921, he began a daily column, "It Seems to Me" for the New York World, but in 1928 he was fired from the World because of his support for Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were convicted of murder on slight evidence but in an atmosphere of fear of anarchists.

Ruth Hale was America's first female movie critic, a reporter for the New York Times, and a drama critic for Vogue. This professionally-successful couple led a somewhat tortured private life and, after seventeen years of marriage, were divorced, although they maintained what their son called a "special intimacy." Ruth Hale battled the State Department for the right to carry a passport bearing her name rather than her husband's, and she founded the Lucy Stone League, a group of women who championed the right to retain their birth names.

Broun ran for Congress as a Socialist in 1930. A few years later, he became the founding president of the American Newspaper Guild. When he died in 1939, more than 10,000 people, some of them readers, attended his funeral. In 1941, two years after his death, the Guild established the Heywood Broun Award for outstanding journalistic achievement that reflects "the spirit of Heywood Broun."

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